Instance Similarity Learning for Unsupervised Feature Representation

In this paper, we propose an instance similarity learning (ISL) method for unsupervised feature representation. Conventional methods assign close instance pairs in the feature space with high similarity, which usually leads to wrong pairwise relationship for large neighborhoods because the Euclidean distance fails to depict the true semantic similarity on the feature manifold. On the contrary, our method mines the feature manifold in an unsupervised manner, through which the semantic similarity among instances is learned in order to obtain discriminative representations. Specifically, we employ the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to mine the underlying feature manifold, where the generated features are applied as the proxies to progressively explore the feature manifold so that the semantic similarity among instances is acquired as reliable pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments on image classification demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/ISL.git.

RiddleSense: Reasoning about Riddle Questions Featuring Linguistic Creativity and Commonsense Knowledge

Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of figurative language, and counterfactual reasoning skills, which are all important abilities for advanced natural language understanding (NLU). However, there are currently no dedicated datasets aiming to test these abilities. Herein, we present RiddleSense, a new multiple-choice question answering task, which comes with the first large dataset (5.7k examples) for answering riddle-style commonsense questions. We systematically evaluate a wide range of models over the challenge, and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance -- suggesting intriguing future research in the direction of higher-order commonsense reasoning and linguistic creativity towards building advanced NLU systems.

IF-Defense: 3D Adversarial Point Cloud Defense via Implicit Function based Restoration

Point cloud is an important 3D data representation widely used in many essential applications. Leveraging deep neural networks, recent works have shown great success in processing 3D point clouds. However, those deep neural networks are vulnerable to various 3D adversarial attacks, which can be summarized as two primary types: point perturbation that affects local point distribution, and surface distortion that causes dramatic changes in geometry. In this paper, we simultaneously address both the aforementioned attacks by learning to restore the clean point clouds from the attacked ones. More specifically, we propose an IF-Defense framework to directly optimize the coordinates of input points with geometry-aware and distribution-aware constraints. The former aims to recover the surface of point cloud through implicit function, while the latter encourages evenly-distributed points. Our experimental results show that IF-Defense achieves the state-of-the-art defense performance against existing 3D adversarial attacks on PointNet, PointNet++, DGCNN, PointConv and RS-CNN. For example, compared with previous methods, IF-Defense presents 20.02% improvement in classification accuracy against salient point dropping attack and 16.29% against LG-GAN attack on PointNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wuziyi616/IF-Defense.

BiDet: An Efficient Binarized Object Detector

In this paper, we propose a binarized neural network learning method called BiDet for efficient object detection. Conventional network binarization methods directly quantize the weights and activations in one-stage or two-stage detectors with constrained representational capacity, so that the information redundancy in the networks causes numerous false positives and degrades the performance significantly. On the contrary, our BiDet fully utilizes the representational capacity of the binary neural networks for object detection by redundancy removal, through which the detection precision is enhanced with alleviated false positives. Specifically, we generalize the information bottleneck (IB) principle to object detection, where the amount of information in the high-level feature maps is constrained and the mutual information between the feature maps and object detection is maximized. Meanwhile, we learn sparse object priors so that the posteriors are concentrated on informative detection prediction with false positive elimination. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art binary neural networks by a sizable margin.

CFUN: Combining Faster R-CNN and U-net Network for Efficient Whole Heart Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel heart segmentation pipeline Combining Faster R-CNN and U-net Network (CFUN). Due to Faster R-CNNs precise localization ability and U-nets powerful segmentation ability, CFUN needs only one-step detection and segmentation inference to get the whole heart segmentation result, obtaining good results with significantly reduced computational cost. Besides, CFUN adopts a new loss function based on edge information named 3D Edge-loss as an auxiliary loss to accelerate the convergence of training and improve the segmentation results. Extensive experiments on the public dataset show that CFUN exhibits competitive segmentation performance in a sharply reduced inference time. Our source code and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/Wuziyi616/CFUN.