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Pengfei Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Pengfei Hu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

DynamicLip: Shape-Independent Continuous Authentication via Lip Articulator Dynamics

Biometrics authentication has become increasingly popular due to its security and convenience; however, traditional biometrics are becoming less desirable in scenarios such as new mobile devices, Virtual Reality, and Smart Vehicles. For example, while face authentication is widely used, it suffers from significant privacy concerns. The collection of complete facial data makes it less desirable for privacy-sensitive applications. Lip authentication, on the other hand, has emerged as a promising biometrics method. However, existing lip-based authentication methods heavily depend on static lip shape when the mouth is closed, which can be less robust due to lip shape dynamic motion and can barely work when the user is speaking. In this paper, we revisit the nature of lip biometrics and extract shape-independent features from the lips. We study the dynamic characteristics of lip biometrics based on articulator motion. Building on the knowledge, we propose a system for shape-independent continuous authentication via lip articulator dynamics. This system enables robust, shape-independent and continuous authentication, making it particularly suitable for scenarios with high security and privacy requirements. We conducted comprehensive experiments in different environments and attack scenarios and collected a dataset of 50 subjects. The results indicate that our system achieves an overall accuracy of 99.06% and demonstrates robustness under advanced mimic attacks and AI deepfake attacks, making it a viable solution for continuous biometric authentication in various applications.

cs.CV↗

Joint Knowledge Editing for Information Enrichment and Probability Promotion

Knowledge stored in large language models requires timely updates to reflect the dynamic nature of real-world information. To update the knowledge, most knowledge editing methods focus on the low layers, since recent probes into the knowledge recall process reveal that the answer information is enriched in low layers. However, these probes only and could only reveal critical recall stages for the original answers, while the goal of editing is to rectify model's prediction for the target answers. This inconsistency indicates that both the probe approaches and the associated editing methods are deficient. To mitigate the inconsistency and identify critical editing regions, we propose a contrast-based probe approach, and locate two crucial stages where the model behavior diverges between the original and target answers: Information Enrichment in low layers and Probability Promotion in high layers. Building upon the insights, we develop the Joint knowledge Editing for information Enrichment and probability Promotion (JEEP) method, which jointly edits both the low and high layers to modify the two critical recall stages. Considering the mutual interference and growing forgetting due to dual modifications, JEEP is designed to ensure that updates to distinct regions share the same objectives and are complementary. We rigorously evaluate JEEP by editing up to thousands of facts on various models, i.e., GPT-J (6B) and LLaMA (7B), and addressing diverse editing objectives, i.e., adding factual and counterfactual knowledge. In all tested scenarios, JEEP achieves best performances, validating the effectiveness of the revealings of our probe approach and the designs of our editing method. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Eric8932/JEEP.

cs.CL↗

t-READi: Transformer-Powered Robust and Efficient Multimodal Inference for Autonomous Driving

Given the wide adoption of multimodal sensors (e.g., camera, lidar, radar) by autonomous vehicles (AVs), deep analytics to fuse their outputs for a robust perception become imperative. However, existing fusion methods often make two assumptions rarely holding in practice: i) similar data distributions for all inputs and ii) constant availability for all sensors. Because, for example, lidars have various resolutions and failures of radars may occur, such variability often results in significant performance degradation in fusion. To this end, we present tREADi, an adaptive inference system that accommodates the variability of multimodal sensory data and thus enables robust and efficient perception. t-READi identifies variation-sensitive yet structure-specific model parameters; it then adapts only these parameters while keeping the rest intact. t-READi also leverages a cross-modality contrastive learning method to compensate for the loss from missing modalities. Both functions are implemented to maintain compatibility with existing multimodal deep fusion methods. The extensive experiments evidently demonstrate that compared with the status quo approaches, t-READi not only improves the average inference accuracy by more than 6% but also reduces the inference latency by almost 15x with the cost of only 5% extra memory overhead in the worst case under realistic data and modal variations.

