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A global threshold (e.g., 0.5) is often applied to determine which bounding boxes should be included in the final results for an object detection task. A higher threshold reduces false positives but may result in missing a significant portion of true positives. A lower threshold can increase detection recall but may also result in more false positives. Because of this, using a preset global threshold (e.g., 0.5) applied to all the bounding box candidates may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a Test-time Self-guided Bounding-box Propagation (TSBP) method, leveraging Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) to enhance object detection in histology images. TSBP utilizes bounding boxes with high confidence to influence those with low confidence, leveraging visual similarities between them. This propagation mechanism enables bounding boxes to be selected in a controllable, explainable, and robust manner, which surpasses the effectiveness of using simple thresholds and uncertainty calibration methods. Importantly, TSBP does not necessitate additional labeled samples for model training or parameter estimation, unlike calibration methods. We conduct experiments on gland detection and cell detection tasks in histology images. The results show that our proposed TSBP significantly improves detection outcomes when working in conjunction with state-of-the-art deep learning-based detection networks. Compared to other methods such as uncertainty calibration, TSBP yields more robust and accurate object detection predictions while using no additional labeled samples. The code is available at https://github.com/jwhgdeu/TSBP., Comment: MICCAI 2024

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a technology specifically designated by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to meet the explosive demand for massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and it is evolving to RedCap. Industrial companies have increasingly adopted NB-IoT as the solution for mMTC due to its lightweight design and comprehensive technical specifications released by 3GPP. This paper presents a system-level simulation framework for NB-IoT networks to evaluate their performance. The system-level simulator is structured into four parts: initialization, pre-generation, main simulation loop, and post-processing. Additionally, three essential features are investigated to enhance coverage, support massive connections, and ensure low power consumption, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the cumulative distribution function curves of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio fully comply with industrial standards. Furthermore, the throughput performance explains how NB-IoT networks realize massive connections at the cost of data rate. This work highlights its practical utility and paves the way for developing NB-IoT networks.

Micro-expressions (MEs) are spontaneous, unconscious facial expressions that have promising applications in various fields such as psychotherapy and national security. Thus, micro-expression recognition (MER) has attracted more and more attention from researchers. Although various MER methods have emerged especially with the development of deep learning techniques, the task still faces several challenges, e.g. subtle motion and limited training data. To address these problems, we propose a novel motion extraction strategy (MoExt) for the MER task and use additional macro-expression data in the pre-training process. We primarily pretrain the feature separator and motion extractor using the contrastive loss, thus enabling them to extract representative motion features. In MoExt, shape features and texture features are first extracted separately from onset and apex frames, and then motion features related to MEs are extracted based on the shape features of both frames. To enable the model to more effectively separate features, we utilize the extracted motion features and the texture features from the onset frame to reconstruct the apex frame. Through pre-training, the module is enabled to extract inter-frame motion features of facial expressions while excluding irrelevant information. The feature separator and motion extractor are ultimately integrated into the MER network, which is then fine-tuned using the target ME data. The effectiveness of proposed method is validated on three commonly used datasets, i.e., CASME II, SMIC, SAMM, and CAS(ME)3 dataset. The results show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

Quantizing the activations of large language models (LLMs) has been a significant challenge due to the presence of structured outliers. Most existing methods focus on the per-token or per-tensor quantization of activations, making it difficult to achieve both accuracy and hardware efficiency. To address this problem, we propose OutlierTune, an efficient per-channel post-training quantization (PTQ) method for the activations of LLMs. OutlierTune consists of two components: pre-execution of dequantization and symmetrization. The pre-execution of dequantization updates the model weights by the activation scaling factors, avoiding the internal scaling and costly additional computational overheads brought by the per-channel activation quantization. The symmetrization further reduces the quantization differences arising from the weight updates by ensuring the balanced numerical ranges across different activation channels. OutlierTune is easy to implement and hardware-efficient, introducing almost no additional computational overheads during the inference. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods across multiple different tasks. Demonstrating better generalization, this framework improves the Int6 quantization of the instruction-tuning LLMs, such as OPT-IML, to the same level as half-precision (FP16). Moreover, we have shown that the proposed framework is 1.48x faster than the FP16 implementation while reducing approximately 2x memory usage.

Recently, considerable efforts have been made on research and improvement for Ni-rich lithium-ion batteries to meet the demand from vehicles and grid-level large-scale energy storage. Development of next-generation high-performance lithium-ion batteries requires a comprehensive understanding on the underlying electrochemical mechanisms associated with its structural evolution. In this work, advanced operando neutron diffraction and four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy techniques are applied to clarify the structural evolution of electrodes in two distinct full cells with identical LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 cathode but different anode counterparts. It is found that both of cathodes in two cells exhibit non-intrinsic two-phase-like behavior at the early charge stage, indicating selective Li+ extraction from cathodes. But the heterogeneous evolution of cathode is less serious with graphite-silicon blended anode than that with graphite anode due to the different delithiation rate. Moreover, it is revealed that the formation of heterogeneous structure is led by the distribution of defects including Li/Ni disordering and microcracks, which should be inhibited by assembling appropriate anode to avoid potential threaten on cell performance. The present work unveils the origin of inhomogeneity in Ni-rich lithium-ion batteries and highlights the significance of kinetics control in electrodes for batteries with higher capacity and longer life., Comment: 29 pages and 5 figures for manuscript; 30 pages, 14 figures and 4 tables for supplementary information

With the rapid development and application of foundation models (FMs), it is foreseeable that FMs will play an important role in future wireless communications. As current Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms applied in wireless networks are dedicated models that aim for different neural network architectures and objectives, drawbacks in aspects of generality, performance gain, management, collaboration, etc. need to be conquered. In this paper, we define NetGPT (Network Generative Pre-trained Transformer) -- the foundation models for wireless communications, and summarize ten issues regarding design and application of NetGPT.