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Ping Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ping Liu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Generating Reliable Pixel-Level Labels for Source Free Domain Adaptation

This work addresses the challenging domain adaptation setting in which knowledge from the labelled source domain dataset is available only from the pretrained black-box segmentation model. The pretrained model's predictions for the target domain images are noisy because of the distributional differences between the source domain data and the target domain data. Since the model's predictions serve as pseudo labels during self-training, the noise in the predictions impose an upper bound on model performance. Therefore, we propose a simple yet novel image translation workflow, ReGEN, to address this problem. ReGEN comprises an image-to-image translation network and a segmentation network. Our workflow generates target-like images using the noisy predictions from the original target domain images. These target-like images are semantically consistent with the noisy model predictions and therefore can be used to train the segmentation network. In addition to being semantically consistent with the predictions from the original target domain images, the generated target-like images are also stylistically similar to the target domain images. This allows us to leverage the stylistic differences between the target-like images and the target domain image as an additional source of supervision while training the segmentation model. We evaluate our model with two benchmark domain adaptation settings and demonstrate that our approach performs favourably relative to recent state-of-the-art work. The source code will be made available.

cs.CV↗

UTSGAN: Unseen Transition Suss GAN for Transition-Aware Image-to-image Translation

In the field of Image-to-Image (I2I) translation, ensuring consistency between input images and their translated results is a key requirement for producing high-quality and desirable outputs. Previous I2I methods have relied on result consistency, which enforces consistency between the translated results and the ground truth output, to achieve this goal. However, result consistency is limited in its ability to handle complex and unseen attribute changes in translation tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a transition-aware approach to I2I translation, where the data translation mapping is explicitly parameterized with a transition variable, allowing for the modelling of unobserved translations triggered by unseen transitions. Furthermore, we propose the use of transition consistency, defined on the transition variable, to enable regularization of consistency on unobserved translations, which is omitted in previous works. Based on these insights, we present Unseen Transition Suss GAN (UTSGAN), a generative framework that constructs a manifold for the transition with a stochastic transition encoder and coherently regularizes and generalizes result consistency and transition consistency on both training and unobserved translations with tailor-designed constraints. Extensive experiments on four different I2I tasks performed on five different datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed UTSGAN in performing consistent translations.

cs.CV↗

An Operator Theory for Analyzing the Resolution of Multi-illumination Imaging Modalities

By introducing a new operator theory, we provide a unified mathematical theory for general source resolution in the multi-illumination imaging problem. Our main idea is to transform multi-illumination imaging into single-snapshot imaging with a new imaging kernel that depends on both the illumination patterns and the point spread function of the imaging system. We thus prove that the resolution of multi-illumination imaging is approximately determined by the essential cutoff frequency of the new imaging kernel, which is roughly limited by the sum of the cutoff frequency of the point spread function and the maximum essential frequency in the illumination patterns. Our theory provides a unified way to estimate the resolution of various existing super-resolution modalities and results in the same estimates as those obtained in experiments. In addition, based on the reformulation of the multi-illumination imaging problem, we also estimate the resolution limits for resolving both complex and positive sources by sparsity-based approaches. We show that the resolution of multi-illumination imaging is approximately determined by the new imaging kernel from our operator theory and better resolution can be realized by sparsity-promoting techniques in practice but only for resolving very sparse sources. This explains experimentally observed phenomena in some sparsity-based super-resolution modalities.

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Super-resolution of positive near-colliding point sources

In this paper, we analyze the capacity of super-resolution of one-dimensional positive sources. In particular, we consider the same setting as in [arXiv:1904.09186v2 [math.NA]] and generalize the results there to the case of super-resolving positive sources. To be more specific, we consider resolving $d$ positive point sources with $p \leqslant d$ nodes closely spaced and forming a cluster, while the rest of the nodes are well separated. Similarly to [arXiv:1904.09186v2 [math.NA]], our results show that when the noise level $ε\lesssim \mathrm{SRF}^{-2 p+1}$, where $\mathrm{SRF}=(ΩΔ)^{-1}$ with $Ω$ being the cutoff frequency and $Δ$ the minimal separation between the nodes, the minimax error rate for reconstructing the cluster nodes is of order $\frac{1}Ω \mathrm{SRF}^{2 p-2} ε$, while for recovering the corresponding amplitudes $\left\{a_j\right\}$ the rate is of order $\mathrm{SRF}^{2 p-1} ε$. For the non-cluster nodes, the corresponding minimax rates for the recovery of nodes and amplitudes are of order $\fracεΩ$ and $ε$, respectively. Our numerical experiments show that the Matrix Pencil method achieves the above optimal bounds when resolving the positive sources.

