Despite significant advancements in image and text conditional image editing, the exploration of using brain signals, which are more direct and personalized to reflect user intentions, remains limited. An intuitive method is to convert implicit brain signals into explicit representations such as images, which can then serve as prompts for editing. However, such two-stage method suffers from low inference efficiency, inaccurate brain interpretation, and unnatural editing results. In this paper, we apply brain signals of visual perception as prompts and propose a cross-modal self-supervised learning for natural image painting (MindPainter). This method achieves efficient and natural brain-conditioned image editing in a straightforward manner. MindPainter is trained for reconstruction from masked images directly with pseudo-brain signals, which is simulated by the proposed Pseudo Brain Generator. It facilitates efficient cross-modal integration. The proposed Brain Adapter further eliminates the gap in implicit space between modalities, ensuring accurate semantic interpretation of brain signals and coherent consolidation. Besides, the designed Multi-Mask Generation Policy enhances the generalization, realizing high-quality editing in various painting scenarios, including inpainting and outpainting. To the best of our knowledge, MindPainter is the first work to achieve efficient brain-conditioned image painting, providing potential for direct brain control in creative AI. The code and the link to the extended version will be available on GitHub.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful strategy for training deep neural networks (DNNs). While it was originally proposed to train a more compact “student” model from a large “teacher” model, many recent efforts have focused on adapting it as an effective way to promote generalization of the model itself, such as online KD and self KD. Here, we propose an easy-to-use and compatible strategy named Spaced KD to improve the effectiveness of both online KD and self KD, in which the student model distills knowledge from a teacher model trained with a space interval ahead. This strategy is inspired by a prominent theory named spacing effect in the field of biological learning and memory, positing that appropriate intervals between learning trials can significantly enhance learning performance. We provide an in-depth theoretical and empirical analysis showing that the benefits of the proposed spacing effect in KD stem from seeking a flat minima during stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Spaced KD in improving the learning performance of DNNs (e.g., the additional performance gain is up to 2.31% and 3.34% on Tiny-ImageNet over online KD and self KD, respectively). Our codes have been released on github https://github.com/SunGL001/Spaced-KD.

To accommodate real-world dynamics, artificial intelligence systems need to cope with sequentially arriving content in an online manner. Beyond regular Continual Learning (CL) attempting to address catastrophic forgetting with offline training of each task, Online Continual Learning (OCL) is a more challenging yet realistic setting that performs CL in a one-pass data stream. Current OCL methods primarily rely on memory replay of old training samples. However, a notable gap from CL to OCL stems from the additional overfitting-underfitting dilemma associated with the use of rehearsal buffers: the inadequate learning of new training samples (underfitting) and the repeated learning of a few old training samples (overfitting). To this end, we introduce a novel approach, Multi-level Online Sequential Experts (MOSE), which cultivates the model as stacked sub-experts, integrating multi-level supervision and reverse self-distillation. Supervision signals across multiple stages facilitate appropriate convergence of the new task while gathering various strengths from experts by knowledge distillation mitigates the performance decline of old tasks. MOSE demonstrates remarkable efficacy in learning new samples and preserving past knowledge through multi-level experts, thereby significantly advancing OCL performance over state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., up to 7.3% on Split CIFAR-100 and 6.1% on Split Tiny-ImageNet).††Our code is available at https://github.com/AnAppleCore/MOSE

Motivation: Comparative genomic studies indicate that extant genomes are more properly considered to be a fusion product of random mutations over generations (vertical evolution) and genomic material transfers between individuals of different lineages (reticulate transfer). This has motivated biologists to use phylogenetic networks and other general models to study genome evolution. Two fundamental algorithmic problems arising from verification of phylogenetic networks and from computing Robinson-Foulds distance in the space of phylogenetic networks are the tree and cluster containment problems. The former asks how to decide whether or not a phylogenetic tree is displayed in a phylogenetic network. The latter is to decide whether a subset of taxa appears as a cluster in some tree displayed in a phylogenetic network. The cluster containment problem (CCP) is also closely related to testing the infinite site model on a recombination network. Both the tree containment and CCP are NP-complete. Although the CCP was introduced a decade ago, there has been little progress in developing fast algorithms for it on arbitrary phylogenetic networks. Results: In this work, we present a fast computer program for the CCP. This program is developed on the basis of a linear-time transformation from the small version of the CCP to the SAT problem. Availability and implementation: The program package is available for download on http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/∼matzlx/ccp.