arXiv subjects

Xiaoguang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoguang Li.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

SAIR: Learning Semantic-aware Implicit Representation

Implicit representation of an image can map arbitrary coordinates in the continuous domain to their corresponding color values, presenting a powerful capability for image reconstruction. Nevertheless, existing implicit representation approaches only focus on building continuous appearance mapping, ignoring the continuities of the semantic information across pixels. As a result, they can hardly achieve desired reconstruction results when the semantic information within input images is corrupted, for example, a large region misses. To address the issue, we propose to learn semantic-aware implicit representation (SAIR), that is, we make the implicit representation of each pixel rely on both its appearance and semantic information (\eg, which object does the pixel belong to). To this end, we propose a framework with two modules: (1) building a semantic implicit representation (SIR) for a corrupted image whose large regions miss. Given an arbitrary coordinate in the continuous domain, we can obtain its respective text-aligned embedding indicating the object the pixel belongs. (2) building an appearance implicit representation (AIR) based on the SIR. Given an arbitrary coordinate in the continuous domain, we can reconstruct its color whether or not the pixel is missed in the input. We validate the novel semantic-aware implicit representation method on the image inpainting task, and the extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

RECESS Vaccine for Federated Learning: Proactive Defense Against Model Poisoning Attacks

Model poisoning attacks greatly jeopardize the application of federated learning (FL). The effectiveness of existing defenses is susceptible to the latest model poisoning attacks, leading to a decrease in prediction accuracy. Besides, these defenses are intractable to distinguish benign outliers from malicious gradients, which further compromises the model generalization. In this work, we propose a novel proactive defense named RECESS against model poisoning attacks. Different from the passive analysis in previous defenses, RECESS proactively queries each participating client with a delicately constructed aggregation gradient, accompanied by the detection of malicious clients according to their responses with higher accuracy. Furthermore, RECESS uses a new trust scoring mechanism to robustly aggregate gradients. Unlike previous methods that score each iteration, RECESS considers clients' performance correlation across multiple iterations to estimate the trust score, substantially increasing fault tolerance. Finally, we extensively evaluate RECESS on typical model architectures and four datasets under various settings. We also evaluated the defensive effectiveness against other types of poisoning attacks, the sensitivity of hyperparameters, and adaptive adversarial attacks. Experimental results show the superiority of RECESS in terms of reducing accuracy loss caused by the latest model poisoning attacks over five classic and two state-of-the-art defenses.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Leveraging Inpainting for Single-Image Shadow Removal

Fully-supervised shadow removal methods achieve the best restoration qualities on public datasets but still generate some shadow remnants. One of the reasons is the lack of large-scale shadow & shadow-free image pairs. Unsupervised methods can alleviate the issue but their restoration qualities are much lower than those of fully-supervised methods. In this work, we find that pretraining shadow removal networks on the image inpainting dataset can reduce the shadow remnants significantly: a naive encoder-decoder network gets competitive restoration quality w.r.t. the state-of-the-art methods via only 10% shadow & shadow-free image pairs. After analyzing networks with/without inpainting pre-training via the information stored in the weight (IIW), we find that inpainting pretraining improves restoration quality in non-shadow regions and enhances the generalization ability of networks significantly. Additionally, shadow removal fine-tuning enables networks to fill in the details of shadow regions. Inspired by these observations we formulate shadow removal as an adaptive fusion task that takes advantage of both shadow removal and image inpainting. Specifically, we develop an adaptive fusion network consisting of two encoders, an adaptive fusion block, and a decoder. The two encoders are responsible for extracting the feature from the shadow image and the shadow-masked image respectively. The adaptive fusion block is responsible for combining these features in an adaptive manner. Finally, the decoder converts the adaptive fused features to the desired shadow-free result. The extensive experiments show that our method empowered with inpainting outperforms all state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Polyimides Crosslinked by Aromatic Molecules and Nanocomposites for High Temperature Capacitive Energy Storage

High temperature polymer-based dielectric capacitors are crucial for application in electronic power systems. However, the storage performance of conventional dielectrics polymer dramatically deteriorates due to the thermal breakdown under concurrent high temperatures and electric fields, and there are hardly reports on the causes of thermal breakdown from the aspects of the high temperature conduction loss and Joule heat dissipation. Herein, a combined strategy of crosslinking and compositing for polyimide-based nanocomposites is proposed, which minimizes the thermal breakdown by significantly inhibiting the high-temperature conduction loss and enhancing the high thermal conductivity. Furthermore, the rationale of the strategy was theoretically and experimentally verified from multiple perspectives. The charge-trapping effect is directly observed and quantitatively probed by Kelvin probe force microscopy with nano level resolution, indicating that the crosslinking network introduces local deep traps and effectively suppresses the charge transport. The thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites inhibits the high temperature thermal breakdown, which is confirmed by phase field simulations. Consequently, the optimized nanocomposites possess an ultra high discharge energy density(Ud) of 5.45 J/cm3 and 3.54 J/cm3 with a charge discharge efficiency, respectively, which outperforms the reported polyimide based dielectric nanocomposites. This work provides a scalable direction for high temperature polymer based capacitors with excellent performance.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2023

