We propose Network Automatic Relevance Determination (NARD), an extension of ARD for linearly probabilistic models, to simultaneously model sparse relationships between inputs $X \in \mathbb R^{d \times N}$ and outputs $Y \in \mathbb R^{m \times N}$, while capturing the correlation structure among the $Y$. NARD employs a matrix normal prior which contains a sparsity-inducing parameter to identify and discard irrelevant features, thereby promoting sparsity in the model. Algorithmically, it iteratively updates both the precision matrix and the relationship between $Y$ and the refined inputs. To mitigate the computational inefficiencies of the $\mathcal O(m^3 + d^3)$ cost per iteration, we introduce Sequential NARD, which evaluates features sequentially, and a Surrogate Function Method, leveraging an efficient approximation of the marginal likelihood and simplifying the calculation of determinant and inverse of an intermediate matrix. Combining the Sequential update with the Surrogate Function method further reduces computational costs. The computational complexity per iteration for these three methods is reduced to $\mathcal O(m^3+p^3)$, $\mathcal O(m^3 + d^2)$, $\mathcal O(m^3+p^2)$ respectively, where $p \ll d$ is the final number of features in the model. Our methods demonstrate significant improvements in computational efficiency with comparable performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

The advent of single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) offers an innovative perspective for deciphering regulatory mechanisms by assembling a vast repository of single-cell chromatin accessibility data. While foundation models have achieved significant success in single-cell transcriptomics, there is currently no foundation model for scATAC-seq that supports zero-shot high-quality cell identification and comprehensive multi-omics analysis simultaneously. Key challenges lie in the high dimensionality and sparsity of scATAC-seq data, as well as the lack of a standardized schema for representing open chromatin regions (OCRs). Here, we present ChromFound, a foundation model tailored for scATAC-seq. ChromFound utilizes a hybrid architecture and genome-aware tokenization to effectively capture genome-wide long contexts and regulatory signals from dynamic chromatin landscapes. Pretrained on 1.97 million cells from 30 tissues and 6 disease conditions, ChromFound demonstrates broad applicability across 6 diverse tasks. Notably, it achieves robust zero-shot performance in generating universal cell representations and exhibits excellent transferability in cell type annotation and cross-omics prediction. By uncovering enhancer-gene links undetected by existing computational methods, ChromFound offers a promising framework for understanding disease risk variants in the noncoding genome. The implementation of ChromFound is available via https://github.com/JohnsonKlose/ChromFound.

The generalization ability of deep learning has been extensively studied in supervised settings, yet it remains less explored in unsupervised scenarios. Recently, the Unsupervised Domain Generalization (UDG) task has been proposed to enhance the generalization of models trained with prevalent unsupervised learning techniques, such as Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). UDG confronts the challenge of distinguishing semantics from variations without category labels. Although some recent methods have employed domain labels to tackle this issue, such domain labels are often unavailable in real-world contexts. In this paper, we address these limitations by formalizing UDG as the task of learning a Minimal Sufficient Semantic Representation: a representation that (i) preserves all semantic information shared across augmented views (sufficiency), and (ii) maximally removes information irrelevant to semantics (minimality). We theoretically ground these objectives from the perspective of information theory, demonstrating that optimizing representations to achieve sufficiency and minimality directly reduces out-of-distribution risk. Practically, we implement this optimization through Minimal-Sufficient UDG (MS-UDG), a learnable model by integrating (a) an InfoNCE-based objective to achieve sufficiency; (b) two complementary components to promote minimality: a novel semantic-variation disentanglement loss and a reconstruction-based mechanism for capturing adequate variation. Empirically, MS-UDG sets a new state-of-the-art on popular unsupervised domain-generalization benchmarks, consistently outperforming existing SSL and UDG methods, without category or domain labels during representation learning.

Prior studies on Remote Sensing Foundation Model (RSFM) reveal immense potential towards a generic model for Earth Observation. Nevertheless, these works primar-ily focus on a single modality without temporal and geo-context modeling, hampering their capabilities for diverse tasks. In this study, we present SkySense, a generic billion-scale model, pretrained on a curated multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) dataset with 21.5 million temporal sequences. SkySense incorporates a factorized multimodal spatiotemporal encoder taking temporal sequences of opti-cal and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data as input. This encoder is pretrained by our proposed Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning to learn representations across different modal and spatial granularities. To further enhance the RSI representations by the geo-context clue, we introduce Geo-Context Prototype Learning to learn region-aware prototypes upon RSI's multimodal spatiotemporal features. To our best knowledge, SkySense is the largest Multi-Modal RSFM to date, whose modules can be flexibly combined or used individually to accommodate various tasks. It demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities on a thor-ough evaluation encompassing 16 datasets over 7 tasks, from single- to multimodal, static to temporal, and classification to localization. SkySense surpasses 18 recent RSFMs in all test scenarios. Specifically, it outperforms the latest models such as GFM, SatLas and Scale-MAE by a large margin, i.e., 2.76%, 3.67% and 3.61% on average respectively. We will release the pretrained weights to facilitate future research and Earth Observation applications.

Long-tailed recognition (LTR) aims to learn balanced models from extremely unbalanced training data. Fine-tuning pretrained foundation models has recently emerged as a promising research direction for LTR. However, we observe that the fine-tuning process tends to degrade the intrinsic representation capability of pretrained models and lead to model bias towards certain classes, thereby hindering the overall recognition performance. To unleash the intrinsic representation capability of pretrained foundation models, in this work, we propose a new Parameter-Efficient Complementary Expert Learning (PECEL) for LTR. Specifically, PECEL consists of multiple experts, where individual experts are trained via Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and encouraged to learn different expertise on complementary sub-categories via the proposed sample-aware logit adjustment loss. By aggregating the predictions of different experts, PECEL effectively achieves a balanced performance on long-tailed classes. Nevertheless, learning multiple experts generally introduces extra trainable parameters. To ensure parameter efficiency, we further propose a parameter sharing strategy which decomposes and shares the parameters in each expert. Extensive experiments on 4 LTR benchmarks show that the proposed PECEL can effectively learn multiple complementary experts without increasing the trainable parameters and achieve new state-of-the-art performance.

