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Kang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Kang Chen.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Global Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting with Multi-modal Multi-scale Causal Autoregressive Model

Accurate forecasting of Tropical cyclone (TC) intensity is crucial for formulating disaster risk reduction strategies. Current methods predominantly rely on limited spatiotemporal information from ERA5 data and neglect the causal relationships between these physical variables, failing to fully capture the spatial and temporal patterns required for intensity forecasting. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal multi-Scale Causal AutoRegressive model (MSCAR), which is the first model that combines causal relationships with large-scale multi-modal data for global TC intensity autoregressive forecasting. Furthermore, given the current absence of a TC dataset that offers a wide range of spatial variables, we present the Satellite and ERA5-based Tropical Cyclone Dataset (SETCD), which stands as the longest and most comprehensive global dataset related to TCs. Experiments on the dataset show that MSCAR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving maximum reductions in global and regional forecast errors of 9.52% and 6.74%, respectively. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MSCAR.

physics.ao-ph↗

FengWu-GHR: Learning the Kilometer-scale Medium-range Global Weather Forecasting

Kilometer-scale modeling of global atmosphere dynamics enables fine-grained weather forecasting and decreases the risk of disastrous weather and climate activity. Therefore, building a kilometer-scale global forecast model is a persistent pursuit in the meteorology domain. Active international efforts have been made in past decades to improve the spatial resolution of numerical weather models. Nonetheless, developing the higher resolution numerical model remains a long-standing challenge due to the substantial consumption of computational resources. Recent advances in data-driven global weather forecasting models utilize reanalysis data for model training and have demonstrated comparable or even higher forecasting skills than numerical models. However, they are all limited by the resolution of reanalysis data and incapable of generating higher-resolution forecasts. This work presents FengWu-GHR, the first data-driven global weather forecasting model running at the 0.09$^{\circ}$ horizontal resolution. FengWu-GHR introduces a novel approach that opens the door for operating ML-based high-resolution forecasts by inheriting prior knowledge from a pretrained low-resolution model. The hindcast of weather prediction in 2022 indicates that FengWu-GHR is superior to the IFS-HRES. Furthermore, evaluations on station observations and case studies of extreme events support the competitive operational forecasting skill of FengWu-GHR at the high resolution.

cs.LG↗

Textual Prompt Guided Image Restoration

Image restoration has always been a cutting-edge topic in the academic and industrial fields of computer vision. Since degradation signals are often random and diverse, "all-in-one" models that can do blind image restoration have been concerned in recent years. Early works require training specialized headers and tails to handle each degradation of concern, which are manually cumbersome. Recent works focus on learning visual prompts from data distribution to identify degradation type. However, the prompts employed in most of models are non-text, lacking sufficient emphasis on the importance of human-in-the-loop. In this paper, an effective textual prompt guided image restoration model has been proposed. In this model, task-specific BERT is fine-tuned to accurately understand user's instructions and generating textual prompt guidance. Depth-wise multi-head transposed attentions and gated convolution modules are designed to bridge the gap between textual prompts and visual features. The proposed model has innovatively introduced semantic prompts into low-level visual domain. It highlights the potential to provide a natural, precise, and controllable way to perform image restoration tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on public denoising, dehazing and deraining datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that, compared with popular state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model can obtain much more superior performance, achieving accurate recognition and removal of degradation without increasing model's complexity. Related source codes and data will be publicly available on github site https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/TextPromptIR.

cs.CV↗

MER 2023: Multi-label Learning, Modality Robustness, and Semi-Supervised Learning

The first Multimodal Emotion Recognition Challenge (MER 2023) was successfully held at ACM Multimedia. The challenge focuses on system robustness and consists of three distinct tracks: (1) MER-MULTI, where participants are required to recognize both discrete and dimensional emotions; (2) MER-NOISE, in which noise is added to test videos for modality robustness evaluation; (3) MER-SEMI, which provides a large amount of unlabeled samples for semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we introduce the motivation behind this challenge, describe the benchmark dataset, and provide some statistics about participants. To continue using this dataset after MER 2023, please sign a new End User License Agreement and send it to our official email address merchallenge.contact@gmail.com. We believe this high-quality dataset can become a new benchmark in multimodal emotion recognition, especially for the Chinese research community.

