arXiv subjects

Shuo Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Shuo Wang.

At least 433 records · Page 24Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

A Unified Query-based Paradigm for Camouflaged Instance Segmentation

Due to the high similarity between camouflaged instances and the background, the recently proposed camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) faces challenges in accurate localization and instance segmentation. To this end, inspired by query-based transformers, we propose a unified query-based multi-task learning framework for camouflaged instance segmentation, termed UQFormer, which builds a set of mask queries and a set of boundary queries to learn a shared composed query representation and efficiently integrates global camouflaged object region and boundary cues, for simultaneous instance segmentation and instance boundary detection in camouflaged scenarios. Specifically, we design a composed query learning paradigm that learns a shared representation to capture object region and boundary features by the cross-attention interaction of mask queries and boundary queries in the designed multi-scale unified learning transformer decoder. Then, we present a transformer-based multi-task learning framework for simultaneous camouflaged instance segmentation and camouflaged instance boundary detection based on the learned composed query representation, which also forces the model to learn a strong instance-level query representation. Notably, our model views the instance segmentation as a query-based direct set prediction problem, without other post-processing such as non-maximal suppression. Compared with 14 state-of-the-art approaches, our UQFormer significantly improves the performance of camouflaged instance segmentation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/dongbo811/UQFormer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

SamDSK: Combining Segment Anything Model with Domain-Specific Knowledge for Semi-Supervised Learning in Medical Image Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits a capability to segment a wide array of objects in natural images, serving as a versatile perceptual tool for various downstream image segmentation tasks. In contrast, medical image segmentation tasks often rely on domain-specific knowledge (DSK). In this paper, we propose a novel method that combines the segmentation foundation model (i.e., SAM) with domain-specific knowledge for reliable utilization of unlabeled images in building a medical image segmentation model. Our new method is iterative and consists of two main stages: (1) segmentation model training; (2) expanding the labeled set by using the trained segmentation model, an unlabeled set, SAM, and domain-specific knowledge. These two stages are repeated until no more samples are added to the labeled set. A novel optimal-matching-based method is developed for combining the SAM-generated segmentation proposals and pixel-level and image-level DSK for constructing annotations of unlabeled images in the iterative stage (2). In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for breast cancer segmentation in ultrasound images, polyp segmentation in endoscopic images, and skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images. Our work initiates a new direction of semi-supervised learning for medical image segmentation: the segmentation foundation model can be harnessed as a valuable tool for label-efficient segmentation learning in medical image segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Agent-Centric Relation Graph for Object Visual Navigation

Object visual navigation aims to steer an agent toward a target object based on visual observations. It is highly desirable to reasonably perceive the environment and accurately control the agent. In the navigation task, we introduce an Agent-Centric Relation Graph (ACRG) for learning the visual representation based on the relationships in the environment. ACRG is a highly effective structure that consists of two relationships, i.e., the horizontal relationship among objects and the distance relationship between the agent and objects . On the one hand, we design the Object Horizontal Relationship Graph (OHRG) that stores the relative horizontal location among objects. On the other hand, we propose the Agent-Target Distance Relationship Graph (ATDRG) that enables the agent to perceive the distance between the target and objects. For ATDRG, we utilize image depth to obtain the target distance and imply the vertical location to capture the distance relationship among objects in the vertical direction. With the above graphs, the agent can perceive the environment and output navigation actions. Experimental results in the artificial environment AI2-THOR demonstrate that ACRG significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in unseen testing environments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Multimodal machine learning for materials science: composition-structure bimodal learning for experimentally measured properties

The widespread application of multimodal machine learning models like GPT-4 has revolutionized various research fields including computer vision and natural language processing. However, its implementation in materials informatics remains underexplored, despite the presence of materials data across diverse modalities, such as composition and structure. The effectiveness of machine learning models trained on large calculated datasets depends on the accuracy of calculations, while experimental datasets often have limited data availability and incomplete information. This paper introduces a novel approach to multimodal machine learning in materials science via composition-structure bimodal learning. The proposed COmposition-Structure Bimodal Network (COSNet) is designed to enhance learning and predictions of experimentally measured materials properties that have incomplete structure information. Bimodal learning significantly reduces prediction errors across distinct materials properties including Li conductivity in solid electrolyte, band gap, refractive index, dielectric constant, energy, and magnetic moment, surpassing composition-only learning methods. Furthermore, we identified that data augmentation based on modal availability plays a pivotal role in the success of bimodal learning.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2023

