Video frame interpolation(VFI) is the task that synthesizes the intermediate frame given two consecutive frames. Most of the previous studies have focused on appropriate frame warping operations and refinement modules for the warped frames. These studies have been conducted on natural videos containing only continuous motions. However, many practical videos contain various unnatural objects with discontinuous motions such as logos, user interfaces and subtitles. We propose three techniques to make the existing deep learning-based VFI architectures robust to these elements. First is a novel data augmentation strategy called figure-text mixing(FTM) which can make the models learn discontinuous motions during training stage without any extra dataset. Second, we propose a simple but effective module that predicts a map called discontinuity map(D-map), which densely distinguishes between areas of continuous and discontinuous motions. Lastly, we propose loss functions to give supervisions of the discontinuous motion areas which can be applied along with FTM and D-map. We additionally collect a special test benchmark called Graphical Discontinuous Motion(GDM) dataset consisting of some mobile games and chatting videos. Applied to the various state-of-the-art VFI networks, our method significantly improves the interpolation qualities on the videos from not only GDM dataset, but also the existing benchmarks containing only continuous motions such as Vimeo90K, UCF101, and DAVIS.

为了提高图像压缩性能，最近的基于神经网络的基于神经网络的研究可以分为三类：学习编解码器，后处理网络和紧凑型表示网络。学习编解码器专为超出传统压缩模块而设计的端到端学习。后处理网络使用基于示例的学习增加解码图像的质量。学习紧凑的表示网络，以降低输入图像的容量，以减少比特率的同时保持解码图像的质量。然而，这些方法与现有的编解码器不兼容，或者不会最佳地增加编码效率。具体地，由于编解码器的不准确性，难以在先前的研究中实现最佳学习。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于辅助编解码器网络（ACN）的新颖的标准兼容图像压缩框架。 ACNS旨在模仿现有编解码器的图像劣化操作，这为紧凑型表示网络提供了更准确的梯度。因此，可以有效地和最佳地学习紧凑的表示和后处理网络。我们证明，我们基于JPEG和高效视频编码（HEVC）标准的建议框架基本上以标准的兼容方式大致优于现有的图像压缩算法。

In this work, we propose a new approach that combines data from multiple sensors for reliable obstacle avoidance. The sensors include two depth cameras and a LiDAR arranged so that they can capture the whole 3D area in front of the robot and a 2D slide around it. To fuse the data from these sensors, we first use an external camera as a reference to combine data from two depth cameras. A projection technique is then introduced to convert the 3D point cloud data of the cameras to its 2D correspondence. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is then developed based on the dynamic window approach. A number of experiments have been conducted to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that the robot can effectively avoid static and dynamic obstacles of different shapes and sizes in different environments.

We introduce an approach for the answer-aware question generation problem. Instead of only relying on the capability of strong pre-trained language models, we observe that the information of answers and questions can be found in some relevant sentences in the context. Based on that, we design a model which includes two modules: a selector and a generator. The selector forces the model to more focus on relevant sentences regarding an answer to provide implicit local information. The generator generates questions by implicitly combining local information from the selector and global information from the whole context encoded by the encoder. The model is trained jointly to take advantage of latent interactions between the two modules. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our model is better than strong pre-trained models for the question generation task. The code is also available (shorturl.at/lV567).

We introduce TeSS (Text Similarity Comparison using Sentence Encoder), a framework for zero-shot classification where the assigned label is determined by the embedding similarity between the input text and each candidate label prompt. We leverage representations from sentence encoders optimized to locate semantically similar samples closer to each other in embedding space during pre-training. The label prompt embeddings serve as prototypes of their corresponding class clusters. Furthermore, to compensate for the potentially poorly descriptive labels in their original format, we retrieve semantically similar sentences from external corpora and additionally use them with the original label prompt (TeSS-R). TeSS outperforms strong baselines on various closed-set and open-set classification datasets under zero-shot setting, with further gains when combined with label prompt diversification through retrieval. These results are robustly attained to verbalizer variations, an ancillary benefit of using a bi-encoder. Altogether, our method serves as a reliable baseline for zero-shot classification and a simple interface to assess the quality of sentence encoders.