cs.CV↗

MPLite: Multi-Aspect Pretraining for Mining Clinical Health Records

The adoption of digital systems in healthcare has resulted in the accumulation of vast electronic health records (EHRs), offering valuable data for machine learning methods to predict patient health outcomes. However, single-visit records of patients are often neglected in the training process due to the lack of annotations of next-visit information, thereby limiting the predictive and expressive power of machine learning models. In this paper, we present a novel framework MPLite that utilizes Multi-aspect Pretraining with Lab results through a light-weight neural network to enhance medical concept representation and predict future health outcomes of individuals. By incorporating both structured medical data and additional information from lab results, our approach fully leverages patient admission records. We design a pretraining module that predicts medical codes based on lab results, ensuring robust prediction by fusing multiple aspects of features. Our experimental evaluation using both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrates improvements over existing models in diagnosis prediction and heart failure prediction tasks, achieving a higher weighted-F1 and recall with MPLite. This work reveals the potential of integrating diverse aspects of data to advance predictive modeling in healthcare.

cs.LG↗

UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition

In the digital era, table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. Previous methods primarily focus on visual aspects of table structure recovery but often fail to effectively comprehend the textual semantics within tables, particularly for descriptive textual cells. In this paper, we introduce UniTabNet, a novel framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model. UniTabNet employs a ``divide-and-conquer'' strategy, utilizing an image-to-text model to decouple table cells and integrating both physical and logical decoders to reconstruct the complete table structure. We further enhance our framework with the Vision Guider, which directs the model's focus towards pertinent areas, thereby boosting prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Language Guider to refine the model's capability to understand textual semantics in table images. Evaluated on prominent table structure datasets such as PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB, UniTabNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. The code will also be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

A Practical Trigger-Free Backdoor Attack on Neural Networks

Backdoor attacks on deep neural networks have emerged as significant security threats, especially as DNNs are increasingly deployed in security-critical applications. However, most existing works assume that the attacker has access to the original training data. This limitation restricts the practicality of launching such attacks in real-world scenarios. Additionally, using a specified trigger to activate the injected backdoor compromises the stealthiness of the attacks. To address these concerns, we propose a trigger-free backdoor attack that does not require access to any training data. Specifically, we design a novel fine-tuning approach that incorporates the concept of malicious data into the concept of the attacker-specified class, resulting the misclassification of trigger-free malicious data into the attacker-specified class. Furthermore, instead of relying on training data to preserve the model's knowledge, we employ knowledge distillation methods to maintain the performance of the infected model on benign samples, and introduce a parameter importance evaluation mechanism based on elastic weight constraints to facilitate the fine-tuning of the infected model. The effectiveness, practicality, and stealthiness of the proposed attack are comprehensively evaluated on three real-world datasets. Furthermore, we explore the potential for enhancing the attack through the use of auxiliary datasets and model inversion.

cs.CR↗

Exploring Audio-Visual Information Fusion for Sound Event Localization and Detection In Low-Resource Realistic Scenarios

This study presents an audio-visual information fusion approach to sound event localization and detection (SELD) in low-resource scenarios. We aim at utilizing audio and video modality information through cross-modal learning and multi-modal fusion. First, we propose a cross-modal teacher-student learning (TSL) framework to transfer information from an audio-only teacher model, trained on a rich collection of audio data with multiple data augmentation techniques, to an audio-visual student model trained with only a limited set of multi-modal data. Next, we propose a two-stage audio-visual fusion strategy, consisting of an early feature fusion and a late video-guided decision fusion to exploit synergies between audio and video modalities. Finally, we introduce an innovative video pixel swapping (VPS) technique to extend an audio channel swapping (ACS) method to an audio-visual joint augmentation. Evaluation results on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2023 Challenge data set demonstrate significant improvements in SELD performances. Furthermore, our submission to the SELD task of the DCASE 2023 Challenge ranks first place by effectively integrating the proposed techniques into a model ensemble.

eess.AS↗

SRFUND: A Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Structure Reconstruction Benchmark in Form Understanding

