联合学习（FL）是一个分布式的机器学习框架，可以减轻数据孤岛，在该筒仓中，分散的客户在不共享其私人数据的情况下协作学习全球模型。但是，客户的非独立且相同分布的（非IID）数据对训练有素的模型产生了负面影响，并且具有不同本地更新的客户可能会在每个通信回合中对本地梯度造成巨大差距。在本文中，我们提出了一种联合矢量平均（FedVeca）方法来解决上述非IID数据问题。具体而言，我们为与本地梯度相关的全球模型设定了一个新的目标。局部梯度定义为具有步长和方向的双向向量，其中步长为局部更新的数量，并且根据我们的定义将方向分为正和负。在FedVeca中，方向受步尺的影响，因此我们平均双向向量，以降低不同步骤尺寸的效果。然后，我们理论上分析了步骤大小与全球目标之间的关系，并在每个通信循环的步骤大小上获得上限。基于上限，我们为服务器和客户端设计了一种算法，以自适应调整使目标接近最佳的步骤大小。最后，我们通过构建原型系统对不同数据集，模型和场景进行实验，实验结果证明了FedVeca方法的有效性和效率。

机器人武器广泛用于自动行业。但是，随着在机器人臂中深入学习的广泛应用，存在新的挑战，例如分配掌握计算能力和对安全性的需求不断增长。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种基于深度学习和边缘云协作的机器人手臂抓握方法。这种方法意识到了机器人组的任意掌握计划，并考虑了掌握效率和信息安全性。此外，由GAN训练的编码器和解码器使图像在压缩时可以加密，从而确保隐私的安全性。该模型在OCID数据集上达到92％的精度，图像压缩比达到0.03％，结构差值高于0.91。

联合学习（FL）以来已提议已应用于许多领域，例如信用评估，医疗等。由于网络或计算资源的差异，客户端可能不会同时更新其渐变可能需要花费等待或闲置的时间。这就是为什么需要异步联合学习（AFL）方法。AFL中的主要瓶颈是沟通。如何在模型性能和通信成本之间找到平衡是AFL的挑战。本文提出了一种新的AFL框架VAFL。我们通过足够的实验验证了算法的性能。实验表明，VAFL可以通过48.23 \％的平均通信压缩速率降低约51.02 \％的通信时间，并允许模型更快地收敛。代码可用于\ url {https://github.com/robai-lab/vafl}

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

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.

Brain midline shift (MLS) is one of the most critical factors to be considered for clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making for intracranial hemorrhage. Existing computational methods on MLS quantification not only require intensive labeling in millimeter-level measurement but also suffer from poor performance due to their dependence on specific landmarks or simplified anatomical assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework to accurately measure the scale of MLS from head CT scans. We formulate the MLS measurement task as a deformation estimation problem and solve it using a few MLS slices with sparse labels. Meanwhile, with the help of diffusion models, we are able to use a great number of unlabeled MLS data and 2793 non-MLS cases for representation learning and regularization. The extracted representation reflects how the image is different from a non-MLS image and regularization serves an important role in the sparse-to-dense refinement of the deformation field. Our experiment on a real clinical brain hemorrhage dataset has achieved state-of-the-art performance and can generate interpretable deformation fields.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Normalizing flow is a class of deep generative models for efficient sampling and density estimation. In practice, the flow often appears as a chain of invertible neural network blocks; to facilitate training, existing works have regularized flow trajectories and designed special network architectures. The current paper develops a neural ODE flow network inspired by the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme, which allows efficient block-wise training of the residual blocks and avoids inner loops of score matching or variational learning. As the JKO scheme unfolds the dynamic of gradient flow, the proposed model naturally stacks residual network blocks one-by-one, reducing the memory load and difficulty of performing end-to-end training of deep flow networks. We also develop adaptive time reparameterization of the flow network with a progressive refinement of the trajectory in probability space, which improves the model training efficiency and accuracy in practice. Using numerical experiments with synthetic and real data, we show that the proposed JKO-iFlow model achieves similar or better performance in generating new samples compared with existing flow and diffusion models at a significantly reduced computational and memory cost.