arXiv subjects

Nian Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Nian Liu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Compact Graph Structure Learning via Mutual Information Compression

Graph Structure Learning (GSL) recently has attracted considerable attentions in its capacity of optimizing graph structure as well as learning suitable parameters of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) simultaneously. Current GSL methods mainly learn an optimal graph structure (final view) from single or multiple information sources (basic views), however the theoretical guidance on what is the optimal graph structure is still unexplored. In essence, an optimal graph structure should only contain the information about tasks while compress redundant noise as much as possible, which is defined as "minimal sufficient structure", so as to maintain the accurancy and robustness. How to obtain such structure in a principled way? In this paper, we theoretically prove that if we optimize basic views and final view based on mutual information, and keep their performance on labels simultaneously, the final view will be a minimal sufficient structure. With this guidance, we propose a Compact GSL architecture by MI compression, named CoGSL. Specifically, two basic views are extracted from original graph as two inputs of the model, which are refinedly reestimated by a view estimator. Then, we propose an adaptive technique to fuse estimated views into the final view. Furthermore, we maintain the performance of estimated views and the final view and reduce the mutual information of every two views. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of CoGSL, we conduct extensive experiments on several datasets under clean and attacked conditions, which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CoGSL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Asymmetry-aware Scalable Locking

The pursuit of power-efficiency is popularizing asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) such as ARM big.LITTLE, Apple M1 and recent Intel Alder Lake with big and little cores. However, we find that existing scalable locks fail to scale on AMP and cause collapses in either throughput or latency, or both, because their implicit assumption of symmetric cores no longer holds. To address this issue, we propose the first asymmetry-aware scalable lock named LibASL. LibASL provides a new lock ordering guided by applications' latency requirements, which allows big cores to reorder with little cores for higher throughput under the condition of preserving applications' latency requirements. Using LibASL only requires linking the applications with it and, if latency-critical, inserting few lines of code to annotate the coarse-grained latency requirement. We evaluate LibASL in various benchmarks including five popular databases on Apple M1. Evaluation results show that LibASL can improve the throughput by up to 5 times while precisely preserving the tail latency designated by applications.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Light Field Saliency Detection with Dual Local Graph Learning andReciprocative Guidance

The application of light field data in salient object de-tection is becoming increasingly popular recently. The diffi-culty lies in how to effectively fuse the features within the fo-cal stack and how to cooperate them with the feature of theall-focus image. Previous methods usually fuse focal stackfeatures via convolution or ConvLSTM, which are both lesseffective and ill-posed. In this paper, we model the infor-mation fusion within focal stack via graph networks. Theyintroduce powerful context propagation from neighbouringnodes and also avoid ill-posed implementations. On the onehand, we construct local graph connections thus avoidingprohibitive computational costs of traditional graph net-works. On the other hand, instead of processing the twokinds of data separately, we build a novel dual graph modelto guide the focal stack fusion process using all-focus pat-terns. To handle the second difficulty, previous methods usu-ally implement one-shot fusion for focal stack and all-focusfeatures, hence lacking a thorough exploration of their sup-plements. We introduce a reciprocative guidance schemeand enable mutual guidance between these two kinds of in-formation at multiple steps. As such, both kinds of featurescan be enhanced iteratively, finally benefiting the saliencyprediction. Extensive experimental results show that theproposed models are all beneficial and we achieve signif-icantly better results than state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Summarize and Search: Learning Consensus-aware Dynamic Convolution for Co-Saliency Detection

Humans perform co-saliency detection by first summarizing the consensus knowledge in the whole group and then searching corresponding objects in each image. Previous methods usually lack robustness, scalability, or stability for the first process and simply fuse consensus features with image features for the second process. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus-aware dynamic convolution model to explicitly and effectively perform the "summarize and search" process. To summarize consensus image features, we first summarize robust features for every single image using an effective pooling method and then aggregate cross-image consensus cues via the self-attention mechanism. By doing this, our model meets the scalability and stability requirements. Next, we generate dynamic kernels from consensus features to encode the summarized consensus knowledge. Two kinds of kernels are generated in a supplementary way to summarize fine-grained image-specific consensus object cues and the coarse group-wise common knowledge, respectively. Then, we can effectively perform object searching by employing dynamic convolution at multiple scales. Besides, a novel and effective data synthesis method is also proposed to train our network. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code and saliency maps are available at \url{https://github.com/nnizhang/CADC}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Visual Saliency Transformer