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SPG-VTON: Semantic Prediction Guidance for Multi-pose Virtual Try-on

Image-based virtual try-on is challenging in fitting a target in-shop clothes into a reference person under diverse human poses. Previous works focus on preserving clothing details ( e.g., texture, logos, patterns ) when transferring desired clothes onto a target person under a fixed pose. However, the performances of existing methods significantly dropped when extending existing methods to multi-pose virtual try-on. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Semantic Prediction Guidance multi-pose Virtual Try-On Network (SPG-VTON), which could fit the desired clothing into a reference person under arbitrary poses. Concretely, SPG-VTON is composed of three sub-modules. First, a Semantic Prediction Module (SPM) generates the desired semantic map. The predicted semantic map provides more abundant guidance to locate the desired clothes region and produce a coarse try-on image. Second, a Clothes Warping Module (CWM) warps in-shop clothes to the desired shape according to the predicted semantic map and the desired pose. Specifically, we introduce a conductible cycle consistency loss to alleviate the misalignment in the clothes warping process. Third, a Try-on Synthesis Module (TSM) combines the coarse result and the warped clothes to generate the final virtual try-on image, preserving details of the desired clothes and under the desired pose. Besides, we introduce a face identity loss to refine the facial appearance and maintain the identity of the final virtual try-on result at the same time. We evaluate the proposed method on the most massive multi-pose dataset (MPV) and the DeepFashion dataset. The qualitative and quantitative experiments show that SPG-VTON is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and is robust to the data noise, including background and accessory changes, i.e., hats and handbags, showing good scalability to the real-world scenario.

cs.CV↗

Meta Knowledge Condensation for Federated Learning

Existing federated learning paradigms usually extensively exchange distributed models at a central solver to achieve a more powerful model. However, this would incur severe communication burden between a server and multiple clients especially when data distributions are heterogeneous. As a result, current federated learning methods often require a large number of communication rounds in training. Unlike existing paradigms, we introduce an alternative perspective to significantly decrease the communication cost in federate learning. In this work, we first introduce a meta knowledge representation method that extracts meta knowledge from distributed clients. The extracted meta knowledge encodes essential information that can be used to improve the current model. As the training progresses, the contributions of training samples to a federated model also vary. Thus, we introduce a dynamic weight assignment mechanism that enables samples to contribute adaptively to the current model update. Then, informative meta knowledge from all active clients is sent to the server for model update. Training a model on the combined meta knowledge without exposing original data among different clients can significantly mitigate the heterogeneity issues. Moreover, to further ameliorate data heterogeneity, we also exchange meta knowledge among clients as conditional initialization for local meta knowledge extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Remarkably, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin (from $74.07\%$ to $92.95\%$) on MNIST with a restricted communication budget (i.e. 10 rounds).

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Improved Multi-Dimensional Bee Colony Algorithm for Airport Freight Station Scheduling

Due to the rapid increase of air cargo and postal transport volume, an efficient automated multi-dimensional warehouse with elevating transfer vehicles (ETVs) should be established and an effective scheduling strategy should be designed for improving the cargo handling efficiency. In this paper, artificial bee colony algorithm, which possesses strong global optimization ability and fewer parameters, is firstly introduced to simultaneously optimize the route of ETV and the assignment of entrances and exits. Moreover, for further improve the optimization performance of ABC, novel full-dimensional search strategy with parallelization, and random multi-dimensional search strategy are incorporated in the framework of ABC to improve the diversity of the population and the convergence speed respectively. Our proposed algorithms are evaluated on several benchmark functions, and then applied to solve the combinatorial optimization problem with multitask, multiple entrances and exits in air cargo terminal. The simulations show that the proposed algorithms can achieve much more desired performance than the traditional artificial bee colony algorithm at balancing the exploitation and exploration abilities.

