arXiv subjects

Jian Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jian Zhang.

At least 541 records · Page 30Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Learning Disentangled Representation Implicitly via Transformer for Occluded Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID) under various occlusions has been a long-standing challenge as person images with different types of occlusions often suffer from misalignment in image matching and ranking. Most existing methods tackle this challenge by aligning spatial features of body parts according to external semantic cues or feature similarities but this alignment approach is complicated and sensitive to noises. We design DRL-Net, a disentangled representation learning network that handles occluded re-ID without requiring strict person image alignment or any additional supervision. Leveraging transformer architectures, DRL-Net achieves alignment-free re-ID via global reasoning of local features of occluded person images. It measures image similarity by automatically disentangling the representation of undefined semantic components, e.g., human body parts or obstacles, under the guidance of semantic preference object queries in the transformer. In addition, we design a decorrelation constraint in the transformer decoder and impose it over object queries for better focus on different semantic components. To better eliminate interference from occlusions, we design a contrast feature learning technique (CFL) for better separation of occlusion features and discriminative ID features. Extensive experiments over occluded and holistic re-ID benchmarks (Occluded-DukeMTMC, Market1501 and DukeMTMC) show that the DRL-Net achieves superior re-ID performance consistently and outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins for Occluded-DukeMTMC.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Linear Dependence of Post-irradiation Input Bias Currents on Pre-irradiation Values in Silicon Bipolar Microcircuits

We find in experiments a linear dependence of ionization irradiation-induced degradations on pre-irradiation values of the input bias current in bipolar devices with simple input stages. The dependence is found to generally exist in all studied cases of different device types and different irradiation conditions. A unique behavior of the energy distribution of the interface states ($D_{it}$) under irradiation is suggested as the origin of the observed phenomenon: the generation of interface traps through the depassivation of Si-H bonds located near the pre-irradiation interface traps displays a $D_{it}$ as an enlarge of the initial $D_{it}$ and results in the general linear dependence. A more accurate damage prediction method by using the pre-irradiation values is proposed based on the observed phenomenon.

physics.space-ph↗

arXiv2021

Dual Attention on Pyramid Feature Maps for Image Captioning

Generating natural sentences from images is a fundamental learning task for visual-semantic understanding in multimedia. In this paper, we propose to apply dual attention on pyramid image feature maps to fully explore the visual-semantic correlations and improve the quality of generated sentences. Specifically, with the full consideration of the contextual information provided by the hidden state of the RNN controller, the pyramid attention can better localize the visually indicative and semantically consistent regions in images. On the other hand, the contextual information can help re-calibrate the importance of feature components by learning the channel-wise dependencies, to improve the discriminative power of visual features for better content description. We conducted comprehensive experiments on three well-known datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MS COCO, which achieved impressive results in generating descriptive and smooth natural sentences from images. Using either convolution visual features or more informative bottom-up attention features, our composite captioning model achieves very promising performance in a single-model mode. The proposed pyramid attention and dual attention methods are highly modular, which can be inserted into various image captioning modules to further improve the performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

A Multi-Branch Hybrid Transformer Networkfor Corneal Endothelial Cell Segmentation

Corneal endothelial cell segmentation plays a vital role inquantifying clinical indicators such as cell density, coefficient of variation,and hexagonality. However, the corneal endothelium's uneven reflectionand the subject's tremor and movement cause blurred cell edges in theimage, which is difficult to segment, and need more details and contextinformation to release this problem. Due to the limited receptive field oflocal convolution and continuous downsampling, the existing deep learn-ing segmentation methods cannot make full use of global context andmiss many details. This paper proposes a Multi-Branch hybrid Trans-former Network (MBT-Net) based on the transformer and body-edgebranch. Firstly, We use the convolutional block to focus on local tex-ture feature extraction and establish long-range dependencies over space,channel, and layer by the transformer and residual connection. Besides,We use the body-edge branch to promote local consistency and to provideedge position information. On the self-collected dataset TM-EM3000 andpublic Alisarine dataset, compared with other State-Of-The-Art (SOTA)methods, the proposed method achieves an improvement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Weakly Supervised Dense Video Captioning via Jointly Usage of Knowledge Distillation and Cross-modal Matching

