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The reading of arbitrarily-shaped text has received increasing research attention. However, existing text spotters are mostly built on two-stage frameworks or character-based methods, which suffer from either Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), Region-of-Interest (RoI) operations, or character-level annotations. In this paper, to address the above problems, we propose a novel fully convolutional Point Gathering Network (PGNet) for reading arbitrarily-shaped text in real-time. The PGNet is a single-shot text spotter, where the pixel-level character classification map is learned with proposed PG-CTC loss avoiding the usage of character-level annotations. With a PG-CTC decoder, we gather high-level character classification vectors from two-dimensional space and decode them into text symbols without NMS and RoI operations involved, which guarantees high efficiency. Additionally, reasoning the relations between each character and its neighbors, a graph refinement module (GRM) is proposed to optimize the coarse recognition and improve the end-to-end performance. Experiments prove that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy, meanwhile significantly improving the running speed. In particular, in Total-Text, it runs at 46.7 FPS, surpassing the previous spotters with a large margin.

AAAI 2021

PGNet: Real-Time Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Spotting with Point Gathering Network

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. 

technical paper

Deep learning based human parsing methods usually require a large amount of training data to reach high performance. However, it is costly and time-consuming to obtain manually annotated high quality labels for a large scale dataset. To alleviate annotation efforts, we propose a new semi-supervised human parsing method for which we only need a small number of labels for training.
 First, we generate high quality pseudo labels on unlabeled images using a hierarchical information passing network (HIPN), which reasons human part segmentation in a coarse to fine manner.
 Furthermore, we develop a noise-tolerant hybrid learning method, which takes advantage of positive and negative learning to better handle noisy pseudo labels.
 When evaluated on standard human parsing benchmarks, our HIPN achieves a new state-of-the-art  performance. Moreover, our noise-tolerant hybrid learning method further improves the performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised method (i.e. GRN) by 4.47 points w.r.t mIoU on the LIP dataset.

Hierarchical Information Passing Based Noise-Tolerant Hybrid Learning for Semi-Supervised Human Parsing

The object of Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WS-TAL) is to localize all action instances in an untrimmed video with only video-level supervision. Due to the lack of frame-level annotations during training, current WS-TAL methods rely on attention mechanisms to localize the foreground snippets or frames that contribute to the video-level classification task. This strategy frequently confuse context with the actual action, in the localization result. Separating action and context is a core problem for precise WS-TAL, but it is very challenging and has been largely ignored in the literature. In this paper, we introduce an Action-Context Separation Network (ACSNet) that explicitly takes into account context for accurate action localization. It consists of two branches (i.e., the Foreground-Background branch and the Action-Context branch). The Foreground-Background branch first distinguishes foreground from background within the entire video while the Action-Context branch further separates the foreground as action and context. We associate video snippets with two latent components (i.e., a positive component and a negative component), and their different combinations can effectively characterize foreground, action and context. Furthermore, we introduce extended labels with auxiliary context categories to facilitate the learning of action-context separation. Experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.2/v1.3 datasets demonstrate the ACSNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art WS-TAL methods by a large margin.

ACSNet: Action-Context Separation Network for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Recent years have witnessed the growing interest in disease severity grading, especially for ocular diseases based on fundus images. The existing grading methods are usually trained with high resolution (HR) images. However, the grading performance decreases a lot given low resolution (LR) images, which are common in practice. In this paper, we mainly focus on diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading with LR fundus images. According to our analysis on the DR task, we find that: 1) image super-resolution (ISR) can boost the performance of DR grading and lesion segmentation; 2) the lesion segmentation regions of fundus images are highly consistent with pathological regions for DR grading. Thus, we propose a deep multi-task learning based DR grading (DeepMT-DR) method for LR fundus images, which simultaneously handles the auxiliary tasks of ISR and lesion segmentation. Specifically, based on our findings, we propose a hierarchical deep learning structure that simultaneously processes the low-level task of ISR, the mid-level task of lesion segmentation and the high-level task of DR grading. Moreover, a novel task-aware loss is developed to encourage ISR to focus on the pathological regions for its subsequent tasks: lesion segmentation and DR grading. Extensive experimental results show that our DeepMT-DR method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for DR grading over two public datasets. In addition, our method achieves comparable performance in two auxiliary tasks of ISR and lesion segmentation.

