Vision Calorimeter for Anti-neutron Reconstruction: A Baseline

In high-energy physics, anti-neutrons ($\bar{n}$) are fundamental particles that frequently appear as final-state particles, and the reconstruction of their kinematic properties provides an important probe for understanding the governing principles. However, this confronts significant challenges instrumentally with the electromagnetic calorimeter (EMC), a typical experimental sensor but recovering the information of incident $\bar{n}$ insufficiently. In this study, we introduce Vision Calorimeter (ViC), a baseline method for anti-neutron reconstruction that leverages deep learning detectors to analyze the implicit relationships between EMC responses and incident $\bar{n}$ characteristics. Our motivation lies in that energy distributions of $\bar{n}$ samples deposited in the EMC cell arrays embody rich contextual information. Converted to 2-D images, such contextual energy distributions can be used to predict the status of $\bar{n}$ ($i.e.$, incident position and momentum) through a deep learning detector along with pseudo bounding boxes and a specified training objective. Experimental results demonstrate that ViC substantially outperforms the conventional reconstruction approach, reducing the prediction error of incident position by 42.81% (from 17.31$^{\circ}$ to 9.90$^{\circ}$). More importantly, this study for the first time realizes the measurement of incident $\bar{n}$ momentum, underscoring the potential of deep learning detectors for particle reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/ViC.

Teach Harder, Learn Poorer: Rethinking Hard Sample Distillation for GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation

To bridge the gaps between powerful Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLPs), GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation (KD) proposes to distill knowledge from a well-trained teacher GNN into a student MLP. In this paper, we revisit the knowledge samples (nodes) in teacher GNNs from the perspective of hardness, and identify that hard sample distillation may be a major performance bottleneck of existing graph KD algorithms. The GNN-to-MLP KD involves two different types of hardness, one student-free knowledge hardness describing the inherent complexity of GNN knowledge, and the other student-dependent distillation hardness describing the difficulty of teacher-to-student distillation. However, most of the existing work focuses on only one of these aspects or regards them as one thing. This paper proposes a simple yet effective Hardness-aware GNN-to-MLP Distillation (HGMD) framework, which decouples the two hardnesses and estimates them using a non-parametric approach. Finally, two hardness-aware distillation schemes (i.e., HGMD-weight and HGMD-mixup) are further proposed to distill hardness-aware knowledge from teacher GNNs into the corresponding nodes of student MLPs. As non-parametric distillation, HGMD does not involve any additional learnable parameters beyond the student MLPs, but it still outperforms most of the state-of-the-art competitors. HGMD-mixup improves over the vanilla MLPs by 12.95% and outperforms its teacher GNNs by 2.48% averaged over seven real-world datasets.

Short-Long Convolutions Help Hardware-Efficient Linear Attention to Focus on Long Sequences

To mitigate the computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism on long sequences, linear attention utilizes computation tricks to achieve linear complexity, while state space models (SSMs) popularize a favorable practice of using non-data-dependent memory pattern, i.e., emphasize the near and neglect the distant, to processing sequences. Recent studies have shown the priorities by combining them as one. However, the efficiency of linear attention remains only at the theoretical level in a causal setting, and SSMs require various designed constraints to operate effectively on specific data. Therefore, in order to unveil the true power of the hybrid design, the following two issues need to be addressed: (1) hardware-efficient implementation for linear attention and (2) stabilization of SSMs. To achieve this, we leverage the thought of tiling and hierarchy to propose CHELA (short-long Convolutions with Hardware-Efficient Linear Attention), which replaces SSMs with short-long convolutions and implements linear attention in a divide-and-conquer manner. This approach enjoys global abstraction and data-dependent selection from stable SSM and linear attention while maintaining real linear complexity. Our comprehensive experiments on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

vHeat: Building Vision Models upon Heat Conduction

A fundamental problem in learning robust and expressive visual representations lies in efficiently estimating the spatial relationships of visual semantics throughout the entire image. In this study, we propose vHeat, a novel vision backbone model that simultaneously achieves both high computational efficiency and global receptive field. The essential idea, inspired by the physical principle of heat conduction, is to conceptualize image patches as heat sources and model the calculation of their correlations as the diffusion of thermal energy. This mechanism is incorporated into deep models through the newly proposed module, the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO), which is physically plausible and can be efficiently implemented using DCT and IDCT operations with a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N^{1.5})$. Extensive experiments demonstrate that vHeat surpasses Vision Transformers (ViTs) across various vision tasks, while also providing higher inference speeds, reduced FLOPs, and lower GPU memory usage for high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/vHeat.

VMamba: Visual State Space Model

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) stand as the two most popular foundation models for visual representation learning. While CNNs exhibit remarkable scalability with linear complexity w.r.t. image resolution, ViTs surpass them in fitting capabilities despite contending with quadratic complexity. A closer inspection reveals that ViTs achieve superior visual modeling performance through the incorporation of global receptive fields and dynamic weights. This observation motivates us to propose a novel architecture that inherits these components while enhancing computational efficiency. To this end, we draw inspiration from the recently introduced state space model and propose the Visual State Space Model (VMamba), which achieves linear complexity without sacrificing global receptive fields. To address the encountered direction-sensitive issue, we introduce the Cross-Scan Module (CSM) to traverse the spatial domain and convert any non-causal visual image into order patch sequences. Extensive experimental results substantiate that VMamba not only demonstrates promising capabilities across various visual perception tasks, but also exhibits more pronounced advantages over established benchmarks as the image resolution increases. Source code has been available at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/VMamba.

Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their potential in rotation-sensitive scenarios has not been fully explored, and this limitation may be inherently attributed to the lack of spatial invariance in the data-forwarding process. In this study, we present a novel approach, termed Spatial Transform Decoupling (STD), providing a simple-yet-effective solution for oriented object detection with ViTs. Built upon stacked ViT blocks, STD utilizes separate network branches to predict the position, size, and angle of bounding boxes, effectively harnessing the spatial transform potential of ViTs in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Moreover, by aggregating cascaded activation masks (CAMs) computed upon the regressed parameters, STD gradually enhances features within regions of interest (RoIs), which complements the self-attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, STD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets including DOTA-v1.0 (82.24% mAP) and HRSC2016 (98.55% mAP), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/Spatial-Transform-Decoupling.

3D-Aware Adversarial Makeup Generation for Facial Privacy Protection

The privacy and security of face data on social media are facing unprecedented challenges as it is vulnerable to unauthorized access and identification. A common practice for solving this problem is to modify the original data so that it could be protected from being recognized by malicious face recognition (FR) systems. However, such ``adversarial examples'' obtained by existing methods usually suffer from low transferability and poor image quality, which severely limits the application of these methods in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a 3D-Aware Adversarial Makeup Generation GAN (3DAM-GAN). which aims to improve the quality and transferability of synthetic makeup for identity information concealing. Specifically, a UV-based generator consisting of a novel Makeup Adjustment Module (MAM) and Makeup Transfer Module (MTM) is designed to render realistic and robust makeup with the aid of symmetric characteristics of human faces. Moreover, a makeup attack mechanism with an ensemble training strategy is proposed to boost the transferability of black-box models. Extensive experiment results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that 3DAM-GAN could effectively protect faces against various FR models, including both publicly available state-of-the-art models and commercial face verification APIs, such as Face++, Baidu and Aliyun.

Semantic-aware One-shot Face Re-enactment with Dense Correspondence Estimation

One-shot face re-enactment is a challenging task due to the identity mismatch between source and driving faces. Specifically, the suboptimally disentangled identity information of driving subjects would inevitably interfere with the re-enactment results and lead to face shape distortion. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) for explicit facial semantic decomposition and identity disentanglement. Instead of using 3D coefficients alone for re-enactment control, we take the advantage of the generative ability of 3DMM to render textured face proxies. These proxies contain abundant yet compact geometric and semantic information of human faces, which enable us to compute the face motion field between source and driving images by estimating the dense correspondence. In this way, we could approximate re-enactment results by warping source images according to the motion field, and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is adopted to further improve the visual quality of warping results. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over existing start-of-the-art benchmarks in both identity preservation and re-enactment fulfillment.

GAN-based Facial Attribute Manipulation

Facial Attribute Manipulation (FAM) aims to aesthetically modify a given face image to render desired attributes, which has received significant attention due to its broad practical applications ranging from digital entertainment to biometric forensics. In the last decade, with the remarkable success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in synthesizing realistic images, numerous GAN-based models have been proposed to solve FAM with various problem formulation approaches and guiding information representations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of GAN-based FAM methods with a focus on summarizing their principal motivations and technical details. The main contents of this survey include: (i) an introduction to the research background and basic concepts related to FAM, (ii) a systematic review of GAN-based FAM methods in three main categories, and (iii) an in-depth discussion of important properties of FAM methods, open issues, and future research directions. This survey not only builds a good starting point for researchers new to this field but also serves as a reference for the vision community.

A Unified Framework for Biphasic Facial Age Translation with Noisy-Semantic Guided Generative Adversarial Networks

Biphasic facial age translation aims at predicting the appearance of the input face at any age. Facial age translation has received considerable research attention in the last decade due to its practical value in cross-age face recognition and various entertainment applications. However, most existing methods model age changes between holistic images, regardless of the human face structure and the age-changing patterns of individual facial components. Consequently, the lack of semantic supervision will cause infidelity of generated faces in detail. To this end, we propose a unified framework for biphasic facial age translation with noisy-semantic guided generative adversarial networks. Structurally, we project the class-aware noisy semantic layouts to soft latent maps for the following injection operation on the individual facial parts. In particular, we introduce two sub-networks, ProjectionNet and ConstraintNet. ProjectionNet introduces the low-level structural semantic information with noise map and produces soft latent maps. ConstraintNet disentangles the high-level spatial features to constrain the soft latent maps, which endows more age-related context into the soft latent maps. Specifically, attention mechanism is employed in ConstraintNet for feature disentanglement. Meanwhile, in order to mine the strongest mapping ability of the network, we embed two types of learning strategies in the training procedure, supervised self-driven generation and unsupervised condition-driven cycle-consistent generation. As a result, extensive experiments conducted on MORPH and CACD datasets demonstrate the prominent ability of our proposed method which achieves state-of-the-art performance.