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Sen Wang

Sen Wang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

27 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

OpenGaFF: Open-Vocabulary Gaussian Feature Field with Codebook Attention

Understanding open-vocabulary 3D scenes with Gaussian-based representations remains challenging due to fragmented and spatially inconsistent semantic predictions across multi-view observations. In this paper, we present OpenGaFF, a novel framework for open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding built upon 3D Gaussian Splatting. At the core of our method is a Gaussian Feature Field that models semantics as a continuous function of Gaussian geometry and appearance. By explicitly conditioning semantic predictions on geometric structure, this formulation strengthens the coupling between geometry and semantics, leading to improved spatial coherence across similar structures in 3D space. To further enforce object-level semantic consistency, we introduce a structured codebook that serves as a set of shared semantic primitives. Furthermore, a codebook-guided attention mechanism is proposed to retrieve language features via similarity matching between query embeddings and learned codebook entries, enabling robust open-vocabulary reasoning while reducing intra-object feature variance. Extensive experiments on standard 2D and 3D open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving improved segmentation quality, stronger 3D semantic consistency and a semantically interpretable codebook that provides insight into the learned representation.

preprint2024arXiv

GTP-ViT: Efficient Vision Transformers via Graph-based Token Propagation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision, yet their deployments on resource-constrained devices remain challenging due to high computational demands. To expedite pre-trained ViTs, token pruning and token merging approaches have been developed, which aim at reducing the number of tokens involved in the computation. However, these methods still have some limitations, such as image information loss from pruned tokens and inefficiency in the token-matching process. In this paper, we introduce a novel Graph-based Token Propagation (GTP) method to resolve the challenge of balancing model efficiency and information preservation for efficient ViTs. Inspired by graph summarization algorithms, GTP meticulously propagates less significant tokens' information to spatially and semantically connected tokens that are of greater importance. Consequently, the remaining few tokens serve as a summarization of the entire token graph, allowing the method to reduce computational complexity while preserving essential information of eliminated tokens. Combined with an innovative token selection strategy, GTP can efficiently identify image tokens to be propagated. Extensive experiments have validated GTP's effectiveness, demonstrating both efficiency and performance improvements. Specifically, GTP decreases the computational complexity of both DeiT-S and DeiT-B by up to 26% with only a minimal 0.3% accuracy drop on ImageNet-1K without finetuning, and remarkably surpasses the state-of-the-art token merging method on various backbones at an even faster inference speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ackesnal/GTP-ViT.

preprint2022arXiv

CURL: Continuous, Ultra-compact Representation for LiDAR

Increasing the density of the 3D LiDAR point cloud is appealing for many applications in robotics. However, high-density LiDAR sensors are usually costly and still limited to a level of coverage per scan (e.g., 128 channels). Meanwhile, denser point cloud scans and maps mean larger volumes to store and longer times to transmit. Existing works focus on either improving point cloud density or compressing its size. This paper aims to design a novel 3D point cloud representation that can continuously increase point cloud density while reducing its storage and transmitting size. The pipeline of the proposed Continuous, Ultra-compact Representation of LiDAR (CURL) includes four main steps: meshing, upsampling, encoding, and continuous reconstruction. It is capable of transforming a 3D LiDAR scan or map into a compact spherical harmonics representation which can be used or transmitted in low latency to continuously reconstruct a much denser 3D point cloud. Extensive experiments on four public datasets, covering college gardens, city streets, and indoor rooms, demonstrate that much denser 3D point clouds can be accurately reconstructed using the proposed CURL representation while achieving up to 80% storage space-saving. We open-source the CURL codes for the community.

preprint2022arXiv

Discovering Domain Disentanglement for Generalized Multi-source Domain Adaptation

A typical multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) approach aims to transfer knowledge learned from a set of labeled source domains, to an unlabeled target domain. Nevertheless, prior works strictly assume that each source domain shares the identical group of classes with the target domain, which could hardly be guaranteed as the target label space is not observable. In this paper, we consider a more versatile setting of MSDA, namely Generalized Multi-source Domain Adaptation, wherein the source domains are partially overlapped, and the target domain is allowed to contain novel categories that are not presented in any source domains. This new setting is more elusive than any existing domain adaptation protocols due to the coexistence of the domain and category shifts across the source and target domains. To address this issue, we propose a variational domain disentanglement (VDD) framework, which decomposes the domain representations and semantic features for each instance by encouraging dimension-wise independence. To identify the target samples of unknown classes, we leverage online pseudo labeling, which assigns the pseudo-labels to unlabeled target data based on the confidence scores. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalized Polarization Transform: A Novel Coded Transmission Paradigm

