Mapping the seafloor with underwater imaging cameras is of significant importance for various applications including marine engineering, geology, geomorphology, archaeology and biology. For shallow waters, among the underwater imaging challenges, caustics i.e., the complex physical phenomena resulting from the projection of light rays being refracted by the wavy surface, is likely the most crucial one. Caustics is the main factor during underwater imaging campaigns that massively degrade image quality and affect severely any 2D mosaicking or 3D reconstruction of the seabed. In this work, we propose a novel method for correcting the radiometric effects of caustics on shallow underwater imagery. Contrary to the state-of-the-art, the developed method can handle seabed and riverbed of any anaglyph, correcting the images using real pixel information, thus, improving image matching and 3D reconstruction processes. In particular, the developed method employs deep learning architectures in order to classify image pixels to "non-caustics" and "caustics". Then, exploits the 3D geometry of the scene to achieve a pixel-wise correction, by transferring appropriate color values between the overlapping underwater images. Moreover, to fill the current gap, we have collected, annotated and structured a real-world caustic dataset, namely R-CAUSTIC, which is openly available. Overall, based on the experimental results and validation the developed methodology is quite promising in both detecting caustics and reconstructing their intensity.

AR/VR应用程序和机器人需要知道场景何时更改。一个示例是从场景中移动，添加或删除对象时。我们提出了仅基于场景更改的3D对象发现方法。我们的方法不需要编码有关对象的任何假设，而是通过利用其连贯的动作来发现对象。最初将变化视为深度图的差异，并在对象进行刚性运动时被分割为对象。图切割优化将不断变化的标签传播到几何一致的区域。实验表明，我们的方法在针对竞争基线的3RSCAN数据集上实现了最先进的性能。我们方法的源代码可以在https://github.com/katadam/objectscanmove上找到。

数据关联是遵循逐个检测范式跟踪的任何多个对象跟踪方法（MOT）方法的关键组件。为了生成完整的轨迹，这种方法采用数据关联过程来在每个时间步长期间建立检测和现有目标之间的分配。最近的数据关联方法试图解决多维线性分配任务或网络流量最小化问题，或者要么通过多个假设跟踪解决。但是，在推论过程中，每个序列帧都需要计算最佳分配的优化步骤，并在任何给定的解决方案中添加显着的计算复杂性。为此，在这项工作的背景下，我们介绍了基于变压器的作业决策网络（TADN），该决策网络（TADN）可以解决数据关联，而无需在推理过程中进行任何明确的优化。特别是，TADN可以在网络的单个正向传球中直接推断检测和活动目标之间的分配对。我们已经将TADN整合到了一个相当简单的MOT框架中，我们设计了一种新颖的培训策略，用于有效的端到端培训，并在两个流行的基准上展示了我们在线视觉跟踪MOT的高潜力，即Mot17和Mot17和UA-DETRAC。我们提出的方法在大多数评估指标中的最新方法都优于最先进的方法，尽管它作为跟踪器的简单性质缺乏重要的辅助组件，例如闭塞处理或重新识别。我们的方法的实现可在https://github.com/psaltaath/tadn-mot上公开获得。

变形金刚和蒙版语言建模在计算机视觉中很快被视为视觉变压器和蒙版图像建模（MIM）。在这项工作中，我们认为由于图像中令牌的数量和相关性，图像令牌掩盖与文本中的令牌掩盖有所不同。特别是，为了为MIM产生具有挑战性的借口任务，我们主张从随机掩盖到知情掩盖的转变。我们在基于蒸馏的MIM的背景下开发并展示了这一想法，其中教师变压器编码器生成了一个注意力图，我们用它来指导学生为学生指导掩盖。因此，我们引入了一种新颖的掩蔽策略，称为注意引导蒙版（ATTMASK），我们证明了其对基于密集蒸馏的MIM以及基于普通蒸馏的自然剥离的自助力学习的有效性。我们确认ATTMASK可以加快学习过程，并提高各种下游任务的性能。我们在https://github.com/gkakogeorgiou/attmask上提供实现代码。

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

This paper deals with the problem of statistical and system heterogeneity in a cross-silo Federated Learning (FL) framework where there exist a limited number of Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) devices in a smart building. We propose a novel Graph Signal Processing (GSP)-inspired aggregation rule based on graph filtering dubbed ``G-Fedfilt''. The proposed aggregator enables a structured flow of information based on the graph's topology. This behavior allows capturing the interconnection of CIoT devices and training domain-specific models. The embedded graph filter is equipped with a tunable parameter which enables a continuous trade-off between domain-agnostic and domain-specific FL. In the case of domain-agnostic, it forces G-Fedfilt to act similar to the conventional Federated Averaging (FedAvg) aggregation rule. The proposed G-Fedfilt also enables an intrinsic smooth clustering based on the graph connectivity without explicitly specified which further boosts the personalization of the models in the framework. In addition, the proposed scheme enjoys a communication-efficient time-scheduling to alleviate the system heterogeneity. This is accomplished by adaptively adjusting the amount of training data samples and sparsity of the models' gradients to reduce communication desynchronization and latency. Simulation results show that the proposed G-Fedfilt achieves up to $3.99\% $ better classification accuracy than the conventional FedAvg when concerning model personalization on the statistically heterogeneous local datasets, while it is capable of yielding up to $2.41\%$ higher accuracy than FedAvg in the case of testing the generalization of the models.

