Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

Technology advancements in wireless communications and high-performance Extended Reality (XR) have empowered the developments of the Metaverse. The demand for Metaverse applications and hence, real-time digital twinning of real-world scenes is increasing. Nevertheless, the replication of 2D physical world images into 3D virtual world scenes is computationally intensive and requires computation offloading. The disparity in transmitted scene dimension (2D as opposed to 3D) leads to asymmetric data sizes in uplink (UL) and downlink (DL). To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we consider an asynchronous joint UL-DL scenario where in the UL stage, the smaller data size of the physical world scenes captured by multiple extended reality users (XUs) will be uploaded to the Metaverse Console (MC) to be construed and rendered. In the DL stage, the larger-size 3D virtual world scenes need to be transmitted back to the XUs. The decisions pertaining to computation offloading and channel assignment are optimized in the UL stage, and the MC will optimize power allocation for users assigned with a channel in the UL transmission stage. Some problems arise therefrom: (i) interactive multi-process chain, specifically Asynchronous Markov Decision Process (AMDP), (ii) joint optimization in multiple processes, and (iii) high-dimensional objective functions, or hybrid reward scenarios. To ensure the reliability and low latency of the system, we design a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm structure, namely Asynchronous Actors Hybrid Critic (AAHC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to proposed baselines, AAHC obtains better solutions with preferable training time.

When a large language model (LLM) performs complex reasoning by chain of thought (CoT), it can be highly sensitive to individual mistakes. We have had to train verifiers to address this issue. As we all know, after human inferring a conclusion, they often check it by re-verifying it, which can avoid some mistakes. We propose a new method called self-verification that uses the conclusion of the CoT as a condition to build a new sample and asks the LLM to re-predict the original conditions which be masked. We calculate an explainable verification score based on the accuracy. This method can improve the accuracy of multiple arithmetics and logical reasoning datasets when using few-shot learning. we have demonstrated that LLMs can conduct explainable self-verification of their own conclusions and achieve competitive reasoning performance. Extensive experimentals have demonstrated that our method can help multiple large language models with self-verification can avoid interference from incorrect CoT. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification}

The Metaverse can be considered the extension of the present-day web, which integrates the physical and virtual worlds, delivering hyper-realistic user experiences. The inception of the Metaverse brings forth many ecosystem services such as content creation, social entertainment, in-world value transfer, intelligent traffic, healthcare. These services are compute-intensive and require computation offloading onto a Metaverse edge computing server (MECS). Existing Metaverse edge computing approaches do not efficiently and effectively handle resource allocation to ensure a fluid, seamless and hyper-realistic Metaverse experience required for Metaverse ecosystem services. Therefore, we introduce a new Metaverse-compatible, Unified, User and Task (UUT) centered artificial intelligence (AI)- based mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm, which serves as a concept upon which future AI control algorithms could be built to develop a more user and task-focused MEC.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

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.

The Metaverse is deemed the next evolution of the Internet and has received much attention recently. Metaverse applications via mobile augmented reality (MAR) require rapid and accurate object detection to mix digital data with the real world. As mobile devices evolve, they become more potent in computing. Hence, their computational resources can be leveraged to train machine learning models. In light of the increasing concerns of user privacy and data security, federated learning (FL) has become a promising distributed learning framework for privacy-preserving analytics. In this article, FL and MAR are brought together in the Metaverse. We discuss the necessity and rationality of the combination of FL and MAR. The prospective technologies that power FL and MAR in the Metaverse are also identified. In addition, existing challenges that prevent the fulfilment of FL and MAR in the Metaverse and several application scenarios are presented. Finally, two case studies of Metaverse FL-MAR systems are demonstrated.

Talking face generation aims at generating photo-realistic video portraits of a target person driven by input audio. Due to its nature of one-to-many mapping from the input audio to the output video (e.g., one speech content may have multiple feasible visual appearances), learning a deterministic mapping like previous works brings ambiguity during training, and thus causes inferior visual results. Although this one-to-many mapping could be alleviated in part by a two-stage framework (i.e., an audio-to-expression model followed by a neural-rendering model), it is still insufficient since the prediction is produced without enough information (e.g., emotions, wrinkles, etc.). In this paper, we propose MemFace to complement the missing information with an implicit memory and an explicit memory that follow the sense of the two stages respectively. More specifically, the implicit memory is employed in the audio-to-expression model to capture high-level semantics in the audio-expression shared space, while the explicit memory is employed in the neural-rendering model to help synthesize pixel-level details. Our experimental results show that our proposed MemFace surpasses all the state-of-the-art results across multiple scenarios consistently and significantly.

Whole-slide images (WSI) in computational pathology have high resolution with gigapixel size, but are generally with sparse regions of interest, which leads to weak diagnostic relevance and data inefficiency for each area in the slide. Most of the existing methods rely on a multiple instance learning framework that requires densely sampling local patches at high magnification. The limitation is evident in the application stage as the heavy computation for extracting patch-level features is inevitable. In this paper, we develop RLogist, a benchmarking deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for fast observation strategy on WSIs. Imitating the diagnostic logic of human pathologists, our RL agent learns how to find regions of observation value and obtain representative features across multiple resolution levels, without having to analyze each part of the WSI at the high magnification. We benchmark our method on two whole-slide level classification tasks, including detection of metastases in WSIs of lymph node sections, and subtyping of lung cancer. Experimental results demonstrate that RLogist achieves competitive classification performance compared to typical multiple instance learning algorithms, while having a significantly short observation path. In addition, the observation path given by RLogist provides good decision-making interpretability, and its ability of reading path navigation can potentially be used by pathologists for educational/assistive purposes. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/tencent-ailab/RLogist}.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables the agent to effectively learn from logged data, which significantly extends the applicability of RL algorithms in real-world scenarios where exploration can be expensive or unsafe. Previous works have shown that extracting primitive skills from the recurring and temporally extended structures in the logged data yields better learning. However, these methods suffer greatly when the primitives have limited representation ability to recover the original policy space, especially in offline settings. In this paper, we give a quantitative characterization of the performance of offline hierarchical learning and highlight the importance of learning lossless primitives. To this end, we propose to use a \emph{flow}-based structure as the representation for low-level policies. This allows us to represent the behaviors in the dataset faithfully while keeping the expression ability to recover the whole policy space. We show that such lossless primitives can drastically improve the performance of hierarchical policies. The experimental results and extensive ablation studies on the standard D4RL benchmark show that our method has a good representation ability for policies and achieves superior performance in most tasks.