Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

Metric-based methods, such as ProtoNet, excel in few-shot image classification by encouraging similarity to class prototypes. However, prototypes built from limited samples often capture only partial class information, limiting performance. Recent distribution estimation-based methods attempt to enhance performance by leveraging similar base class distributions. Yet, these approaches struggle when the distributions of base and novel classes differ significantly. Empirical analysis reveals that conceptually related categories share a local-global semantic invariance even under large distribution gaps. Based on this insight, a Self-Regressive Prototype Refinement (SRPR) is proposed to address the issue of incomplete prototype representations in few-shot learning. SRPR estimates an optimization direction for local embeddings, progressively refining them toward more global representations by exploiting local-global semantic invariance in base class data. The conservative use of coarse-grained local-global semantic structures, rather than relying on similar distributions, enhances SRPR’s applicability. With minimal computational overhead per refinement step, SRPR significantly improves classification performance and achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple few-shot benchmarks, particularly in the challenging 1-shot setting. Code is available at: https://github.com/giraffe2021/SRPR .

While humans can excel at image classification tasks by comparing a few images, existing metric-based few-shot classification methods are still not well adapted to novel tasks. Performance declines rapidly when encountering new patterns, as feature embeddings cannot effectively encode discriminative properties. Moreover, existing matching methods inadequately utilize support set samples, focusing only on comparing query samples to category prototypes without exploiting contrastive relationships across categories for discriminative features. In this work, we propose a method where query samples select their most category-representative features for matching, making feature embeddings adaptable and category-related. We introduce a category alignment mechanism (CAM) to align query image features with different categories. CAM ensures features chosen for matching are distinct and strongly correlated to intra- and inter-contrastive relationships within categories, making extracted features highly related to their respective categories. CAM is parameter-free, requires no extra training to adapt to new tasks, and adjusts features for matching when task categories change. We also implement a cross-validation-based feature selection technique for support samples, generating more discriminative category prototypes. We implement two versions of inductive and transductive inference and conduct extensive experiments on six datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. The results indicate that our method consistently yields performance improvements on benchmark tasks and surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods.

Precise cell segmentation and tracking are essential in biomedical research, but current methods are often complex and inefficient. We propose Cell DINO, an extension of the Transformer-based Mask DINO, designed for cell segmentation and tracking. By introducing rotated bounding boxes, track queries, and mitosis queries, our model detects, segments, and tracks cells simultaneously. Benchmarked on the Cell Tracking Challenge, Cell DINO ranked first on DIC-C2DH-HeLa and second on Fluo-N2DH-GOWT1 datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness and simplicity.

A weakness of the existing metric-based few-shot classification method is that task-unrelated objects or backgrounds may mislead the model since the small number of samples in the support set is insufficient to reveal the task-related targets. An essential cue of human wisdom in the few-shot classification task is that they can recognize the task-related targets by a glimpse of support images without being distracted by task-unrelated things. Thus, we propose to explicitly learn task-related saliency features and make use of them in the metric-based few-shot learning schema. We divide the tackling of the task into three phases, namely, the modeling, the analyzing, and the matching. In the modeling phase, we introduce a saliency sensitive module (SSM), which is an inexact supervision task jointly trained with a standard multiclass classification task. SSM not only enhances the fine-grained representation of feature embedding but also can locate the task-related saliency features. Meanwhile, we propose a self-training-based task-related saliency network (TRSN) which is a lightweight network to distill task-related salience produced by SSM. In the analyzing phase, we freeze TRSN and use it to handle novel tasks. TRSN extracts task-relevant features while suppressing the disturbing task-unrelated features. We, therefore, can discriminate samples accurately in the matching phase by strengthening the task-related features. We conduct extensive experiments on five-way 1-shot and 5-shot settings to evaluate the proposed method. Results show that our method achieves a consistent performance gain on benchmarks and achieves the state-of-the-art.

Typical embedded processors, such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), usually adopt Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture to improve computing efficiency. The performance of VLIW processors heavily relies on Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP). Therefore, it is crucial to develop an efficient instruction scheduling algorithm to explore more ILP. While heuristic algorithms are widely used in modern compilers due to simple implementation and low computational cost, they have limitations in providing accurate solutions and are prone to local optima. On the other hand, exact algorithms can usually find the optimal solution, but their high time overhead makes them less suitable for large-scale problems. This article proposes a two-dimensional constrained dynamic programming (TDCDP) approach and a quantitative model for instruction scheduling. The TDCDP approach achieves near-optimal solutions within an acceptable time overhead. Furthermore, we integrate our TDCDP approach into mainstream compiler architecture, encompassing Pre- and Post-RA (register allocation) scheduling. We conduct a quantitative evaluation of TDCDP compared with four heuristic algorithms on a typical VLIW processor. Our approach achieves an efficiency improvement of up to 58.34% in final solutions compared with the heuristic algorithms. Additionally, the Post-RA Scheduling enhances programs with an average speedup of 14.04% than solely applying the Pre-RA Scheduling.