Existing state-of-the-art saliency detection methods heavily rely on CNN-based architectures. Alternatively, we rethink this task from a convolution-free sequence-to-sequence perspective and predict saliency by modeling long-range dependencies, which can not be achieved by convolution. Specifically, we develop a novel unified model based on a pure transformer, namely, Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), for both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). It takes image patches as inputs and leverages the transformer to propagate global contexts among image patches. Unlike conventional architectures used in Vision Transformer (ViT), we leverage multi-level token fusion and propose a new token upsampling method under the transformer framework to get high-resolution detection results. We also develop a token-based multi-task decoder to simultaneously perform saliency and boundary detection by introducing task-related tokens and a novel patch-task-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods on both RGB and RGB-D SOD benchmark datasets. Most importantly, our whole framework not only provides a new perspective for the SOD field but also shows a new paradigm for transformer-based dense prediction models. Code is available at https://github.com/nnizhang/VST.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Instance-Level Relative Saliency Ranking with Graph Reasoning

Conventional salient object detection models cannot differentiate the importance of different salient objects. Recently, two works have been proposed to detect saliency ranking by assigning different degrees of saliency to different objects. However, one of these models cannot differentiate object instances and the other focuses more on sequential attention shift order inference. In this paper, we investigate a practical problem setting that requires simultaneously segment salient instances and infer their relative saliency rank order. We present a novel unified model as the first end-to-end solution, where an improved Mask R-CNN is first used to segment salient instances and a saliency ranking branch is then added to infer the relative saliency. For relative saliency ranking, we build a new graph reasoning module by combining four graphs to incorporate the instance interaction relation, local contrast, global contrast, and a high-level semantic prior, respectively. A novel loss function is also proposed to effectively train the saliency ranking branch. Besides, a new dataset and an evaluation metric are proposed for this task, aiming at pushing forward this field of research. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is more effective than previous methods. We also show an example of its practical usage on adaptive image retargeting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is a challenging task due to the low boundary contrast between the object and its surroundings. In addition, the appearance of camouflaged objects varies significantly, e.g., object size and shape, aggravating the difficulties of accurate COD. In this paper, we propose a novel Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network (C2F-Net) to address the challenging COD task. Specifically, we propose an Attention-induced Cross-level Fusion Module (ACFM) to integrate the multi-level features with informative attention coefficients. The fused features are then fed to the proposed Dual-branch Global Context Module (DGCM), which yields multi-scale feature representations for exploiting rich global context information. In C2F-Net, the two modules are conducted on high-level features using a cascaded manner. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our C2F-Net is an effective COD model and outperforms state-of-the-art models remarkably. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/thograce/C2FNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Self-consistent Stellar Radial Velocities from LAMOST Medium-Resolution Survey (MRS) DR7

Radial velocity (RV) is among the most fundamental physical quantities obtainable from stellar spectra and is rather important in the analysis of time-domain phenomena. The LAMOST Medium-Resolution Survey (MRS) DR7 contains 5 million single-exposure stellar spectra at spectral resolution $R\sim7\,500$. However, the temporal variation of the RV zero-points (RVZPs) of the MRS survey, which makes the RVs from multiple epochs inconsistent, has not been addressed. In this paper, we measure the RVs of the 3.8 million single-exposure spectra (for 0.6 million stars) with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) higher than 5 based on cross-correlation function (CCF) method, and propose a robust method to self-consistently determine the RVZPs exposure-by-exposure for each spectrograph with the help of \textit{Gaia} DR2 RVs. Such RVZPs are estimated for 3.6 million RVs and can reach a mean precision of $\sim 0.38\,\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$. The result of the temporal variation of RVZPs indicates that our algorithm is efficient and necessary before we use the absolute RVs to perform time-domain analysis. Validating the results with APOGEE DR16 shows that our absolute RVs can reach an overall precision of 0.84/0.80 $\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ in the blue/red arm at $50<\mathrm{SNR}<100$, while 1.26/1.99 $\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ at $5<\mathrm{SNR}<10$. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the standard deviations of multiple RVs ($N_\mathrm{obs}\geq 8$) for 678 standard stars reach 0.45/0.54, 1.07/1.39, and 1.45/1.86 $\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ in the blue/red arm at 50\%, 90\%, and 95\% levels, respectively. The catalogs of the RVs, RVZPs, and selected candidate RV standard stars are available at \url{https://github.com/hypergravity/paperdata}.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2021

Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Co-contrastive Learning

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Lorentzian Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have received considerable research attention recently. Most GCNs learn the node representations in Euclidean geometry, but that could have a high distortion in the case of embedding graphs with scale-free or hierarchical structure. Recently, some GCNs are proposed to deal with this problem in non-Euclidean geometry, e.g., hyperbolic geometry. Although hyperbolic GCNs achieve promising performance, existing hyperbolic graph operations actually cannot rigorously follow the hyperbolic geometry, which may limit the ability of hyperbolic geometry and thus hurt the performance of hyperbolic GCNs. In this paper, we propose a novel hyperbolic GCN named Lorentzian graph convolutional network (LGCN), which rigorously guarantees the learned node features follow the hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, we rebuild the graph operations of hyperbolic GCNs with Lorentzian version, e.g., the feature transformation and non-linear activation. Also, an elegant neighborhood aggregation method is designed based on the centroid of Lorentzian distance. Moreover, we prove some proposed graph operations are equivalent in different types of hyperbolic geometry, which fundamentally indicates their correctness. Experiments on six datasets show that LGCN performs better than the state-of-the-art methods. LGCN has lower distortion to learn the representation of tree-likeness graphs compared with existing hyperbolic GCNs. We also find that the performance of some hyperbolic GCNs can be improved by simply replacing the graph operations with those we defined in this paper.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection

Significant performance improvement has been achieved for fully-supervised video salient object detection with the pixel-wise labeled training datasets, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. To relieve the burden of data annotation, we present the first weakly supervised video salient object detection model based on relabeled "fixation guided scribble annotations". Specifically, an "Appearance-motion fusion module" and bidirectional ConvLSTM based framework are proposed to achieve effective multi-modal learning and long-term temporal context modeling based on our new weak annotations. Further, we design a novel foreground-background similarity loss to further explore the labeling similarity across frames. A weak annotation boosting strategy is also introduced to boost our model performance with a new pseudo-label generation technique. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark video saliency detection datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our solution.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Learning Selective Mutual Attention and Contrast for RGB-D Saliency Detection

How to effectively fuse cross-modal information is the key problem for RGB-D salient object detection. Early fusion and the result fusion schemes fuse RGB and depth information at the input and output stages, respectively, hence incur the problem of distribution gap or information loss. Many models use the feature fusion strategy but are limited by the low-order point-to-point fusion methods. In this paper, we propose a novel mutual attention model by fusing attention and contexts from different modalities. We use the non-local attention of one modality to propagate long-range contextual dependencies for the other modality, thus leveraging complementary attention cues to perform high-order and trilinear cross-modal interaction. We also propose to induce contrast inference from the mutual attention and obtain a unified model. Considering low-quality depth data may detriment the model performance, we further propose selective attention to reweight the added depth cues. We embed the proposed modules in a two-stream CNN for RGB-D SOD. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model. Moreover, we also construct a new challenging large-scale RGB-D SOD dataset with high-quality, thus can both promote the training and evaluation of deep models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Online Multi-Object Tracking with Dual Matching Attention Networks

In this paper, we propose an online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approach which integrates the merits of single object tracking and data association methods in a unified framework to handle noisy detections and frequent interactions between targets. Specifically, for applying single object tracking in MOT, we introduce a cost-sensitive tracking loss based on the state-of-the-art visual tracker, which encourages the model to focus on hard negative distractors during online learning. For data association, we propose Dual Matching Attention Networks (DMAN) with both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms. The spatial attention module generates dual attention maps which enable the network to focus on the matching patterns of the input image pair, while the temporal attention module adaptively allocates different levels of attention to different samples in the tracklet to suppress noisy observations. Experimental results on the MOT benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against both online and offline trackers in terms of identity-preserving metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Radial velocity measurements from LAMOST medium-resolution spectroscopic observations: A pointing towards the Kepler field