AI-Generated Network Design: A Diffusion Model-based Learning Approach

The future networks pose intense demands for intelligent and customized designs to cope with the surging network scale, dynamically time-varying environments, diverse user requirements, and complicated manual configuration. However, traditional rule-based solutions heavily rely on human efforts and expertise, while data-driven intelligent algorithms still lack interpretability and generalization. In this paper, we propose the AIGN (AI-Generated Network), a novel intention-driven paradigm for network design, which allows operators to quickly generate a variety of customized network solutions and achieve expert-free problem optimization. Driven by the diffusion model-based learning approach, AIGN has great potential to learn the reward-maximizing trajectories, automatically satisfy multiple constraints, adapt to different objectives and scenarios, or even intelligently create novel designs and mechanisms unseen in existing network environments. Finally, we conduct a use case to demonstrate that AIGN can effectively guide the design of transmit power allocation in digital twin-based access networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Conservative Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Safety Constraints

Safety exploration can be regarded as a constrained Markov decision problem where the expected long-term cost is constrained. Previous off-policy algorithms convert the constrained optimization problem into the corresponding unconstrained dual problem by introducing the Lagrangian relaxation technique. However, the cost function of the above algorithms provides inaccurate estimations and causes the instability of the Lagrange multiplier learning. In this paper, we present a novel off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm called Conservative Distributional Maximum a Posteriori Policy Optimization (CDMPO). At first, to accurately judge whether the current situation satisfies the constraints, CDMPO adapts distributional reinforcement learning method to estimate the Q-function and C-function. Then, CDMPO uses a conservative value function loss to reduce the number of violations of constraints during the exploration process. In addition, we utilize Weighted Average Proportional Integral Derivative (WAPID) to update the Lagrange multiplier stably. Empirical results show that the proposed method has fewer violations of constraints in the early exploration process. The final test results also illustrate that our method has better risk control.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Synthetic Demographic Data Generation for Card Fraud Detection Using GANs

Using machine learning models to generate synthetic data has become common in many fields. Technology to generate synthetic transactions that can be used to detect fraud is also growing fast. Generally, this synthetic data contains only information about the transaction, such as the time, place, and amount of money. It does not usually contain the individual user's characteristics (age and gender are occasionally included). Using relatively complex synthetic demographic data may improve the complexity of transaction data features, thus improving the fraud detection performance. Benefiting from developments of machine learning, some deep learning models have potential to perform better than other well-established synthetic data generation methods, such as microsimulation. In this study, we built a deep-learning Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), called DGGAN, which will be used for demographic data generation. Our model generates samples during model training, which we found important to overcame class imbalance issues. This study can help improve the cognition of synthetic data and further explore the application of synthetic data generation in card fraud detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Segmentation and Tracking of Vegetable Plants by Exploiting Vegetable Shape Feature for Precision Spray of Agricultural Robots

With the increasing deployment of agricultural robots, the traditional manual spray of liquid fertilizer and pesticide is gradually being replaced by agricultural robots. For robotic precision spray application in vegetable farms, accurate plant phenotyping through instance segmentation and robust plant tracking are of great importance and a prerequisite for the following spray action. Regarding the robust tracking of vegetable plants, to solve the challenging problem of associating vegetables with similar color and texture in consecutive images, in this paper, a novel method of Multiple Object Tracking and Segmentation (MOTS) is proposed for instance segmentation and tracking of multiple vegetable plants. In our approach, contour and blob features are extracted to describe unique feature of each individual vegetable, and associate the same vegetables in different images. By assigning a unique ID for each vegetable, it ensures the robot to spray each vegetable exactly once, while traversing along the farm rows. Comprehensive experiments including ablation studies are conducted, which prove its superior performance over two State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) MOTS methods. Compared to the conventional MOTS methods, the proposed method is able to re-identify objects which have gone out of the camera field of view and re-appear again using the proposed data association strategy, which is important to ensure each vegetable be sprayed only once when the robot travels back and forth. Although the method is tested on lettuce farm, it can be applied to other similar vegetables such as broccoli and canola. Both code and the dataset of this paper is publicly released for the benefit of the community: https://github.com/NanH5837/LettuceMOTS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Explainable Recommendation with Personalized Review Retrieval and Aspect Learning

Explainable recommendation is a technique that combines prediction and generation tasks to produce more persuasive results. Among these tasks, textual generation demands large amounts of data to achieve satisfactory accuracy. However, historical user reviews of items are often insufficient, making it challenging to ensure the precision of generated explanation text. To address this issue, we propose a novel model, ERRA (Explainable Recommendation by personalized Review retrieval and Aspect learning). With retrieval enhancement, ERRA can obtain additional information from the training sets. With this additional information, we can generate more accurate and informative explanations. Furthermore, to better capture users' preferences, we incorporate an aspect enhancement component into our model. By selecting the top-n aspects that users are most concerned about for different items, we can model user representation with more relevant details, making the explanation more persuasive. To verify the effectiveness of our model, extensive experiments on three datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (for example, 3.4% improvement in prediction and 15.8% improvement in explanation for TripAdvisor).