Few-shot learning presents a substantial challenge in developing robust models due to the inherent scarcity of samples within each category. To overcome this challenge, metric-based methods have been introduced, classifying images based on the relationships among samples within a given embedding space. While these methods are effective, the limited samples often result in an incomplete representation of the category’s feature space, leading to sub-optimal prototypes for classification. Recognizing this shortcoming, we identified that categories in new tasks often exhibit structural similarities with those in the relative base domain. Driven by this observation, we introduce ProtoRefine. Our approach employs the structural information of categories within the base domain that bear relevance to the new tasks, generating additional sample embeddings. This strategy refines the prototype representation, thus providing a more accurate prototype for category classification. We performed extensive experiments on popular few-shot learning benchmarks, with the results highlighting the effectiveness of ProtoRefine, especially within the 5-way 1-shot settings. Matching the competitive results of state-of-the-art methods, our work underlines the significant advantage of enhancing prototypes with structurally similar information from the base domain in the context of few-shot learning.

In the past few years, numerous multi-view graph clustering algorithms have been proposed to enhance the clustering performance by exploring information from multiple views. Despite the superior performance, the high time and space expenditures limit their scalability. Accordingly, anchor graph learning has been introduced to alleviate the computational complexity. However, existing approaches can be further improved by the following considerations: (i) Existing anchor-based methods share the same number of anchors across views. This strategy violates the diversity and flexibility of multi-view data distribution. (ii) Searching for the optimal anchor number within hyper-parameters takes much extra tuning time, which makes existing methods impractical. (iii) How to flexibly fuse multi-view anchor graphs of diverse sizes has not been well explored in existing literature. To address the above issues, we propose a novel anchor-based method termed Flexible and Diverse Anchor Graph Fusion for Scalable Multi-view Clustering (FDAGF) in this paper. Instead of manually tuning optimal anchor with massive hyper-parameters, we propose to optimize the contribution weights of a group of pre-defined anchor numbers to avoid extra time expenditure among views. Most importantly, we propose a novel hybrid fusion strategy for multi-size anchor graphs with theoretical proof, which allows flexible and diverse anchor graph fusion. Then, an efficient linear optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the resultant problem. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jeaninezpp/FDAGF.

Recently, metric-based meta-learning methods have been effectively applied to few-shot image classification. These methods classify images based on the relationship between samples in an embedding space, avoiding over-fitting that can occur when training classifiers with limited samples. However, finding an embedding space with good generalization properties remains a challenge. Our work highlights that having an initial manifold space that preserves sample neighbor relationships can prevent the metric model from reaching a suboptimal solution. We propose a feature learning method that leverages Instance Neighbor Constraints (INC). This theory is thoroughly evaluated and analyzed through experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving the efficiency of learning and the overall performance of the model. We further integrate the INC into an alternate optimization training framework (AOT) that leverages both batch learning and episode learning to better optimize the metric-based model. We conduct extensive experiments on 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot settings on four popular few-shot image benchmarks: miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, Fewshot-CIFAR100 (FC100), and Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011(CUB). Results show that our method achieves consistent performance gains on benchmarks and state-of-the-art performance. Our findings suggest that initializing the embedding space appropriately and leveraging both batch and episode learning can significantly improve few-shot learning performance.

Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering has been extensively studied due to its effectiveness and efficiency. Though demonstrating promising performance in various applications, it cannot effectively address the absent features among data, which is not uncommon in practical applications. In this article, different from existing approaches that first impute the absence and then perform GMM clustering tasks on the imputed data, we propose to integrate the imputation and GMM clustering into a unified learning procedure. Specifically, the missing data is filled by the result of GMM clustering, and the imputed data is then taken for GMM clustering. These two steps alternatively negotiate with each other to achieve optimum. By this way, the imputed data can best serve for GMM clustering. A two-step alternative algorithm with proved convergence is carefully designed to solve the resultant optimization problem. Extensive experiments have been conducted on eight UCI benchmark datasets, and the results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Deep learning (DL) has been widely adopted in various domains of artificial intelligence (AI), achieving dramatic developments in industry and academia. Besides giant AI companies, numerous small and medium-sized enterprises, institutes, and universities (EIUs) have focused on the research and development (R&D) of DL. Considering the high cost of datacenters and high performance computing (HPC) systems, EIUs prefer adopting off-the-shelf GPU clusters as a DL R&D platform for multiple users and developers to process diverse DL workloads. In such scenarios, the scheduling of multiple DL tasks on a shared GPU cluster is both significant and challenging in terms of efficiently utilizing limited resources. Existing schedulers cannot predict the resource requirements of diverse DL workloads, leading to the under-utilization of computing resources and a decline in user satisfaction. This paper proposes GENIE, a QoS-aware dynamic scheduling framework for a shared GPU cluster, which achieves users' QoS guarantee and high system utilization. In accordance with an exhaustive characterization, GENIE analyzes the key factors that affect the performance of DL tasks and proposes a prediction model derived from lightweight profiling to estimate the processing rate and response latency for diverse DL workloads. Based on the prediction models, we propose a QoS-aware scheduling algorithm to identify the best placements for DL tasks and schedule them on the shared cluster. Experiments on a GPU cluster and large-scale simulations demonstrate that GENIE achieves a QoS-guarantee percentage improvement of up to 67.4 percent and a makespan reduction of up to 28.2 percent, compared to other baseline schedulers.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has achieved dramatic developments in emerging Machine Learning (ML) services. Compared to online ML services, offline ML services that are full of diverse CNN workloads are common in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), research institutes and universities. Efficient scheduling and processing of multiple CNN-based tasks on SME clusters is both significant and challenging. Existing schedulers cannot predict the resource requirements of CNN-based tasks. In this paper, we propose GENIE, a QoS-guided dynamic scheduling framework for SME clusters that achieves users' QoS guarantee and high system utilization. Based on a prediction model derived from lightweight profiling, a QoS-guided scheduling strategy is proposed to identify the best placements for CNN-based tasks. We implement GENIE as a plugin of Tensorflow and experiment with real SME clusters and large-scale simulations. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the QoS-guided strategy outperforms other baseline schedulers by up to 67.4% and 28.2% in terms of QoS-guarantee percentage and makespan.

Deep clustering aims to cluster unlabeled data by embedding them into a subspace based on deep model. The key challenge of deep clustering is to learn discriminative representations for input data with high dimensions. In this paper, we present a deep discriminative clustering network for clustering the real-world images. We use a convolutional auto-encoder stacked with a softmax layer to predict clustering assignments. To learn a discriminative representations, the proposed approach adds discriminative loss as embedded regularization with relative entropy minimization. With the discriminative loss, the network can not only produce clustering assignments, but also learn discriminative features by reducing intra-cluster distance and increasing inter-cluster distance. We evaluate the proposed method on three datasets: MNIST-full, YTF and FRGC-v2.0. We outperform state-of-the-art results on MNIST-full and FRGC-v2.0 and achieve competitive result on YTF. The source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/shaoxuying/DeepDiscriminativeClusteringNetwork.

Graph algorithms currently play increasingly important roles, especially in social networks and language modeling scenarios. Recently, accelerating graph algorithms by heterogeneous high performance computers with the integrated cores and expanded SIMD lanes has been becoming the mainstream. However, the existing methods, restricted by the low-efficiency grouping strategy and the non-optimized selection mechanism of tile size of a graph, are far below our expectations in many ways. Moreover, there are few convenient integrated tools provided for deploying the graph algorithms on MIC architecture. In this paper, we propose a high-efficiency framework MicRun, which is flexible to be used for graph algorithms on SIMD architecture of the Xeon Phi. There are two key components in MicRun, the Bucket Grouping module and Auto-tuning module. In the Grouping module, an optimization algorithm is designed for splitting graph tiles into conflict-free groups, which can be directly processed on SIMD parallelism. In the Auto-tuning module, a novel strategy is proposed for optimizing the tile size to boost execution efficiency of the graph computation. MicRun currently supports Bellman-Ford and PageRank algorithms, we also conduct extensive validation experiments on MicRun. Experimental results show that MicRun outperforms existing mechanisms in terms of storage and time overhead. As a consequence, both graph algorithms achieve an average speedup of 1.1× by MicRun, compared with the state-of-the-art.

Recently correlation filter based trackers have attracted considerable attention for their high computational efficiency. However, they cannot handle occlusion and scale variation well enough. This paper aims at preventing the tracker from failure in these two situations by integrating the depth information into a correlation filter based tracker. By using RGB-D data, we construct a depth context model to reveal the spatial correlation between the target and its surrounding regions. Furthermore, we adopt a region growing method to make our tracker robust to occlusion and scale variation. Additional optimizations such as a model updating scheme are applied to improve the performance for longer video sequences. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging benchmark image sequences demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs favourably against state-of-the-art algorithms.

Deploying cache has been generally adopted by Internet service providers (ISPs) to mitigate P2P traffic in recent years. Most traditional caching algorithms are designed for locality-unaware P2P networks, which mainly consider the requested frequency of contents as the principle of caching policies. However, in more prevalent locality-aware conditions with biased neighbor-selection policies, the existing caching schemes can hardly optimize the situation. In this paper we show that, what need to be cached in locality-aware conditions are the contents that can not be well provided by local neighbors, rather than the contents which are requested most frequently. Therefore, states of local neighbors should be taken into consideration in caching policies. We first present a new model in which P2P cache and locality-aware neighbor selection work together. We focus on inter-ISP traffic and available bandwidth of users in order to benefit both ISPs and users. Based on the mathematical model, a novel caching algorithm is proposed which considers replacement and allocation policies together. According to trace-driven simulations, the proposed algorithm outperforms other two representative caching algorithms in various scenarios.