For the upcoming 6G wireless networks, a new wave of applications and services will demand ultra-high data rates and reliability. To this end, future wireless systems are expected to pave the way for entirely new fundamental air interface technologies to attain a breakthrough in spectrum efficiency (SE). This article discusses a new paradigm, named generalized polarization transform (GPT), to achieve an integrated design of coding, modulation, multi-antenna, multiple access, etc., in a real sense. The GPT enabled air interface develops far-reaching insights that the joint optimization of critical air interface ingredients can achieve remarkable gains on SE compared with the state-of-the-art module-stacking design.

preprint2022arXiv

GSMFlow: Generation Shifts Mitigating Flow for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) aims to recognize images from both the seen and unseen classes by transferring semantic knowledge from seen to unseen classes. It is a promising solution to take the advantage of generative models to hallucinate realistic unseen samples based on the knowledge learned from the seen classes. However, due to the generation shifts, the synthesized samples by most existing methods may drift from the real distribution of the unseen data. To address this issue, we propose a novel flow-based generative framework that consists of multiple conditional affine coupling layers for learning unseen data generation. Specifically, we discover and address three potential problems that trigger the generation shifts, i.e., semantic inconsistency, variance collapse, and structure disorder. First, to enhance the reflection of the semantic information in the generated samples, we explicitly embed the semantic information into the transformation in each conditional affine coupling layer. Second, to recover the intrinsic variance of the real unseen features, we introduce a boundary sample mining strategy with entropy maximization to discover more difficult visual variants of semantic prototypes and hereby adjust the decision boundary of the classifiers. Third, a relative positioning strategy is proposed to revise the attribute embeddings, guiding them to fully preserve the inter-class geometric structure and further avoid structure disorder in the semantic space. Extensive experimental results on four GZSL benchmark datasets demonstrate that GSMFlow achieves the state-of-the-art performance on GZSL.

preprint2022arXiv

Joint Successive Cancellation List Decoding for the Double Polar codes

As a new joint source-channel coding scheme, the double polar (D-Polar) codes have been proposed recently. In this letter, a novel joint source-channel decoder, namely the joint successive cancellation list (J-SCL) decoder, is proposed to improve the decoding performance of the D-Polar codes. We merge the trellis of the source polar code and that of the channel polar code to construct a compound trellis. In this compound trellis, the joint source-channel nodes represent both of the information bits and the high-entropy bits. Based on the compound trellis, the J-SCL decoder is designed to recover the source messages by combining the source SCL decoding and channel SCL decoding. The J-SCL decoder doubles the number of the decoding paths at each decoding level and then reserves the L paths with the smallest joint path-metric (JPM). For the JSC node, the JPM is updated considering both the channel decision log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) and the source decision LLRs. Simulation results show that the J-SCL decoder outperforms the turbo-like BP (TL-BP) decoder with lower complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

Object Wake-up: 3D Object Rigging from a Single Image

Given a single image of a general object such as a chair, could we also restore its articulated 3D shape similar to human modeling, so as to animate its plausible articulations and diverse motions? This is an interesting new question that may have numerous downstream augmented reality and virtual reality applications. Comparing with previous efforts on object manipulation, our work goes beyond 2D manipulation and rigid deformation, and involves articulated manipulation. To achieve this goal, we propose an automated approach to build such 3D generic objects from single images and embed articulated skeletons in them. Specifically, our framework starts by reconstructing the 3D object from an input image. Afterwards, to extract skeletons for generic 3D objects, we develop a novel skeleton prediction method with a multi-head structure for skeleton probability field estimation by utilizing the deep implicit functions. A dataset of generic 3D objects with ground-truth annotated skeletons is collected. Empirically our approach is demonstrated with satisfactory performance on public datasets as well as our in-house dataset; our results surpass those of the state-of-the-arts by a noticeable margin on both 3D reconstruction and skeleton prediction.

preprint2022arXiv

Reliability Assessment and Safety Arguments for Machine Learning Components in System Assurance

