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The article discusses the emergence of "machine language," a new form of representation that combines deep neural networks with symbolic intelligence. The authors propose three essential properties that machine language should possess: spontaneity, flexibility, and semantics. They simulate the process of language emergence through a collaborative game between two agents, where one describes an image using machine language and the other interprets and draws the image based on the description. The article also compares machine language with discrete language and continuous features in terms of interpretability, generalization, and robustness. The authors argue that machine language, which emphasizes visual information, can lead to significant progress in AI capability. [Extracted from the article]

It has been widely observed that deep neural networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Decision-based attacks could generate adversarial examples based solely on top-1 labels returned by the target model. However, they typically make excessive queries and could not bypass detection effectively. To comprehensively assess a decision-based attack, besides its query efficiency, the performance against detection is also a concern. Considering that previous detections consume massive resources and always mistakenly recognize benign video frames as malicious attacks, we design a lightweight detection called boundary detection to overcome the above limitations, whose success reveals serious limitations of existing decision-based attacks. To develop more powerful attacks, we first present f-mixup as a basic method to produce candidate adversarial examples in the frequency domain. Using f-mixup as the building block, we propose f-attack as a complete decision-based attack. With the help of several natural images, f-attack could both work well with limited (hundreds of) queries and bypass detection effectively. Nevertheless, if the attacker could make relatively adequate (thousands of) queries and the target model is not equipped with detection, f-attack will lag behind existing decision-based attacks. We additionally introduce frequency binary search based on f-mixup, which serves as a plug-and-play module for existing decision-based attacks to further improve their query efficiency. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the success of convolutional neural network (CNN) in conventional closed-set recognition (CSR), it still lacks robustness for dealing with unknowns (those out of known classes) in open environment. To improve the robustness of CNN in open-set recognition (OSR) and meanwhile maintain its high accuracy in CSR, we propose an alternative deep framework called convolutional prototype network (CPN), which keeps CNN for representation learning but replaces the closed-world assumed softmax with an open-world oriented and human-like prototype model. To equip CPN with discriminative ability for classifying known samples, we design several discriminative losses for training. Moreover, to increase the robustness of CPN for unknowns, we interpret CPN from the perspective of generative model and further propose a generative loss, which is essentially maximizing the log-likelihood of known samples and serves as a latent regularization for discriminative learning. The combination of discriminative and generative losses makes CPN a hybrid model with advantages for both CSR and OSR. Under the designed losses, the CPN is trained end-to-end for learning the convolutional network and prototypes jointly. For application of CPN in OSR, we propose two rejection rules for detecting different types of unknowns. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of CPN for both CSR and OSR tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transductive zero-shot learning (TZSL) extends conventional ZSL by leveraging (unlabeled) unseen images for model training. A typical method for ZSL involves learning embedding weights from the feature space to the semantic space. However, the learned weights in most existing methods are dominated by seen images, and can thus not be adapted to unseen images very well. In this paper, to align the (embedding) weights for better knowledge transfer between seen/unseen classes, we propose the virtual mainstay alignment network (VMAN), which is tailored for the transductive ZSL task. Specifically, VMAN is casted as a tied encoder-decoder net, thus only one linear mapping weights need to be learned. To explicitly learn the weights in VMAN, for the first time in ZSL, we propose to generate virtual mainstay (VM) samples for each seen class, which serve as new training data and can prevent the weights from being shifted to seen images, to some extent. Moreover, a weighted reconstruction scheme is proposed and incorporated into the model training phase, in both the semantic/feature spaces. In this way, the manifold relationships of the VM samples are well preserved. To further align the weights to adapt to more unseen images, a novel instance-category matching regularization is proposed for model re-training. VMAN is thus modeled as a nested minimization problem and is solved by a Taylor approximate optimization paradigm. In comprehensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets, VMAN achieves superior performances under the (Generalized) TZSL setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracies for many pattern recognition tasks have increased rapidly year by year, achieving or even outperforming human performance. From the perspective of accuracy, pattern recognition seems to be a nearly solved problem. However, once launched in real applications, the high-accuracy pattern recognition systems may become unstable and unreliable due to the lack of robustness in open and changing environments. