Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

Benefiting from the intrinsic supervision information exploitation capability, contrastive learning has achieved promising performance in the field of deep graph clustering recently. However, we observe that two drawbacks of the positive and negative sample construction mechanisms limit the performance of existing algorithms from further improvement. 1) The quality of positive samples heavily depends on the carefully designed data augmentations, while inappropriate data augmentations would easily lead to the semantic drift and indiscriminative positive samples. 2) The constructed negative samples are not reliable for ignoring important clustering information. To solve these problems, we propose a Cluster-guided Contrastive deep Graph Clustering network (CCGC) by mining the intrinsic supervision information in the high-confidence clustering results. Specifically, instead of conducting complex node or edge perturbation, we construct two views of the graph by designing special Siamese encoders whose weights are not shared between the sibling sub-networks. Then, guided by the high-confidence clustering information, we carefully select and construct the positive samples from the same high-confidence cluster in two views. Moreover, to construct semantic meaningful negative sample pairs, we regard the centers of different high-confidence clusters as negative samples, thus improving the discriminative capability and reliability of the constructed sample pairs. Lastly, we design an objective function to pull close the samples from the same cluster while pushing away those from other clusters by maximizing and minimizing the cross-view cosine similarity between positive and negative samples. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCGC compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on robust average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case average reward over an uncertainty set. We first take an approach that approximates average-reward MDPs using discounted MDPs. We prove that the robust discounted value function converges to the robust average-reward as the discount factor $\gamma$ goes to $1$, and moreover, when $\gamma$ is large, any optimal policy of the robust discounted MDP is also an optimal policy of the robust average-reward. We further design a robust dynamic programming approach, and theoretically characterize its convergence to the optimum. Then, we investigate robust average-reward MDPs directly without using discounted MDPs as an intermediate step. We derive the robust Bellman equation for robust average-reward MDPs, prove that the optimal policy can be derived from its solution, and further design a robust relative value iteration algorithm that provably finds its solution, or equivalently, the optimal robust policy.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to different tasks such as bioinformatics, drug design, and social networks. However, recent studies have shown that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which aim to mislead the node or subgraph classification prediction by adding subtle perturbations. Detecting these attacks is challenging due to the small magnitude of perturbation and the discrete nature of graph data. In this paper, we propose a general adversarial edge detection pipeline EDoG without requiring knowledge of the attack strategies based on graph generation. Specifically, we propose a novel graph generation approach combined with link prediction to detect suspicious adversarial edges. To effectively train the graph generative model, we sample several sub-graphs from the given graph data. We show that since the number of adversarial edges is usually low in practice, with low probability the sampled sub-graphs will contain adversarial edges based on the union bound. In addition, considering the strong attacks which perturb a large number of edges, we propose a set of novel features to perform outlier detection as the preprocessing for our detection. Extensive experimental results on three real-world graph datasets including a private transaction rule dataset from a major company and two types of synthetic graphs with controlled properties show that EDoG can achieve above 0.8 AUC against four state-of-the-art unseen attack strategies without requiring any knowledge about the attack type; and around 0.85 with knowledge of the attack type. EDoG significantly outperforms traditional malicious edge detection baselines. We also show that an adaptive attack with full knowledge of our detection pipeline is difficult to bypass it.

Contrastive deep graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes into disjoint groups via contrastive mechanisms, is a challenging research spot. Among the recent works, hard sample mining-based algorithms have achieved great attention for their promising performance. However, we find that the existing hard sample mining methods have two problems as follows. 1) In the hardness measurement, the important structural information is overlooked for similarity calculation, degrading the representativeness of the selected hard negative samples. 2) Previous works merely focus on the hard negative sample pairs while neglecting the hard positive sample pairs. Nevertheless, samples within the same cluster but with low similarity should also be carefully learned. To solve the problems, we propose a novel contrastive deep graph clustering method dubbed Hard Sample Aware Network (HSAN) by introducing a comprehensive similarity measure criterion and a general dynamic sample weighing strategy. Concretely, in our algorithm, the similarities between samples are calculated by considering both the attribute embeddings and the structure embeddings, better revealing sample relationships and assisting hardness measurement. Moreover, under the guidance of the carefully collected high-confidence clustering information, our proposed weight modulating function will first recognize the positive and negative samples and then dynamically up-weight the hard sample pairs while down-weighting the easy ones. In this way, our method can mine not only the hard negative samples but also the hard positive sample, thus improving the discriminative capability of the samples further. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated superior novel view synthesis performance but are slow at rendering. To speed up the volume rendering process, many acceleration methods have been proposed at the cost of large memory consumption. To push the frontier of the efficiency-memory trade-off, we explore a new perspective to accelerate NeRF rendering, leveraging a key fact that the viewpoint change is usually smooth and continuous in interactive viewpoint control. This allows us to leverage the information of preceding viewpoints to reduce the number of rendered pixels as well as the number of sampled points along the ray of the remaining pixels. In our pipeline, a low-resolution feature map is rendered first by volume rendering, then a lightweight 2D neural renderer is applied to generate the output image at target resolution leveraging the features of preceding and current frames. We show that the proposed method can achieve competitive rendering quality while reducing the rendering time with little memory overhead, enabling 30FPS at 1080P image resolution with a low memory footprint.