The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) components embedded in autonomous systems -- so-called Learning-Enabled Systems (LESs) -- has resulted in the pressing need to assure their functional safety. As for traditional functional safety, the emerging consensus within both, industry and academia, is to use assurance cases for this purpose. Typically assurance cases support claims of reliability in support of safety, and can be viewed as a structured way of organising arguments and evidence generated from safety analysis and reliability modelling activities. While such assurance activities are traditionally guided by consensus-based standards developed from vast engineering experience, LESs pose new challenges in safety-critical application due to the characteristics and design of ML models. In this article, we first present an overall assurance framework for LESs with an emphasis on quantitative aspects, e.g., breaking down system-level safety targets to component-level requirements and supporting claims stated in reliability metrics. We then introduce a novel model-agnostic Reliability Assessment Model (RAM) for ML classifiers that utilises the operational profile and robustness verification evidence. We discuss the model assumptions and the inherent challenges of assessing ML reliability uncovered by our RAM and propose solutions to practical use. Probabilistic safety argument templates at the lower ML component-level are also developed based on the RAM. Finally, to evaluate and demonstrate our methods, we not only conduct experiments on synthetic/benchmark datasets but also scope our methods with case studies on simulated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and physical Unmanned Ground Vehicles.

preprint2022arXiv

TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts

Inspired by the strong ties between vision and language, the two intimate human sensing and communication modalities, our paper aims to explore the generation of 3D human full-body motions from texts, as well as its reciprocal task, shorthanded for text2motion and motion2text, respectively. To tackle the existing challenges, especially to enable the generation of multiple distinct motions from the same text, and to avoid the undesirable production of trivial motionless pose sequences, we propose the use of motion token, a discrete and compact motion representation. This provides one level playing ground when considering both motions and text signals, as the motion and text tokens, respectively. Moreover, our motion2text module is integrated into the inverse alignment process of our text2motion training pipeline, where a significant deviation of synthesized text from the input text would be penalized by a large training loss; empirically this is shown to effectively improve performance. Finally, the mappings in-between the two modalities of motions and texts are facilitated by adapting the neural model for machine translation (NMT) to our context. This autoregressive modeling of the distribution over discrete motion tokens further enables non-deterministic production of pose sequences, of variable lengths, from an input text. Our approach is flexible, could be used for both text2motion and motion2text tasks. Empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach on both tasks over a variety of state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://ericguo5513.github.io/TM2T/

preprint2021arXiv

Watch and Learn: Mapping Language and Noisy Real-world Videos with Self-supervision

In this paper, we teach machines to understand visuals and natural language by learning the mapping between sentences and noisy video snippets without explicit annotations. Firstly, we define a self-supervised learning framework that captures the cross-modal information. A novel adversarial learning module is then introduced to explicitly handle the noises in the natural videos, where the subtitle sentences are not guaranteed to be strongly corresponded to the video snippets. For training and evaluation, we contribute a new dataset `ApartmenTour' that contains a large number of online videos and subtitles. We carry out experiments on the bidirectional retrieval tasks between sentences and videos, and the results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both retrieval tasks and exceeds several strong baselines. The dataset can be downloaded at https://github.com/zyj-13/WAL.

preprint2020arXiv

3D Human Shape Reconstruction from a Polarization Image

This paper tackles the problem of estimating 3D body shape of clothed humans from single polarized 2D images, i.e. polarization images. Polarization images are known to be able to capture polarized reflected lights that preserve rich geometric cues of an object, which has motivated its recent applications in reconstructing surface normal of the objects of interest. Inspired by the recent advances in human shape estimation from single color images, in this paper, we attempt at estimating human body shapes by leveraging the geometric cues from single polarization images. A dedicated two-stage deep learning approach, SfP, is proposed: given a polarization image, stage one aims at inferring the fined-detailed body surface normal; stage two gears to reconstruct the 3D body shape of clothing details. Empirical evaluations on a synthetic dataset (SURREAL) as well as a real-world dataset (PHSPD) demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative performance of our approach in estimating human poses and shapes. This indicates polarization camera is a promising alternative to the more conventional color or depth imaging for human shape estimation. Further, normal maps inferred from polarization imaging play a significant role in accurately recovering the body shapes of clothed people.