360-degree panoramic videos have gained considerable attention in recent years due to the rapid development of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and panoramic cameras. One major problem in streaming panoramic videos is that panoramic videos are much larger in size compared to traditional ones. Moreover, the user devices are often in a wireless environment, with limited battery, computation power, and bandwidth. To reduce resource consumption, researchers have proposed ways to predict the users' viewports so that only part of the entire video needs to be transmitted from the server. However, the robustness of such prediction approaches has been overlooked in the literature: it is usually assumed that only a few models, pre-trained on past users' experiences, are applied for prediction to all users. We observe that those pre-trained models can perform poorly for some users because they might have drastically different behaviors from the majority, and the pre-trained models cannot capture the features in unseen videos. In this work, we propose a novel meta learning based viewport prediction paradigm to alleviate the worst prediction performance and ensure the robustness of viewport prediction. This paradigm uses two machine learning models, where the first model predicts the viewing direction, and the second model predicts the minimum video prefetch size that can include the actual viewport. We first train two meta models so that they are sensitive to new training data, and then quickly adapt them to users while they are watching the videos. Evaluation results reveal that the meta models can adapt quickly to each user, and can significantly increase the prediction accuracy, especially for the worst-performing predictions.

Background samples provide key contextual information for segmenting regions of interest (ROIs). However, they always cover a diverse set of structures, causing difficulties for the segmentation model to learn good decision boundaries with high sensitivity and precision. The issue concerns the highly heterogeneous nature of the background class, resulting in multi-modal distributions. Empirically, we find that neural networks trained with heterogeneous background struggle to map the corresponding contextual samples to compact clusters in feature space. As a result, the distribution over background logit activations may shift across the decision boundary, leading to systematic over-segmentation across different datasets and tasks. In this study, we propose context label learning (CoLab) to improve the context representations by decomposing the background class into several subclasses. Specifically, we train an auxiliary network as a task generator, along with the primary segmentation model, to automatically generate context labels that positively affect the ROI segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted on several challenging segmentation tasks and datasets. The results demonstrate that CoLab can guide the segmentation model to map the logits of background samples away from the decision boundary, resulting in significantly improved segmentation accuracy. Code is available.

Reinforcement learning (RL) gained considerable attention by creating decision-making agents that maximize rewards received from fully observable environments. However, many real-world problems are partially or noisily observable by nature, where agents do not receive the true and complete state of the environment. Such problems are formulated as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Some studies applied RL to POMDPs by recalling previous decisions and observations or inferring the true state of the environment from received observations. Nevertheless, aggregating observations and decisions over time is impractical for environments with high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. Moreover, so-called inference-based RL approaches require large number of samples to perform well since agents eschew uncertainty in the inferred state for the decision-making. Active inference is a framework that is naturally formulated in POMDPs and directs agents to select decisions by minimising expected free energy (EFE). This supplies reward-maximising (exploitative) behaviour in RL, with an information-seeking (exploratory) behaviour. Despite this exploratory behaviour of active inference, its usage is limited to discrete state and action spaces due to the computational difficulty of the EFE. We propose a unified principle for joint information-seeking and reward maximization that clarifies a theoretical connection between active inference and RL, unifies active inference and RL, and overcomes their aforementioned limitations. Our findings are supported by strong theoretical analysis. The proposed framework's superior exploration property is also validated by experimental results on partial observable tasks with high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. Moreover, the results show that our model solves reward-free problems, making task reward design optional.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) describes a process for inferring quantifiable metrics of structural condition, which can serve as input to support decisions on the operation and maintenance of infrastructure assets. Given the long lifespan of critical structures, this problem can be cast as a sequential decision making problem over prescribed horizons. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) offer a formal framework to solve the underlying optimal planning task. However, two issues can undermine the POMDP solutions. Firstly, the need for a model that can adequately describe the evolution of the structural condition under deterioration or corrective actions and, secondly, the non-trivial task of recovery of the observation process parameters from available monitoring data. Despite these potential challenges, the adopted POMDP models do not typically account for uncertainty on model parameters, leading to solutions which can be unrealistically confident. In this work, we address both key issues. We present a framework to estimate POMDP transition and observation model parameters directly from available data, via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) conditioned on actions. The MCMC inference estimates distributions of the involved model parameters. We then form and solve the POMDP problem by exploiting the inferred distributions, to derive solutions that are robust to model uncertainty. We successfully apply our approach on maintenance planning for railway track assets on the basis of a "fractal value" indicator, which is computed from actual railway monitoring data.