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Gaze following aims to interpret human-scene interactions by predicting the person's focal point of gaze. Prevailing approaches often use multi-modality inputs, most of which adopt a two-stage framework. Hence their performance highly depends on the previous prediction accuracy. Others use a single-modality approach with complex decoders, increasing network computational load. Inspired by the remarkable success of pre-trained plain Vision Transformers (ViTs), we introduce a novel single-modality gaze following framework, ViTGaze. In contrast to previous methods, ViTGaze creates a brand new gaze following framework based mainly on powerful encoders (dec. param. less than 1%). Our principal insight lies in that the inter-token interactions within self-attention can be transferred to interactions between humans and scenes. Leveraging this presumption, we formulate a framework consisting of a 4D interaction encoder and a 2D spatial guidance module to extract human-scene interaction information from self-attention maps. Furthermore, our investigation reveals that ViT with self-supervised pre-training exhibits an enhanced ability to extract correlated information. A large number of experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among all single-modality methods (3.4% improvement on AUC, 5.1% improvement on AP) and very comparable performance against multi-modality methods with 59% number of parameters less.

Discovering the causality from observational data is a crucial task in various scientific domains. With increasing awareness of privacy, data are not allowed to be exposed, and it is very hard to learn causal graphs from dispersed data, since these data may have different distributions. In this paper, we propose a federated causal discovery strategy (FedCausal) to learn the unified global causal graph from decentralized heterogeneous data. We design a global optimization formula to naturally aggregate the causal graphs from client data and constrain the acyclicity of the global graph without exposing local data. Unlike other federated causal learning algorithms, FedCausal unifies the local and global optimizations into a complete directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning process with a flexible optimization objective. We prove that this optimization objective has a high interpretability and can adaptively handle homogeneous and heterogeneous data. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that FedCausal can effectively deal with non-independently and identically distributed (non-iid) data and has a superior performance., Comment: Accepted by the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2024)

Adapting the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for direct image super-resolution is wasteful, given that a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can recover the main low-frequency content. Therefore, we present ResDiff, a novel Diffusion Probabilistic Model based on Residual structure for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). ResDiff utilizes a combination of a CNN, which restores primary low-frequency components, and a DPM, which predicts the residual between the ground-truth image and the CNN predicted image. In contrast to the common diffusion-based methods that directly use LR images to guide the noise towards HR space, ResDiff utilizes the CNN's initial prediction to direct the noise towards the residual space between HR space and CNN-predicted space, which not only accelerates the generation process but also acquires superior sample quality. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss function for CNN is introduced to facilitate its restoration, and a frequency-domain guided diffusion is designed for DPM on behalf of predicting high-frequency details. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResDiff outperforms previous diffusion based methods in terms of shorter model convergence time, superior generation quality, and more diverse samples., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Crowdsourcing is a favorable computing paradigm for processing computer-hard tasks by harnessing human intelligence. However, generic crowdsourcing systems may lead to privacy-leakage through the sharing of worker data. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach, called iFedCrowd (incentive-boosted Federated Crowdsourcing), to manage the privacy and quality of crowdsourcing projects. iFedCrowd allows participants to locally process sensitive data and only upload encrypted training models, and then aggregates the model parameters to build a shared server model to protect data privacy. To motivate workers to build a high-quality global model in an efficacy way, we introduce an incentive mechanism that encourages workers to constantly collect fresh data to train accurate client models and boosts the global model training. We model the incentive-based interaction between the crowdsourcing platform and participating workers as a Stackelberg game, in which each side maximizes its own profit. We derive the Nash Equilibrium of the game to find the optimal solutions for the two sides. Experimental results confirm that iFedCrowd can complete secure crowdsourcing projects with high quality and efficiency., Comment: Accepted by the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence(AAAI2023), the new version of the paper that includes all technical appendices and real experiments

Existing Cross Modal Hashing (CMH) methods are mainly designed for balanced data, while imbalanced data with long-tail distribution is more general in real-world. Several long-tail hashing methods have been proposed but they can not adapt for multi-modal data, due to the complex interplay between labels and individuality and commonality information of multi-modal data. Furthermore, CMH methods mostly mine the commonality of multi-modal data to learn hash codes, which may override tail labels encoded by the individuality of respective modalities. In this paper, we propose LtCMH (Long-tail CMH) to handle imbalanced multi-modal data. LtCMH firstly adopts auto-encoders to mine the individuality and commonality of different modalities by minimizing the dependency between the individuality of respective modalities and by enhancing the commonality of these modalities. Then it dynamically combines the individuality and commonality with direct features extracted from respective modalities to create meta features that enrich the representation of tail labels, and binaries meta features to generate hash codes. LtCMH significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on long-tail datasets and holds a better (or comparable) performance on datasets with balanced labels., Comment: Accepted by the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence(AAAI2023)

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications can potentially meet the high data-rate requirements of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. However, as the prerequisite of mmWave communications, the narrow directional beam tracking is very challenging because of the three-dimensional (3D) mobility and attitude variation of UAVs. Aiming to address the beam tracking difficulties, we propose to integrate the conformal array (CA) with the surface of each UAV, which enables the full spatial coverage and the agile beam tracking in highly dynamic UAV mmWave networks. More specifically, the key contributions of our work are three-fold. 1) A new mmWave beam tracking framework is established for the CA-enabled UAV mmWave network. 2) A specialized hierarchical codebook is constructed to drive the directional radiating element (DRE)-covered cylindrical conformal array (CCA), which contains both the angular beam pattern and the subarray pattern to fully utilize the potential of the CA. 3) A codebook-based multiuser beam tracking scheme is proposed, where the Gaussian process machine learning enabled UAV position/attitude predication is developed to improve the beam tracking efficiency in conjunction with the tracking-error aware adaptive beamwidth control. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed codebook-based beam tracking scheme in the CA-enabled UAV mmWave network, and demonstrate the advantages of CA over the conventional planner array in terms of spectrum efficiency and outage probability in the highly dynamic scenarios.