Implicit Alignment Research Articles

An approach for handwritten Chinese text recognition unifying character segmentation and recognition

Text line recognition methods can be categorized into explicit segmentation based and implicit segmentation based ones. Explicit segmentation based methods require character-level annotation during training, while implicit segmentation based methods, trained on line-level annotated data, face alignment drift challenges. Though some methods have been proposed to address these challenges using weakly supervised object detection, they often rely on cumbersome pseudo-box generation processes and complex decoding. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to overcome these challenges, achieving high accuracy in text recognition and character segmentation. To eliminate the need of character-level annotated real text line data in training, we introduce a novel training paradigm that utilizes character-level annotated synthetic data and line-level annotated real data jointly. For synthetic data, candidate characters are explicitly aligned with labeled characters to generate hard labels for supervising model training. For real data, implicit alignment is produced by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) mapping to provide soft labels for weakly-supervised model training. And for inference, we propose two decoding strategies leveraging the advantages of Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and CTC decoding. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in text recognition and character localization, even with minimal amounts of character-level annotated line data.

Omniscient Video Super-Resolution with Explicit-Implicit Alignment

When considering the temporal relationships, most previous video super-resolution (VSR) methods follow the iterative or recurrent framework. The iterative framework adopts neighboring low-resolution (LR) frames from a sliding window, while the recurrent framework utilizes the output generated in the previous SR procedure. The hybrid framework combines them but still cannot fully leverage the temporal relationships. Meanwhile, the existing methods are limited in the receptive field of the optical flow or lack semantic constrains on motion information. In this work, we propose an omniscient framework to fully explore the temporal relationships in the video, which encompasses both LR frames and SR outputs from the past, present, and future. The omniscient framework is more generic because the iterative, recurrent, and hybrid frameworks can be regarded as its special cases. Besides, when addressing the motion information, most previous VSR methods adopt the explicit motion estimation and compensation, while many recent methods turn to implicit alignment. In implicit alignment methods, because basic non-local means suffers from heavy computational costs, we improve it by capturing the non-local correlations in a relatively local manner to reduce the complexity. Moreover, we integrate the explicit and implicit methods into an explicit-implicit alignment module to better utilize motion information. We have conducted extensive experiments on public datasets, which show that our method is superior over the state-of-the-art methods in objective metrics, subjective visual quality, and complexity. In particular, on datasets of Vid4 and UDM10, our method improves PSNR by 0.19 dB, 0.49 dB against the most advanced method BasicVSR++, respectively.

Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Trusted Pseudo Samples

Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) aims to accomplish the task of adaptation to the target domain by utilizing pre-trained source domain model and unlabeled target domain samples, without directly accessing any source domain data. Although many SFUDA works use the pseudo-labeling strategy to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels in the target domain, these strategies ignore the influence of domain shift on calculating the reference distribution of pseudo-labels. In this article, we propose a novel kind of SFUDA with trusted pseudo samples (SFUDA-TPS), which uses reliable feature reference distribution to solve the SFUDA problem. In SFUDA-TPS, we design a target feature correcting classifier to alleviate the problem of feature reference distribution deviating from target domain samples distribution. On this basis, the more reliable feature reference distribution is calculated by selecting the target domain samples with a high amount of information, i.e., low entropy in the fixed source domain classifier and target feature correcting classifier. The implicit alignment between the source domain and target domain is realized by learning the source domain distributions hidden in the fixed source domain classifier. Experimental evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in solving SFUDA tasks.

Implicit Cross-Lingual Word Embedding Alignment for Reference-Free Machine Translation Evaluation

As we know, cross-lingual word embedding alignment is critically important for reference-free machine translation evaluation, where source texts are directly compared with system translations. In this paper, it is revealed that multilingual knowledge distillation for sentence embedding alignment could achieve cross-lingual word embedding alignment implicitly. A simplified analysis is given to explain the implicit alignment reason. And according to the analysis, it could be deduced that using the last layer embeddings of the distilled student model will have the best alignment effect, which is also validated by the experimental results on the WMT19 datasets. Furthermore, with the assistant of a target-side language model, BERTScore andWord Mover’s Distance using the cross-lingual word embeddings get very competitive results (4 best average scores on 3 types of language directions and ranking first among more than half of all 18 language pairs for the system-level evaluations) in the WMT19’s reference-free machine translation evaluation tasks when the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) metrics are chosen for comparison.

Multi-Scale Attention-Guided Non-Local Network for HDR Image Reconstruction.