This paper proposes an approach to Dense Video Captioning (DVC) without pairwise event-sentence annotation. First, we adopt the knowledge distilled from relevant and well solved tasks to generate high-quality event proposals. Then we incorporate contrastive loss and cycle-consistency loss typically applied to cross-modal retrieval tasks to build semantic matching between the proposals and sentences, which are eventually used to train the caption generation module. In addition, the parameters of matching module are initialized via pre-training based on annotated images to improve the matching performance. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet-Caption dataset reveal the significance of distillation-based event proposal generation and cross-modal retrieval-based semantic matching to weakly supervised DVC, and demonstrate the superiority of our method to existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Uncertainty Weighted Actor-Critic for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when bootstrapping from out-of-distribution (OOD) actions or states. We hypothesize that a key missing ingredient from the existing methods is a proper treatment of uncertainty in the offline setting. We propose Uncertainty Weighted Actor-Critic (UWAC), an algorithm that detects OOD state-action pairs and down-weights their contribution in the training objectives accordingly. Implementation-wise, we adopt a practical and effective dropout-based uncertainty estimation method that introduces very little overhead over existing RL algorithms. Empirically, we observe that UWAC substantially improves model stability during training. In addition, UWAC out-performs existing offline RL methods on a variety of competitive tasks, and achieves significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art baseline on datasets with sparse demonstrations collected from human experts.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Robust Beamforming for Enhancing Security in Multibeam Satellite Systems

This paper proposes a robust beamforming (BF) scheme to enhance physical layer security (PLS) of the downlink of a multibeam satellite system in the presence of either uncoordinated or coordinated eavesdroppers (Eves). Specifically, with knowing only the approximate locations of the Eves, we aim at maximizing the worst-case achievable secrecy rate (ASR) of the legitimate user (LU), subject to the constraints of per-antenna transmit power and quality of service (QoS) requirement of the LU. Since the optimization problem is non-convex, we first adopt the discretization method to deal with the unknown regions of the Eves and then exploit the log-sum-exp function to approximate the objective function. Afterwards, a BF method joint alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with Dinkelbach iteration is presented to solve this non-convex problem. Finally, simulation results verify that our robust BF algorithm can effectively improve the security of multibeam satellite systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

G-Tran: Making Distributed Graph Transactions Fast

Graph transaction processing raises many unique challenges such as random data access due to the irregularity of graph structures, low throughput and high abort rate due to the relatively large read/write sets in graph transactions. To address these challenges, we present G-Tran -- an RDMA-enabled distributed in-memory graph database with serializable and snapshot isolation support. First, we propose a graph-native data store to achieve good data locality and fast data access for transactional updates and queries. Second, G-Tran adopts a fully decentralized architecture that leverages RDMA to process distributed transactions with the MPP model, which can achieve high performance by utilizing all computing resources. In addition, we propose a new MV-OCC implementation with two optimizations to address the issue of large read/write sets in graph transactions. Extensive experiments show that G-Tran achieves competitive performance compared with other popular graph databases on benchmark workloads.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Unsupervised Sentiment Analysis by Transferring Multi-source Knowledge

Sentiment analysis (SA) is an important research area in cognitive computation-thus in-depth studies of patterns of sentiment analysis are necessary. At present, rich resource data-based SA has been well developed, while the more challenging and practical multi-source unsupervised SA (i.e. a target domain SA by transferring from multiple source domains) is seldom studied. The challenges behind this problem mainly locate in the lack of supervision information, the semantic gaps among domains (i.e., domain shifts), and the loss of knowledge. However, existing methods either lack the distinguishable capacity of the semantic gaps among domains or lose private knowledge. To alleviate these problems, we propose a two-stage domain adaptation framework. In the first stage, a multi-task methodology-based shared-private architecture is employed to explicitly model the domain common features and the domain-specific features for the labeled source domains. In the second stage, two elaborate mechanisms are embedded in the shared private architecture to transfer knowledge from multiple source domains. The first mechanism is a selective domain adaptation (SDA) method, which transfers knowledge from the closest source domain. And the second mechanism is a target-oriented ensemble (TOE) method, in which knowledge is transferred through a well-designed ensemble method. Extensive experiment evaluations verify that the performance of the proposed framework outperforms unsupervised state-of-the-art competitors. What can be concluded from the experiments is that transferring from very different distributed source domains may degrade the target-domain performance, and it is crucial to choose the proper source domains to transfer from.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Underwater Target Recognition based on Multi-Decision LOFAR Spectrum Enhancement: A Deep Learning Approach

