Garment-centric fashion image generation aims to synthesize realistic and controllable human models dressing a given garment, which has attracted growing interest due to its practical applications in e-commerce. The key challenges of the task lie in two aspects: (1) faithfully preserving the garment details, and (2) gaining fine-grained controllability over the model's appearance. Existing methods typically require performing garment deformation in the generation process, which often leads to garment texture distortions. Also, they fail to control the fine-grained attributes of the generated models, due to the lack of specifically designed mechanisms. To address these issues, we propose FashionMAC, a novel diffusion-based deformation-free framework that achieves high-quality and controllable fashion showcase image generation. The core idea of our framework is to eliminate the need for performing garment deformation and directly outpaint the garment segmented from a dressed person, which enables faithful preservation of the intricate garment details. Moreover, we propose a novel region-adaptive decoupled attention (RADA) mechanism along with a chained mask injection strategy to achieve fine-grained appearance controllability over the synthesized human models. Specifically, RADA adaptively predicts the generated regions for each fine-grained text attribute and enforces the text attribute to focus on the predicted regions by a chained mask injection strategy, significantly enhancing the visual fidelity and the controllability. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our framework compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Inadequate consideration of tactile sensor features in existing algorithms can lead to insufficient prediction accuracy for robotic tactile recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal information based adjacency matrix construction method called transfer cost. On this basis, we propose a multi-branch multi-scale channel fusion graph convolutional network (MSCF-LSTM-GCN). This network combines the advantages of long short-term memory networks (LSTM) with graph convolutional networks (GCN) to extract spatial-temporal features. It is the first LSTM-GCN network with a multi-branch structure that utilizes multi-feature scale and multi-channel fusion. This structure provides diverse perceptual ranges and information levels. We introduce shortcuts combined with the multi-branch structure to reduce the loss of information caused by multiple layers of transmission. The Einstein summation calculation method and the parameters of binarizing the adjacency matrix are optimized to enable the established dynamic tactile graph to participate in batch training. The proposed method improves both prediction accuracy and F1 score by over 1% on the tactile grasp stability prediction task. In the tactile object recognition task, the proposed method improves both prediction accuracy and F1 score by over 3%.Note to Practitioners—Robotic tactile perception is an important research area that can improve the flexibility, accuracy and stability of robots in robotic tactile recognition tasks. However, the amount of accessible information depends on the resolution and number of tactile sensors, and the features extracted using conventional deep learning methods are limited. For this reason, we propose a spatial-temporal information based adjacency matrix construction method called transfer cost. Then, we propose the MSCF-LSTM-GCN model that extract spatial-temporal features from different feature scales and shortcuts. The network solves the problems of traditional deep learning methods in acquiringsingle features and losing deep information. The experiments on two public datasets show that our method performs due to other competing algorithms on the tasks of robotic grasp stability prediction and object recognition for multi-tactile sensor scenarios. In future research we will invest in the problem of 3D force regression.

The sense of touch is essential for robots to perform various daily tasks. Artificial Neural Networks have shown significant promise in advancing robotic tactile learning. However, due to the changing of tactile data distribution as robots encounter new tasks, ANN-based robotic tactile learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel continual learning (CL) framework called the Probabilistic Spiking Neural Network with Variational Continual Learning (PSNN-VCL). In this framework, PSNN introduces uncertainty during spike emission and can apply fast Variational Inference by optimizing the uncertainty through backpropagation, which significantly reduces the required model parameters for VCL. We establish a robotic tactile CL benchmark using publicly available datasets to evaluate our method. Experimental results demonstrated that, compared to other CL methods, PSNN-VCL not only achieves superior performance in terms of widely used CL metrics but also achieves at least a 50% reduction in model parameters on the robotic tactile CL benchmark.

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared server model while preserving data privacy. Most existing FL systems rely on the assumption that the server model and client models have homogeneous architecture. However, intensive resource requirements during the training process prevent low-end devices from contributing to the server model with their own data. On the other hand, the resource constraints on participating clients can significantly limit the size of the server model in the model-homogeneous setting, thereby restricting the application scope of FL. In this work, we propose FedEKT, a novel model-heterogeneous FL system designed to obtain a high-performance large server model while benefiting heterogeneous small client models. Specifically, a new aggregation approach is designed to enable the integration of knowledge from heterogeneous client models to a large server model while mitigating the adverse effects of biases stemming from data heterogeneity. Subsequently, to enhance the performance of client models by benefiting from the high-performance server model, FedEKT distills this large server model into multiple heterogeneous client models, facilitating the transfer of integrated knowledge back to the client models. In addition, we design specialized modules within the model and communication strategy to accomplish aggregation and transfer of knowledge in a data-free manner. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedEKT enhances the accuracy of the server model and client models by up to 53.96% and 12.35%, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art FL approach on CIFAR-100.