preprint2020arXiv

Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions

Action recognition is a relatively established task, where givenan input sequence of human motion, the goal is to predict its ac-tion category. This paper, on the other hand, considers a relativelynew problem, which could be thought of as an inverse of actionrecognition: given a prescribed action type, we aim to generateplausible human motion sequences in 3D. Importantly, the set ofgenerated motions are expected to maintain itsdiversityto be ableto explore the entire action-conditioned motion space; meanwhile,each sampled sequence faithfully resembles anaturalhuman bodyarticulation dynamics. Motivated by these objectives, we followthe physics law of human kinematics by adopting the Lie Algebratheory to represent thenaturalhuman motions; we also propose atemporal Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) that encourages adiversesampling of the motion space. A new 3D human motion dataset, HumanAct12, is also constructed. Empirical experiments overthree distinct human motion datasets (including ours) demonstratethe effectiveness of our approach.

preprint2020arXiv

Artificial Intelligence Enabled Wireless Networking for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks are currently being deployed, and beyond 5G (B5G) networks are expected to be developed over the next decade. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and, in particular, machine learning (ML) have the potential to efficiently solve the unstructured and seemingly intractable problems by involving large amounts of data that need to be dealt with in B5G. This article studies how AI and ML can be leveraged for the design and operation of B5G networks. We first provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances and future challenges that result from bringing AI/ML technologies into B5G wireless networks. Our survey touches different aspects of wireless network design and optimization, including channel measurements, modeling, and estimation, physical-layer research, and network management and optimization. Then, ML algorithms and applications to B5G networks are reviewed, followed by an overview of standard developments of applying AI/ML algorithms to B5G networks. We conclude this study by the future challenges on applying AI/ML to B5G networks.

preprint2020arXiv

Estimation of genome size using k-mer frequencies from corrected long reads

The third-generation long reads sequencing technologies, such as PacBio and Nanopore, have great advantages over second-generation Illumina sequencing in de novo assembly studies. However, due to the inherent low base accuracy, third-generation sequencing data cannot be used for k-mer counting and estimating genomic profile based on k-mer frequencies. Thus, in current genome projects, second-generation data is also necessary for accurately determining genome size and other genomic characteristics. We show that corrected third-generation data can be used to count k-mer frequencies and estimate genome size reliably, in replacement of using second-generation data. Therefore, future genome projects can depend on only one sequencing technology to finish both assembly and k-mer analysis, which will largely decrease sequencing cost in both time and money. Moreover, we present a fast light-weight tool kmerfreq and use it to perform all the k-mer counting tasks in this work. We have demonstrated that corrected third-generation sequencing data can be used to estimate genome size and developed a new open-source C/C++ k-mer counting tool, kmerfreq, which is freely available at https://github.com/fanagislab/kmerfreq.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning based Mobile Manipulation Control for Dynamic Object Tracking and Grasping

Agile control of mobile manipulator is challenging because of the high complexity coupled by the robotic system and the unstructured working environment. Tracking and grasping a dynamic object with a random trajectory is even harder. In this paper, a multi-task reinforcement learning-based mobile manipulation control framework is proposed to achieve general dynamic object tracking and grasping. Several basic types of dynamic trajectories are chosen as the task training set. To improve the policy generalization in practice, random noise and dynamics randomization are introduced during the training process. Extensive experiments show that our policy trained can adapt to unseen random dynamic trajectories with about 0.1m tracking error and 75\% grasping success rate of dynamic objects. The trained policy can also be successfully deployed on a real mobile manipulator.

preprint2020arXiv

Polarization Human Shape and Pose Dataset

Polarization images are known to be able to capture polarized reflected lights that preserve rich geometric cues of an object, which has motivated its recent applications in reconstructing detailed surface normal of the objects of interest. Meanwhile, inspired by the recent breakthroughs in human shape estimation from a single color image, we attempt to investigate the new question of whether the geometric cues from polarization camera could be leveraged in estimating detailed human body shapes. This has led to the curation of Polarization Human Shape and Pose Dataset (PHSPD), our home-grown polarization image dataset of various human shapes and poses.

preprint2020arXiv

Privacy-Preserving Boosting in the Local Setting

In machine learning, boosting is one of the most popular methods that designed to combine multiple base learners to a superior one. The well-known Boosted Decision Tree classifier, has been widely adopted in many areas. In the big data era, the data held by individual and entities, like personal images, browsing history and census information, are more likely to contain sensitive information. The privacy concern raises when such data leaves the hand of the owners and be further explored or mined. Such privacy issue demands that the machine learning algorithm should be privacy aware. Recently, Local Differential Privacy is proposed as an effective privacy protection approach, which offers a strong guarantee to the data owners, as the data is perturbed before any further usage, and the true values never leave the hands of the owners. Thus the machine learning algorithm with the private data instances is of great value and importance. In this paper, we are interested in developing the privacy-preserving boosting algorithm that a data user is allowed to build a classifier without knowing or deriving the exact value of each data samples. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed boosting algorithm and the high utility of the learned classifiers.

