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Recent studies on machine reading comprehension have focused on text-level understanding but have not yet reached the level of human understanding of the visual layout and content of real-world documents. In this study, we introduce a new visual machine reading comprehension dataset, named VisualMRC, wherein given a question and a document image, a machine reads and comprehends texts in the image to answer the question in natural language. Compared with existing visual question answering datasets that contain texts in images, VisualMRC focuses more on developing natural language understanding and generation abilities. It contains 30,000+ pairs of a question and an abstractive answer for 10,000+ document images sourced from multiple domains of webpages. We also introduce a new model that extends existing sequence-to-sequence models, pre-trained with large-scale text corpora, to take into account the visual layout and content of documents. Experiments with VisualMRC show that this model outperformed the base sequence-to-sequence models and a state-of-the-art VQA model. However, its performance is still below that of humans on most automatic evaluation metrics.  The dataset will facilitate research aimed at connecting vision and language understanding.

AAAI 2021

VisualMRC: Machine Reading Comprehension on Document Images

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

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. 

Given limited handwriting scripts, humans can easily visualize (or imagine) what the handwritten words/texts would look like with other arbitrary textual contents. Moreover, a person also is able to imitate the handwriting styles of provided reference samples. Humans can do such hallucinations, perhaps because they can learn to disentangle the calligraphic styles and textual contents from given handwriting scripts. However, computers cannot study to do such flexible handwriting imitation with existing techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel handwriting imitation generative adversarial network (HiGAN) to mimic such hallucinations. Specifically, HiGAN can generate variable-length handwritten words/texts conditioned on arbitrary textual contents, which are unconstrained to any predefined corpus or out-of-vocabulary words. Moreover, HiGAN can flexibly control the handwriting styles of synthetic images by disentangling calligraphic styles from the reference samples. Experiments on handwriting benchmarks validate our superiority in terms of visual quality and scalability when comparing to the state-of-the-art methods for handwritten word/text synthesis. The code and pre-trained models can be found at https://github.com/ganji15/HiGAN.

HiGAN: Handwriting Imitation Conditioned on Arbitrary-Length Texts and Disentangled Styles

In wearable-sensor-based activity recognition, it is often assumed that the training and test samples follow the same data distribution. This assumption neglects practical scenarios where the activity patterns inevitably vary from person to person. To solve this problem, transfer learning and domain adaptation approaches are often leveraged to reduce the gaps between different participants. Nevertheless, these approaches require additional information (i.e., labeled or unlabeled data, meta-information) from the target domain during the training stage. In this paper, we introduce a novel method named Generalizable Independent Latent Excitation (GILE) for human activity recognition, which greatly enhances the cross-person generalization capability of the model. Our proposed method is superior to existing methods in the sense that it does not require any access to the target domain information. Besides, this novel model can be directly applied to various target domains without re-training or fine-tuning. Specifically, the proposed model learns to automatically disentangle domain-agnostic and domain-specific features, the former of which are expected to be invariant across various persons. To further remove correlations between the two types of features, a novel Independent Excitation mechanism is incorporated in the latent feature space. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are conducted on three benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art solutions.

Latent Independent Excitation for Generalizable Sensor-Based Cross-Person Activity Recognition

The Algebra of Modular System is a KR formalism that allows for combinations of modules written in multiple languages. Informally, a module represents a piece of knowledge. It can be given by a knowledge base, be an agent, an ASP, ILP, CP program, etc. Formally, a module is a class of structures over the same vocabulary. Modules are combined declaratively, using, essentially, operations of Codd's relational algebra. 
In this paper, we address the problem of checking modular system containment, which we relate to a homomorphism problem. We prove that, for a large class of modular systems, the containment problem (and thus equivalence) is in the complexity class NP, and therefore is solvable by, e.g.,  SAT solvers. We discuss  conditions under which  the problem is polynomial time solvable.

Algebra of Modular Systems: Containment and Equivalence

While generative adversarial networks (GANs) based neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have shown significant improvement in neural speech synthesis, there is no TTS system to learn to synthesize speech from text sequences with only adversarial feedback. Because adversarial feedback alone is not sufficient to train the generator, current models still require the reconstruction loss compared with the ground-truth and the generated mel-spectrogram directly. In this paper, we present Multi-SpectroGAN (MSG), which can train the multi-speaker model with only the adversarial feedback by conditioning a self-supervised hidden representation of the generator to a conditional discriminator. This leads to better guidance for generator training. Moreover, we also propose  adversarial style combination (ASC) for better generalization in the unseen speaking style and transcript, which can learn latent representations of the combined style embedding from multiple mel-spectrograms. Trained with ASC and feature matching, the MSG synthesizes a high-diversity mel-spectrogram by controlling and mixing the individual speaking styles (e.g., duration, pitch, and energy). The result shows that the MSG synthesizes a high-fidelity mel-spectrogram, which has almost the same naturalness MOS score as the ground-truth mel-spectrogram.