Accurately identifying and organizing textual content is crucial for the automation of document processing in the field of form understanding. Existing datasets, such as FUNSD and XFUND, support entity classification and relationship prediction tasks but are typically limited to local and entity-level annotations. This limitation overlooks the hierarchically structured representation of documents, constraining comprehensive understanding of complex forms. To address this issue, we present the SRFUND, a hierarchically structured multi-task form understanding benchmark. SRFUND provides refined annotations on top of the original FUNSD and XFUND datasets, encompassing five tasks: (1) word to text-line merging, (2) text-line to entity merging, (3) entity category classification, (4) item table localization, and (5) entity-based full-document hierarchical structure recovery. We meticulously supplemented the original dataset with missing annotations at various levels of granularity and added detailed annotations for multi-item table regions within the forms. Additionally, we introduce global hierarchical structure dependencies for entity relation prediction tasks, surpassing traditional local key-value associations. The SRFUND dataset includes eight languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, making it a powerful tool for cross-lingual form understanding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the SRFUND dataset presents new challenges and significant opportunities in handling diverse layouts and global hierarchical structures of forms, thus providing deep insights into the field of form understanding. The original dataset and implementations of baseline methods are available at https://sprateam-ustc.github.io/SRFUND

cs.CL↗

A Poisson-Gamma Dynamic Factor Model with Time-Varying Transition Dynamics

Probabilistic approaches for handling count-valued time sequences have attracted amounts of research attentions because their ability to infer explainable latent structures and to estimate uncertainties, and thus are especially suitable for dealing with \emph{noisy} and \emph{incomplete} count data. Among these models, Poisson-Gamma Dynamical Systems (PGDSs) are proven to be effective in capturing the evolving dynamics underlying observed count sequences. However, the state-of-the-art PGDS still fails to capture the \emph{time-varying} transition dynamics that are commonly observed in real-world count time sequences. To mitigate this gap, a non-stationary PGDS is proposed to allow the underlying transition matrices to evolve over time, and the evolving transition matrices are modeled by sophisticatedly-designed Dirichlet Markov chains. Leveraging Dirichlet-Multinomial-Beta data augmentation techniques, a fully-conjugate and efficient Gibbs sampler is developed to perform posterior simulation. Experiments show that, in comparison with related models, the proposed non-stationary PGDS achieves improved predictive performance due to its capacity to learn non-stationary dependency structure captured by the time-evolving transition matrices.

cs.LG↗

SEMv3: A Fast and Robust Approach to Table Separation Line Detection

Table structure recognition (TSR) aims to parse the inherent structure of a table from its input image. The `"split-and-merge" paradigm is a pivotal approach to parse table structure, where the table separation line detection is crucial. However, challenges such as wireless and deformed tables make it demanding. In this paper, we adhere to the "split-and-merge" paradigm and propose SEMv3 (SEM: Split, Embed and Merge), a method that is both fast and robust for detecting table separation lines. During the split stage, we introduce a Keypoint Offset Regression (KOR) module, which effectively detects table separation lines by directly regressing the offset of each line relative to its keypoint proposals. Moreover, in the merge stage, we define a series of merge actions to efficiently describe the table structure based on table grids. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our proposed KOR module can detect table separation lines quickly and accurately. Furthermore, on public datasets (e.g. WTW, ICDAR-2019 cTDaR Historical and iFLYTAB), SEMv3 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Chunchunwumu/SEMv3.

cs.CV↗

SEMv2: Table Separation Line Detection Based on Instance Segmentation

Table structure recognition is an indispensable element for enabling machines to comprehend tables. Its primary purpose is to identify the internal structure of a table. Nevertheless, due to the complexity and diversity of their structure and style, it is highly challenging to parse the tabular data into a structured format that machines can comprehend. In this work, we adhere to the principle of the split-and-merge based methods and propose an accurate table structure recognizer, termed SEMv2 (SEM: Split, Embed and Merge). Unlike the previous works in the ``split'' stage, we aim to address the table separation line instance-level discrimination problem and introduce a table separation line detection strategy based on conditional convolution. Specifically, we design the ``split'' in a top-down manner that detects the table separation line instance first and then dynamically predicts the table separation line mask for each instance. The final table separation line shape can be accurately obtained by processing the table separation line mask in a row-wise/column-wise manner. To comprehensively evaluate the SEMv2, we also present a more challenging dataset for table structure recognition, dubbed iFLYTAB, which encompasses multiple style tables in various scenarios such as photos, scanned documents, etc. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets (e.g. SciTSR, PubTabNet and iFLYTAB) demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code and iFLYTAB dataset are available at https://github.com/ZZR8066/SEMv2.