The Low frequency analysis and recording (LOFAR) spectrum is one of the key features of the under water target, which can be used for underwater target recognition. However, the underwater environment noise is complicated and the signal-to-noise ratio of the underwater target is rather low, which introduces the breakpoints to the LOFAR spectrum and thus hinders the underwater target recognition. To overcome this issue and to further improve the recognition performance, we adopt a deep learning approach for underwater target recognition and propose a LOFAR spectrum enhancement (LSE)-based underwater target recognition scheme, which consists of preprocessing, offline training, and online testing. In preprocessing, a LOFAR spectrum enhancement based on multi-step decision algorithm is specifically designed to recover the breakpoints in LOFAR spectrum. In offline training, we then adopt the enhanced LOFAR spectrum as the input of convolutional neural network (CNN) and develop a LOFAR-based CNN (LOFAR-CNN) for online recognition. Taking advantage of the powerful capability of CNN in feature extraction, the proposed LOFAR-CNN can further improve the recognition accuracy. Finally, extensive simulation results demonstrate that the LOFAR-CNN network can achieve a recognition accuracy of $95.22\%$, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

PTN: A Poisson Transfer Network for Semi-supervised Few-shot Learning

The predicament in semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) is to maximize the value of the extra unlabeled data to boost the few-shot learner. In this paper, we propose a Poisson Transfer Network (PTN) to mine the unlabeled information for SSFSL from two aspects. First, the Poisson Merriman Bence Osher (MBO) model builds a bridge for the communications between labeled and unlabeled examples. This model serves as a more stable and informative classifier than traditional graph-based SSFSL methods in the message-passing process of the labels. Second, the extra unlabeled samples are employed to transfer the knowledge from base classes to novel classes through contrastive learning. Specifically, we force the augmented positive pairs close while push the negative ones distant. Our contrastive transfer scheme implicitly learns the novel-class embeddings to alleviate the over-fitting problem on the few labeled data. Thus, we can mitigate the degeneration of embedding generality in novel classes. Extensive experiments indicate that PTN outperforms the state-of-the-art few-shot and SSFSL models on miniImageNet and tieredImageNet benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Towards Better Graph Representation: Two-Branch Collaborative Graph Neural Networks for Multimodal Marketing Intention Detection

Inspired by the fact that spreading and collecting information through the Internet becomes the norm, more and more people choose to post for-profit contents (images and texts) in social networks. Due to the difficulty of network censors, malicious marketing may be capable of harming society. Therefore, it is meaningful to detect marketing intentions online automatically. However, gaps between multimodal data make it difficult to fuse images and texts for content marketing detection. To this end, this paper proposes Two-Branch Collaborative Graph Neural Networks to collaboratively represent multimodal data by Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior graph classification performance for marketing intention detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

AutoBSS: An Efficient Algorithm for Block Stacking Style Search

Neural network architecture design mostly focuses on the new convolutional operator or special topological structure of network block, little attention is drawn to the configuration of stacking each block, called Block Stacking Style (BSS). Recent studies show that BSS may also have an unneglectable impact on networks, thus we design an efficient algorithm to search it automatically. The proposed method, AutoBSS, is a novel AutoML algorithm based on Bayesian optimization by iteratively refining and clustering Block Stacking Style Code (BSSC), which can find optimal BSS in a few trials without biased evaluation. On ImageNet classification task, ResNet50/MobileNetV2/EfficientNet-B0 with our searched BSS achieve 79.29%/74.5%/77.79%, which outperform the original baselines by a large margin. More importantly, experimental results on model compression, object detection and instance segmentation show the strong generalizability of the proposed AutoBSS, and further verify the unneglectable impact of BSS on neural networks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Edible meta-atoms