preprint2020arXiv

Privacy-Preserving Image Classification in the Local Setting

Image data has been greatly produced by individuals and commercial vendors in the daily life, and it has been used across various domains, like advertising, medical and traffic analysis. Recently, image data also appears to be greatly important in social utility, like emergency response. However, the privacy concern becomes the biggest obstacle that prevents further exploration of image data, due to that the image could reveal sensitive information, like the personal identity and locations. The recent developed Local Differential Privacy (LDP) brings us a promising solution, which allows the data owners to randomly perturb their input to provide the plausible deniability of the data before releasing. In this paper, we consider a two-party image classification problem, in which data owners hold the image and the untrustworthy data user would like to fit a machine learning model with these images as input. To protect the image privacy, we propose to locally perturb the image representation before revealing to the data user. Subsequently, we analyze how the perturbation satisfies ε-LDP and affect the data utility regarding count-based and distance-based machine learning algorithm, and propose a supervised image feature extractor, DCAConv, which produces an image representation with scalable domain size. Our experiments show that DCAConv could maintain a high data utility while preserving the privacy regarding multiple image benchmark datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

RadarSLAM: Radar based Large-Scale SLAM in All Weathers

Numerous Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms have been presented in last decade using different sensor modalities. However, robust SLAM in extreme weather conditions is still an open research problem. In this paper, RadarSLAM, a full radar based graph SLAM system, is proposed for reliable localization and mapping in large-scale environments. It is composed of pose tracking, local mapping, loop closure detection and pose graph optimization, enhanced by novel feature matching and probabilistic point cloud generation on radar images. Extensive experiments are conducted on a public radar dataset and several self-collected radar sequences, demonstrating the state-of-the-art reliability and localization accuracy in various adverse weather conditions, such as dark night, dense fog and heavy snowfall.

preprint2020arXiv

Rethinking Generative Zero-Shot Learning: An Ensemble Learning Perspective for Recognising Visual Patches

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is commonly used to address the very pervasive problem of predicting unseen classes in fine-grained image classification and other tasks. One family of solutions is to learn synthesised unseen visual samples produced by generative models from auxiliary semantic information, such as natural language descriptions. However, for most of these models, performance suffers from noise in the form of irrelevant image backgrounds. Further, most methods do not allocate a calculated weight to each semantic patch. Yet, in the real world, the discriminative power of features can be quantified and directly leveraged to improve accuracy and reduce computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called multi-patch generative adversarial nets (MPGAN) that synthesises local patch features and labels unseen classes with a novel weighted voting strategy. The process begins by generating discriminative visual features from noisy text descriptions for a set of predefined local patches using multiple specialist generative models. The features synthesised from each patch for unseen classes are then used to construct an ensemble of diverse supervised classifiers, each corresponding to one local patch. A voting strategy averages the probability distributions output from the classifiers and, given that some patches are more discriminative than others, a discrimination-based attention mechanism helps to weight each patch accordingly. Extensive experiments show that MPGAN has significantly greater accuracy than state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Robot Calligraphy using Pseudospectral Optimal Control in Conjunction with a Novel Dynamic Brush Model

Chinese calligraphy is a unique art form with great artistic value but difficult to master. In this paper, we formulate the calligraphy writing problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and propose an improved virtual brush model for simulating the real writing process. Our approach is inspired by pseudospectral optimal control in that we parameterize the actuator trajectory for each stroke as a Chebyshev polynomial. The proposed dynamic virtual brush model plays a key role in formulating the objective function to be optimized. Our approach shows excellent performance in drawing aesthetically pleasing characters, and does so much more efficiently than previous work, opening up the possibility to achieve real-time closed-loop control.

preprint2020arXiv

Robot Calligraphy using Pseudospectral Optimal Control in Conjunction with a Novel Dynamic Brush Model