SuperInpaint: Learning Detail-Enhanced Attentional Implicit Representation for Super-resolutional Image Inpainting

In this work, we introduce a challenging image restoration task, referred to as SuperInpaint, which aims to reconstruct missing regions in low-resolution images and generate completed images with arbitrarily higher resolutions. We have found that this task cannot be effectively addressed by stacking state-of-the-art super-resolution and image inpainting methods as they amplify each other's flaws, leading to noticeable artifacts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the detail-enhanced attentional implicit representation (DEAR) that can achieve SuperInpaint with a single model, resulting in high-quality completed images with arbitrary resolutions. Specifically, we use a deep convolutional network to extract the latent embedding of an input image and then enhance the high-frequency components of the latent embedding via an adaptive high-pass filter. This leads to detail-enhanced semantic embedding. We further feed the semantic embedding into an unmask-attentional module that suppresses embeddings from ineffective masked pixels. Additionally, we extract a pixel-wise importance map that indicates which pixels should be used for image reconstruction. Given the coordinates of a pixel we want to reconstruct, we first collect its neighboring pixels in the input image and extract their detail-enhanced semantic embeddings, unmask-attentional semantic embeddings, importance values, and spatial distances to the desired pixel. Then, we feed all the above terms into an implicit representation and generate the color of the specified pixel. To evaluate our method, we extend three existing datasets for this new task and build 18 meaningful baselines using SOTA inpainting and super-resolution methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing methods by a significant margin on four widely used metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

CNN-based Dendrite Core Detection from Microscopic Images of Directionally Solidified Ni-base Alloys

Dendrite core is the center point of the dendrite. The information of dendrite core is very helpful for material scientists to analyze the properties of materials. Therefore, detecting the dendrite core is a very important task in the material science field. Meanwhile, because of some special properties of the dendrites, this task is also very challenging. Different from the typical detection problems in the computer vision field, detecting the dendrite core aims to detect a single point location instead of the bounding-box. As a result, the existing regressing bounding-box based detection methods can not work well on this task because the calculated center point location based on the upper-left and lower-right corners of the bounding-box is usually not precise. In this work, we formulate the dendrite core detection problem as a segmentation task and proposed a novel detection method to detect the dendrite core directly. Our whole pipeline contains three steps: Easy Sample Detection (ESD), Hard Sample Detection(HSD), and Hard Sample Refinement (HSR). Specifically, ESD and HSD focus on the easy samples and hard samples of dendrite cores respectively. Both of them employ the same Central Point Detection Network (CPDN) but do not share parameters. To make HSD only focus on the feature of hard samples of dendrite cores, we destroy the structure of the easy samples of dendrites which are detected by ESD and force HSD to learn the feature of hard samples. HSR is a binary classifier which is used to filter out the false positive prediction of HSD. We evaluate our method on the dendrite dataset. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on three metrics, i.e., Recall, Precision, and F-score.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Learning Restoration is Not Enough: Transfering Identical Mapping for Single-Image Shadow Removal

Shadow removal is to restore shadow regions to their shadow-free counterparts while leaving non-shadow regions unchanged. State-of-the-art shadow removal methods train deep neural networks on collected shadow & shadow-free image pairs, which are desired to complete two distinct tasks via shared weights, i.e., data restoration for shadow regions and identical mapping for non-shadow regions. We find that these two tasks exhibit poor compatibility, and using shared weights for these two tasks could lead to the model being optimized towards only one task instead of both during the training process. Note that such a key issue is not identified by existing deep learning-based shadow removal methods. To address this problem, we propose to handle these two tasks separately and leverage the identical mapping results to guide the shadow restoration in an iterative manner. Specifically, our method consists of three components: an identical mapping branch (IMB) for non-shadow regions processing, an iterative de-shadow branch (IDB) for shadow regions restoration based on identical results, and a smart aggregation block (SAB). The IMB aims to reconstruct an image that is identical to the input one, which can benefit the restoration of the non-shadow regions without explicitly distinguishing between shadow and non-shadow regions. Utilizing the multi-scale features extracted by the IMB, the IDB can effectively transfer information from non-shadow regions to shadow regions progressively, facilitating the process of shadow removal. The SAB is designed to adaptive integrate features from both IMB and IDB. Moreover, it generates a finely tuned soft shadow mask that guides the process of removing shadows. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms all the state-of-the-art shadow removal approaches on the widely used shadow removal datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Fine-grained Poisoning Attack to Local Differential Privacy Protocols for Mean and Variance Estimation

