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NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results
Apr 17, 2024
This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.
Ground-to-UAV 140 GHz channel measurement and modeling
Apr 03, 2024Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) assisted terahertz (THz) wireless communications have been expected to play a vital role in the next generation of wireless networks. UAVs can serve as either repeaters or data collectors within the communication link, thereby potentially augmenting the efficacy of communication systems. Despite their promise, the channel analysis and modeling specific to THz wireless channels leveraging UAVs remain under explored. This work delves into a ground-to-UAV channel at 140 GHz, with a specific focus on the influence of UAV hovering behavior on channel performance. Employing experimental measurements through an unmodulated channel setup and a geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) that integrates three-dimensional positional coordinates and beamwidth, this work evaluates the impact of UAV dynamic movements and antenna orientation on channel performance. Our findings highlight the minimal impact of UAV orientation adjustments on channel performance and underscore the diminishing necessity for precise alignment between UAVs and ground stations as beamwidth increases.
Terahertz channel modeling based on surface sensing characteristics
Apr 03, 2024The dielectric properties of environmental surfaces, including walls, floors and the ground, etc., play a crucial role in shaping the accuracy of terahertz (THz) channel modeling, thereby directly impacting the effectiveness of communication systems. Traditionally, acquiring these properties has relied on methods such as terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) or vector network analyzers (VNA), demanding rigorous sample preparation and entailing a significant expenditure of time. However, such measurements are not always feasible, particularly in novel and uncharacterized scenarios. In this work, we propose a new approach for channel modeling that leverages the inherent sensing capabilities of THz channels. By comparing the results obtained through channel sensing with that derived from THz-TDS measurements, we demonstrate the method's ability to yield dependable surface property information. The application of this approach in both a miniaturized cityscape scenario and an indoor environment has shown consistency with experimental measurements, thereby verifying its effectiveness in real-world settings.
Extraction of n = 0 pick-up by locked mode detectors based on neural networks in J-TEXT
Nov 23, 2023Measurement of locked mode (LM) is important for the physical research of Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities and plasma disruption. The n = 0 pick-up need to be extracted and subtracted to calculate the amplitude and phase of the LM. A new method to extract this pick-up has been developed by predicting the n = 0 pick-up brn=0 by the LM detectors based on Neural Networks (NNs) in J-TEXT. An approach called Power Multiple Time Scale (PMTS) has been developed with outstanding regressing effect in multiple frequency ranges. Three models have been progressed based on PMTS NNs. PMTS could fit the brn=0 on the LM detectors with little errors both in time domain and frequency domain. The n>0 pick-up brn>0 generated by resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) can be obtained after subtracting the extracted brn=0. This new method uses only one LM instead of 4 LM detectors to extract brn=0. Therefore, the distribution of the LM detectors can also be optimized based on this new method.
Sketch-based Video Object Segmentation: Benchmark and Analysis
Nov 13, 2023Reference-based video object segmentation is an emerging topic which aims to segment the corresponding target object in each video frame referred by a given reference, such as a language expression or a photo mask. However, language expressions can sometimes be vague in conveying an intended concept and ambiguous when similar objects in one frame are hard to distinguish by language. Meanwhile, photo masks are costly to annotate and less practical to provide in a real application. This paper introduces a new task of sketch-based video object segmentation, an associated benchmark, and a strong baseline. Our benchmark includes three datasets, Sketch-DAVIS16, Sketch-DAVIS17 and Sketch-YouTube-VOS, which exploit human-drawn sketches as an informative yet low-cost reference for video object segmentation. We take advantage of STCN, a popular baseline of semi-supervised VOS task, and evaluate what the most effective design for incorporating a sketch reference is. Experimental results show sketch is more effective yet annotation-efficient than other references, such as photo masks, language and scribble.
FedL2P: Federated Learning to Personalize
Oct 03, 2023
Federated learning (FL) research has made progress in developing algorithms for distributed learning of global models, as well as algorithms for local personalization of those common models to the specifics of each client's local data distribution. However, different FL problems may require different personalization strategies, and it may not even be possible to define an effective one-size-fits-all personalization strategy for all clients: depending on how similar each client's optimal predictor is to that of the global model, different personalization strategies may be preferred. In this paper, we consider the federated meta-learning problem of learning personalization strategies. Specifically, we consider meta-nets that induce the batch-norm and learning rate parameters for each client given local data statistics. By learning these meta-nets through FL, we allow the whole FL network to collaborate in learning a customized personalization strategy for each client. Empirical results show that this framework improves on a range of standard hand-crafted personalization baselines in both label and feature shift situations.
Better Practices for Domain Adaptation
Sep 07, 2023
Distribution shifts are all too common in real-world applications of machine learning. Domain adaptation (DA) aims to address this by providing various frameworks for adapting models to the deployment data without using labels. However, the domain shift scenario raises a second more subtle challenge: the difficulty of performing hyperparameter optimisation (HPO) for these adaptation algorithms without access to a labelled validation set. The unclear validation protocol for DA has led to bad practices in the literature, such as performing HPO using the target test labels when, in real-world scenarios, they are not available. This has resulted in over-optimism about DA research progress compared to reality. In this paper, we analyse the state of DA when using good evaluation practice, by benchmarking a suite of candidate validation criteria and using them to assess popular adaptation algorithms. We show that there are challenges across all three branches of domain adaptation methodology including Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA), and Test Time Adaptation (TTA). While the results show that realistically achievable performance is often worse than expected, they also show that using proper validation splits is beneficial, as well as showing that some previously unexplored validation metrics provide the best options to date. Altogether, our improved practices covering data, training, validation and hyperparameter optimisation form a new rigorous pipeline to improve benchmarking, and hence research progress, within this important field going forward.
Label Calibration for Semantic Segmentation Under Domain Shift
Jul 20, 2023
Performance of a pre-trained semantic segmentation model is likely to substantially decrease on data from a new domain. We show a pre-trained model can be adapted to unlabelled target domain data by calculating soft-label prototypes under the domain shift and making predictions according to the prototype closest to the vector with predicted class probabilities. The proposed adaptation procedure is fast, comes almost for free in terms of computational resources and leads to considerable performance improvements. We demonstrate the benefits of such label calibration on the highly-practical synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation problem.
Feed-Forward Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Class Prototypes
Jul 20, 2023
Source-free domain adaptation has become popular because of its practical usefulness and no need to access source data. However, the adaptation process still takes a considerable amount of time and is predominantly based on optimization that relies on back-propagation. In this work we present a simple feed-forward approach that challenges the need for back-propagation based adaptation. Our approach is based on computing prototypes of classes under the domain shift using a pre-trained model. It achieves strong improvements in accuracy compared to the pre-trained model and requires only a small fraction of time of existing domain adaptation methods.
Neural Fine-Tuning Search for Few-Shot Learning
Jun 15, 2023
In few-shot recognition, a classifier that has been trained on one set of classes is required to rapidly adapt and generalize to a disjoint, novel set of classes. To that end, recent studies have shown the efficacy of fine-tuning with carefully crafted adaptation architectures. However this raises the question of: How can one design the optimal adaptation strategy? In this paper, we study this question through the lens of neural architecture search (NAS). Given a pre-trained neural network, our algorithm discovers the optimal arrangement of adapters, which layers to keep frozen and which to fine-tune. We demonstrate the generality of our NAS method by applying it to both residual networks and vision transformers and report state-of-the-art performance on Meta-Dataset and Meta-Album.