Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been a prevailing technique for tackling various analysis tasks on graph data. A key premise for the remarkable performance of GNNs relies on complete and trustworthy initial graph descriptions (i.e., node features and graph structure), which is often not satisfied since real-world graphs are often incomplete due to various unavoidable factors. In particular, GNNs face greater challenges when both node features and graph structure are incomplete at the same time. The existing methods either focus on feature completion or structure completion. They usually rely on the matching relationship between features and structure, or employ joint learning of node representation and feature (or structure) completion in the hope of achieving mutual benefit. However, recent studies confirm that the mutual interference between features and structure leads to the degradation of GNN performance. When both features and structure are incomplete, the mismatch between features and structure caused by the missing randomness exacerbates the interference between the two, which may trigger incorrect completions that negatively affect node representation. To this end, in this paper we propose a general GNN framework based on teacher-student distillation to improve the performance of GNNs on incomplete graphs, namely T2-GNN. To avoid the interference between features and structure, we separately design feature-level and structure-level teacher models to provide targeted guidance for student model (base GNNs, such as GCN) through distillation. Then we design two personalized methods to obtain well-trained feature and structure teachers. To ensure that the knowledge of the teacher model is comprehensively and effectively distilled to the student model, we further propose a dual distillation mode to enable the student to acquire as much expert knowledge as possible.

We propose the first joint audio-video generation framework that brings engaging watching and listening experiences simultaneously, towards high-quality realistic videos. To generate joint audio-video pairs, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion model (i.e., MM-Diffusion), with two-coupled denoising autoencoders. In contrast to existing single-modal diffusion models, MM-Diffusion consists of a sequential multi-modal U-Net for a joint denoising process by design. Two subnets for audio and video learn to gradually generate aligned audio-video pairs from Gaussian noises. To ensure semantic consistency across modalities, we propose a novel random-shift based attention block bridging over the two subnets, which enables efficient cross-modal alignment, and thus reinforces the audio-video fidelity for each other. Extensive experiments show superior results in unconditional audio-video generation, and zero-shot conditional tasks (e.g., video-to-audio). In particular, we achieve the best FVD and FAD on Landscape and AIST++ dancing datasets. Turing tests of 10k votes further demonstrate dominant preferences for our model. The code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at https://github.com/researchmm/MM-Diffusion.

The dual-encoder has become the de facto architecture for dense retrieval. Typically, it computes the latent representations of the query and document independently, thus failing to fully capture the interactions between the query and document. To alleviate this, recent work expects to get query-informed representations of documents. During training, it expands the document with a real query, while replacing the real query with a generated pseudo query at inference. This discrepancy between training and inference makes the dense retrieval model pay more attention to the query information but ignore the document when computing the document representation. As a result, it even performs worse than the vanilla dense retrieval model, since its performance depends heavily on the relevance between the generated queries and the real query. In this paper, we propose a curriculum sampling strategy, which also resorts to the pseudo query at training and gradually increases the relevance of the generated query to the real query. In this way, the retrieval model can learn to extend its attention from the document only to both the document and query, hence getting high-quality query-informed document representations. Experimental results on several passage retrieval datasets show that our approach outperforms the previous dense retrieval methods1.

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.

We propose a sparse end-to-end multi-person pose regression framework, termed QueryPose, which can directly predict multi-person keypoint sequences from the input image. The existing end-to-end methods rely on dense representations to preserve the spatial detail and structure for precise keypoint localization. However, the dense paradigm introduces complex and redundant post-processes during inference. In our framework, each human instance is encoded by several learnable spatial-aware part-level queries associated with an instance-level query. First, we propose the Spatial Part Embedding Generation Module (SPEGM) that considers the local spatial attention mechanism to generate several spatial-sensitive part embeddings, which contain spatial details and structural information for enhancing the part-level queries. Second, we introduce the Selective Iteration Module (SIM) to adaptively update the sparse part-level queries via the generated spatial-sensitive part embeddings stage-by-stage. Based on the two proposed modules, the part-level queries are able to fully encode the spatial details and structural information for precise keypoint regression. With the bipartite matching, QueryPose avoids the hand-designed post-processes and surpasses the existing dense end-to-end methods with 73.6 AP on MS COCO mini-val set and 72.7 AP on CrowdPose test set. Code is available at https://github.com/buptxyb666/QueryPose.

In the realm of multi-modality, text-guided image retouching techniques emerged with the advent of deep learning. Most currently available text-guided methods, however, rely on object-level supervision to constrain the region that may be modified. This not only makes it more challenging to develop these algorithms, but it also limits how widely deep learning can be used for image retouching. In this paper, we offer a text-guided mask-free image retouching approach that yields consistent results to address this concern. In order to perform image retouching without mask supervision, our technique can construct plausible and edge-sharp masks based on the text for each object in the image. Extensive experiments have shown that our method can produce high-quality, accurate images based on spoken language. The source code will be released soon.

Generating new fonts is a time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially in a language with a huge amount of characters like Chinese. Various deep learning models have demonstrated the ability to efficiently generate new fonts with a few reference characters of that style. This project aims to develop a few-shot cross-lingual font generator based on AGIS-Net and improve the performance metrics mentioned. Our approaches include redesigning the encoder and the loss function. We will validate our method on multiple languages and datasets mentioned.

Partial MaxSAT (PMS) and Weighted PMS (WPMS) are two practical generalizations of the MaxSAT problem. In this paper, we propose a local search algorithm for these problems, called BandHS, which applies two multi-armed bandits to guide the search directions when escaping local optima. One bandit is combined with all the soft clauses to help the algorithm select to satisfy appropriate soft clauses, and the other bandit with all the literals in hard clauses to help the algorithm select appropriate literals to satisfy the hard clauses. These two bandits can improve the algorithm's search ability in both feasible and infeasible solution spaces. We further propose an initialization method for (W)PMS that prioritizes both unit and binary clauses when producing the initial solutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance and generalization capability of our proposed methods, that greatly boost the state-of-the-art local search algorithm, SATLike3.0, and the state-of-the-art SAT-based incomplete solver, NuWLS-c.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

In RGB-D based 6D pose estimation, direct regression approaches can directly predict the 3D rotation and translation from RGB-D data, allowing for quick deployment and efficient inference. However, directly regressing the absolute translation of the pose suffers from diverse object translation distribution between the training and testing datasets, which is usually caused by the diversity of pose distribution of objects in 3D physical space. To this end, we generalize the pin-hole camera projection model to a residual-based projection model and propose the projective residual regression (Res6D) mechanism. Given a reference point for each object in an RGB-D image, Res6D not only reduces the distribution gap and shrinks the regression target to a small range by regressing the residual between the target and the reference point, but also aligns its output residual and its input to follow the projection equation between the 2D plane and 3D space. By plugging Res6D into the latest direct regression methods, we achieve state-of-the-art overall results on datasets including Occlusion LineMOD (ADD(S): 79.7%), LineMOD (ADD(S): 99.5%), and YCB-Video datasets (AUC of ADD(S): 95.4%).