Abstract Within Open Relation Extraction (ORE) tasks, the Zero-shot ORE method is to generalize undefined relations from predefined relations, while the Unsupervised ORE method is to extract undefined relations without the need for annotations. However, despite the possibility of overlap between predefined and undefined relations in the training data, a unified framework for both Zero-shot and Unsupervised ORE has yet to be established. To address this gap, we propose U-CORE: A Unified Deep Cluster-wise Contrastive Framework for both Zero-shot and Unsupervised ORE, by leveraging techniques from Contrastive Learning (CL) and Clustering.1 U-CORE overcomes the limitations of CL-based Zero-shot ORE methods by employing Cluster-wise CL that preserves both local smoothness as well as global semantics. Additionally, we employ a deep-cluster-based updater that optimizes the cluster center, thus enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of the model. To increase the stability of the model, we adopt Adaptive Self-paced Learning that effectively addresses the data-shifting problems. Experimental results on three well-known datasets demonstrate that U-CORE significantly improves upon existing methods by showing an average improvement of 7.35% ARI on Zero-shot ORE tasks and 15.24% ARI on Unsupervised ORE tasks.

The widely deployed of hospital information systems causes an explosive growth of the electronic medical records (EMRs). It makes the medical structured processing technologies become critical to find researchable data in the large medical dataset. However, the high quality structured processing is a challenging task, in particular due to the inherent complexity and polysemy of medical terminology. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to achieve the joint extraction of events in Chinese electronic medical records, which solves the problem of cascading error transmission in traditional models and the ambiguity of Chinese characters. We first use the Bi-directional Encoder Representation from Transformers(BERT) model to mine features from the preprocessed medical data; then based on the characteristics of Chinese, we use the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory(BILSTM) model to capture the semantic information of the context. The experiments were conducted on a real dataset. The F1 score of our model in the identification and classification tasks of event triggers and arguments is the highest, reaching 71.6, 68.1, 55.4 and 46.9, respectively, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Photographs acquired under low-lighting conditions require long exposure times and therefore exhibit significant blurring due to the shaking of the camera. Using shorter exposure times results in sharper images but with a very high level of noise. In this paper we address the problem of utilizing two such images in order to obtain an estimate of the original scene and present a novel blind deconvolution algorithm for solving it. We formulate the problem in a hierarchical Bayesian framework by utilizing prior knowledge on the unknown image and blur, and also on the dependency between the two observed images. By incorporating a fully Bayesian analysis, the developed algorithm estimates all necessary model parameters along with the unknown image and blur, such that no user-intervention is needed. Moreover, we employ a variational Bayesian inference procedure, which allows for the statistical compensation of errors occurring at different stages of the restoration, and also provides uncertainties of the estimates. Experimental results with synthetic and real images demonstrate that the proposed method provides very high quality restoration results and compares favorably to existing methods even though no user supervision is needed.

Photographs acquired under low-light conditions require long exposure times and therefore exhibit significant blurring due to the shaking of the camera. Using shorter exposure times results in sharper images but with a very high level of noise. In this paper we address this problem and present a novel blind deconvolution algorithm for a pair of differently exposed images. We formulate the problem in a hierarchical Bayesian framework by utilizing prior knowledge on the unknown image and blur, and also on the dependency between two observed images. By incorporating a fully Bayesian analysis, the developed algorithm estimates all necessary algorithm parameters along with the unknowns, such that no user-intervention is needed. Moreover, we employ a variational Bayesian inference procedure, which allows for the statistical compensation of errors occurring at different stages of the restoration, and also provides uncertainties of the estimates. Experimental results demonstrate the high restoration performance of the proposed algorithm.

A compression artifacts removal algorithm that is adaptive to the artifact visibility level of the input video signal is proposed. The artifact visibility is determined per frame by the ratio of the accumulated gradient on the block edges to that of the remaining area. The filtering of each video frame is optimized using a least mean square mechanism which trains on pairs of target images and decompressed images of similar quality as the input frame. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several methods in coding artifact reduction.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the loss of neurons in the brain. In many cases, the medical experts use MR (magnetic resonance) images to qualitatively measure the neuronal loss by the shrinkage (atrophy) of the structures-of-interest, or sometimes more easily by the enlargement of the fluid-filled structures, such as the ventricles. For quantitative analysis, volume is the common choice. Volume, or area in 2D, is a gross measure and it cannot capture shape differences that can improve the diagnostic accuracy. Because most existing methods use complex and difficult- to-reproduce shape descriptors, the experts prefer more easily and robustly extractable area and volume in their diagnosis. In this paper, we introduce several novel and easily-extractable 2D shape descriptors for brain ventricle, and show that they and some of the well-known simple shape descriptors, such as perimeter, are better descriptors in the classification of AD patients and healthy controls.