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of research toward robust pattern recognition from the perspective of breaking three basic and implicit assumptions: closed-world assumption, independent and identically distributed assumption, and clean and big data assumption, which form the foundation of most pattern recognition models. Actually, our brain is robust at learning concepts continually and incrementally, in complex, open, and changing environments, with different contexts, modalities, and tasks, by showing only a few examples, under weak or noisy supervision. These are the major differences between human intelligence and machine intelligence, which are closely related to the above three assumptions. After witnessing the significant progress in accuracy improvement nowadays, this review paper will enable us to analyze the shortcomings and limitations of current methods and identify future research directions for robust pattern recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent deep learning based approaches have achieved great success on handwriting recognition. Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world. Previous research has mainly focused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters. However, recognition is only one aspect for understanding a language, another challenging and interesting task is to teach a machine to automatically write (pictographic) Chinese characters. In this paper, we propose a framework by using the recurrent neural network (RNN) as both a discriminative model for recognizing Chinese characters and a generative model for drawing (generating) Chinese characters. To recognize Chinese characters, previous methods usually adopt the convolutional neural network (CNN) models which require transforming the online handwriting trajectory into image-like representations. Instead, our RNN based approach is an end-to-end system which directly deals with the sequential structure and does not require any domain-specific knowledge. With the RNN system (combining an LSTM and GRU), state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on the ICDAR-2013 competition database. Furthermore, under the RNN framework, a conditional generative model with character embedding is proposed for automatically drawing recognizable Chinese characters. The generated characters (in vector format) are human-readable and also can be recognized by the discriminative RNN model with high accuracy. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of using RNNs as both generative and discriminative models for the tasks of drawing and recognizing Chinese characters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, the research on KMH (renminbi bank note, the paper currency used in China) serial number recognition has drawn more and more attentions. It has promising applications in financial crime reduction, financial market and social stabilization. The accuracy of RMB recognition relies heavily on the image preprocessing results. In this paper, we propose an entire preprocessing system, including the steps of RMB image sampling, skew correction, identification of RMB orientation, serial number region detection and binarization, and character extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high precision and facilitates the subsequent character recognition task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adapting a writer-independent classifier toward the unique handwriting style of a particular writer has the potential to significantly increase accuracy for personalized handwriting recognition. This paper proposes a novel framework of style transfer mapping (STM) for writer adaptation. The STM is a writer-specific class-independent feature transformation which has a closed-form solution. After style transfer mapping, the data of different writers are projected onto a style-free space, where the writer-independent classifier needs no change to classify the transformed data and can achieve significantly higher accuracy. The framework of STM can be combined with different types of classifiers for supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised adaptation, where writer-specific data can be either labeled or unlabeled and need not cover all classes. In this paper, we combine STM with the state-of-the-art classifiers for large-category Chinese handwriting recognition: learning vector quantization (LVQ) and modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF). Experiments on the online Chinese handwriting database CASIA-OLHWDB demonstrate that STM-based adaptation is very efficient and effective in improving classification accuracy. Semi-supervised adaptation achieves the best performance, while unsupervised adaptation is even better than supervised adaptation. On handwritten text data, semi-supervised adaptation achieves error reduction rates 31.95 and 25.00 percent by LVQ and MQDF, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliable confidence estimation is a challenging yet fundamental requirement in many risk-sensitive applications. However, modern deep neural networks are often overconfident for their incorrect predictions, i.e., misclassified samples from known classes, and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples from unknown classes. In recent years, many confidence calibration and OOD detection methods have been developed. In this paper, we find a general, widely existing but actually-neglected phenomenon that most confidence estimation methods are harmful for detecting misclassification errors. We investigate this problem and reveal that popular calibration and OOD detection methods often lead to worse confidence separation between correctly classified and misclassified examples, making it difficult to decide whether to trust a prediction or not. Finally, we propose to enlarge the confidence gap by finding flat minima, which yields state-of-the-art failure prediction performance under various settings including balanced, long-tailed, and covariate-shift classification scenarios. Our study not only provides a strong baseline for reliable confidence estimation but also acts as a bridge between understanding calibration, OOD detection, and failure prediction.