Although local differential privacy (LDP) protects individual users' data from inference by an untrusted data curator, recent studies show that an attacker can launch a data poisoning attack from the user side to inject carefully-crafted bogus data into the LDP protocols in order to maximally skew the final estimate by the data curator. In this work, we further advance this knowledge by proposing a new fine-grained attack, which allows the attacker to fine-tune and simultaneously manipulate mean and variance estimations that are popular analytical tasks for many real-world applications. To accomplish this goal, the attack leverages the characteristics of LDP to inject fake data into the output domain of the local LDP instance. We call our attack the output poisoning attack (OPA). We observe a security-privacy consistency where a small privacy loss enhances the security of LDP, which contradicts the known security-privacy trade-off from prior work. We further study the consistency and reveal a more holistic view of the threat landscape of data poisoning attacks on LDP. We comprehensively evaluate our attack against a baseline attack that intuitively provides false input to LDP. The experimental results show that OPA outperforms the baseline on three real-world datasets. We also propose a novel defense method that can recover the result accuracy from polluted data collection and offer insight into the secure LDP design.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Mechanical properties of AlMgB14-related boron carbide structures. A first principle study

We examine the effects produced by replacing B-B interlayer bonds by C-C bonds in AlMgB14-related boron network on its mechanical properties. The elastic constants, Vickers hardness and shear strength are evaluated by means of first principle computer simulations on the basis of density functional theory. The results of simulations suggest a possibility of existence of several orthorhombic boron carbide phases with strongly enhanced mechanical properties with the Young modulus and Vickers hardness being within the range of 550-600 GPa and 43-50 GPa, respectively

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Pre-training Language Models with Deterministic Factual Knowledge

Previous works show that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can capture factual knowledge. However, some analyses reveal that PLMs fail to perform it robustly, e.g., being sensitive to the changes of prompts when extracting factual knowledge. To mitigate this issue, we propose to let PLMs learn the deterministic relationship between the remaining context and the masked content. The deterministic relationship ensures that the masked factual content can be deterministically inferable based on the existing clues in the context. That would provide more stable patterns for PLMs to capture factual knowledge than randomly masking. Two pre-training tasks are further introduced to motivate PLMs to rely on the deterministic relationship when filling masks. Specifically, we use an external Knowledge Base (KB) to identify deterministic relationships and continuously pre-train PLMs with the proposed methods. The factual knowledge probing experiments indicate that the continuously pre-trained PLMs achieve better robustness in factual knowledge capturing. Further experiments on question-answering datasets show that trying to learn a deterministic relationship with the proposed methods can also help other knowledge-intensive tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering

To alleviate the data scarcity problem in training question answering systems, recent works propose additional intermediate pre-training for dense passage retrieval (DPR). However, there still remains a large discrepancy between the provided upstream signals and the downstream question-passage relevance, which leads to less improvement. To bridge this gap, we propose the HyperLink-induced Pre-training (HLP), a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlink-based topology within Web documents. We demonstrate that the hyperlink-based structures of dual-link and co-mention can provide effective relevance signals for large-scale pre-training that better facilitate downstream passage retrieval. We investigate the effectiveness of our approach across a wide range of open-domain QA datasets under zero-shot, few-shot, multi-hop, and out-of-domain scenarios. The experiments show our HLP outperforms the BM25 by up to 7 points as well as other pre-training methods by more than 10 points in terms of top-20 retrieval accuracy under the zero-shot scenario. Furthermore, HLP significantly outperforms other pre-training methods under the other scenarios.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Stabilization and application of asymmetric Néel skyrmions in hybrid nanostructures

Increasing amounts of information force the continuous improvement of information storage and processing technologies, further device miniaturization, and their efficiency increase. Magnetic skyrmions, topological quasiparticles, and the smallest stable magnetic textures possess intriguing properties and potential for data storage applications. Hybrid nanostructures with elements of different magnetization orientations can offer additional advantages for developing skyrmion-based spintronic and magnonic devices. We show that an Néel-type skyrmion confined within a nanodot placed on top of a ferromagnetic stripe produces a unique and compelling platform for exploring mutual coupling between magnetization textures. The skyrmion induces an imprint upon the stripe, which, in turn, asymmetrically squeezes the skyrmion in the dot, increasing their size and the range of skyrmion stability for small values of DMI, as well as introducing skyrmion bi-stability. At the end, we present a proof-of-concept technique for unconstrained transport of a skyrmion along a racetrack based on proposed hybrid systems. Our results demonstrate a hybrid structure that is promising for applications in magnonics and spintronics.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2022

