Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has been proposed to alleviate the conflict between data annotation cost and model performance through employing sparsely-grained (i.e., point-, box-, scribble-wise) supervision and has shown promising performance, particularly in the image segmentation field. However, it is still a very challenging problem due to the limited supervision, especially when only a small number of labeled samples are available. Additionally, almost all existing WSL segmentation methods are designed for star-convex structures which are very different from curvilinear structures such as vessels and nerves. In this paper, we propose a novel sparsely annotated segmentation framework for curvilinear structures, named YoloCurvSeg, based on image synthesis. A background generator delivers image backgrounds that closely match real distributions through inpainting dilated skeletons. The extracted backgrounds are then combined with randomly emulated curves generated by a Space Colonization Algorithm-based foreground generator and through a multilayer patch-wise contrastive learning synthesizer. In this way, a synthetic dataset with both images and curve segmentation labels is obtained, at the cost of only one or a few noisy skeleton annotations. Finally, a segmenter is trained with the generated dataset and possibly an unlabeled dataset. The proposed YoloCurvSeg is evaluated on four publicly available datasets (OCTA500, CORN, DRIVE and CHASEDB1) and the results show that YoloCurvSeg outperforms state-of-the-art WSL segmentation methods by large margins. With only one noisy skeleton annotation (respectively 0.14%, 0.02%, 1.4%, and 0.65% of the full annotation), YoloCurvSeg achieves more than 97% of the fully-supervised performance on each dataset. Code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/llmir/YoloCurvSeg.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

在本文中，我们提出了一条基于截短的签名距离函数（TSDF）体积的接触点检测的新型抓紧管道，以实现闭环7度自由度（7-DOF）在杂物环境上抓住。我们方法的关键方面是1）提议的管道以多视图融合，接触点采样和评估以及碰撞检查，可提供可靠且无碰撞的7-DOF抓手姿势，并带有真实的碰撞 - 时间性能；2）基于接触的姿势表示有效地消除了基于正常方法的歧义，从而提供了更精确和灵活的解决方案。广泛的模拟和实体机器人实验表明，在模拟和物理场景中，就掌握成功率而言，提出的管道可以选择更多的反物和稳定的抓握姿势，并优于基于正常的基线。

由于存在动态变化，在标称环境中培训的强化学习（RL）控制策略可能在新的/扰动环境中失败。为了控制具有连续状态和动作空间的系统，我们提出了一种加载方法，通过使用$ \ mathcal {l} _ {1} $自适应控制器（$ \ mathcal {l} _{1} $ AC）。利用$ \ mathcal {l} _ {1} $ AC的能力进行快速估计和动态变化的主动补偿，所提出的方法可以提高RL策略的稳健性，该策略在模拟器或现实世界中培训不考虑广泛的动态变化。数值和现实世界实验经验证明了所提出的方法在使用无模型和基于模型的方法训练的RL政策中的强制性策略的功效。用于真正的拼图设置实验的视频是可用的：//youtu.be/xgob9vpyuge。

一个多世纪以前，伊万·P·帕夫洛夫（Ivan P. Pavlov）在经典实验中展示了狗如何学会将铃铛与食物联系起来，从而导致戒指导致唾液。如今，很少发现使用Pavlovian类型的关联学习用于人工智能（AI）应用程序，即使其他学习概念，尤其是对人工神经网络（ANN）的反向传播也蓬勃发展。但是，使用反向传播方法的训练在“常规” ANN上，尤其是现代深神经网络（DNNS）的形式，是计算和能量密集型的。在这里，我们在实验上展示了使用单个（或单一）关联硬件元素的无反向传播学习形式。我们使用相位变换材料与芯片级联方向耦合器相结合的集成光子平台上意识到这一点。然后，我们使用我们的Monadic Pavlovian光子硬件开发扩展的电路网络，该硬件可以基于单元素关联提供独特的机器学习框架，并且重要的是，重要的是，使用无反向传播的架构来解决一般学习任务。我们的方法通过在传统的神经网络方法中学习来减轻施加的计算负担，从而提高了速度，同时还提供了我们光子实现固有的更高带宽。

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Brain midline shift (MLS) is one of the most critical factors to be considered for clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making for intracranial hemorrhage. Existing computational methods on MLS quantification not only require intensive labeling in millimeter-level measurement but also suffer from poor performance due to their dependence on specific landmarks or simplified anatomical assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework to accurately measure the scale of MLS from head CT scans. We formulate the MLS measurement task as a deformation estimation problem and solve it using a few MLS slices with sparse labels. Meanwhile, with the help of diffusion models, we are able to use a great number of unlabeled MLS data and 2793 non-MLS cases for representation learning and regularization. The extracted representation reflects how the image is different from a non-MLS image and regularization serves an important role in the sparse-to-dense refinement of the deformation field. Our experiment on a real clinical brain hemorrhage dataset has achieved state-of-the-art performance and can generate interpretable deformation fields.