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Nearly optimal resolution estimate for the two-dimensional super-resolution and a new algorithm for direction of arrival estimation with uniform rectangular array

In this paper, we develop a new technique to obtain nearly optimal estimates of the computational resolution limits introduced in Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 56 (2022) 402-446; IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 67(7) (2021) 4812-4827; Inverse Probl. 37(10) (2021) 104001 for two-dimensional super-resolution problems. Our main contributions are fivefold: (i) Our work improves the resolution estimate for number detection and location recovery in two-dimensional super-resolution problems to nearly optimal; (ii) As a consequence, we derive a stability result for a sparsity-promoting algorithm in two-dimensional super-resolution problems (or Direction of Arrival problems (DOA)). The stability result exhibits the optimal performance of sparsity promoting in solving such problems; (iii) Our techniques pave the way for improving the estimate for resolution limits in higher-dimensional super-resolutions to nearly optimal; (iv) Inspired by these new techniques, we propose a new coordinate-combination-based model order detection algorithm for two-dimensional DOA estimation and theoretically demonstrate its optimal performance, and (v) we also propose a new coordinate-combination-based MUSIC algorithm for super-resolving sources in two-dimensional DOA estimation. It has excellent performance and enjoys many advantages compared to the conventional DOA algorithms. The coordinate-combination idea seems to be a promising way for multi-dimensional DOA estimation.

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Active Learning for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Spatial-Structural Diversity Reasoning

The expensive annotation cost is notoriously known as the main constraint for the development of the point cloud semantic segmentation technique. Active learning methods endeavor to reduce such cost by selecting and labeling only a subset of the point clouds, yet previous attempts ignore the spatial-structural diversity of the selected samples, inducing the model to select clustered candidates with similar shapes in a local area while missing other representative ones in the global environment. In this paper, we propose a new 3D region-based active learning method to tackle this problem. Dubbed SSDR-AL, our method groups the original point clouds into superpoints and incrementally selects the most informative and representative ones for label acquisition. We achieve the selection mechanism via a graph reasoning network that considers both the spatial and structural diversities of superpoints. To deploy SSDR-AL in a more practical scenario, we design a noise-aware iterative labeling strategy to confront the "noisy annotation" problem introduced by the previous "dominant labeling" strategy in superpoints. Extensive experiments on two point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SSDR-AL in the semantic segmentation task. Particularly, SSDR-AL significantly outperforms the baseline method and reduces the annotation cost by up to 63.0% and 24.0% when achieving 90% performance of fully supervised learning, respectively.

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Dynamic super-resolution in particle tracking problems

Particle tracking in biological imaging is concerned with reconstructing the trajectories, locations, or velocities of the targeting particles. The standard approach of particle tracking consists of two steps: first reconstructing statically the source locations in each time step, and second applying tracking techniques to obtain the trajectories and velocities. In contrast, the dynamic reconstruction seeks to simultaneously recover the source locations and velocities from all frames, which enjoys certain advantages. In this paper, we provide a rigorous mathematical analysis for the resolution limit of reconstructing source number, locations, and velocities by general dynamical reconstruction in particle tracking problems, by which we demonstrate the possibility of achieving super-resolution for the dynamic reconstruction. We show that when the location-velocity pairs of the particles are separated beyond certain distances (the resolution limits), the number of particles and the location-velocity pair can be stably recovered. The resolution limits are related to the cut-off frequency of the imaging system, signal-to-noise ratio, and the sparsity of the source. By these estimates, we also derive a stability result for a sparsity-promoting dynamic reconstruction. In addition, we further show that the reconstruction of velocities has a better resolution limit which improves constantly as the particles moving. This result is derived by an observation that the inherent cut-off frequency for the velocity recovery can be viewed as the total observation time multiplies the cut-off frequency of the imaging system, which may lead to a better resolution limit as compared to the one for each diffraction-limited frame. It is anticipated that this observation can inspire new reconstruction algorithms that improve the resolution of particle tracking in practice.

