Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method.
Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition
that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than
other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This
objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar
predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method.

Abstract: Human-machine, human-robot interaction, and collaboration appear in diverse fields, from homecare to Cyber-Physical Systems. Technological development is fast, whereas real-time methods for social communication analysis that can measure small changes in sentiment and personality states, including visual, acoustic and language modalities are lagging, particularly when the goal is to build robust, appearance invariant, and fair methods. We study and compare methods capable of fusing modalities while satisfying real-time and invariant appearance conditions. We compare state-of-the-art transformer architectures in sentiment estimation and introduce them in the much less explored field of personality perception. We show that the architectures perform differently on automatic sentiment and personality perception, suggesting that each task may be better captured/modeled by a particular method. Our work calls attention to the attractive properties of the linear versions of the transformer architectures. In particular, we show that the best results are achieved by fusing the different architectures{’} preprocessing methods. However, they pose extreme conditions in computation power and energy consumption for real-time computations for quadratic transformers due to their memory requirements. In turn, linear transformers pave the way for quantifying small changes in sentiment estimation and personality perception for real-time social communications for machines and robots.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to remove non homogeneous haze from real images. The proposed method consists mainly of image feature extraction, haze removal, and image reconstruction. To accomplish this challenging task, we propose an architecture based on transformers, which have been recently introduced and have shown great potential in different computer vision tasks. Our model is based on the SwinIR an image restoration architecture based on a transformer, but by modifying the deep feature extraction module, the depth level of the model, and by applying a combined loss function that improves styling and adapts the model for the non-homogeneous haze removal present in images. The obtained results prove to be superior to those obtained by state-of-the-art models.

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-view scheme to tackle the challenging problem of the self-occlusion in human pose estimation problem. The proposed approach first obtains the human body joints of a set of images, which are captured from different views at the same time. Then, it enhances the obtained joints by using a
multi-view scheme. Basically, the joints from a given view are used to enhance poorly estimated joints from another view, especially intended to tackle the self occlusions cases. A network architecture initially proposed for the monocular case is adapted to be used in the proposed multi-view scheme. Experimental results and
comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches on Human3.6m dataset are presented showing improvements in the accuracy of body joints estimations.

Abstract: Large-scale accurate labels are very important to the Deep Neural Networks to train them and assure high performance. However, it is very expensive to create a clean dataset since usually it relies on human interaction. To this purpose, the labelling process is made cheap with a trade-off of having noisy labels. Learning with Noisy Labels is an active area of research being at the same time very challenging. The recent advances in Self-supervised learning and robust loss functions have helped in advancing noisy label research. In this paper, we propose a loss correction method that relies on dynamic weights computed based on the model training. We extend the existing Contrast to Divide algorithm coupled with DivideMix using a new class-conditional weighted scheme. We validate the method using the standard noise experiments and achieved encouraging results.

Abstract: Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). This appears, for example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the content. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol from the desired alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive results compared to the usage of real annotated data.

Abstract: The sewerage infrastructure is one of the most important and expensive infrastructures in modern society. In order to efficiently manage the sewerage infrastructure, automated sewer inspection has to be utilized. However, while sewer
defect classification has been investigated for decades, little attention has been given to classifying sewer pipe properties such as water level, pipe material, and pipe shape, which are needed to evaluate the level of sewer pipe deterioration.
In this work we classify sewer pipe defects and properties concurrently and present a novel decoder-focused multi-task classification architecture Cross-Task Graph Neural Network (CT-GNN), which refines the disjointed per-task predictions using cross-task information. The CT-GNN architecture extends the traditional disjointed task-heads decoder, by utilizing a cross-task graph and unique class node embeddings. The cross-task graph can either be determined a priori based on the conditional probability between the task classes or determined dynamically using self-attention.
CT-GNN can be added to any backbone and trained end-toend at a small increase in the parameter count. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on all four classification tasks in the Sewer-ML dataset, improving defect classification and
water level classification by 5.3 and 8.0 percentage points, respectively. We also outperform the single task methods as well as other multi-task classification approaches while introducing 50 times fewer parameters than previous modelfocused approaches.