Radial velocity is one of key measurements in understanding the fundamental properties of stars, stellar clusters and the Galaxy. A plate of stars in the Kepler field were observed in May of 2018 with the medium-resolution spectrographs of LAMOST, aiming to test the performance of this new system which is the upgraded equipment of LAMOST after the first five-year regular survey.We present our analysis on the radial velocity measurements (RVs) derived from these data. The results show that slight and significant systematic errors exist among the RVs obtained from the spectra collected by different spectrographs and exposures, respectively. After correcting the systematic errors with different techniques, the precision of RVs reaches ~1.3, ~1.0, ~0.5 and ~0.3 km/s at S/Nr = 10, 20, 50, and 100, respectively. Comparing with the RVs of the standard stars of the APOGEE survey, our RVs are calibrated with a zero-point shift of ~7 km/s. The results indicate that the LAMOST medium-resolution spectroscopic system may provide RVs in a reasonable accuracy and precision for the selected targets.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

PiCANet: Pixel-wise Contextual Attention Learning for Accurate Saliency Detection

In saliency detection, every pixel needs contextual information to make saliency prediction. Previous models usually incorporate contexts holistically. However, for each pixel, usually only part of its context region is useful and contributes to its prediction, while some other part may serve as noises and distractions. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, \ie PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations at each pixel. Specifically, PiCANet generates an attention map over the context region of each pixel, where each attention weight corresponds to the relevance of a context location w.r.t the referred pixel. Then, attentive contextual features can be constructed via selectively incorporating the features of useful context locations with the learned attention. We propose three specific formulations of the PiCANet via embedding the pixel-wise contextual attention mechanism into the pooling and convolution operations with attending to global or local contexts. All the three models are fully differentiable and can be integrated with CNNs with joint training. We introduce the proposed PiCANets into a U-Net architecture for salient object detection. Experimental results indicate that the proposed PiCANets can significantly improve the saliency detection performance. The generated global and local attention can learn to incorporate global contrast and smoothness, respectively, which help localize salient objects more accurately and highlight them more uniformly. Consequently, our saliency model performs favorably against other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also validate that PiCANets can also improve semantic segmentation and object detection performances, which further demonstrates their effectiveness and generalization ability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

A Queueing Model for Sleep as a Vacation

Vacation queueing systems are widely used as an extension of the classical queueing theory. We consider both working vacations and regular vacations in this paper, and compare systems with vacations to the regular $M/M/1$ system via mean service rates and expected numbers of customers, using matrix-analytic methods.

math.PR↗

arXiv2018

Statistical Analysis of Torus and Kink Instabilities in Solar Eruptions

A recent laboratory experiment of ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities reveals four distinct eruption regimes readily distinguished by the torus instability (TI) and helical kink instability (KI) parameters \citep{Myers2015}. To establish its observational counterpart, we collect 38 solar flares (stronger than GOES class M5 in general) that took place within 45$^{\circ}$ of disk center during 2011$-$2017, 26 of which are associated with a halo or partial halo coronal mass ejection (CME) (i.e., ejective events), while the others are CMEless (i.e., confined events). This is a complete sample of solar events satisfying our selection criteria detailed in the paper. For each event, we calculate decay index $n$ of the potential strapping field above the magnetic flux rope (MFR) in and around the flaring magnetic polarity inversion line (a TI parameter), and the unsigned twist number $T_w$ of the non-linear force-free (NLFF) field lines forming the same MFR (a KI parameter). We then construct a $n-T_w$ diagram to investigate how the eruptiveness depends on these parameters. We find: (1) $T_w$ appears to play little role in discriminating between confined and ejective events; (2) the events with $n\gtrsim0.8$ are all ejective and all confined events have $n\lesssim0.8$. However, $n\gtrsim0.8$ is not a necessary condition for eruption, because some events with $n\lesssim0.8$ also erupted. In addition, we investigate the MFR's geometrical parameters, apex height and distance between footpoints, as a possible factor for the eruptiveness. We briefly discuss the difference of the present result for solar eruptions with that of the laboratory result in terms of the role played by magnetic reconnection.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

Scheduling a Rescue

Scheduling service order, in a very specific queueing/inventory model with perishable inventory, is considered. Different strategies are discusses and results are applied to the tragic cave situation in Thailand in June and July of 2018.

stat.ME↗