In order to tackle video semantic segmentation task at a lower cost, e.g., only one frame annotated per video, lots of efforts have been devoted to investigate the utilization of those unlabeled frames by either assigning pseudo labels or performing feature enhancement. In this work, we propose a novel feature enhancement network to simultaneously model short- and long-term temporal correlation. Compared with existing work that only leverage short-term correspondence, the long-term temporal correlation obtained from distant frames can effectively expand the temporal perception field and provide richer contextual prior. More importantly, modeling adjacent and distant frames together can alleviate the risk of over-fitting, hence produce high-quality feature representation for the distant unlabeled frames in training set and unseen videos in testing set. To this end, we term our method SSLTM, short for Simultaneously Short- and Long-Term Temporal Modeling. In the setting of only one frame annotated per video, SSLTM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 2% ∼ 3% mIoU on the challenging VSPW dataset. Furthermore, when working with a pseudo label based method such as MeanTeacher, our final model only exhibits 0.13% mIoU less than the ceiling performance (i.e., all frames are manually annotated).

Image manipulation detection (IMD) is of vital importance as faking images and spreading misinformation can be malicious and harm our daily life. IMD is the core technique to solve these issues and poses challenges in two main aspects: (1) Data Uncertainty, i.e., the manipulated artifacts are often hard for humans to discern and lead to noisy labels, which may disturb model training; (2) Model Uncertainty, i.e., the same object may hold different categories (tampered or not) due to manipulation operations, which could potentially confuse the model training and result in unreliable outcomes. Previous works mainly focus on solving the model uncertainty issue by designing meticulous features and networks, however, the data uncertainty problem is rarely considered. In this paper, we address both problems by introducing an uncertainty-guided learning framework, which measures data and model uncertainties by a novel Uncertainty Estimation Network (UEN). UEN is trained under dynamic supervision, and outputs estimated uncertainty maps to refine manipulation detection results, which significantly alleviates the learning difficulties. To our knowledge, this is the first work to embed uncertainty modeling into IMD. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our method.

Under the impact of climate change, monitoring forest carbon stock becomes an important task to evaluate the changes in carbon sequestrated from the atmosphere. Forest carbon stock estimation is still a challenging task, due to limited data sources that have a high correlation with above-ground biomass. With the help of the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission, above-ground biomass (AGB) can be measured by using the LiDAR data provided. However, GEDI data is sparse since it only samples about 4% of the Earth’s land surface between 51.6° N&S. Previous studies demonstrated L-Band SAR’s promising ability in retrieving forest stem volumes and estimating above-ground biomass. In this work, we propose a Deep Learning based workflow which utilizes PALSAR-2 L-Band images and GEDI to generate wall-to-wall above-ground biomass maps of North America. The workflow uses Convolutional Neural Network as the DL model and leverages both PALSAR-2 L-Band images and GEDI Relative Heights data to estimate the dense above-ground biomass maps. The results show that, by fusing GEDI Level 2 Relative Heights data with PALSAR-2 L-Band SAR data, it is possible to achieve a significantly high correlation with GEDI level 4 AGB data, as the final R-squared score of our model is as high as 0.83.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a promising approach for compressing large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The performance of KD relies on how to effectively formulate and transfer the knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Prior arts mainly focus on directly aligning output features from the transformer block, which may impose overly strict constraints on the student model's learning process and complicate the training process by introducing extra parameters and computational cost. Moreover, our analysis indicates that the different relations within self-attention, as adopted in other works, involves more computation complexities and can easily be constrained by the number of heads, potentially leading to suboptimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that builds relationships directly from output features. Specifically, we introduce token-level and sequence-level relations concurrently to fully exploit the knowledge from the teacher model. Furthermore, we propose a correlation-based distillation loss to alleviate the exact match properties inherent in traditional KL divergence or MSE loss functions. Our method, dubbed FCD, presents a simple yet effective method to compress various architectures (BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT) and model sizes (base-size and large-size). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our distilled, smaller language models significantly surpass existing KD methods across various NLP tasks.

We demonstrate a car damage assessment system in car insurance field based on artificial intelligence techniques, which can exempt insurance inspectors from checking cars on site and help people without professional knowledge to evaluate car damages when accidents happen. Unlike existing approaches, we utilize videos instead of photos to interact with users to make the whole procedure as simple as possible. We adopt object and video detection and segmentation techniques in computer vision, and take advantage of multiple frames extracted from videos to achieve high damage recognition accuracy. The system uploads video streams captured by mobile devices, recognizes car damage on the cloud asynchronously and then returns damaged components and repair costs to users. The system evaluates car damages and returns results automatically and effectively in seconds, which reduces laboratory costs and decreases insurance claim time significantly.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) based sound source separation involves two phases: First, the signal spectrum is decomposed into components which, in a second step, are clustered in order to obtain estimates of the source signal spectra. The major challenge with this approach is the accuracy of the clustering algorithm in the second step, especially as most previously used clustering algorithms are focusing on the frequency part of NMF only and, hence, are missing the information of the time activation matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering criterion which combines the frequency and time activation part of NMF. It is based on the linear predictive coding compression error and we show that it allows a good clustering of the NMF components while at the same time can be efficiently computed. Our new clustering criterion shows an overall improved performance compared with the current state-of-the-art clustering algorithms as we experiment on the TRIOS dataset.