cs.CL↗

Multi-scale Cross-restoration Framework for Electrocardiogram Anomaly Detection

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely used diagnostic tool for detecting heart conditions. Rare cardiac diseases may be underdiagnosed using traditional ECG analysis, considering that no training dataset can exhaust all possible cardiac disorders. This paper proposes using anomaly detection to identify any unhealthy status, with normal ECGs solely for training. However, detecting anomalies in ECG can be challenging due to significant inter-individual differences and anomalies present in both global rhythm and local morphology. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel multi-scale cross-restoration framework for ECG anomaly detection and localization that considers both local and global ECG characteristics. The proposed framework employs a two-branch autoencoder to facilitate multi-scale feature learning through a masking and restoration process, with one branch focusing on global features from the entire ECG and the other on local features from heartbeat-level details, mimicking the diagnostic process of cardiologists. Anomalies are identified by their high restoration errors. To evaluate the performance on a large number of individuals, this paper introduces a new challenging benchmark with signal point-level ground truths annotated by experienced cardiologists. The proposed method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark and two other well-known ECG datasets. The benchmark dataset and source code are available at: \url{https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/ECGAD}

cs.CV↗

What You See is What You Grasp: User-Friendly Grasping Guided by Near-eye-tracking

This work presents a next-generation human-robot interface that can infer and realize the user's manipulation intention via sight only. Specifically, we develop a system that integrates near-eye-tracking and robotic manipulation to enable user-specified actions (e.g., grasp, pick-and-place, etc), where visual information is merged with human attention to create a mapping for desired robot actions. To enable sight guided manipulation, a head-mounted near-eye-tracking device is developed to track the eyeball movements in real-time, so that the user's visual attention can be identified. To improve the grasping performance, a transformer based grasp model is then developed. Stacked transformer blocks are used to extract hierarchical features where the volumes of channels are expanded at each stage while squeezing the resolution of feature maps. Experimental validation demonstrates that the eye-tracking system yields low gaze estimation error and the grasping system yields promising results on multiple grasping datasets. This work is a proof of concept for gaze interaction-based assistive robot, which holds great promise to help the elder or upper limb disabilities in their daily lives. A demo video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuZ1hukYUrM

cs.RO↗

CLIPVG: Text-Guided Image Manipulation Using Differentiable Vector Graphics

Considerable progress has recently been made in leveraging CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) models for text-guided image manipulation. However, all existing works rely on additional generative models to ensure the quality of results, because CLIP alone cannot provide enough guidance information for fine-scale pixel-level changes. In this paper, we introduce CLIPVG, a text-guided image manipulation framework using differentiable vector graphics, which is also the first CLIP-based general image manipulation framework that does not require any additional generative models. We demonstrate that CLIPVG can not only achieve state-of-art performance in both semantic correctness and synthesis quality, but also is flexible enough to support various applications far beyond the capability of all existing methods.

cs.CV↗

FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Lead

We present FengWu, an advanced data-driven global medium-range weather forecast system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Different from existing data-driven weather forecast methods, FengWu solves the medium-range forecast problem from a multi-modal and multi-task perspective. Specifically, a deep learning architecture equipped with model-specific encoder-decoders and cross-modal fusion Transformer is elaborately designed, which is learned under the supervision of an uncertainty loss to balance the optimization of different predictors in a region-adaptive manner. Besides this, a replay buffer mechanism is introduced to improve medium-range forecast performance. With 39-year data training based on the ERA5 reanalysis, FengWu is able to accurately reproduce the atmospheric dynamics and predict the future land and atmosphere states at 37 vertical levels on a 0.25° latitude-longitude resolution. Hindcasts of 6-hourly weather in 2018 based on ERA5 demonstrate that FengWu performs better than GraphCast in predicting 80\% of the 880 reported predictands, e.g., reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) of 10-day lead global z500 prediction from 733 to 651 $m^{2}/s^2$. In addition, the inference cost of each iteration is merely 600ms on NVIDIA Tesla A100 hardware. The results suggest that FengWu can significantly improve the forecast skill and extend the skillful global medium-range weather forecast out to 10.75 days lead (with ACC of z500 > 0.6) for the first time.

cs.AI↗

VTQA: Visual Text Question Answering via Entity Alignment and Cross-Media Reasoning

