Adder Neural Network (AdderNet) provides a new way for developing energy-efficient neural networks by replacing the expensive multiplications in convolution with cheaper additions (i.e.l1-norm). To achieve higher hardware efficiency, it is necessary to further study the low-bit quantization of AdderNet. Due to the limitation that the commutative law in multiplication does not hold in l1-norm, the well-established quantization methods on convolutional networks cannot be applied on AdderNets. Thus, the existing AdderNet quantization techniques propose to use only one shared scale to quantize both the weights and activations simultaneously. Admittedly, such an approach can keep the commutative law in the l1-norm quantization process, while the accuracy drop after low-bit quantization cannot be ignored. To this end, we first thoroughly analyze the difference on distributions of weights and activations in AdderNet and then propose a new quantization algorithm by redistributing the weights and the activations. Specifically, the pre-trained full-precision weights in different kernels are clustered into different groups, then the intra-group sharing and inter-group independent scales can be adopted. To further compensate the accuracy drop caused by the distribution difference, we then develop a lossless range clamp scheme for weights and a simple yet effective outliers clamp strategy for activations. Thus, the functionality of full-precision weights and the representation ability of full-precision activations can be fully preserved. The effectiveness of the proposed quantization method for AdderNet is well verified on several benchmarks, e.g., our 4-bit post-training quantized adder ResNet-18 achieves an 66.5% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet with comparable energy efficiency, which is about 8.5% higher than that of the previous AdderNet quantization methods.

Bilevel optimization plays an essential role in many machine learning tasks, ranging from hyperparameter optimization to meta-learning. Existing studies on bilevel optimization, however, focus on either centralized or synchronous distributed setting. The centralized bilevel optimization approaches require collecting massive amount of data to a single server, which inevitably incur significant communication expenses and may give rise to data privacy risks. Synchronous distributed bilevel optimization algorithms, on the other hand, often face the straggler problem and will immediately stop working if a few workers fail to respond. As a remedy, we propose Asynchronous Distributed Bilevel Optimization (ADBO) algorithm. The proposed ADBO can tackle bilevel optimization problems with both nonconvex upper-level and lower-level objective functions, and its convergence is theoretically guaranteed. Furthermore, it is revealed through theoretic analysis that the iteration complexity of ADBO to obtain the $\epsilon$-stationary point is upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{{{\epsilon ^2}}})$. Thorough empirical studies on public datasets have been conducted to elucidate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed ADBO.

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.

Human modeling and relighting are two fundamental problems in computer vision and graphics, where high-quality datasets can largely facilitate related research. However, most existing human datasets only provide multi-view human images captured under the same illumination. Although valuable for modeling tasks, they are not readily used in relighting problems. To promote research in both fields, in this paper, we present UltraStage, a new 3D human dataset that contains more than 2K high-quality human assets captured under both multi-view and multi-illumination settings. Specifically, for each example, we provide 32 surrounding views illuminated with one white light and two gradient illuminations. In addition to regular multi-view images, gradient illuminations help recover detailed surface normal and spatially-varying material maps, enabling various relighting applications. Inspired by recent advances in neural representation, we further interpret each example into a neural human asset which allows novel view synthesis under arbitrary lighting conditions. We show our neural human assets can achieve extremely high capture performance and are capable of representing fine details such as facial wrinkles and cloth folds. We also validate UltraStage in single image relighting tasks, training neural networks with virtual relighted data from neural assets and demonstrating realistic rendering improvements over prior arts. UltraStage will be publicly available to the community to stimulate significant future developments in various human modeling and rendering tasks.

The combination of transformers and masked image modeling (MIM) pre-training framework has shown great potential in various vision tasks. However, the pre-training computational budget is too heavy and withholds the MIM from becoming a practical training paradigm. This paper presents FastMIM, a simple and generic framework for expediting masked image modeling with the following two steps: (i) pre-training vision backbones with low-resolution input images; and (ii) reconstructing Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature instead of original RGB values of the input images. In addition, we propose FastMIM-P to progressively enlarge the input resolution during pre-training stage to further enhance the transfer results of models with high capacity. We point out that: (i) a wide range of input resolutions in pre-training phase can lead to similar performances in fine-tuning phase and downstream tasks such as detection and segmentation; (ii) the shallow layers of encoder are more important during pre-training and discarding last several layers can speed up the training stage with no harm to fine-tuning performance; (iii) the decoder should match the size of selected network; and (iv) HOG is more stable than RGB values when resolution transfers;. Equipped with FastMIM, all kinds of vision backbones can be pre-trained in an efficient way. For example, we can achieve 83.8%/84.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with ViT-B/Swin-B as backbones. Compared to previous relevant approaches, we can achieve comparable or better top-1 accuracy while accelerate the training procedure by $\sim$5$\times$. Code can be found in https://github.com/ggjy/FastMIM.pytorch.