Multi-SpectroGAN: High-Diversity and High-Fidelity Spectrogram Generation with Adversarial Style Combination for Speech Synthesis

The conventional standard for object detection uses a bounding box to represent each individual object instance. However, it is not practical in the industry-relevant applications in the context of warehouses due to severe occlusions among groups of instances of the same categories. In this paper, we propose a new task, i.e., simultaneously object localization and counting, abbreviated as Locount, which requires algorithms to localize groups of objects of interest with the number of instances. However, there does not exist a dataset or benchmark designed for such a task. To this end, we collect a large-scale object localization and counting dataset with rich annotations in retail stores, which consists of 50,394 images with more than 1.9 million object instances in 140 categories. Together with this dataset, we provide a new evaluation protocol and divide the training and testing subsets to fairly evaluate the performance of algorithms for Locount, developing a new benchmark for the Locount task. Moreover, we present a cascaded localization and counting network as a strong baseline, which gradually classifies and regresses the bounding boxes of objects with the predicted numbers of instances enclosed in the bounding boxes, trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on the proposed dataset to demonstrate its significance and the analysis is provided to indicate future directions. Dataset is available at https://isrc.iscas.ac.cn/gitlab/research/locount-dataset.

Rethinking Object Detection in Retail Stores

Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.

KG-BART: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Bart for Generative Commonsense Reasoning

Illumination estimation from a single image is critical in 3D rendering and it has been investigated extensively in the computer vision and computer graphic research community. On the other hand, existing works estimate illumination by either regressing light parameters or generating illumination maps that are often hard to optimize or tend to produce inaccurate predictions. We propose Earth Moverâ€™s Light (EMLight), an illumination estimation framework that leverages a regression network and a neural projector for accurate illumination estimation. We decompose the illumination map into spherical light distribution, light intensity and the ambient term, and define the illumination estimation as a parameter regression task for the three illumination components. Motivated by the Earth Mover's distance, we design a novel spherical mover's loss that guides to regress light distribution parameters accurately by taking advantage of the subtleties of spherical distribution. Under the guidance of the predicted spherical distribution, light intensity and ambient term, the neural projector synthesizes panoramic illumination maps with realistic light frequency. Extensive experiments show that EMLight achieves accurate illumination estimation and the generated relighting in 3D object embedding exhibits superior plausibility and fidelity as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

EMLight: Lighting Estimation via Spherical Distribution Approximation

Person search aims at jointly solving Person Detection and Person Re-identification (re-ID). Existing works have designed end-to-end networks based on Faster R-CNN. However, due to the parallel structure of Faster R-CNN, the extracted features come from the low-quality proposals generated by the Region Proposal Network, rather than the detected high-quality bounding boxes. Person search is a fine-grained task and such inferior features will significantly reduce re-ID performance. To address this issue, we propose a Sequential End-to-end Network (SeqNet) to extract superior features. In SeqNet, detection and re-ID are considered as a progressive process and tackled with two sub-networks sequentially. In addition, we design a robust Context Bipartite Graph Matching (CBGM) algorithm to effectively employ context information as an important complementary cue for person matching. Extensive experiments on two widely used person search benchmarks, CUHK-SYSU and PRW, have shown that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Also, our model runs at 11.5 fps on a single GPU and can be integrated into the existing end-to-end framework easily.

Sequential End-to-End Network for Efficient Person Search

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) consist of gene regulations between transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) brings both opportunities and challenges to the inference of GRNs. On the one hand, scRNA-seq data reveals statistic information of gene expressions at the single-cell resolution, which is conducive to the construction of GRNs; on the other hand, noises and dropouts pose great difficulties on the analysis of scRNA-seq data, causing low prediction accuracy by traditional methods. In this paper, we propose 3D Co-Expression Matrix Analysis (3DCEMA), which predicts regulatory relationships by classifying 3D co-expression matrices of gene triples using a 3D convolutional neural network. We found that by introducing a third gene as a comparison factor, our method can avoid the disturbance of noises and dropouts, and significantly increase the prediction accuracy of regulations between gene pairs. Compared with other existing GRN inference algorithms on both in-silico datasets and scRNA-Seq datasets, our algorithm based on deep learning shows higher stability and accuracy in the task of GRN inference.

Gene Regulatory Network Inference Using 3D Convolutional Neural Network

We propose a novel framework that unifies and extends existing methods of transfer learning (TL) for regression. To bridge a pretrained source model to the model on a target task, we introduce a density-ratio reweighting function, which is estimated through the Bayesian framework with a specific prior distribution. By changing two intrinsic hyperparameters and the choice of the density-ratio model, the proposed method can integrate three popular methods of TL: TL based on cross-domain similarity regularization, a probabilistic TL using the density-ratio estimation, and fine-tuning of pretrained neural networks. Moreover, the proposed method can benefit from its simple implementation without any additional cost; the regression model can be fully trained using off-the-shelf libraries for supervised learning in which the original output variable is simply transformed to a new output variable. We demonstrate its simplicity, generality, and applicability using various real data applications.

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HiGAN: Handwriting Imitation Conditioned on Arbitrary-Length Texts and Disentangled Styles

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