Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Dialogue models are able to generate coherent and fluent responses, but they can still be challenging to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. This unpredictability diminishes user trust and can hinder the use of the models in the real world. To address this, we introduce DialGuide, a novel framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines. These guidelines provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response, allowing the models to generate responses that are more closely aligned with the developer's expectations and intent. We evaluate DialGuide on three tasks in open-domain dialogue response generation: guideline selection, response generation, and response entailment verification. Our dataset contains 10,737 positive and 15,467 negative dialogue context-response-guideline triplets across two domains - chit-chat and safety. We provide baseline models for the tasks and benchmark their performance. We also demonstrate that DialGuide is effective in the dialogue safety domain, producing safe and engaging responses that follow developer guidelines.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Evaluating neural network performance is critical to deep neural network design but a costly procedure. Neural predictors provide an efficient solution by treating architectures as samples and learning to estimate their performance on a given task. However, existing predictors are task-dependent, predominantly estimating neural network performance on image classification benchmarks. They are also search-space dependent; each predictor is designed to make predictions for a specific architecture search space with predefined topologies and set of operations. In this paper, we propose a novel All-in-One Predictor (AIO-P), which aims to pretrain neural predictors on architecture examples from multiple, separate computer vision (CV) task domains and multiple architecture spaces, and then transfer to unseen downstream CV tasks or neural architectures. We describe our proposed techniques for general graph representation, efficient predictor pretraining and knowledge infusion techniques, as well as methods to transfer to downstream tasks/spaces. Extensive experimental results show that AIO-P can achieve Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Spearman's Rank Correlation (SRCC) below 1% and above 0.5, respectively, on a breadth of target downstream CV tasks with or without fine-tuning, outperforming a number of baselines. Moreover, AIO-P can directly transfer to new architectures not seen during training, accurately rank them and serve as an effective performance estimator when paired with an algorithm designed to preserve performance while reducing FLOPs.

The 1$^{\text{st}}$ Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

In the scenario of unsupervised extractive summarization, learning high-quality sentence representations is essential to select salient sentences from the input document. Previous studies focus more on employing statistical approaches or pre-trained language models (PLMs) to extract sentence embeddings, while ignoring the rich information inherent in the heterogeneous types of interaction between words and sentences. In this paper, we are the first to propose an unsupervised extractive summarizaiton method with heterogeneous graph embeddings (HGEs) for Chinese document. A heterogeneous text graph is constructed to capture different granularities of interactions by incorporating graph structural information. Moreover, our proposed graph is general and flexible where additional nodes such as keywords can be easily integrated. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the strong baseline in three summarization datasets.

Since the recent success of Vision Transformers (ViTs), explorations toward transformer-style architectures have triggered the resurgence of modern ConvNets. In this work, we explore the representation ability of DNNs through the lens of interaction complexities. We empirically show that interaction complexity is an overlooked but essential indicator for visual recognition. Accordingly, a new family of efficient ConvNets, named MogaNet, is presented to pursue informative context mining in pure ConvNet-based models, with preferable complexity-performance trade-offs. In MogaNet, interactions across multiple complexities are facilitated and contextualized by leveraging two specially designed aggregation blocks in both spatial and channel interaction spaces. Extensive studies are conducted on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and ADE20K semantic segmentation tasks. The results demonstrate that our MogaNet establishes new state-of-the-art over other popular methods in mainstream scenarios and all model scales. Typically, the lightweight MogaNet-T achieves 80.0\% top-1 accuracy with only 1.44G FLOPs using a refined training setup on ImageNet-1K, surpassing ParC-Net-S by 1.4\% accuracy but saving 59\% (2.04G) FLOPs.

Machine learning models rely on various assumptions to attain high accuracy. One of the preliminary assumptions of these models is the independent and identical distribution, which suggests that the train and test data are sampled from the same distribution. However, this assumption seldom holds in the real world due to distribution shifts. As a result models that rely on this assumption exhibit poor generalization capabilities. Over the recent years, dedicated efforts have been made to improve the generalization capabilities of these models collectively known as -- \textit{domain generalization methods}. The primary idea behind these methods is to identify stable features or mechanisms that remain invariant across the different distributions. Many generalization approaches employ causal theories to describe invariance since causality and invariance are inextricably intertwined. However, current surveys deal with the causality-aware domain generalization methods on a very high-level. Furthermore, we argue that it is possible to categorize the methods based on how causality is leveraged in that method and in which part of the model pipeline is it used. To this end, we categorize the causal domain generalization methods into three categories, namely, (i) Invariance via Causal Data Augmentation methods which are applied during the data pre-processing stage, (ii) Invariance via Causal representation learning methods that are utilized during the representation learning stage, and (iii) Invariance via Transferring Causal mechanisms methods that are applied during the classification stage of the pipeline. Furthermore, this survey includes in-depth insights into benchmark datasets and code repositories for domain generalization methods. We conclude the survey with insights and discussions on future directions.

人搜索是多个子任务的集成任务，例如前景/背景分类，边界框回归和人员重新识别。因此，人搜索是一个典型的多任务学习问题，尤其是在以端到端方式解决时。最近，一些作品通过利用各种辅助信息，例如人关节关键点，身体部位位置，属性等，这带来了更多的任务并使人搜索模型更加复杂。每个任务的不一致的趋同率可能会损害模型优化。一个直接的解决方案是手动为不同的任务分配不同的权重，以补偿各种融合率。但是，鉴于人搜索的特殊情况，即有大量任务，手动加权任务是不切实际的。为此，我们提出了一种分组的自适应减肥方法（GALW）方法，该方法会自动和动态地调整每个任务的权重。具体而言，我们根据其收敛率对任务进行分组。同一组中的任务共享相同的可学习权重，这是通过考虑损失不确定性动态分配的。对两个典型基准（Cuhk-Sysu and Prw）的实验结果证明了我们方法的有效性。

在本文中，我们研究了代理人（个人）具有战略性或自我利益的情况，并且在报告数据时关注其隐私。与经典环境相比，我们的目标是设计机制，这些机制既可以激励大多数代理来真实地报告他们的数据并保留个人报告的隐私，而它们的输出也应接近基础参数。在本文的第一部分中，我们考虑了协变量是次高斯的情况，并且在他们只有有限的第四瞬间的情况下进行了重尾。首先，我们是受可能性功能最大化器的固定条件的动机，我们得出了一种新颖的私人和封闭式估计量。基于估算器，我们提出了一种机制，该机制通过对几种规范模型的计算和付款方案进行一些适当的设计具有以下属性，例如线性回归，逻辑回归和泊松回归：（1）机制为$ O（1） $ - 接点差异私有（概率至少$ 1-O（1）$）; （2）这是一个$ o（\ frac {1} {n}）$ - 近似于$（1-o（1））$的代理的近似贝叶斯nash平衡，以真实地报告其数据，其中$ n $是代理人的数量； （3）输出可能会达到基础参数的$ O（1）$； （4）对于机制中的$（1-o（1））$的代理分数是个人合理的； （5）分析师运行该机制所需的付款预算为$ O（1）$。在第二部分中，我们考虑了在更通用的环境下的线性回归模型，在该设置中，协变量和响应都是重尾，只有有限的第四次矩。通过使用$ \ ell_4 $ -norm收缩运算符，我们提出了一种私人估算器和付款方案，该方案具有与次高斯案例相似的属性。