The ideal form of Visual Question Answering requires understanding, grounding and reasoning in the joint space of vision and language and serves as a proxy for the AI task of scene understanding. However, most existing VQA benchmarks are limited to just picking the answer from a pre-defined set of options and lack attention to text. We present a new challenge with a dataset that contains 23,781 questions based on 10124 image-text pairs. Specifically, the task requires the model to align multimedia representations of the same entity to implement multi-hop reasoning between image and text and finally use natural language to answer the question. The aim of this challenge is to develop and benchmark models that are capable of multimedia entity alignment, multi-step reasoning and open-ended answer generation.

cs.CV↗

LookinGood^π: Real-time Person-independent Neural Re-rendering for High-quality Human Performance Capture

We propose LookinGood^π, a novel neural re-rendering approach that is aimed to (1) improve the rendering quality of the low-quality reconstructed results from human performance capture system in real-time; (2) improve the generalization ability of the neural rendering network on unseen people. Our key idea is to utilize the rendered image of reconstructed geometry as the guidance to assist the prediction of person-specific details from few reference images, thus enhancing the re-rendered result. In light of this, we design a two-branch network. A coarse branch is designed to fix some artifacts (i.e. holes, noise) and obtain a coarse version of the rendered input, while a detail branch is designed to predict "correct" details from the warped references. The guidance of the rendered image is realized by blending features from two branches effectively in the training of the detail branch, which improves both the warping accuracy and the details' fidelity. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods at producing high-fidelity images on unseen people.

cs.CV↗

Modulated Collective Behaviors and Condensation of Bacteria

Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same frequency of the field. As the dynamic clusters go beyond a critical size, they split into smaller ones spontaneously. The critical size for splitting depends on the frequency of electric field and the concentration of bacteria. We show that instead of their biological activity, the physical properties of bacteria as charged particles are responsible for the formation of dynamic clusters. Electroconvective flows across the system play the key role in stabilizing the clusters. However, to form clusters, collective hydrodynamic cooperation between bacteria is important such that no aggregation occurs in dilute suspensions. The findings in this study illustrate that bio-systems can respond collectively to an external field, promising an effective way to control and modulate the behavior of organisms. Moreover, the controlled aggregation and condensation of bacteria offer a robust approach to improve the local concentration of bacteria for early and rapid detection, which has wide applications in clinics.

cond-mat.soft↗

TODE-Trans: Transparent Object Depth Estimation with Transformer

Transparent objects are widely used in industrial automation and daily life. However, robust visual recognition and perception of transparent objects have always been a major challenge. Currently, most commercial-grade depth cameras are still not good at sensing the surfaces of transparent objects due to the refraction and reflection of light. In this work, we present a transformer-based transparent object depth estimation approach from a single RGB-D input. We observe that the global characteristics of the transformer make it easier to extract contextual information to perform depth estimation of transparent areas. In addition, to better enhance the fine-grained features, a feature fusion module (FFM) is designed to assist coherent prediction. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that our model delivers significant improvements in recent popular datasets, e.g., 25% gain on RMSE and 21% gain on REL compared to previous state-of-the-art convolutional-based counterparts in ClearGrasp dataset. Extensive results show that our transformer-based model enables better aggregation of the object's RGB and inaccurate depth information to obtain a better depth representation. Our code and the pre-trained model will be available at https://github.com/yuchendoudou/TODE.

cs.CV↗

Multi-Forgery Detection Challenge 2022: Push the Frontier of Unconstrained and Diverse Forgery Detection

In this paper, we present the Multi-Forgery Detection Challenge held concurrently with the IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Biometrics at CVPR 2022. Our Multi-Forgery Detection Challenge aims to detect automatic image manipulations including but not limited to image editing, image synthesis, image generation, image photoshop, etc. Our challenge has attracted 674 teams from all over the world, with about 2000 valid result submission counts. We invited the Top 10 teams to present their solutions to the challenge, from which three teams are awarded prizes in the grand finale. In this paper, we present the solutions from the Top 3 teams, in order to boost the research work in the field of image forgery detection.

cs.CV↗

Occlum: Secure and Efficient Multitasking Inside a Single Enclave of Intel SGX

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces library operating systems (LibOSes) to SGX so that legacy applications can run inside enclaves with few or even no modifications. As virtually any non-trivial application demands multiple processes, it is essential for LibOSes to support multitasking. However, none of the existing SGX LibOSes support multitasking both securely and efficiently. This paper presents Occlum, a system that enables secure and efficient multitasking on SGX. We implement the LibOS processes as SFI-Isolated Processes (SIPs). SFI is a software instrumentation technique for sandboxing untrusted modules (called domains). We design a novel SFI scheme named MPX-based, Multi-Domain SFI (MMDSFI) and leverage MMDSFI to enforce the isolation of SIPs. We also design an independent verifier to ensure the security guarantees of MMDSFI. With SIPs safely sharing the single address space of an enclave, the LibOS can implement multitasking efficiently. The Occlum LibOS outperforms the state-of-the-art SGX LibOS on multitasking-heavy workloads by up to 6,600X on micro-benchmarks and up to 500X on application benchmarks.