Deep Multi-Task Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading in Fundus Images

The use of a policy and a heuristic function for guiding search can be quite effective in adversarial problems, as demonstrated by AlphaGo and its successors, which are  based on the PUCT search algorithm.  While PUCT can also be used to solve single-agent deterministic problems,  it lacks guarantees on its search effort and it can be computationally inefficient in practice.   Combining the A* algorithm with a learned heuristic function  tends to work better in these domains, but A* and its variants do not use a policy. Moreover, the purpose of using A* is to find solutions of minimum cost,  while we seek instead to minimize the search loss (e.g., the number of search steps). LevinTS is guided by a policy and provides guarantees on the number of search steps that relate to the quality of the policy, but it does not make use of a heuristic function. In this work we introduce Policy-guided Heuristic Search (PHS), a novel search algorithm that uses both a heuristic function and a policy and has theoretical guarantees on the search loss that relates to both the quality of the heuristic and of the policy. We show empirically on the sliding-tile puzzle, Sokoban, and a puzzle from the commercial game `The Witness' that PHS enables the rapid learning of both a policy and a heuristic function and compares favorably with A*, Weighted A*, Greedy Best-First Search, LevinTS, and PUCT in terms of number of problems solved and search time in all three domains tested.

Policy-Guided Heuristic Search with Guarantees

Computational image reconstruction algorithms generally produce a single image without any measure of uncertainty or confidence. Regularized Maximum Likelihood (RML) and feed-forward deep learning approaches for inverse problems typically focus on recovering a point estimate. This is a serious limitation when working with under-determined imaging systems, where it is conceivable that multiple image modes would be consistent with the measured data. Characterizing the space of probable images that explain the observational data is therefore crucial. In this paper, we propose a variational deep probabilistic imaging approach to quantify reconstruction uncertainty. Deep Probabilistic Imaging (DPI) employs an untrained deep generative model to estimate a posterior distribution of an unobserved image. This approach does not require any training data; instead, it optimizes the weights of a neural network to generate image samples that fit a particular measurement dataset. Once the network weights have been learned, the posterior distribution can be efficiently sampled. We demonstrate this approach in the context of interferometric radio imaging, which is used for black hole imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, and compressed sensing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Deep Probabilistic Imaging: Uncertainty Quantification and Multi-Modal Solution Characterization for Computational Imaging

A normalizing flow is an invertible mapping between an arbitrary probability distribution and a standard normal distribution; it can be used for density estimation and statistical inference. Computing the flow follows the change of variables formula and thus requires invertibility of the mapping and an efficient way to compute the determinant of its Jacobian. To satisfy these requirements, normalizing flows typically consist of carefully chosen components. Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) are mappings obtained by solving a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE). The neural ODE's dynamics can be chosen almost arbitrarily while ensuring invertibility. Moreover, the log-determinant of the flow's Jacobian can be obtained by integrating the trace of the dynamics' Jacobian along the flow. Our proposed OT-Flow approach tackles two critical computational challenges that limit a more widespread use of CNFs. First, OT-Flow leverages optimal transport (OT) theory to regularize the CNF and enforce straight trajectories that are easier to integrate. Second, OT-Flow features exact trace computation with time complexity equal to trace estimators used in existing CNFs. On five high-dimensional density estimation and generative modeling tasks, OT-Flow performs competitively to state-of-the-art CNFs while on average requiring one-fourth of the number of weights with an 8x speedup in training time and 24x speedup in inference.

