A recent study has shown a phenomenon called neural collapse in that the within-class means of features and the classifier weight vectors converge to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame at the terminal phase of training for classification. In this paper, we explore the corresponding structures of the last-layer feature centers and classifiers in semantic segmentation. Based on our empirical and theoretical analysis, we point out that semantic segmentation naturally brings contextual correlation and imbalanced distribution among classes, which breaks the equiangular and maximally separated structure of neural collapse for both feature centers and classifiers. However, such a symmetric structure is beneficial to discrimination for the minor classes. To preserve these advantages, we introduce a regularizer on feature centers to encourage the network to learn features closer to the appealing structure in imbalanced semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvements on both 2D and 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks. Moreover, our method ranks 1st and sets a new record (+6.8% mIoU) on the ScanNet200 test leaderboard. Code will be available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Imbalanced-Learning.

Recently, great progress has been made in single-image super-resolution (SISR) based on deep learning technology. However, the existing methods usually require a large computational cost. Meanwhile, the activation function will cause some features of the intermediate layer to be lost. Therefore, it is a challenge to make the model lightweight while reducing the impact of intermediate feature loss on the reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose a Feature Interaction Weighted Hybrid Network (FIWHN) to alleviate the above problem. Specifically, FIWHN consists of a series of novel Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Blocks (WDIB) as the backbone, where every third WDIBs form a Feature shuffle Weighted Group (FSWG) by mutual information mixing and fusion. In addition, to mitigate the adverse effects of intermediate feature loss on the reconstruction results, we introduced a well-designed Wide Convolutional Residual Weighting (WCRW) and Wide Identical Residual Weighting (WIRW) units in WDIB, and effectively cross-fused features of different finenesses through a Wide-residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) framework and a Self-Calibrating Fusion (SCF) unit. Finally, to complement the global features lacking in the CNN model, we introduced the Transformer into our model and explored a new way of combining the CNN and Transformer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on low-level and high-level tasks show that our proposed FIWHN can achieve a good balance between performance and efficiency, and is more conducive to downstream tasks to solve problems in low-pixel scenarios.

Motivated by the human-machine interaction such as training chatbots for improving customer satisfaction, we study human-guided human-machine interaction involving private information. We model this interaction as a two-player turn-based game, where one player (Alice, a human) guides the other player (Bob, a machine) towards a common goal. Specifically, we focus on offline reinforcement learning (RL) in this game, where the goal is to find a policy pair for Alice and Bob that maximizes their expected total rewards based on an offline dataset collected a priori. The offline setting presents two challenges: (i) We cannot collect Bob's private information, leading to a confounding bias when using standard RL methods, and (ii) a distributional mismatch between the behavior policy used to collect data and the desired policy we aim to learn. To tackle the confounding bias, we treat Bob's previous action as an instrumental variable for Alice's current decision making so as to adjust for the unmeasured confounding. We develop a novel identification result and use it to propose a new off-policy evaluation (OPE) method for evaluating policy pairs in this two-player turn-based game. To tackle the distributional mismatch, we leverage the idea of pessimism and use our OPE method to develop an off-policy learning algorithm for finding a desirable policy pair for both Alice and Bob. Finally, we prove that under mild assumptions such as partial coverage of the offline data, the policy pair obtained through our method converges to the optimal one at a satisfactory rate.

Generative models have been widely applied to solve extractive tasks, where parts of the input is extracted to form the desired output, and achieved significant success. For example, in extractive question answering (QA), generative models have constantly yielded state-of-the-art results. In this work, we identify the issue of tokenization inconsistency that is commonly neglected in training these models. This issue damages the extractive nature of these tasks after the input and output are tokenized inconsistently by the tokenizer, and thus leads to performance drop as well as hallucination. We propose a simple yet effective fix to this issue and conduct a case study on extractive QA. We show that, with consistent tokenization, the model performs better in both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, with a notable average of +1.7 F2 gain when a BART model is trained on SQuAD and evaluated on 8 QA datasets. Further, the model converges faster, and becomes less likely to generate out-of-context answers. With these findings, we would like to call for more attention on how tokenization should be done when solving extractive tasks and recommend applying consistent tokenization during training.

