United States

Counting dense crowds through computer vision technology has attracted widespread attention. Most crowd counting datasets use point annotations. In this paper, we formulate crowd counting as a measure regression problem to minimize the distance between two measures with different supports and unequal total mass. Specifically, we adopt the unbalanced optimal transport distance, which remains stable under spatial perturbations, to quantify the discrepancy between predicted density maps and point annotations. An efficient optimization algorithm based on the regularized semi-dual formulation of UOT is introduced, which alternatively learns the optimal transportation and optimizes the density regressor. The quantitative and qualitative results illustrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art counting and localization performance.

AAAI 2021

Learning to Count via Unbalanced Optimal Transport

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. 


ICPR 2020

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

This paper focuses on the unsupervised domain adaptation problem for video-based crowd counting, in which we use labeled data as source domain and unlabelled video data as target domain. It is challenging as there is a huge gap between the source and the target domain and no annotations of samples are available in the target domain. The key issue is how to utilize unlabelled videos in the target domain for knowledge learning and transferring from the source domain. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Error-aware Density Isomorphism REConstruction Network (EDIREC-Net) for cross-domain crowd counting. EDIREC-Net jointly transfers a pre-trained counting model to target domains using a density isomorphism reconstruction objective and models the reconstruction erroneousness by error reasoning. Specifically, as crowd flows in videos are consecutive, the density maps in adjacent frames turn out to be isomorphic. On this basis, we regard the density isomorphism reconstruction error as a self-supervised signal to transfer the pre-trained counting models to different target domains. Moreover, we leverage an estimation-reconstruction consistency to monitor the density reconstruction erroneousness and suppress unreliable density reconstructions during training. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and ablation studies investigate the efficiency and robustness. The source code is available at https://github.com/GehenHe/EDIREC-Net.

Error-Aware Density Isomorphism Reconstruction for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Crowd Counting

Manga is a world popular comic form originated in Japan, which typically employs black-and-white stroke lines and geometric exaggeration to describe humans' appearances, poses, and actions. In this paper, we propose MangaGAN, the first method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for unpaired photo-to-manga translation. Inspired by the drawing process of experienced manga artists, MangaGAN generates geometric features and converts each facial region into the manga domain with a tailored multi-GANs architecture. For training MangaGAN, we collect a new data-set from a popular manga work with extensive features. To produce high-quality manga faces, we propose a structural smoothing loss to smooth stroke-lines and avoid noisy pixels, and a similarity preserving module to improve the similarity between domains of photo and manga. Extensive experiments show that MangaGAN can produce high-quality manga faces preserving both the facial similarity and manga style, and outperforms other reference methods.

MangaGAN: Unpaired Photo-to-Manga Translation Based on the Methodology of Manga Drawing

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become dominant in the single image de-raining area. However, most deep CNNs-based de-raining methods are designed by stacking vanilla convolutional layers, which can only be used to model local relations. Therefore, long-range contextual information is rarely considered for this specific task. To address the above problem, we propose a simple yet effective dual graph convolutional network (GCN) for single image rain removal. Specifically, we design two graphs to perform global relational modeling and reasoning. The first GCN is used to explore global spatial relations among pixels in feature maps, while the second GCN models the global relations across the channels. Compared to standard convolutional operations, the proposed two graphs enable the network to extract representations from new dimensions. To achieve the image rain removal, we further embed these two graphs and multi-scale dilated convolution into a symmetrically skip-connected network architecture. Therefore, our dual graph convolutional network is able to well handle complex and spatially long rain streaks by exploring multiple representations, e.g., multi-scale local feature, global spatial coherence and cross-channel correlation. Meanwhile, our model is easy to implement, end-to-end trainable and computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Rain Streak Removal via Dual Graph Convolutional Network

Online insurance is a new type of e-commerce with exponential growth.
An effective recommendation model that maximizes the total revenue of insurance products listed in multiple customized sales scenarios is crucial for the success of online insurance business.
Prior recommendation models are ineffective because they fail to characterize the complex relatedness of insurance products in multiple sales scenarios and maximize the overall conversion rate rather than the total revenue.
Even worse, it is impractical to collect training data online for total revenue maximization due to the business logic of online insurance.
We propose RevMan, a Revenue-aware Multi-task Network for online insurance recommendation.
RevMan adopts an adaptive attention mechanism to allow effective feature sharing among complex insurance products and sales scenarios.
It also designs an efficient offline learning mechanism to learn the rank that maximizes the expected total revenue, by reusing training data and model for conversion rate maximization.
Extensive offline and online evaluations show that RevMan outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation systems for e-commerce.