cs.CV↗

Incentivizing Massive Unknown Workers for Budget-Limited Crowdsensing: From Off-Line and On-Line Perspectives

How to incentivize strategic workers using limited budget is a very fundamental problem for crowdsensing systems; nevertheless, since the sensing abilities of the workers may not always be known as prior knowledge due to the diversities of their sensor devices and behaviors, it is difficult to properly select and pay the unknown workers. Although the uncertainties of the workers can be addressed by the standard Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) framework in existing proposals through a trade-off between exploration and exploitation, we may not have sufficient budget to enable the trade-off among the individual workers, especially when the number of the workers is huge while the budget is limited. Moreover, the standard CMAB usually assumes the workers always stay in the system, whereas the workers may join in or depart from the system over time, such that what we have learnt for an individual worker cannot be applied after the worker leaves. To address the above challenging issues, in this paper, we first propose an off-line Context-Aware CMAB-based Incentive (CACI) mechanism. We innovate in leveraging the exploration-exploitation trade-off in an elaborately partitioned context space instead of the individual workers, to effectively incentivize the massive unknown workers with a very limited budget. We also extend the above basic idea to the on-line setting where unknown workers may join in or depart from the systems dynamically, and propose an on-line version of the CACI mechanism. We perform rigorous theoretical analysis to reveal the upper bounds on the regrets of our CACI mechanisms and to prove their truthfulness and individual rationality, respectively. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets are also conducted to verify the efficacy of our mechanisms.

cs.AI↗

Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Decoupling and Interacting Multi-Task Learning Network for Joint Speech and Accent Recognition

Accents, as variations from standard pronunciation, pose significant challenges for speech recognition systems. Although joint automatic speech recognition (ASR) and accent recognition (AR) training has been proven effective in handling multi-accent scenarios, current multi-task ASR-AR approaches overlook the granularity differences between tasks. Fine-grained units capture pronunciation-related accent characteristics, while coarse-grained units are better for learning linguistic information. Moreover, an explicit interaction of two tasks can also provide complementary information and improve the performance of each other, but it is rarely used by existing approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel Decoupling and Interacting Multi-task Network (DIMNet) for joint speech and accent recognition, which is comprised of a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) branch, an AR branch, an ASR branch, and a bottom feature encoder. Specifically, AR and ASR are first decoupled by separated branches and two-granular modeling units to learn task-specific representations. The AR branch is from our previously proposed linguistic-acoustic bimodal AR model and the ASR branch is an encoder-decoder based Conformer model. Then, for the task interaction, the CTC branch provides aligned text for the AR task, while accent embeddings extracted from our AR model are incorporated into the ASR branch's encoder and decoder. Finally, during ASR inference, a cross-granular rescoring method is introduced to fuse the complementary information from the CTC and attention decoder after the decoupling. Our experiments on English and Chinese datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, which achieves 21.45%/28.53% AR accuracy relative improvement and 32.33%/14.55% ASR error rate relative reduction over a published standard baseline, respectively.

cs.SD↗

Hierarchical Audio-Visual Information Fusion with Multi-label Joint Decoding for MER 2023

