Almost all existing amodal segmentation methods make the inferences of occluded regions by using features corresponding to the whole image. This is against the human's amodal perception, where human uses the visible part and the shape prior knowledge of the target to infer the occluded region. To mimic the behavior of human and solve the ambiguity in the learning, we propose a framework, it firstly estimates a coarse visible mask and a coarse amodal mask. Then based on the coarse prediction, our model infers the amodal mask by concentrating on the visible region and utilizing the shape prior in the memory. In this way, features corresponding to background and occlusion can be suppressed for amodal mask estimation. Consequently, the amodal mask would not be affected by what the occlusion is given the same visible regions. The leverage of shape prior makes the amodal mask estimation more robust and reasonable. Our proposed model is evaluated on three datasets. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The visualization of shape prior indicates that the category-specific feature in the codebook has certain interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/YutingXiao/Amodal-Segmentation-Based-on-Visible-Region-Segmentation-and-Shape-Prior.

To fully leverage the data captured from different scenes with different view angles while reducing the annotation cost, this paper studies a novel crowd counting setting, i.e. only using partial annotations in each image as training data. Inspired by the repetitive patterns in the annotated and unannotated regions as well as the ones between them, we design a network with three components to tackle those unannotated regions: i) in an Unannotated Regions Characterization (URC) module, we employ a memory bank to only store the annotated features, which could help the visual features extracted from these annotated regions flow to these unannotated regions; ii) For each image, Feature Distribution Consistency (FDC) regularizes the feature distributions of annotated head and unannotated head regions to be consistent; iii) a Cross-regressor Consistency Regularization (CCR) module is designed to learn the visual features of unannotated regions in a self-supervised style. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed model under the partial annotation setting for several datasets, such as ShanghaiTech, UCF-CC-50, UCF-QNRF, NWPU-Crowd and JHU-CROWD++. With only 10% annotated regions in each image, our proposed model achieves better performance than the recent methods and baselines under semi-supervised or active learning settings on all datasets. The code is https://github.com/svip-lab/CrwodCountingPAL.

This paper presents a purely data-driven approach for generating natural language (NL) expressions from its corresponding semantic representations. Our aim is to exploit a parsing paradigm for natural language generation (NLG) task, which first encodes semantic representations with a situated probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG), then decodes and yields natural sentences at the leaves of the optimal parsing tree. We deployed our system in two different domains, one is response generation for a Chinese spoken dialogue system, and the other is instruction generation for a virtual environment in English language, obtaining results comparable to state-of-the-art systems both in terms of BLEU scores and human evaluation.

Heterogeneous multiprocessor systems, which are composed of a mix of processing elements, such as commodity multicore processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and others, have been widely used in scientific computing community. Software applications incorporate the code designed and optimized for different types of processing elements in order to exploit the computing power of such heterogeneous computing systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimal distribution of the workload of data-parallel scientific applications between processing elements of such heterogeneous computing systems. We present a solution that uses functional performance models (FPMs) of processing elements and FPM-based data partitioning algorithms. Efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by experiments with parallel matrix multiplication and numerical simulation of lid-driven cavity flow on hybrid servers and clusters.

Transition to hybrid CPU/GPU platforms in high performance computing is challenging in the aspect of efficient utilisation of the heterogeneous hardware and existing optimised software. During recent years, scientific software has been ported to multicore and GPU architectures and now should be reused on hybrid platforms. In this paper, we model the performance of such scientific applications in order to execute them efficiently on hybrid platforms. We consider a hybrid platform as a heterogeneous distributed-memory system and apply the approach of functional performance models, which was originally designed for uniprocessor machines. The functional performance model (FPM) represents the processor speed by a function of problem size and integrates many important features characterising the performance of the architecture and the application. We demonstrate that FPMs facilitate performance evaluation of scientific applications on hybrid platforms. FPM-based data partitioning algorithms have been proved to be accurate for load balancing on heterogeneous networks of uniprocessor computers. We apply FPM-based data partitioning to balance the load between cores and GPUs in the hybrid architecture. In our experiments with parallel matrix multiplication, we couple the existing software optimised for multicores and GPUs and achieve high performance of the whole hybrid system.

In this paper, we present two techniques for inter- and intra-node data partitioning aimed at load balancing MPI applications on heterogeneous multicore platforms. For load balancing between the multicore nodes of a heterogeneous multicore cluster, we propose how to define a functional performance model of an individual multicore node as a single computing unit, and use these models for data partitioning between the nodes. For load balancing within a heterogeneous multicore node, we propose a data partitioning technique between cores. Since parallel processes interfere with each other through shared memory, the speed of individual cores cannot be measured independently, and independent performance models cannot be defined for cores. Therefore, for a given problem size, we dynamically evaluate the performance of cores, while they are executing only the computational kernel of parallel application, and partition data proportionally to the observed speed.