Italy

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) and its variants are popular few-shot classification methods. They train an initializer across a variety of sampled learning tasks (also known as episodes) such that the initialized model can adapt quickly to new ones. In this paper, we propose an approach called MetaMix, which generates virtual feature-target pairs within each episode to regularize the backbone models.
MetaMix can be integrated with any of the MAML-based algorithms and learn the decision boundaries generalizing better to new tasks. Experiments on the mini-ImageNet, CUB, and FC100 datasets show that MetaMix improves the performance of MAML-based algorithms and achieves state-of-the-art result when integrated with Meta-Transfer Learning.

ICPR 2020

MetaMix: Improved Meta-Learning with Interpolation-based Consistency Regularization

consistency regularization

few-shot learning

meta-learning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 



This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Creating Classifier Ensembles through Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Aerial Scene Classification

Metallic surface defect detection is of great significance in quality control for production. However, this task is very challenging due to the noise disturbance, large appearance variation, and the ambiguous definition of the defect individual. Traditional image processing methods are unable to detect the damaged region effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new defect detection method, Attention Cascade R- CNN with Mix-NMS (ACRM), to classify and locate defects robustly. Three submodules are developed to achieve this goal: 1) a lightweight attention block is introduced, which can improve the ability in capture global and local feature both in the spatial and channel dimension; 2) we firstly apply the cascade R-CNN to our task, which exploits multiple detectors to sequentially refine the detection result robustly; 3) we introduce a new method named Mix Non-Maximum Suppression (Mix- NMS), which can significantly improve its ability in filtering the redundant detection result in our task. Extensive experiments on a real industrial dataset show that ACRM achieves state-of-the- art results compared to the existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our detection method.

ACRM: Attention Cascade R-CNN with Mix-NMS for Metallic Surface Defect Detection

In this paper, we propose a new image classifier based on the incorporation of the nearest neighbor algorithm and the activation space of convolutional neural network. The classifier has been successfully implemented on some state-of- the-art models and further improve their performance. The main
technique tool we use is convex hull based classification and its acceleration. We find several phenomena which we believe are of both theoretical and application interest: 1) in several cases, the new classifier outperforms original CNN by reaching higher accuracy; 2) the classifier can work more efficiently by combining with sampling strategy; 3) centroid of each convex hull shows surprising ability in classification. Most of the work have strong geometric meanings, which helps us have a new understanding about convolutional layers.

Nearest Neighbor Classification Based onActivation Space of Convolutional Neural Network


With the advent of data living on vertices of graphs, there is much interest in processing the so-called graph signals for partitioning tasks. As active contours have had much impact in the image processing community, their formulation on graphs is of importance to the field of graph signal processing. This paper proposes an adaptation on graphs of a model that combines the Geodesic Active Contour and the Active Contour Without Edges models. In addition, specific terms depending on graphs are introduced in the formulation. This adaptation is solved using a level set formulation with a gradient descent that can be expressed as a morphological front evolution process. Experimental results on different kinds of graphs signals show the benefit of the approach.

Graph signal active contours


In this paper, we address the problem of video summarization, which aims at selecting a subset of video frames as a summary to represent the original video contents compactly and completely. We propose a simple but effective supervised approach with a dual attention capsule network towards this end. Unlike existing LSTM based methods, it pays attention to short- and long-term dependencies among video frames through an elaborate dual self-attention architecture, which can handle longer-term dependencies and admit parallel computing. To reconcile the outputs of dual self-attention, we rely on a two-stream capsule network to learn the underlying frame selection criteria. Experiments on real-world datasets show the advantages of the proposed approach compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Video Summarization with a Dual Attention Capsule Network

Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) have shown great performance in the context of skeleton-based action recognition. Nevertheless, ST-GCNs use raw skeleton data as vertex features. Such features have low dimensionality and might not be optimal for action discrimination. Moreover, a single layer of temporal convolution is used to model short-term temporal dependencies but can be insufficient for capturing both long-term. In this paper, we extend the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for skeleton-based action recognition by introducing two novel modules, namely, the Graph Vertex Feature Encoder (GVFE) and the Dilated Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Network (DH-TCN). On the one hand, the GVFE module learns appropriate vertex features for action recognition by encoding raw skeleton data into a new feature space. On the other hand, the DH-TCN module is capable of capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies using a hierarchical dilated convolutional network. Experiments have been conducted on the challenging NTU RGB-D 60, NTU RGB-D 120 and Kinetics datasets. The obtained results show that our method competes with state-of-the-art approaches while using a smaller number of layers and parameters; thus reducing the required training time and memory.

Vertex Feature Encoding and Hierarchical Temporal Modeling in a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Action Recognition


The paper presents a new theory of combined moment invariants to Gaussian blur and spatial affine transformation. The blur kernel may be arbitrary oriented, scaled, and elongated. No prior information about the kernel parameters and about the underlying affine transform is required. The main idea, expressed by the Substitution Theorem, is to substitute pure blur invariants into traditional affine moment invariants. Potential applications of the new descriptors are in blur-invariant image recognition and in robust template matching.

Combined Invariants to Gaussian Blur and Affine Transformation

Due to the irregularity and sparsity of 3D point clouds, applying convolutional neural networks directly on them
can be nontrivial. In this work, we propose a simple but effective approach for 3D Point Clouds analysis, named PC-Net. PC-Net directly learns on point sets and is equipped with three new operations: first, we apply a novel scale-aware neighbor search for adaptive neighborhood extracting; second, for each neighboring point, we learn a local spatial feature as a complement to their associated features; finally, at the end we use a distance reweighted pooling to aggregate all the features from local structure. With this module, we design hierarchical neural network for point cloud understanding. For both classification and segmentation tasks, our architecture proves effective in the experiments and our models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over existing deep learning methods on popular point cloud benchmarks.

PC-Net: A Deep Network for 3D Point Clouds Analysis

Exciting research is being conducted using Google’s street view imagery. Researchers can have access to training data that allows CNN training for topics ranging from assessing neighborhood environments to estimating the age of a building. However, due to the uncontrolled nature of imagery available via Google’s Street View API, data collection can be lengthy and tedious. In an effort to help researchers gather address specific dwelling images efficiently, we developed an innovative and novel way of automatically performing this task. It was accomplished by exploiting Google’s publicly available platform with a combination of 3 separate network types and postprocessing techniques. Our uniquely developed NMS technique helped achieve 99.4%, valid, address specific, dwelling images.

Automatically Gather Address Specific Dwelling Images Using Google Street View

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have enabled significant advancements to the state-of-the-art in computer vision. For classification tasks, CNNs have widely employed probabilistic output and have shown the significance of providing additional confidence for predictions. However, such probabilistic methodologies are not widely applicable for addressing regression problems using CNNs, as regression involves learning unconstrained continuous and, in many cases, multi-variate target variables. We propose a PRObabilistic Parametric rEgression Loss (PROPEL) that facilitates CNNs to learn parameters of probability distributions for addressing probabilistic regression problems. PROPEL is fully differentiable and, hence, can be easily incorporated for end-to-end training of existing CNN regression architectures using existing optimization algorithms. The proposed method is flexible as it enables learning complex unconstrained probabilities while being generalizable to higher dimensional multi-variate regression problems. We utilize a PROPEL-based CNN to address the problem of learning hand and head orientation from uncalibrated color images. Our experimental validation and comparison with existing CNN regression loss functions show that PROPEL improves the accuracy of a CNN by enabling probabilistic regression, while significantly reducing required model parameters by $10 \times$, resulting in improved generalization as compared to the existing state-of-the-art.


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