Generative (generalized) zero-shot learning [(G)ZSL] models aim to synthesize unseen class features by using only seen class feature and attribute pairs as training data. However, the generated fake unseen features tend to be dominated by the seen class features and thus classified as seen classes, which can lead to inferior performances under zero-shot learning (ZSL), and unbalanced results under generalized ZSL (GZSL). To address this challenge, we tailor a novel balanced semantic embedding generative network (BSeGN), which incorporates balanced semantic embedding learning into generative learning scenarios in the pursuit of unbiased GZSL. Specifically, we first design a feature-to-semantic embedding module (FEM) to distinguish real seen and fake unseen features collaboratively with the generator in an online manner. We introduce the bidirectional contrastive and balance losses for the FEM learning, which can guarantee a balanced prediction for the interdomain features. In turn, the updated FEM can boost the learning of the generator. Next, we propose a multilevel feature integration module (mFIM) from the cycle-consistency branch of BSeGN, which can mitigate the domain bias through feature enhancement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore embedding and generative learning jointly within the field of ZSL. Extensive evaluations on four benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of BSeGN over its state-of-the-art counterparts.

Traditional pattern recognition models usually assume a fixed and identical number of classes during both training and inference stages. In this paper, we study an interesting but ignored question: can increasing the number of classes during training improve the generalization and reliability performance? For a k-class problem, instead of training with only these k classes, we propose to learn with k+m classes, where the additional m classes can be either real classes from other datasets or synthesized from known classes. Specifically, we propose two strategies for constructing new classes from known classes. By making the model see more classes during training, we can obtain several advantages. First, the added m classes serve as a regularization which is helpful to improve the generalization accuracy on the original k classes. Second, this will alleviate the overconfident phenomenon and produce more reliable confidence estimation for different tasks like misclassification detection, confidence calibration, and out-of-distribution detection. Lastly, the additional classes can also improve the learned feature representation, which is beneficial for new classes generalization in few-shot learning and class-incremental learning. Compared with the widely proved concept of data augmentation (dataAug), our method is driven from another dimension of augmentation based on additional classes (classAug). Comprehensive experiments demonstrated the superiority of our classAug under various open-environment metrics on benchmark datasets.

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to classify novel images based on a few labeled samples with the help of meta-knowledge. Most previous works address this problem based on the hypothesis that the training set and testing set are from the same domain, which is not realistic for some real-world applications. Thus, we extend FSL to domain-agnostic few-shot recognition, where the domain of the testing task is unknown. In domain-agnostic few-shot recognition, the model is optimized on data from one domain and evaluated on tasks from different domains. Previous methods for FSL mostly focus on learning general features or adapting to few-shot tasks effectively. They suffer from inappropriate features or complex adaptation in domain-agnostic few-shot recognition. In this brief, we propose meta-prototypical learning to address this problem. In particular, a meta-encoder is optimized to learn the general features. Different from the traditional prototypical learning, the meta encoder can effectively adapt to few-shot tasks from different domains by the traces of the few labeled examples. Experiments on many datasets demonstrate that meta-prototypical learning performs competitively on traditional few-shot tasks, and on few-shot tasks from different domains, meta-prototypical learning outperforms related methods.

Immunotherapy has become the breakthrough strategies for treatment of cancer in recent years. The application of messenger RNA in cancer immunotherapy is gaining tremendous popularity as mRNA can function as an effective vector for the delivery of therapeutic antibodies on immune targets. The high efficacy, decreased toxicity, rapid manufacturing and safe administration of mRNA vaccines have great advantages over conventional vaccines. The unprecedent success of mRNA vaccines against infection has proved its effectiveness. However, the instability and inefficient delivery of mRNA has cast a shadow on the wide application of this approach. In the past decades, modifications on mRNA structure and delivery methods have been made to solve these questions. This review summarizes recent advancements of mRNA vaccines in cancer immunotherapy and the existing challenges for its clinical application, providing insights on the future optimization of mRNA vaccines for the successful treatment of cancer., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Duan, Wang, Zhang, Yang and Zhang.)

Scene text detection is an important and challenging task in computer vision. For detecting arbitrarily-shaped texts, most existing methods require heavy data labeling efforts to produce polygon-level text region labels for supervised training. In order to reduce the cost in data labeling, we study mixed-supervised arbitrarily-shaped text detection by combining various weak supervision forms (e.g., image-level tags, coarse, loose and tight bounding boxes), which are far easier to annotate. Whereas the existing weakly-supervised learning methods (such as multiple instance learning) do not promote full object coverage, to approximate the performance of fully-supervised detection, we propose an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based mixed-supervised learning framework to train scene text detector using only a small amount of polygon-level annotated data combined with a large amount of weakly annotated data. The polygon-level labels are treated as latent variables and recovered from the weak labels by the EM algorithm. A new contour-based scene text detector is also proposed to facilitate the use of weak labels in our mixed-supervised learning framework. Extensive experiments on six scene text benchmarks show that (1) using only 10% strongly annotated data and 90% weakly annotated data, our method yields comparable performance to that of fully supervised methods, (2) with 100% strongly annotated data, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five scene text benchmarks (CTW1500, Total-Text, ICDAR-ArT, MSRA-TD500, and C-SVT), and competitive results on the ICDAR2015 Dataset. We will make our weakly annotated datasets publicly available.