Metamaterials are artificial structures with unusual and superior properties that come from their carefully designed building blocks -- also called meta-atoms. Metamaterials have permeated large swatches of science, including electromagnetics and mechanics. Although metamaterials hold the promise for realizing technological advances, their potential to enhance interactions between humans and materials has remained unexplored. Here, we devise meta-atoms with tailored fracture properties to control mouthfeel sensory experience. Using chocolate as a model material, we first use meta-atoms to control the fracture anisotropy and the number of cracks and demonstrate that these properties are captured in mouthfeel experience. We further use topology optimization to rationally design edible meta-atoms with maximally anisotropic fracture strength. Our work opens avenues for the use of meta-atoms and metamaterials to control fracture and to enhance human-matter interactions.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2021

Super-Resolving Compressed Video in Coding Chain

Scaling and lossy coding are widely used in video transmission and storage. Previous methods for enhancing the resolution of such videos often ignore the inherent interference between resolution loss and compression artifacts, which compromises perceptual video quality. To address this problem, we present a mixed-resolution coding framework, which cooperates with a reference-based DCNN. In this novel coding chain, the reference-based DCNN learns the direct mapping from low-resolution (LR) compressed video to their high-resolution (HR) clean version at the decoder side. We further improve reconstruction quality by devising an efficient deformable alignment module with receptive field block to handle various motion distances and introducing a disentangled loss that helps networks distinguish the artifact patterns from texture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed innovations by comparing with state-of-the-art single image, video and reference-based restoration methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation aims to classify every pixel of an input image. Considering the difficulty of acquiring dense labels, researchers have recently been resorting to weak labels to alleviate the annotation burden of segmentation. However, existing works mainly concentrate on expanding the seed of pseudo labels within the image's salient region. In this work, we propose a non-salient region object mining approach for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. We introduce a graph-based global reasoning unit to strengthen the classification network's ability to capture global relations among disjoint and distant regions. This helps the network activate the object features outside the salient area. To further mine the non-salient region objects, we propose to exert the segmentation network's self-correction ability. Specifically, a potential object mining module is proposed to reduce the false-negative rate in pseudo labels. Moreover, we propose a non-salient region masking module for complex images to generate masked pseudo labels. Our non-salient region masking module helps further discover the objects in the non-salient region. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art results compared to current methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Jo-SRC: A Contrastive Approach for Combating Noisy Labels

Due to the memorization effect in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), training with noisy labels usually results in inferior model performance. Existing state-of-the-art methods primarily adopt a sample selection strategy, which selects small-loss samples for subsequent training. However, prior literature tends to perform sample selection within each mini-batch, neglecting the imbalance of noise ratios in different mini-batches. Moreover, valuable knowledge within high-loss samples is wasted. To this end, we propose a noise-robust approach named Jo-SRC (Joint Sample Selection and Model Regularization based on Consistency). Specifically, we train the network in a contrastive learning manner. Predictions from two different views of each sample are used to estimate its "likelihood" of being clean or out-of-distribution. Furthermore, we propose a joint loss to advance the model generalization performance by introducing consistency regularization. Extensive experiments have validated the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

ISTA-Net++: Flexible Deep Unfolding Network for Compressive Sensing

While deep neural networks have achieved impressive success in image compressive sensing (CS), most of them lack flexibility when dealing with multi-ratio tasks and multi-scene images in practical applications. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end flexible ISTA-unfolding deep network, dubbed ISTA-Net++, with superior performance and strong flexibility. Specifically, by developing a dynamic unfolding strategy, our model enjoys the adaptability of handling CS problems with different ratios, i.e., multi-ratio tasks, through a single model. A cross-block strategy is further utilized to reduce blocking artifacts and enhance the CS recovery quality. Furthermore, we adopt a balanced dataset for training, which brings more robustness when reconstructing images of multiple scenes. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that ISTA-Net++ achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality. Considering its flexibility, effectiveness and practicability, our model is expected to serve as a suitable baseline in future CS research. The source code is available on https://github.com/jianzhangcs/ISTA-Netpp.

cs.CV↗