In this paper, we present a pure-Python open-source library, called PyPop7, for black-box optimization (BBO). It provides a unified and modular interface for more than 60 versions and variants of different black-box optimization algorithms, particularly population-based optimizers, which can be classified into 12 popular families: Evolution Strategies (ES), Natural Evolution Strategies (NES), Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA), Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), Differential Evolution (DE), Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO), Cooperative Coevolution (CC), Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithms (GA), Evolutionary Programming (EP), Pattern Search (PS), and Random Search (RS). It also provides many examples, interesting tutorials, and full-fledged API documentations. Through this new library, we expect to provide a well-designed platform for benchmarking of optimizers and promote their real-world applications, especially for large-scale BBO. Its source code and documentations are available at https://github.com/Evolutionary-Intelligence/pypop and https://pypop.readthedocs.io/en/latest, respectively.

Crowd counting is usually handled in a density map regression fashion, which is supervised via a L2 loss between the predicted density map and ground truth. To effectively regulate models, various improved L2 loss functions have been proposed to find a better correspondence between predicted density and annotation positions. In this paper, we propose to predict the density map at one resolution but measure the density map at multiple resolutions. By maximizing the posterior probability in such a setting, we obtain a log-formed multi-resolution L2-difference loss, where the traditional single-resolution L2 loss is its particular case. We mathematically prove it is superior to a single-resolution L2 loss. Without bells and whistles, the proposed loss substantially improves several baselines and performs favorably compared to state-of-the-art methods on four crowd counting datasets, ShanghaiTech A & B, UCF-QNRF, and JHU-Crowd++.

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal events in videos using only video-level labels. Recently, two-stage self-training methods have achieved significant improvements by self-generating pseudo labels and self-refining anomaly scores with these labels. As the pseudo labels play a crucial role, we propose an enhancement framework by exploiting completeness and uncertainty properties for effective self-training. Specifically, we first design a multi-head classification module (each head serves as a classifier) with a diversity loss to maximize the distribution differences of predicted pseudo labels across heads. This encourages the generated pseudo labels to cover as many abnormal events as possible. We then devise an iterative uncertainty pseudo label refinement strategy, which improves not only the initial pseudo labels but also the updated ones obtained by the desired classifier in the second stage. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches on the UCF-Crime, TAD, and XD-Violence benchmark datasets.

Crowd localization aims to predict the spatial position of humans in a crowd scenario. We observe that the performance of existing methods is challenged from two aspects: (i) ranking inconsistency between test and training phases; and (ii) fixed anchor resolution may underfit or overfit crowd densities of local regions. To address these problems, we design a supervision target reassignment strategy for training to reduce ranking inconsistency and propose an anchor pyramid scheme to adaptively determine the anchor density in each image region. Extensive experimental results on three widely adopted datasets (ShanghaiTech A\&B, JHU-CROWD++, UCF-QNRF) demonstrate the favorable performance against several state-of-the-art methods.

Given a piece of text, a video clip and a reference audio, the movie dubbing (also known as visual voice clone V2C) task aims to generate speeches that match the speaker's emotion presented in the video using the desired speaker voice as reference. V2C is more challenging than conventional text-to-speech tasks as it additionally requires the generated speech to exactly match the varying emotions and speaking speed presented in the video. Unlike previous works, we propose a novel movie dubbing architecture to tackle these problems via hierarchical prosody modelling, which bridges the visual information to corresponding speech prosody from three aspects: lip, face, and scene. Specifically, we align lip movement to the speech duration, and convey facial expression to speech energy and pitch via attention mechanism based on valence and arousal representations inspired by recent psychology findings. Moreover, we design an emotion booster to capture the atmosphere from global video scenes. All these embeddings together are used to generate mel-spectrogram and then convert to speech waves via existing vocoder. Extensive experimental results on the Chem and V2C benchmark datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.

Autoregressive language modeling (ALM) have been successfully used in self-supervised pre-training in Natural language processing (NLP). However, this paradigm has not achieved comparable results with other self-supervised approach in computer vision (e.g., contrastive learning, mask image modeling). In this paper, we try to find the reason why autoregressive modeling does not work well on vision tasks. To tackle this problem, we fully analyze the limitation of visual autoregressive methods and proposed a novel stochastic autoregressive image modeling (named SAIM) by the two simple designs. First, we employ stochastic permutation strategy to generate effective and robust image context which is critical for vision tasks. Second, we create a parallel encoder-decoder training process in which the encoder serves a similar role to the standard vision transformer focus on learning the whole contextual information, and meanwhile the decoder predicts the content of the current position, so that the encoder and decoder can reinforce each other. By introducing stochastic prediction and the parallel encoder-decoder, SAIM significantly improve the performance of autoregressive image modeling. Our method achieves the best accuracy (83.9%) on the vanilla ViT-Base model among methods using only ImageNet-1K data. Transfer performance in downstream tasks also show that our model achieves competitive performance.