Chinese calligraphy is a unique art form with great artistic value but difficult to master. In this paper, we formulate the calligraphy writing problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and propose an improved virtual brush model for simulating the real writing process. Our approach is inspired by pseudospectral optimal control in that we parameterize the actuator trajectory for each stroke as a Chebyshev polynomial. The proposed dynamic virtual brush model plays a key role in formulating the objective function to be optimized. Our approach shows excellent performance in drawing aesthetically pleasing characters, and does so much more efficiently than previous work, opening up the possibility to achieve real-time closed-loop control.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-Attention Enhanced Patient Journey Understanding in Healthcare System

Understanding patients' journeys in healthcare system is a fundamental prepositive task for a broad range of AI-based healthcare applications. This task aims to learn an informative representation that can comprehensively encode hidden dependencies among medical events and its inner entities, and then the use of encoding outputs can greatly benefit the downstream application-driven tasks. A patient journey is a sequence of electronic health records (EHRs) over time that is organized at multiple levels: patient, visits and medical codes. The key challenge of patient journey understanding is to design an effective encoding mechanism which can properly tackle the aforementioned multi-level structured patient journey data with temporal sequential visits and a set of medical codes. This paper proposes a novel self-attention mechanism that can simultaneously capture the contextual and temporal relationships hidden in patient journeys. A multi-level self-attention network (MusaNet) is specifically designed to learn the representations of patient journeys that is used to be a long sequence of activities. The MusaNet is trained in end-to-end manner using the training data derived from EHRs. We evaluated the efficacy of our method on two medical application tasks with real-world benchmark datasets. The results have demonstrated the proposed MusaNet produces higher-quality representations than state-of-the-art baseline methods. The source code is available in https://github.com/xueping/MusaNet.

preprint2020arXiv

SparseFusion: Dynamic Human Avatar Modeling from Sparse RGBD Images

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reconstruct 3D human body shapes based on a sparse set of RGBD frames using a single RGBD camera. We specifically focus on the realistic settings where human subjects move freely during the capture. The main challenge is how to robustly fuse these sparse frames into a canonical 3D model, under pose changes and surface occlusions. This is addressed by our new framework consisting of the following steps. First, based on a generative human template, for every two frames having sufficient overlap, an initial pairwise alignment is performed; It is followed by a global non-rigid registration procedure, in which partial results from RGBD frames are collected into a unified 3D shape, under the guidance of correspondences from the pairwise alignment; Finally, the texture map of the reconstructed human model is optimized to deliver a clear and spatially consistent texture. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively the superior performance of our framework in reconstructing complete 3D human models with high fidelity. It is worth noting that our framework is flexible, with potential applications going beyond shape reconstruction. As an example, we showcase its use in reshaping and reposing to a new avatar.

preprint2020arXiv

ZSTAD: Zero-Shot Temporal Activity Detection

An integral part of video analysis and surveillance is temporal activity detection, which means to simultaneously recognize and localize activities in long untrimmed videos. Currently, the most effective methods of temporal activity detection are based on deep learning, and they typically perform very well with large scale annotated videos for training. However, these methods are limited in real applications due to the unavailable videos about certain activity classes and the time-consuming data annotation. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a novel task setting called zero-shot temporal activity detection (ZSTAD), where activities that have never been seen in training can still be detected. We design an end-to-end deep network based on R-C3D as the architecture for this solution. The proposed network is optimized with an innovative loss function that considers the embeddings of activity labels and their super-classes while learning the common semantics of seen and unseen activities. Experiments on both the THUMOS14 and the Charades datasets show promising performance in terms of detecting unseen activities.

preprint2019arXiv

Temporal Self-Attention Network for Medical Concept Embedding

In longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), the event records of a patient are distributed over a long period of time and the temporal relations between the events reflect sufficient domain knowledge to benefit prediction tasks such as the rate of inpatient mortality. Medical concept embedding as a feature extraction method that transforms a set of medical concepts with a specific time stamp into a vector, which will be fed into a supervised learning algorithm. The quality of the embedding significantly determines the learning performance over the medical data. In this paper, we propose a medical concept embedding method based on applying a self-attention mechanism to represent each medical concept. We propose a novel attention mechanism which captures the contextual information and temporal relationships between medical concepts. A light-weight neural net, "Temporal Self-Attention Network (TeSAN)", is then proposed to learn medical concept embedding based solely on the proposed attention mechanism. To test the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we have conducted clustering and prediction tasks on two public EHRs datasets comparing TeSAN against five state-of-the-art embedding methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TeSAN model is superior to all the compared methods. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to exploit temporal self-attentive relations between medical events.