In this paper, we aim to design an efficient real-time object detector that exceeds the YOLO series and is easily extensible for many object recognition tasks such as instance segmentation and rotated object detection. To obtain a more efficient model architecture, we explore an architecture that has compatible capacities in the backbone and neck, constructed by a basic building block that consists of large-kernel depth-wise convolutions. We further introduce soft labels when calculating matching costs in the dynamic label assignment to improve accuracy. Together with better training techniques, the resulting object detector, named RTMDet, achieves 52.8% AP on COCO with 300+ FPS on an NVIDIA 3090 GPU, outperforming the current mainstream industrial detectors. RTMDet achieves the best parameter-accuracy trade-off with tiny/small/medium/large/extra-large model sizes for various application scenarios, and obtains new state-of-the-art performance on real-time instance segmentation and rotated object detection. We hope the experimental results can provide new insights into designing versatile real-time object detectors for many object recognition tasks. Code and models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/tree/3.x/configs/rtmdet.

This paper presents a new data augmentation algorithm for natural understanding tasks, called RPN:Random Position Noise algorithm.Due to the relative paucity of current text augmentation methods. Few of the extant methods apply to natural language understanding tasks for all sentence-level tasks.RPN applies the traditional augmentation on the original text to the word vector level. The RPN algorithm makes a substitution in one or several dimensions of some word vectors. As a result, the RPN can introduce a certain degree of perturbation to the sample and can adjust the range of perturbation on different tasks. The augmented samples are then used to give the model training.This makes the model more robust. In subsequent experiments, we found that adding RPN to the training or fine-tuning model resulted in a stable boost on all 8 natural language processing tasks, including TweetEval, CoLA, and SST-2 datasets, and more significant improvements than other data augmentation algorithms.The RPN algorithm applies to all sentence-level tasks for language understanding and is used in any deep learning model with a word embedding layer.

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR), aiming to deduce new facts from existing facts based on mined logic rules underlying knowledge graphs (KGs), has become a fast-growing research direction. It has been proven to significantly benefit the usage of KGs in many AI applications, such as question answering and recommendation systems, etc. According to the graph types, the existing KGR models can be roughly divided into three categories, \textit{i.e.,} static models, temporal models, and multi-modal models. The early works in this domain mainly focus on static KGR and tend to directly apply general knowledge graph embedding models to the reasoning task. However, these models are not suitable for more complex but practical tasks, such as inductive static KGR, temporal KGR, and multi-modal KGR. To this end, multiple works have been developed recently, but no survey papers and open-source repositories comprehensively summarize and discuss models in this important direction. To fill the gap, we conduct a survey for knowledge graph reasoning tracing from static to temporal and then to multi-modal KGs. Concretely, the preliminaries, summaries of KGR models, and typical datasets are introduced and discussed consequently. Moreover, we discuss the challenges and potential opportunities. The corresponding open-source repository is shared on GitHub: https://github.com/LIANGKE23/Awesome-Knowledge-Graph-Reasoning.

Inserting an SVD meta-layer into neural networks is prone to make the covariance ill-conditioned, which could harm the model in the training stability and generalization abilities. In this paper, we systematically study how to improve the covariance conditioning by enforcing orthogonality to the Pre-SVD layer. Existing orthogonal treatments on the weights are first investigated. However, these techniques can improve the conditioning but would hurt the performance. To avoid such a side effect, we propose the Nearest Orthogonal Gradient (NOG) and Optimal Learning Rate (OLR). The effectiveness of our methods is validated in two applications: decorrelated Batch Normalization (BN) and Global Covariance Pooling (GCP). Extensive experiments on visual recognition demonstrate that our methods can simultaneously improve covariance conditioning and generalization. The combinations with orthogonal weight can further boost the performance. Moreover, we show that our orthogonality techniques can benefit generative models for better latent disentanglement through a series of experiments on various benchmarks. Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/KingJamesSong/OrthoImproveCond}{https://github.com/KingJamesSong/OrthoImproveCond}.