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Input Augmentation with SAM: Boosting Medical Image Segmentation with Segmentation Foundation Model

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a recently developed large model for general-purpose segmentation for computer vision tasks. SAM was trained using 11 million images with over 1 billion masks and can produce segmentation results for a wide range of objects in natural scene images. SAM can be viewed as a general perception model for segmentation (partitioning images into semantically meaningful regions). Thus, how to utilize such a large foundation model for medical image segmentation is an emerging research target. This paper shows that although SAM does not immediately give high-quality segmentation for medical image data, its generated masks, features, and stability scores are useful for building and training better medical image segmentation models. In particular, we demonstrate how to use SAM to augment image input for commonly-used medical image segmentation models (e.g., U-Net). Experiments on three segmentation tasks show the effectiveness of our proposed SAMAug method. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/yizhezhang2000/SAMAug}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Mechanism design for the end-to-end deterministic transmissions with decoupled time domains

This paper proposes an innovative end-to-end deterministic network mechanism to achieve delay-bounded transmissions across multiple network domains. The proposed mechanism installs discrete shapers at the edge of the network domains, which serves to decouple the clock domains of different networks. Thereby, the challenges associated with cross-domain clock synchronization that are inherent in state-of-the-art deterministic mechanisms are mitigated, e.g., high complexity during the system implementation and the traffic scheduling. Moreover, the proposed mechanism enhances the availability of the deterministic networking, i.e., not only periodic deterministic traffic, but also aperiodic deterministic traffic and stochastic flows are enabled to be served. Furthermore, an auction-based online scheduling algorithm is developed to improve network efficiency and reduce cost. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively realize the end-to-end delay-bounded transmission across multiple domains. Meanwhile, the cross-domain latency could also be reduced compared to the existing methods.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

AirBirds: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for Bird Strike Prevention in Real-world Airports

One fundamental limitation to the research of bird strike prevention is the lack of a large-scale dataset taken directly from real-world airports. Existing relevant datasets are either small in size or not dedicated for this purpose. To advance the research and practical solutions for bird strike prevention, in this paper, we present a large-scale challenging dataset AirBirds that consists of 118,312 time-series images, where a total of 409,967 bounding boxes of flying birds are manually, carefully annotated. The average size of all annotated instances is smaller than 10 pixels in 1920x1080 images. Images in the dataset are captured over 4 seasons of a whole year by a network of cameras deployed at a real-world airport, covering diverse bird species, lighting conditions and 13 meteorological scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale image dataset that directly collects flying birds in real-world airports for bird strike prevention. This dataset is publicly available at https://airbirdsdata.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Video-based Contrastive Learning on Decision Trees: from Action Recognition to Autism Diagnosis

How can we teach a computer to recognize 10,000 different actions? Deep learning has evolved from supervised and unsupervised to self-supervised approaches. In this paper, we present a new contrastive learning-based framework for decision tree-based classification of actions, including human-human interactions (HHI) and human-object interactions (HOI). The key idea is to translate the original multi-class action recognition into a series of binary classification tasks on a pre-constructed decision tree. Under the new framework of contrastive learning, we present the design of an interaction adjacent matrix (IAM) with skeleton graphs as the backbone for modeling various action-related attributes such as periodicity and symmetry. Through the construction of various pretext tasks, we obtain a series of binary classification nodes on the decision tree that can be combined to support higher-level recognition tasks. Experimental justification for the potential of our approach in real-world applications ranges from interaction recognition to symmetry detection. In particular, we have demonstrated the promising performance of video-based autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis on the CalTech interview video database.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