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A measurement decoupling based fast algorithm for super-resolving point sources with multi-cluster structure

We consider the problem of resolving closely spaced point sources in one dimension from their Fourier data in a bounded domain. Classical subspace methods (e.g., MUSIC algorithm, Matrix Pencil method, etc.) show great superiority in resolving closely spaced sources, but their computational cost is usually heavy. This is especially the case for point sources with a multi-cluster structure which requires processing large-sized data matrix resulted from highly sampled measurements. To address this issue, we propose a fast algorithm termed D-MUSIC, based on a measurement decoupling strategy. We demonstrate theoretically that for point sources with a known cluster structure, their measurement can be decoupled into local measurements of each of the clusters by solving a system of linear equations that are obtained by using a multipole basis. We further develop a subsampled MUSIC algorithm to detect the cluster structure and utilize it to decouple the global measurement. In the end, the MUSIC algorithm was applied to each local measurement to resolve point sources therein. Compared to the standard MUSIC algorithm, the proposed algorithm has comparable super-resolving capability while having a much lower computational complexity.

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Pro-UIGAN: Progressive Face Hallucination from Occluded Thumbnails

In this paper, we study the task of hallucinating an authentic high-resolution (HR) face from an occluded thumbnail. We propose a multi-stage Progressive Upsampling and Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network, dubbed Pro-UIGAN, which exploits facial geometry priors to replenish and upsample (8*) the occluded and tiny faces (16*16 pixels). Pro-UIGAN iteratively (1) estimates facial geometry priors for low-resolution (LR) faces and (2) acquires non-occluded HR face images under the guidance of the estimated priors. Our multi-stage hallucination network super-resolves and inpaints occluded LR faces in a coarse-to-fine manner, thus reducing unwanted blurriness and artifacts significantly. Specifically, we design a novel cross-modal transformer module for facial priors estimation, in which an input face and its landmark features are formulated as queries and keys, respectively. Such a design encourages joint feature learning across the input facial and landmark features, and deep feature correspondences will be discovered by attention. Thus, facial appearance features and facial geometry priors are learned in a mutual promotion manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Pro-UIGAN achieves visually pleasing HR faces, reaching superior performance in downstream tasks, i.e., face alignment, face parsing, face recognition and expression classification, compared with other state-of-the-art (SotA) methods.

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Filter Pruning by Switching to Neighboring CNNs with Good Attributes

Filter pruning is effective to reduce the computational costs of neural networks. Existing methods show that updating the previous pruned filter would enable large model capacity and achieve better performance. However, during the iterative pruning process, even if the network weights are updated to new values, the pruning criterion remains the same. In addition, when evaluating the filter importance, only the magnitude information of the filters is considered. However, in neural networks, filters do not work individually, but they would affect other filters. As a result, the magnitude information of each filter, which merely reflects the information of an individual filter itself, is not enough to judge the filter importance. To solve the above problems, we propose Meta-attribute-based Filter Pruning (MFP). First, to expand the existing magnitude information based pruning criteria, we introduce a new set of criteria to consider the geometric distance of filters. Additionally, to explicitly assess the current state of the network, we adaptively select the most suitable criteria for pruning via a meta-attribute, a property of the neural network at the current state. Experiments on two image classification benchmarks validate our method. For ResNet-50 on ILSVRC-2012, we could reduce more than 50% FLOPs with only 0.44% top-5 accuracy loss.

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Onsite Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging via Online Calibrations

There has been an increasing interest in deploying non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging systems for recovering objects behind an obstacle. Existing solutions generally pre-calibrate the system before scanning the hidden objects. Onsite adjustments of the occluder, object and scanning pattern require re-calibration. We present an online calibration technique that directly decouples the acquired transients at onsite scanning into the LOS and hidden components. We use the former to directly (re)calibrate the system upon changes of scene/obstacle configurations, scanning regions, and scanning patterns whereas the latter for hidden object recovery via spatial, frequency or learning based techniques. Our technique avoids using auxiliary calibration apparatus such as mirrors or checkerboards and supports both laboratory validations and real-world deployments.