Autonomous cars are indispensable when humans go further down the hands-free route. Although existing literature highlights that the acceptance of the autonomous car will increase if it drives in a human-like manner, sparse research offers the naturalistic experience from a passenger's seat perspective to examine the human likeness of current autonomous cars. The present study tested whether the AI driver could create a human-like ride experience for passengers based on 69 participants' feedback in a real-road scenario. We designed a ride experience-based version of the non-verbal Turing test for automated driving. Participants rode in autonomous cars (driven by either human or AI drivers) as a passenger and judged whether the driver was human or AI. The AI driver failed to pass our test because passengers detected the AI driver above chance. In contrast, when the human driver drove the car, the passengers' judgement was around chance. We further investigated how human passengers ascribe humanness in our test. Based on Lewin's field theory, we advanced a computational model combining signal detection theory with pre-trained language models to predict passengers' humanness rating behaviour. We employed affective transition between pre-study baseline emotions and corresponding post-stage emotions as the signal strength of our model. Results showed that the passengers' ascription of humanness would increase with the greater affective transition. Our study suggested an important role of affective transition in passengers' ascription of humanness, which might become a future direction for autonomous driving.

Network structure evolves with time in the real world, and the discovery of changing communities in dynamic networks is an important research topic that poses challenging tasks. Most existing methods assume that no significant change in the network occurs; namely, the difference between adjacent snapshots is slight. However, great change exists in the real world usually. The great change in the network will result in the community detection algorithms are difficulty obtaining valuable information from the previous snapshot, leading to negative transfer for the next time steps. This paper focuses on dynamic community detection with substantial changes by integrating higher-order knowledge from the previous snapshots to aid the subsequent snapshots. Moreover, to improve search efficiency, a higher-order knowledge transfer strategy is designed to determine first-order and higher-order knowledge by detecting the similarity of the adjacency matrix of snapshots. In this way, our proposal can better keep the advantages of previous community detection results and transfer them to the next task. We conduct the experiments on four real-world networks, including the networks with great or minor changes. Experimental results in the low-similarity datasets demonstrate that higher-order knowledge is more valuable than first-order knowledge when the network changes significantly and keeps the advantage even if handling the high-similarity datasets. Our proposal can also guide other dynamic optimization problems with great changes.

由于经过验证的2D检测技术的适用性，大多数当前点云检测器都广泛采用了鸟类视图（BEV）。但是，现有方法通过简单地沿高度尺寸折叠的体素或点特征来获得BEV特征，从而导致3D空间信息的重丢失。为了减轻信息丢失，我们提出了一个基于多级特征降低降低策略的新颖点云检测网络，称为MDRNET。在MDRNET中，空间感知的维度降低（SDR）旨在在体素至BEV特征转换过程中动态关注对象的宝贵部分。此外，提出了多级空间残差（MSR），以融合BEV特征图中的多级空间信息。关于Nuscenes的广泛实验表明，该提出的方法的表现优于最新方法。该代码将在出版时提供。

对于许多技术领域的专业用户，例如医学，遥感，精密工程和科学研究，无损和近乎无情的图像压缩至关重要。但是，尽管在基于学习的图像压缩方面的研究兴趣迅速增长，但没有发表的方法提供无损和近乎无情的模式。在本文中，我们提出了一个统一而强大的深层损失加上残留（DLPR）编码框架，以实现无损和近乎无情的图像压缩。在无损模式下，DLPR编码系统首先执行有损压缩，然后执行残差的无损编码。我们在VAE的方法中解决了关节损失和残留压缩问题，并添加残差的自回归上下文模型以增强无损压缩性能。在近乎荒谬的模式下，我们量化了原始残差以满足给定的$ \ ell_ \ infty $错误绑定，并提出了可扩展的近乎无情的压缩方案，该方案适用于可变$ \ ell_ \ infty $ bunds而不是训练多个网络。为了加快DLPR编码，我们通过新颖的编码环境设计提高了算法并行化的程度，并以自适应残留间隔加速熵编码。实验结果表明，DLPR编码系统以竞争性的编码速度实现了最先进的无损和近乎无效的图像压缩性能。

本文介绍了端到端以任务为导向的对话（TOD）的本体学预验证的语言模型（OPAL）。与Chit-Chat对话模型不同，面向任务的对话模型至少满足两个特定于任务的模块：对话状态跟踪器（DST）和响应生成器（RG）。对话状态由域插槽值三元组成，它们被认为是用户搜索与域相关数据库的约束。带有带注释的对话状态的大规模面向任务的对话数据通常是无法访问的。它可以防止针对任务对话的审慎语言模型的开发。我们提出了一种简单而有效的预处理方法来减轻此问题，该方法由两个预审进阶段组成。第一阶段是在大规模上下文文本数据上预处理，其中文本的结构化信息是由信息提取工具提取的。为了弥合训练方法和下游任务之间的差距，我们设计了两个预训练的任务：类似于本体的三重恢复和下一文本生成，分别模拟了DST和RG。第二阶段是在TOD数据上微调验证的模型。实验结果表明，即使没有CAMREST676和MULTIWOZ基准的任何TOD数据，我们提出的方法即使没有任何TOD数据，我们提出的方法也可以提高竞争性能。