Harnessing Multi-resolution and Multi-scale Attention for Underwater Image Restoration

Underwater imagery is often compromised by factors such as color distortion and low contrast, posing challenges for high-level vision tasks. Recent underwater image restoration (UIR) methods either analyze the input image at full resolution, resulting in spatial richness but contextual weakness, or progressively from high to low resolution, yielding reliable semantic information but reduced spatial accuracy. Here, we propose a lightweight multi-stage network called Lit-Net that focuses on multi-resolution and multi-scale image analysis for restoring underwater images while retaining original resolution during the first stage, refining features in the second, and focusing on reconstruction in the final stage. Our novel encoder block utilizes parallel $1\times1$ convolution layers to capture local information and speed up operations. Further, we incorporate a modified weighted color channel-specific $l_1$ loss ($cl_1$) function to recover color and detail information. Extensive experimentations on publicly available datasets suggest our model's superiority over recent state-of-the-art methods, with significant improvement in qualitative and quantitative measures, such as $29.477$ dB PSNR ($1.92\%$ improvement) and $0.851$ SSIM ($2.87\%$ improvement) on the EUVP dataset. The contributions of Lit-Net offer a more robust approach to underwater image enhancement and super-resolution, which is of considerable importance for underwater autonomous vehicles and surveillance. The code is available at: https://github.com/Alik033/Lit-Net.

End-to-End Argument Mining as Augmented Natural Language Generation

Argument Mining (AM) is a crucial aspect of computational argumentation, which deals with the identification and extraction of Argumentative Components (ACs) and their corresponding Argumentative Relations (ARs). Most prior works have solved these problems by dividing them into multiple subtasks. And the available end-to-end setups are mostly based on the dependency parsing approach. This work proposes a unified end-to-end framework based on a generative paradigm, in which the argumentative structures are framed into label-augmented text, called Augmented Natural Language (ANL). Additionally, we explore the role of different types of markers in solving AM tasks. Through different marker-based fine-tuning strategies, we present an extensive study by integrating marker knowledge into our generative model. The proposed framework achieves competitive results to the state-of-the-art (SoTA) model and outperforms several baselines.