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for recognizing both discrete and dimensional emotions. In our framework, deep features extracted from foundation models are used as robust acoustic and visual representations of raw video. Three different structures based on attention-guided feature gathering (AFG) are designed for deep feature fusion. Then, we introduce a joint decoding structure for emotion classification and valence regression in the decoding stage. A multi-task loss based on uncertainty is also designed to optimize the whole process. Finally, by combining three different structures on the posterior probability level, we obtain the final predictions of discrete and dimensional emotions. When tested on the dataset of multimodal emotion recognition challenge (MER 2023), the proposed framework yields consistent improvements in both emotion classification and valence regression. Our final system achieves state-of-the-art performance and ranks third on the leaderboard on MER-MULTI sub-challenge.

eess.AS↗

Speech2Lip: High-fidelity Speech to Lip Generation by Learning from a Short Video

Synthesizing realistic videos according to a given speech is still an open challenge. Previous works have been plagued by issues such as inaccurate lip shape generation and poor image quality. The key reason is that only motions and appearances on limited facial areas (e.g., lip area) are mainly driven by the input speech. Therefore, directly learning a mapping function from speech to the entire head image is prone to ambiguity, particularly when using a short video for training. We thus propose a decomposition-synthesis-composition framework named Speech to Lip (Speech2Lip) that disentangles speech-sensitive and speech-insensitive motion/appearance to facilitate effective learning from limited training data, resulting in the generation of natural-looking videos. First, given a fixed head pose (i.e., canonical space), we present a speech-driven implicit model for lip image generation which concentrates on learning speech-sensitive motion and appearance. Next, to model the major speech-insensitive motion (i.e., head movement), we introduce a geometry-aware mutual explicit mapping (GAMEM) module that establishes geometric mappings between different head poses. This allows us to paste generated lip images at the canonical space onto head images with arbitrary poses and synthesize talking videos with natural head movements. In addition, a Blend-Net and a contrastive sync loss are introduced to enhance the overall synthesis performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on three benchmarks demonstrate that our model can be trained by a video of just a few minutes in length and achieve state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and speech-visual synchronization. Code: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Speech2Lip.

cs.CV↗

Count, Decode and Fetch: A New Approach to Handwritten Chinese Character Error Correction

Recently, handwritten Chinese character error correction has been greatly improved by employing encoder-decoder methods to decompose a Chinese character into an ideographic description sequence (IDS). However, existing methods implicitly capture and encode linguistic information inherent in IDS sequences, leading to a tendency to generate IDS sequences that match seen characters. This poses a challenge when dealing with an unseen misspelled character, as the decoder may generate an IDS sequence that matches a seen character instead. Therefore, we introduce Count, Decode and Fetch (CDF), a novel approach that exhibits better generalization towards unseen misspelled characters. CDF is mainly composed of three parts: the counter, the decoder, and the fetcher. In the first stage, the counter predicts the number of each radical class without the symbol-level position annotations. In the second stage, the decoder employs the counting information and generates the IDS sequence step by step. Moreover, by updating the counting information at each time step, the decoder becomes aware of the existence of each radical. With the decomposed IDS sequence, we can determine whether the given character is misspelled. If it is misspelled, the fetcher under the transductive transfer learning strategy predicts the ideal character that the user originally intended to write. We integrate our method into existing encoder-decoder models and significantly enhance their performance.

cs.CV↗

HRDoc: Dataset and Baseline Method Toward Hierarchical Reconstruction of Document Structures

The problem of document structure reconstruction refers to converting digital or scanned documents into corresponding semantic structures. Most existing works mainly focus on splitting the boundary of each element in a single document page, neglecting the reconstruction of semantic structure in multi-page documents. This paper introduces hierarchical reconstruction of document structures as a novel task suitable for NLP and CV fields. To better evaluate the system performance on the new task, we built a large-scale dataset named HRDoc, which consists of 2,500 multi-page documents with nearly 2 million semantic units. Every document in HRDoc has line-level annotations including categories and relations obtained from rule-based extractors and human annotators. Moreover, we proposed an encoder-decoder-based hierarchical document structure parsing system (DSPS) to tackle this problem. By adopting a multi-modal bidirectional encoder and a structure-aware GRU decoder with soft-mask operation, the DSPS model surpass the baseline method by a large margin. All scripts and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/jfma-USTC/HRDoc.

cs.CL↗