cs.OS↗

Robust Invisible Hyperlinks in Physical Photographs Based on 3D Rendering Attacks

In the era of multimedia and Internet, people are eager to obtain information from offline to online. Quick Response (QR) codes and digital watermarks help us access information quickly. However, QR codes look ugly and invisible watermarks can be easily broken in physical photographs. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method to embed hyperlinks into natural images, making the hyperlinks invisible for human eyes but detectable for mobile devices. Our method is an end-to-end neural network with an encoder to hide information and a decoder to recover information. From original images to physical photographs, camera imaging process will introduce a series of distortion such as noise, blur, and light. To train a robust decoder against the physical distortion from the real world, a distortion network based on 3D rendering is inserted between the encoder and the decoder to simulate the camera imaging process. Besides, in order to maintain the visual attraction of the image with hyperlinks, we propose a loss function based on just noticeable difference (JND) to supervise the training of encoder. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous method in both simulated and real situations.

eess.IV↗

Long Short-Term Attention

Attention is an important cognition process of humans, which helps humans concentrate on critical information during their perception and learning. However, although many machine learning models can remember information of data, they have no the attention mechanism. For example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network is able to remember sequential information, but it cannot pay special attention to part of the sequences. In this paper, we present a novel model called long short-term attention (LSTA), which seamlessly integrates the attention mechanism into the inner cell of LSTM. More than processing long short term dependencies, LSTA can focus on important information of the sequences with the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LSTA outperforms LSTM and related models on the sequence learning tasks.

cs.LG↗

A Case for Asymmetric Non-Volatile Memory Architecture

The byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is a promising technology since it simultaneously provides DRAM-like performance, disk-like capacity, and persistency. The current NVM deployment is symmetric, where NVM devices are directly attached to servers. Due to the higher density, NVM provides larger capacity and can be shared among servers. Unfortunately, in the symmetric setting, the availability of NVM devices is affected by the specific machine it is attached to. High availability can be realized by replicating data to NVM on a remote machine. However, it requires full replication of data structure in local memory, limiting the size of the working set. This paper rethinks NVM deployment and makes a case for the asymmetric NVM architecture, which decouples servers from persistent data storage. In the proposed AsymNVM architecture, NVM devices (back-end nodes) can be shared by multiple servers (front-end nodes) and provide recoverable persistent data structures. The asymmetric architecture is made possible by RDMA, and follows the recent industry trend of resource disaggregation. We build AsymNVM framework based on AsymNVM architecture that implements: 1) high performance persistent data structure update; 2) NVM data management; 3) concurrency control; and 4) crash-consistency and replication. The central idea is to use operation logs to reduce the stall due to RDMA writes and enable efficient batching and caching in front-end nodes. To evaluation performance, we construct eight widely used data structures and two applications based on AsymNVM framework, and use traces of industry workloads. In a cluster with ten machines, the results show that AsymNVM achieves comparable performance to the best possible symmetric architecture while avoiding all the drawbacks with disaggregation. Compared to the baseline AsymNVM, speedup brought by the proposed optimizations is 6~22x.

cs.DC↗

Unfolding of a diblock chain and its anomalous diffusion induced by active particles

We study the structural and dynamical behaviors of a diblock copolymer chain in a bath of active Brownian particles (ABPs) by extensive Brownian dynamics simulation in a two-dimensional model system. Specifically, the A block of chain is self-attractive, while the B block is self-repulsive. We find, beyond a threshold, the A block unfolds with a pattern like extracting a woolen string from a ball. The critical force decreases with the increase of the B block length,NB, for short cases, then keeps a constant with further increase of NB. In addition, we find a power law exists between the unfolding time of chain and active force, Fa, as well as NB. Finally, we focus on the translational and rotational diffusion of chain, and find that both of them remain supper-diffusive at the long time limit for small active forces due to an asymmetry distribution of ABPs. Our results open new routes for manipulating polymer's behaviors with ABPs.

cond-mat.soft↗