图像文本匹配是在涉及对视觉和语言的共同理解的任务中发挥领导作用。在文献中，此任务通常被用作培训能够共同处理图像和文本的架构的预训练目标。但是，它具有直接的下游应用程序：跨模式检索，其中包括查找与给定查询文本或反之亦然相关的图像。解决此任务对于跨模式搜索引擎至关重要。许多最近的方法提出了针对图像文本匹配问题的有效解决方案，主要是使用最近的大型视觉语言（VL）变压器网络。但是，这些模型通常在计算上很昂贵，尤其是在推理时间。这样可以防止他们在大规模的跨模式检索场景中采用，几乎应该立即向用户提供结果。在本文中，我们建议通过提出对齐和提炼网络（Aladin）来填补有效性和效率之间的空白。阿拉丁首先通过在细粒度的图像和文本上对齐来产生高效的分数。然后，它通过提炼从细粒对齐方式获得的相关性分数来提炼共享的嵌入空间 - 可以进行有效的KNN搜索。我们在MS-Coco上取得了显着的结果，表明我们的方法可以与最先进的VL变形金刚竞争，同时快了近90倍。复制我们结果的代码可在https://github.com/mesnico/aladin上获得。

连接视觉和语言在生成智能中起着重要作用。因此，已经致力于图像标题的大型研究工作，即用句法和语义有意义的句子描述图像。从2015年开始，该任务通常通过由Visual Encoder组成的管道和文本生成的语言模型来解决任务。在这些年来，两种组件通过对象区域，属性，介绍多模态连接，完全关注方法和伯特早期融合策略的利用而显着发展。但是，无论令人印象深刻的结果，图像标题的研究还没有达到结论性答案。这项工作旨在提供图像标题方法的全面概述，从视觉编码和文本生成到培训策略，数据集和评估度量。在这方面，我们量化地比较了许多相关的最先进的方法来确定架构和培训策略中最有影响力的技术创新。此外，讨论了问题的许多变体及其开放挑战。这项工作的最终目标是作为理解现有文献的工具，并突出显示计算机视觉和自然语言处理的研究领域的未来方向可以找到最佳的协同作用。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

Explainability is a vibrant research topic in the artificial intelligence community, with growing interest across methods and domains. Much has been written about the topic, yet explainability still lacks shared terminology and a framework capable of providing structural soundness to explanations. In our work, we address these issues by proposing a novel definition of explanation that is a synthesis of what can be found in the literature. We recognize that explanations are not atomic but the product of evidence stemming from the model and its input-output and the human interpretation of this evidence. Furthermore, we fit explanations into the properties of faithfulness (i.e., the explanation being a true description of the model's decision-making) and plausibility (i.e., how much the explanation looks convincing to the user). Using our proposed theoretical framework simplifies how these properties are ope rationalized and provide new insight into common explanation methods that we analyze as case studies.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Objective: Accurate visual classification of bladder tissue during Trans-Urethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) procedures is essential to improve early cancer diagnosis and treatment. During TURBT interventions, White Light Imaging (WLI) and Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) techniques are used for lesion detection. Each imaging technique provides diverse visual information that allows clinicians to identify and classify cancerous lesions. Computer vision methods that use both imaging techniques could improve endoscopic diagnosis. We address the challenge of tissue classification when annotations are available only in one domain, in our case WLI, and the endoscopic images correspond to an unpaired dataset, i.e. there is no exact equivalent for every image in both NBI and WLI domains. Method: We propose a semi-surprised Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method composed of three main components: a teacher network trained on the labeled WLI data; a cycle-consistency GAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, and a multi-input student network. To ensure the quality of the synthetic images generated by the proposed GAN we perform a detailed quantitative, and qualitative analysis with the help of specialists. Conclusion: The overall average classification accuracy, precision, and recall obtained with the proposed method for tissue classification are 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89 respectively, while the same metrics obtained in the unlabeled domain (NBI) are 0.92, 0.64, and 0.94 respectively. The quality of the generated images is reliable enough to deceive specialists. Significance: This study shows the potential of using semi-supervised GAN-based classification to improve bladder tissue classification when annotations are limited in multi-domain data.

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has recently accomplished successful achievements in various fields such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, which typically require a lot of labour to construct ground-truth. Especially in the depth estimation task, annotating training data is very costly and time-consuming, and thus recent SSL regime seems an attractive solution. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce a novel framework for semi-supervised learning of monocular depth estimation networks, using consistency regularization to mitigate the reliance on large ground-truth depth data. We propose a novel data augmentation approach, called K-way disjoint masking, which allows the network for learning how to reconstruct invisible regions so that the model not only becomes robust to perturbations but also generates globally consistent output depth maps. Experiments on the KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in our pipeline, robustness to the use of fewer and fewer annotated images, and superior results compared to other state-of-the-art, semi-supervised methods for monocular depth estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/KU-CVLAB/MaskingDepth.

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.