A large amount of User Generated Content (UGC) is uploaded to the Internet daily and displayed to people world-widely through the client side (mobile and PC). This requires the cropping algorithms to produce the aesthetic thumbnail within a specific aspect ratio on different devices. However, existing image cropping works mainly focus on landmark or landscape images, which fail to model the relations among the multi-objects with the complex background in UGC. Besides, previous methods merely consider the aesthetics of the cropped images while ignoring the content integrity, which is crucial for UGC cropping. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Semantic Collaborative cropping network (S2CNet) for arbitrary user generated content accompanied by a new cropping benchmark. Specifically, we first mine the visual genes of the potential objects. Then, the suggested adaptive attention graph recasts this task as a procedure of information association over visual nodes. The underlying spatial and semantic relations are ultimately centralized to the crop candidate through differentiable message passing, which helps our network efficiently to preserve both the aesthetics and the content integrity. Extensive experiments on the proposed UGCrop5K and other public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art counterparts.

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a preferred paradigm in many deep learning tasks, which reduces the need for human labor. Previous studies primarily focus on effectively utilising the labelled and unlabeled data to improve performance. However, we observe that how to select samples for labelling also significantly impacts performance, particularly under extremely low-budget settings. The sample selection task in SSL has been under-explored for a long time. To fill in this gap, we propose a Representative and Diverse Sample Selection approach (RDSS). By adopting a modified Frank-Wolfe algorithm to minimise a novel criterion $\alpha$-Maximum Mean Discrepancy ($\alpha$-MMD), RDSS samples a representative and diverse subset for annotation from the unlabeled data. We demonstrate that minimizing $\alpha$-MMD enhances the generalization ability of low-budget learning. Experimental results show that RDSS consistently improves the performance of several popular SSL frameworks and outperforms the state-of-the-art sample selection approaches used in Active Learning (AL) and Semi-Supervised Active Learning (SSAL), even with constrained annotation budgets. Our code is available at [RDSS](https://github.com/YanhuiAILab/RDSS).

Object localization aims to generate a tight bounding box for the target object, which is a challenging problem that has been deeply studied in recent years. Since collecting bounding-box labels is time-consuming and laborious, many researchers focus on weakly supervised object localization (WSOL). As the recent appealing self-supervised learning technique shows its powerful function in visual tasks, in this paper, we take the early attempt to explore unsupervised object localization by self-supervision. Specifically, we adopt different geometric transformations to image and utilize their parameters as pseudo labels for self-supervised learning. Then, the class-agnostic activation map (CAAM) is used to highlight the target object potential regions. However, such attention maps merely focus on the most discriminative part of the objects, which will affect the quality of the predicted bounding box. Based on the motivation that the activation maps of different transformations of the same image should be equivariant, we further design a siamese network that encodes the paired images and propose a joint graph cluster partition mechanism in an unsupervised manner to enhance the object co-occurrent regions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC-Aircraft datasets. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods using the same level of supervision, even outperforms some weakly-supervised methods.