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Omni-supervised Facial Expression Recognition via Distilled Data

Facial expression plays an important role in understanding human emotions. Most recently, deep learning based methods have shown promising for facial expression recognition. However, the performance of the current state-of-the-art facial expression recognition (FER) approaches is directly related to the labeled data for training. To solve this issue, prior works employ the pretrain-and-finetune strategy, i.e., utilize a large amount of unlabeled data to pretrain the network and then finetune it by the labeled data. As the labeled data is in a small amount, the final network performance is still restricted. From a different perspective, we propose to perform omni-supervised learning to directly exploit reliable samples in a large amount of unlabeled data for network training. Particularly, a new dataset is firstly constructed using a primitive model trained on a small number of labeled samples to select samples with high confidence scores from a face dataset, i.e., MS-Celeb-1M, based on feature-wise similarity. We experimentally verify that the new dataset created in such an omni-supervised manner can significantly improve the generalization ability of the learned FER model. However, as the number of training samples grows, computational cost and training time increase dramatically. To tackle this, we propose to apply a dataset distillation strategy to compress the created dataset into several informative class-wise images, significantly improving the training efficiency. We have conducted extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks, where consistent performance gains can be achieved under various settings using the proposed framework. More importantly, the distilled dataset has shown its capabilities of boosting the performance of FER with negligible additional computational costs.

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Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification via Human Learning Imitation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification has received significant attention due to its high practical value. In past years, by following the clustering and finetuning paradigm, researchers propose to utilize the teacher-student framework in their methods to decrease the domain gap between different person re-identification datasets. Inspired by recent teacher-student framework based methods, which try to mimic the human learning process either by making the student directly copy behavior from the teacher or selecting reliable learning materials, we propose to conduct further exploration to imitate the human learning process from different aspects, \textit{i.e.}, adaptively updating learning materials, selectively imitating teacher behaviors, and analyzing learning materials structures. The explored three components, collaborate together to constitute a new method for unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification, which is called Human Learning Imitation framework. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method.

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Adversarial Semantic Hallucination for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks typically perform poorly when the test (target domain) and training (source domain) data have significantly different distributions. While this problem can be mitigated by using the target domain data to align the source and target domain feature representations, the target domain data may be unavailable due to privacy concerns. Consequently, there is a need for methods that generalize well despite restricted access to target domain data during training. In this work, we propose an adversarial semantic hallucination approach (ASH), which combines a class-conditioned hallucination module and a semantic segmentation module. Since the segmentation performance varies across different classes, we design a semantic-conditioned style hallucination module to generate affine transformation parameters from semantic information in the segmentation probability maps of the source domain image. Unlike previous adaptation approaches, which treat all classes equally, ASH considers the class-wise differences. The segmentation module and the hallucination module compete adversarially, with the hallucination module generating increasingly "difficult" stylized images to challenge the segmentation module. In response, the segmentation module improves as it is trained with generated samples at an appropriate class-wise difficulty level. Our results on the Cityscapes and Mapillary benchmark datasets show that our method is competitive with state of the art work. Code is made available at https://github.com/gabriel-tjio/ASH.

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Social, Environmental, and Technical: Factors at Play in the Current Use and Future Design of Small-Group Captioning

Real-time captioning is a critical accessibility tool for many d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people. While the vast majority of captioning work has focused on formal settings and technical innovations, in contrast, we investigate captioning for informal, interactive small-group conversations, which have a high degree of spontaneity and foster dynamic social interactions. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews and design probe activities we conducted with 15 DHH participants to understand their use of existing real-time captioning services and future design preferences for both in-person and remote small-group communication. We found that our participants' experiences of captioned small-group conversations are shaped by social, environmental, and technical considerations (e.g., interlocutors' pre-established relationships, the type of captioning displays available, and how far captions lag behind speech). When considering future captioning tools, participants were interested in greater feedback on non-speech elements of conversation (e.g., speaker identity, speech rate, volume) both for their personal use and to guide hearing interlocutors toward more accessible communication. We contribute a qualitative account of DHH people's real-time captioning experiences during small-group conversation and future design considerations to better support the groups being captioned, both in person and online.

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