How Pre-trained Language Models Capture Factual Knowledge? A Causal-Inspired Analysis

Recently, there has been a trend to investigate the factual knowledge captured by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Many works show the PLMs' ability to fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as "Dante was born in [MASK]." However, it is still a mystery how PLMs generate the results correctly: relying on effective clues or shortcut patterns? We try to answer this question by a causal-inspired analysis that quantitatively measures and evaluates the word-level patterns that PLMs depend on to generate the missing words. We check the words that have three typical associations with the missing words: knowledge-dependent, positionally close, and highly co-occurred. Our analysis shows: (1) PLMs generate the missing factual words more by the positionally close and highly co-occurred words than the knowledge-dependent words; (2) the dependence on the knowledge-dependent words is more effective than the positionally close and highly co-occurred words. Accordingly, we conclude that the PLMs capture the factual knowledge ineffectively because of depending on the inadequate associations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

MISF: Multi-level Interactive Siamese Filtering for High-Fidelity Image Inpainting

Although achieving significant progress, existing deep generative inpainting methods are far from real-world applications due to the low generalization across different scenes. As a result, the generated images usually contain artifacts or the filled pixels differ greatly from the ground truth. Image-level predictive filtering is a widely used image restoration technique, predicting suitable kernels adaptively according to different input scenes. Inspired by this inherent advantage, we explore the possibility of addressing image inpainting as a filtering task. To this end, we first study the advantages and challenges of image-level predictive filtering for image inpainting: the method can preserve local structures and avoid artifacts but fails to fill large missing areas. Then, we propose semantic filtering by conducting filtering on the deep feature level, which fills the missing semantic information but fails to recover the details. To address the issues while adopting the respective advantages, we propose a novel filtering technique, i.e., Multilevel Interactive Siamese Filtering (MISF), which contains two branches: kernel prediction branch (KPB) and semantic & image filtering branch (SIFB). These two branches are interactively linked: SIFB provides multi-level features for KPB while KPB predicts dynamic kernels for SIFB. As a result, the final method takes the advantage of effective semantic & image-level filling for high-fidelity inpainting. We validate our method on three challenging datasets, i.e., Dunhuang, Places2, and CelebA. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four metrics, i.e., L1, PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Please try the released code and model at https://github.com/tsingqguo/misf.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Read before Generate! Faithful Long Form Question Answering with Machine Reading

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims to generate a paragraph-length answer for a given question. While current work on LFQA using large pre-trained model for generation are effective at producing fluent and somewhat relevant content, one primary challenge lies in how to generate a faithful answer that has less hallucinated content. We propose a new end-to-end framework that jointly models answer generation and machine reading. The key idea is to augment the generation model with fine-grained, answer-related salient information which can be viewed as an emphasis on faithful facts. State-of-the-art results on two LFQA datasets, ELI5 and MS MARCO, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in comparison with strong baselines on automatic and human evaluation metrics. A detailed analysis further proves the competency of our methods in generating fluent, relevant, and more faithful answers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Nonreciprocal dynamics of ferrimagnetic bimerons

Magnetic bimerons are topologically nontrivial spin textures in in-plane easy-axis magnets, which can be used as particle-like information carriers. Here, we report a theoretical study on the nonreciprocal dynamics of asymmetrical ferrimagnetic (FiM) bimerons induced by spin currents. The FiM bimerons have the ability to move at a speed of kilometers per second and do not show the skyrmion Hall effect at the angular momentum compensation point. Our micromagnetic simulations and analytical results demonstrate that spin currents are able to induce the nonreciprocal transport and a drift motion of the FiM bimeron even if the system is at the angular momentum compensation point. By analyzing the current-induced effective fields, we find that the nonreciprocal transport is attributed to the asymmetry of the bimeron structure. Our results are useful for understanding the physics of bimerons in ferrimagnets and may provide guidelines for building bimeron-based spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

NEZHA: Neural Contextualized Representation for Chinese Language Understanding

The pre-trained language models have achieved great successes in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks due to its capacity to capture the deep contextualized information in text by pre-training on large-scale corpora. In this technical report, we present our practice of pre-training language models named NEZHA (NEural contextualiZed representation for CHinese lAnguage understanding) on Chinese corpora and finetuning for the Chinese NLU tasks. The current version of NEZHA is based on BERT with a collection of proven improvements, which include Functional Relative Positional Encoding as an effective positional encoding scheme, Whole Word Masking strategy, Mixed Precision Training and the LAMB Optimizer in training the models. The experimental results show that NEZHA achieves the state-of-the-art performances when finetuned on several representative Chinese tasks, including named entity recognition (People's Daily NER), sentence matching (LCQMC), Chinese sentiment classification (ChnSenti) and natural language inference (XNLI).

cs.CL↗