OT-Flow: Fast and Accurate Continuous Normalizing Flows via Optimal Transport

We consider the allocation of scarce societal resources, where a central authority decides which individuals receive which resources under capacity or budget constraints. Several algorithmic fairness criteria have been proposed to guide these
procedures, each quantifying a notion of local justice to ensure the allocation is aligned with the principles of the local institution making the allocation. For example, the efficient allocation maximizes overall social welfare, whereas the leximin assignment seeks to help the â€œneediest first.â€ Although the â€œprice of fairnessâ€ (PoF) of leximin has been studied in prior work, we expand on these results by exploiting the structure inherent in real-world scenarios to provide tighter bounds. We further propose a novel criterion â€“ which we term LoINC (leximin over individually normalized costs) â€“ that maximizes a different but commonly used notion of local justice: prioritizing those benefiting the most from receiving the resources. We derive analogous PoF bounds for LoINC, showing that the price of LoINC is typically much lower than that of leximin. We provide extensive experimental results using both synthetic data and in a real-world setting considering the efficacy of different homelessness interventions. These results show that the empirical PoF tends to be substantially lower than worst-case bounds would imply and allow us to characterize situations where the price of LoINC fairness can be high.

Scarce Societal Resource Allocation and the Price of (Local) Justice

Mail privacy protection aims to prevent unauthorized access to hidden content within an envelope since normal paper envelopes are not as safe as we think. In this paper, for the first time, we show that with a well designed deep learning model, the hidden content may be largely recovered without opening the envelope. We start by modeling deep learning-based privacy attacks on physical mail content as learning the mapping from the camera-captured envelope front face image to the hidden content, then we explicitly model the mapping as a combination of perspective transformation, image dehazing and denoising using a deep convolutional neural network, named Neural-STE (See-Through-Envelope). We show experimentally that hidden content details, such as texture and image structure, can be clearly recovered. Finally, our formulation and model allow us to design envelopes that can counter deep learning-based privacy attacks on physical mail.

Modeling Deep Learning Based Privacy Attacks on Physical Mail

Bayesian neural networks (BNN) can estimate the uncertainty in predictions, as opposed to non-Bayesian neural networks (NNs). However, BNNs have been far less widely used than non-Bayesian NNs in practice since they need iterative NN executions to predict a result for one data, and it gives rise to prohibitive computational cost. This computational burden is a critical problem when processing data streams with low-latency. To address this problem, we propose a novel model VQ-BNN, which approximates BNN inference for data streams. In order to reduce the computational burden, VQ-BNN inference predicts NN only once and compensates the result with previously memorized predictions. To be specific, VQ-BNN inference for data streams is given by temporal exponential smoothing of recent predictions. The computational cost of this model is almost the same as that of non-Bayesian NNs. Experiments including semantic segmentation on real-world data show that this model performs significantly faster than BNNs while estimating predictive results comparable to or superior to the results of BNNs.

Vector Quantized Bayesian Neural Network Inference for Data Streams

This paper explores the behavior of present-biased agents, that is, agents who erroneously anticipate the costs of future actions compared to their real costs. Specifically, the paper extends the origi- nal framework proposed by Akerlof (1991) for studying various aspects of human behavior related to time-inconsistent planning, including pro- crastination, and abandonment, as well as the elegant graph-theoretic model encapsulating this framework recently proposed by Kleinberg and Oren (2014). The benefit of this extension is twofold. First, it enables to perform fine grained analysis of the behavior of present-biased agents depending on the optimisation task they have to perform. In particular, we study covering tasks vs. hitting tasks, and show that the ratio be- tween the cost of the solutions computed by present-biased agents and the cost of the optimal solutions may differ significantly depending on the problem constraints. Second, our extension enables to study not only un- derestimation of future costs, coupled with minimization problems, but also all combinations of minimization/maximization, and underestima- tion/overestimation. We study the four scenarios, and we establish upper bounds on the cost ratio for three of them (the cost ratio for the origi- nal scenario was known to be unbounded), providing a complete global picture of the behavior of present-biased agents, as far as optimisation tasks are concerned.

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