This paper presents a solution to the Weather4cast 2022 Challenge Stage 2. The goal of the challenge is to forecast future high-resolution rainfall events obtained from ground radar using low-resolution multiband satellite images. We suggest a solution that performs data preprocessing appropriate to the challenge and then predicts rainfall movies using a novel RainUNet. RainUNet is a hierarchical U-shaped network with temporal-wise separable block (TS block) using a decoupled large kernel 3D convolution to improve the prediction performance. Various evaluation metrics show that our solution is effective compared to the baseline method. The source codes are available at https://github.com/jinyxp/Weather4cast-2022

Federated Learning has emerged to cope with raising concerns about privacy breaches in using Machine or Deep Learning models. This new paradigm allows the leverage of deep learning models in a distributed manner, enhancing privacy preservation. However, the server's blindness to local datasets introduces its vulnerability to model poisoning attacks and data heterogeneity, tampering with the global model performance. Numerous works have proposed robust aggregation algorithms and defensive mechanisms, but the approaches are orthogonal to individual attacks or issues. FedCC, the proposed method, provides robust aggregation by comparing the Centered Kernel Alignment of Penultimate Layers Representations. The experiment results on FedCC demonstrate that it mitigates untargeted and targeted model poisoning or backdoor attacks while also being effective in non-Independently and Identically Distributed data environments. By applying FedCC against untargeted attacks, global model accuracy is recovered the most. Against targeted backdoor attacks, FedCC nullified attack confidence while preserving the test accuracy. Most of the experiment results outstand the baseline methods.

Generative models have shown great promise in synthesizing photorealistic 3D objects, but they require large amounts of training data. We introduce SinGRAF, a 3D-aware generative model that is trained with a few input images of a single scene. Once trained, SinGRAF generates different realizations of this 3D scene that preserve the appearance of the input while varying scene layout. For this purpose, we build on recent progress in 3D GAN architectures and introduce a novel progressive-scale patch discrimination approach during training. With several experiments, we demonstrate that the results produced by SinGRAF outperform the closest related works in both quality and diversity by a large margin.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising solution for autonomous vehicles to deal with complex and uncertain traffic environments. The RL training process is however expensive, unsafe, and time consuming. Algorithms are often developed first in simulation and then transferred to the real world, leading to a common sim2real challenge that performance decreases when the domain changes. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning process to minimize the gap by exploiting digital twin technology, relying on a systematic and simultaneous combination of virtual and real world data coming from vehicle dynamics and traffic scenarios. The model and testing environment are evolved from model, hardware to vehicle in the loop and proving ground testing stages, similar to standard development cycle in automotive industry. In particular, we also integrate other transfer learning techniques such as domain randomization and adaptation in each stage. The simulation and real data are gradually incorporated to accelerate and make the transfer learning process more robust. The proposed RL methodology is applied to develop a path following steering controller for an autonomous electric vehicle. After learning and deploying the real-time RL control policy on the vehicle, we obtained satisfactory and safe control performance already from the first deployment, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed digital twin based learning process.

The goal of this work is to localize sound sources in visual scenes with a self-supervised approach. Contrastive learning in the context of sound source localization leverages the natural correspondence between audio and visual signals where the audio-visual pairs from the same source are assumed as positive, while randomly selected pairs are negatives. However, this approach brings in noisy correspondences; for example, positive audio and visual pair signals that may be unrelated to each other, or negative pairs that may contain semantically similar samples to the positive one. Our key contribution in this work is to show that using a less strict decision boundary in contrastive learning can alleviate the effect of noisy correspondences in sound source localization. We propose a simple yet effective approach by slightly modifying the contrastive loss with a negative margin. Extensive experimental results show that our approach gives on-par or better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the introduction of a negative margin to existing methods results in a consistent improvement in performance.