Feature representation learning, an emerging topic in recent years, has achieved great progress. Powerful learned features can lead to excellent classification accuracy. In this article, a selective and robust feature representation framework with a supervised constraint (SRSC) is presented. SRSC seeks a selective, robust, and discriminative subspace by transforming the original feature space into the category space. Particularly, we add a selective constraint to the transformation matrix (or classifier parameter) that can select discriminative dimensions of the input samples. Moreover, a supervised regularization is tailored to further enhance the discriminability of the subspace. To relax the hard zero-one label matrix in the category space, an additional error term is also incorporated into the framework, which can lead to a more robust transformation matrix. SRSC is formulated as a constrained least square learning (feature transforming) problem. For the SRSC problem, an inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier method (ALM) is utilized to solve it. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets adequately demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. The proposed SRSC approach has achieved better performances than the compared counterpart methods.

Conjugate gradient (CG) methods are a class of important methods for solving linear equations and nonlinear optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic CG algorithm with variance reduction 1 and we prove its linear convergence with the Fletcher and Reeves method for strongly convex and smooth functions. We experimentally demonstrate that the CG with variance reduction algorithm converges faster than its counterparts for four learning models, which may be convex, nonconvex or nonsmooth. In addition, its area under the curve performance on six large-scale data sets is comparable to that of the LIBLINEAR solver for the L2 -regularized L2 -loss but with a significant improvement in computational efficiency. 1 CGVR algorithm is available on github: https://github.com/xbjin/cgvr.

Multi-oriented and multi-lingual scene text detection plays an important role in computer vision area and is challenging due to the wide variety of text and background. In this paper, firstly we point out the two key tasks when extending CNN based object detection frameworks to scene text detection. The first task is to localize the text region by a down-sampled segmentation based module, and the second task is to regress the boundaries of text region determined by the first task. Secondly, we propose a scene text detection framework based on fully convolutional network (FCN) with a bi-task prediction module in which one is pixel-wise classification between text and non-text, and the other is pixel-wise regression to determine the vertex coordinates of quadrilateral text boundaries. Post-processing for word-level detection is based on Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), and for line-level detection we design a heuristic line segments grouping method to localize long text lines. We evaluated the proposed framework on various benchmarks including multi-oriented and multi-lingual scene text datasets, and achieved state-of-the-art performance on most of them. We also provide abundant ablation experiments to analyze several key factors in building high performance CNN based scene text detection systems.

In this brief, we propose a new margin scalable discriminative least squares regression (MSDLSR) model for multicategory classification. The main motivation behind the MSDLSR is to explicitly control the margin of DLSR model. We first prove that the DLSR is a relaxation of the traditional L 2 -support vector machine. Based on this fact, we further provide a theorem on the margin of DLSR. With this theorem, we add an explicit constraint on DLSR to restrict the number of zeros of dragging values, so as to control the margin of DLSR. The new model is called MSDLSR. Theoretically, we analyze the determination of the margin and support vectors of MSDLSR. Extensive experiments illustrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches on various machine leaning and real-world data sets.

This brief presents a framework of retargeted least squares regression (ReLSR) for multicategory classification. The core idea is to directly learn the regression targets from data other than using the traditional zero-one matrix as regression targets. The learned target matrix can guarantee a large margin constraint for the requirement of correct classification for each data point. Compared with the traditional least squares regression (LSR) and a recently proposed discriminative LSR models, ReLSR is much more accurate in measuring the classification error of the regression model. Furthermore, ReLSR is a single and compact model, hence there is no need to train two-class (binary) machines that are independent of each other. The convex optimization problem of ReLSR is solved elegantly and efficiently with an alternating procedure including regression and retargeting as substeps. The experimental evaluation over a range of databases identifies the validity of our method.