RevMan: Revenue-Aware Multi-Task Online Insurance Recommendation

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is essential for visual recognition. Many methods tackle this challenging problem via learning an embedding function from seen classes and transfer it to unseen classes with a few labeled instances. Researchers recently found it beneficial to incorporate task-specific feature adaptation into FSL models, which produces the most representative features for each task. However, these methods ignore the diversity of classes and apply a global transformation to the task. In this paper, we propose Global and Local Feature Adaptor (GLoFA), a unifying framework that tailors the instance representation to specific tasks by global and local feature adaptors. We claim that class-specific local transformation helps to improve the representation ability of feature adaptor.  Global masks tend to capture sketchy patterns, while local masks focus on detailed characteristics. A strategy to measure the relationship between instances adaptively based on the characteristics of both tasks and classes endow GLoFA with the ability to handle mix-grained tasks. GLoFA outperforms other methods on a heterogeneous task distribution and achieves competitive results on benchmark datasets.

Tailoring Embedding Function to Heterogeneous Few-Shot Tasks by Global and Local Feature Adaptors

In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS) jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our method against several strong baselines.

Topic-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Summarization for Customer Service with Saliency-Aware Topic Modeling

Boundary information plays a significant role in 2D image segmentation, while usually being ignored in 3D point cloud segmentation where ambiguous features might be generated in feature extraction, leading to misclassification in the transition area between two objects. In this paper, firstly, we propose a Boundary Prediction Module (BPM) to predict boundary points. Based on the predicted boundary, a boundary-aware Geometric Encoding Module (GEM) is designed to encode geometric information and aggregate features with discrimination in a neighborhood, so that the local features belonging to different categories will not be polluted by each other. To provide extra geometric information for boundary-aware GEM, we also propose a light-weight Geometric Convolution Operation (GCO), making the extracted features more distinguishing. Built upon the boundary-aware GEM, we build our network and test it on benchmarks like ScanNet v2, S3DIS. Results show our methods can significantly improve the baseline and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Boundary-Aware Geometric Encoding for Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to train the classifier for unseen classes. They may have a strong bias towards seen classes during training. Meta-learning has been introduced to mitigate the basis, but meta-ZSL methods are inapplicable when tasks used for training are sampled from diverse distributions. In this regard, we propose a novel Task-aligned Generative Meta-learning model for Zero-shot learning (TGMZ), aiming to mitigate the potentially biased training and to enable meta-ZSL to accommodate real-world datasets that contain diverse distributions. Specifically, TGMZ incorporates an attribute-conditioned task-wise distribution alignment network that projects tasks into a unified distribution to deliver an unbiased model. Our experiments show TGMZ achieves a relative improvement of 2.1%, 3.0%, 2.5%, and 7.6% over state-of-the-art algorithms on AWA1, AWA2, CUB, and aPY datasets, respectively. Overall, TGMZ outperforms competitors by 3.6% in the generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) setting and 7.9% in our proposed fusion-ZSL setting.

Task Aligned Generative Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Learning

Shared on-demand mobility holds immense potential for urban transportation. However, finding ride matches in real-time at urban scale is a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem and mostly heuristic approaches are applied. In this work, we introduce a principled approach to this combinatorial problem. Our approach proceeds by constructing suitable representations for rides and driver routes capturing their essential spatio-temporal aspects in an appropriate vector space, and defining a similarity metric in this space that expresses matching utility. This then lets us mathematically model the problem of finding ride matches as that of Near Neighbor Search (NNS). Exploiting this modeling, we devise a novel spatio-temporal search algorithm for finding ride matches based on the theory of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Apart from being highly efficient, our algorithm enjoys several practically useful properties and extension possibilities. Experiments with large real-world datasets show that our algorithm consistently outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic methods thereby proving its practical applicability.

When Hashing Met Matching: Efficient Spatio-Temporal Search for Ridesharing

Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results.In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes of this problem: (1) The ELBO objective cannot utilize the label information directly. (2) A bottleneck value exists, and continuing to optimize ELBO after this value will not improve inference accuracy. On the basis of the experiment results, we propose SHOT-VAE to address these problems without introducing additional prior knowledge. The SHOT-VAE offers two contributions: (1) A new ELBO approximation named smooth-ELBO that integrates the label predictive loss into ELBO. (2) An approximation based on optimal interpolation that breaks the ELBO value bottleneck by reducing the margin between ELBO and the data likelihood. The SHOT-VAE achieves good performance with 25.30% error rate on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels and reduces the error rate to 6.11% on CIFAR-10 with 4k labels.

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