The 7th AI City Challenge

The AI City Challenge's seventh edition emphasizes two domains at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence - retail business and Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) - that have considerable untapped potential. The 2023 challenge had five tracks, which drew a record-breaking number of participation requests from 508 teams across 46 countries. Track 1 was a brand new track that focused on multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) people tracking, where teams trained and evaluated using both real and highly realistic synthetic data. Track 2 centered around natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 required teams to classify driver actions in naturalistic driving analysis. Track 4 aimed to develop an automated checkout system for retail stores using a single view camera. Track 5, another new addition, tasked teams with detecting violations of the helmet rule for motorcyclists. Two leader boards were released for submissions based on different methods: a public leader board for the contest where external private data wasn't allowed and a general leader board for all results submitted. The participating teams' top performances established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

CamDiff: Camouflage Image Augmentation via Diffusion Model

The burgeoning field of camouflaged object detection (COD) seeks to identify objects that blend into their surroundings. Despite the impressive performance of recent models, we have identified a limitation in their robustness, where existing methods may misclassify salient objects as camouflaged ones, despite these two characteristics being contradictory. This limitation may stem from lacking multi-pattern training images, leading to less saliency robustness. To address this issue, we introduce CamDiff, a novel approach inspired by AI-Generated Content (AIGC) that overcomes the scarcity of multi-pattern training images. Specifically, we leverage the latent diffusion model to synthesize salient objects in camouflaged scenes, while using the zero-shot image classification ability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to prevent synthesis failures and ensure the synthesized object aligns with the input prompt. Consequently, the synthesized image retains its original camouflage label while incorporating salient objects, yielding camouflage samples with richer characteristics. The results of user studies show that the salient objects in the scenes synthesized by our framework attract the user's attention more; thus, such samples pose a greater challenge to the existing COD models. Our approach enables flexible editing and efficient large-scale dataset generation at a low cost. It significantly enhances COD baselines' training and testing phases, emphasizing robustness across diverse domains. Our newly-generated datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/drlxj/CamDiff.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Synthetic Distracted Driving (SynDD2) dataset for analyzing distracted behaviors and various gaze zones of a driver

This article presents a synthetic distracted driving (SynDD2 - a continuum of SynDD1) dataset for machine learning models to detect and analyze drivers' various distracted behavior and different gaze zones. We collected the data in a stationary vehicle using three in-vehicle cameras positioned at locations: on the dashboard, near the rearview mirror, and on the top right-side window corner. The dataset contains two activity types: distracted activities and gaze zones for each participant, and each activity type has two sets: without appearance blocks and with appearance blocks such as wearing a hat or sunglasses. The order and duration of each activity for each participant are random. In addition, the dataset contains manual annotations for each activity, having its start and end time annotated. Researchers could use this dataset to evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms to classify various distracting activities and gaze zones of drivers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers

Vision transformers have recently shown strong global context modeling capabilities in camouflaged object detection. However, they suffer from two major limitations: less effective locality modeling and insufficient feature aggregation in decoders, which are not conducive to camouflaged object detection that explores subtle cues from indistinguishable backgrounds. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based Feature Shrinkage Pyramid Network (FSPNet), which aims to hierarchically decode locality-enhanced neighboring transformer features through progressive shrinking for camouflaged object detection. Specifically, we propose a nonlocal token enhancement module (NL-TEM) that employs the non-local mechanism to interact neighboring tokens and explore graph-based high-order relations within tokens to enhance local representations of transformers. Moreover, we design a feature shrinkage decoder (FSD) with adjacent interaction modules (AIM), which progressively aggregates adjacent transformer features through a layer-bylayer shrinkage pyramid to accumulate imperceptible but effective cues as much as possible for object information decoding. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing 24 competitors on three challenging COD benchmark datasets under six widely-used evaluation metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhouHuang23/FSPNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Bi-directional Distribution Alignment for Transductive Zero-Shot Learning

It is well-known that zero-shot learning (ZSL) can suffer severely from the problem of domain shift, where the true and learned data distributions for the unseen classes do not match. Although transductive ZSL (TZSL) attempts to improve this by allowing the use of unlabelled examples from the unseen classes, there is still a high level of distribution shift. We propose a novel TZSL model (named as Bi-VAEGAN), which largely improves the shift by a strengthened distribution alignment between the visual and auxiliary spaces. The key proposal of the model design includes (1) a bi-directional distribution alignment, (2) a simple but effective L_2-norm based feature normalization approach, and (3) a more sophisticated unseen class prior estimation approach. In benchmark evaluation using four datasets, Bi-VAEGAN achieves the new state of the arts under both the standard and generalized TZSL settings. Code could be found at https://github.com/Zhicaiwww/Bi-VAEGAN

cs.CV↗