Fuss-Free Network: A Simplified and Efficient Neural Network for Crowd Counting

In the field of crowd-counting research, many recent deep learning based methods have demonstrated robust capabilities for accurately estimating crowd sizes. However, the enhancement in their performance often arises from an increase in the complexity of the model structure. This paper introduces the Fuss-Free Network (FFNet), a crowd counting deep learning model that is characterized by its simplicity and efficiency in terms of its structure. The model comprises only a backbone of a neural network and a multi-scale feature fusion structure.The multi-scale feature fusion structure is a simple architecture consisting of three branches, each only equipped with a focus transition module, and combines the features from these branches through the concatenation operation.Our proposed crowd counting model is trained and evaluated on four widely used public datasets, and it achieves accuracy that is comparable to that of existing complex models.The experimental results further indicate that excellent performance in crowd counting tasks can also be achieved by utilizing a simple, low-parameter, and computationally efficient neural network structure.

Error Controlled Actor-Critic

On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic which ensures confining the approximation error in value function. We present an analysis of how the approximation error can hinder the optimization process of actor-critic methods.Then, we derive an upper boundary of the approximation error of Q function approximator and find that the error can be lowered by restricting on the KL-divergence between every two consecutive policies when training the policy. The results of experiments on a range of continuous control tasks demonstrate that the proposed actor-critic algorithm apparently reduces the approximation error and significantly outperforms other model-free RL algorithms.