The rapid rising of Linux users requires P2P, an efficient content transport method, to distribute packages. Different from traditional streaming P2P systems, a P2P package distribution system is hazarded by the special characteristics of small package size and hot packages. Due to the small package size, DHT search performance, which is rarely considered in traditional P2P system, comes to be an important factor in package distribution process. To improve the DHT search performance in this circumstance, we propose four kinds of optimizations as follow. Firstly, Fast-Response is proposed to eliminate useless searches after having found the target pair. Secondly, LRU Cache is proposed to reduce search hops on the same package. Thirdly, Leap Cache is proposed to reduce the cache redundancy. Finally, Probability Cache, gathering those optimizing above and considering hot packages in addition, is proposed to get increase of cache hit rate and overall efficiency improvement. We simulate our optimizations using PeerSim platform. The results show that all the four optimizations get considerable improvement in performance. With the best situation of Probability Cache, 86.22% delay time of original Kademlia is saved.

Among increasingly complicated trackers in visual tracking area, recently proposed correlation filter based trackers have achieved appealing performance despite their great simplicity and superior speed. However, the filter input is a bounding box of fixed size, so they are not born with the adaptability to target’s scale and aspect ratio changes. Although scaleadaptive variants have been proposed, they are not flexible enough due to pre-defined scale sampling manners. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no correlation filter variant has been proposed to handle aspect ratio variation. To tackle this problem, this paper integrates the class-agnostic detection proposal method, which is widely adopted in object detection area, into a correlation filter tracker, and presents KCFDP tracker. The correlation filter part of KCFDP is based on KCF[2] with some modifications. We extend the HOG feature in KCF to a combination of HOG, intensity, and color naming by simply concatenating the three features, resulting in 42 feature channels. The model updating scheme in KCF, which is simple linear interpolation, is substituted with a more robust scheme presented in [1]. EdgeBoxes[4] is adopted to generate flexible detection proposals and enable the scale and aspect ratio adaptability of our tracker. It traverses the whole image in a sliding window manner, and scores every sampled bounding box according to the number of contours that are wholly enclosed. To accelerate EdgeBoxes and produce less unnecessary proposals, we set the minimum proposal area and aspect ratio range dynamically in sliding window sampling according to the current target size. In the tracking pipeline, KCF is firstly performed to estimate the preliminary target location ld . Within a patch zd extracted from current frame, KCF locates the target center according to the location of the maximum element in f : f(zd) = kxz d · α, (1)

Visual tracking is one of the challenging tasks in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust visual tracking algorithm which is directly extended from STC [1]. By exploring RGB-D data, we construct a context depth model to record spatial correlation between the low-level features from the target and its surrounding regions. According to the continuity and stability of target in depth image, we adopt region growing method and a model updating schema for scaling and occlusion detection. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging benchmark image sequences demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs favorably against several state-of-the-art algorithms.

We propose a new 2D shape decomposition method based on the short-cut rule. The short-cut rule originates from cognition research, and states that the human visual system prefers to partition an object into parts using the shortest possible cuts. We propose and implement a computational model for the short-cut rule and apply it to the problem of shape decomposition. The model we proposed generates a set of cut hypotheses passing through the points on the silhouette, which represent the negative minima of curvature. We then show that most part-cut hypotheses can be eliminated by analysis of local properties of each. Finally, the remaining hypotheses are evaluated in ascending length order, which guarantees that of any pair of conflicting cuts only the shortest will be accepted. We demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art shape decomposition methods, the proposed approach achieves decomposition results, which better correspond to human intuition as revealed in psychological experiments.

Similarity analysis is a powerful tool for shape matching/retrieval and other computer vision tasks. In the literature, various shape (dis)similarity measures have been introduced. Different measures specialize on different aspects of the data. In this paper, we consider the problem of improving retrieval accuracy by systematically fusing several different measures. To this end, we propose the locally constrained mixed-diffusion method, which partly fuses the given measures into one and propagates on the resulted locally dense data space. Furthermore, we advocate the use of self-adaptive neighborhoods to automatically determine the appropriate size of the neighborhoods in the diffusion process, with which the retrieval performance is comparable to the best manually tuned kNNs. The superiority of our approach is empirically demonstrated on both shape and image datasets. Our approach achieves a score of 100% in the bull's eye test on the MPEG-7 shape dataset, which is the best reported result to date.