High-dynamic-range (HDR) image reconstruction methods are designed to fuse multiple Low-dynamic-range (LDR) images captured with different exposure values into a single HDR image. Recent CNN-based methods mostly perform local attention- or alignment-based fusion of multiple LDR images to create HDR contents. Depending on a single attention mechanism or alignment causes failure in compensating ghosting artifacts, which can arise in the synthesized HDR images due to the motion of objects or camera movement across different LDR image inputs. In this study, we propose a multi-scale attention-guided non-local network called MSANLnet for efficient HDR image reconstruction. To mitigate the ghosting artifacts, the proposed MSANLnet performs implicit alignment of LDR image features with multi-scale spatial attention modules and then reconstructs pixel intensity values using long-range dependencies through non-local means-based fusion. These modules adaptively select useful information that is not damaged by an object’s movement or unfavorable lighting conditions for image pixel fusion. Quantitative evaluations against several current state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed approach achieves higher performance than the existing methods. Moreover, comparative visual results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in restoring saturated information from original input images and mitigating ghosting artifacts caused by large movement of objects. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed method, architectural choices, and modules for efficient HDR reconstruction.

MSAF: Multimodal Supervise-Attention Enhanced Fusion for Video Anomaly Detection

The complementarity of multimodal signal is essential for video anomaly detection. However, existing methods either lack exploration to multimodal data or ignore the implicit alignment of multimodal features. In our work, we address this problem using a novel fusion method and propose a Multimodal Supervise-Attention enhanced Fusion (MSAF) framework under weak supervision. Our framework can be divided into two parts: 1) the multimodal labels refinement part refines video-level ground truth into pseudo clip-level labels for subsequent training, 2) the multimodal supervise-attention fusion network enhances features via implicitly aligning different information, then fusing them effectively to predict anomaly scores with the help of refined labels. We validate our framework on four challenging datasets: ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, LAD, and XD-Violence. Extensive experiments on the benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, which achieves comparable results on several benchmarks and outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on the XD-Violence audiovisual multimodal dataset.

TANet: Target Attention Network for Video Bit-Depth Enhancement

Video bit-depth enhancement (VBDE) reconstructs high-bit-depth (HBD) frames from a low-bit-depth (LBD) video sequence. As neighboring frames contain a considerable amount of complementary information related to the center frame, it is vital for VBDE to exploit neighboring frames as much as possible. Conventional VBDE algorithms with explicit alignment across frames attempt to warp each neighboring frame to the center frame with estimated optical flow, taking into account only pairwise correlation. Most spatiotemporal fusion approaches involve direct concatenation or 3D convolution and treat all features equally, failing to focus on information related to the center frame. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce an improved nonlocal block as a global attentive alignment (GAA) module, which takes the whole input video sequence into consideration to capture features that are globally correlated, to perform implicit alignment. Furthermore, given the bulk of features extracted from the center and neighboring frames, we propose target-guided attention (TGA). TGA can exploit more center-frame-related details and facilitate feature fusion. The proposed network (dubbed TANet) is capable of effectively eliminating false contours and recovering the center frame in high quality, as demonstrated by the experimental results. TANet outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of both PSNR and SSIM with low time consumption.

Implicit alignment: India's National Water Policy and a human rights‐based approach to water management

AbstractAs a potential solution to water scarcity, the United Nations advocates for a human rights‐based (HRB) approach to water management, characterized by a focus on the provision of safe drinking water and sanitation, stakeholder participation, and the realization of water equity for traditionally marginalized communities. Although most states around the world suffer from some form of water scarcity or stress, not all governments have officially recognized the validity of an HRB approach to water management. India stands as an instructive case study in this regard. The Indian state suffers from physical and economic water scarcity across its urban and rural communities, but the Indian federal government has not yet explicitly recognized the human right to water as a legitimate policy approach. Interestingly, though, the right to water has been tacitly recognized within India's legal system; thus, it is worth examining whether a tacit recognition of an HRB approach to water management exists in other aspects of India's national policy. This article utilizes content analysis to explore that question by, first, identifying seven key concepts within an HRB water management approach and, second, tracing those concepts through the 1987, 2002, and 2012 iterations of India's National Water Policy. The results help to illustrate that India's National Water Policy is congruent with an HRB approach to water management, although challenges remain due to a lack of both accountability and clarification of responsibilities between the national and subsidiary governments within India.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance

Critical pedagogy and teacher professional development for online and blended learning: the equity imperative in the shift to digital.

This paper provides a response to the work of Philipsen et al. (Educ Technol Res Dev 67:1145–1174, Philipsen et al., Educational Technology, Research and Development 67:1145–1174, 2019), from a critical pedagogy perspective. Here, critical pedagogy is defined from a post-colonial framework focused on liberation. From this perspective, the value of Philipsen et al.’s paper is in its implicit alignment with critical methodologies, including how liberatory ideas are embedded in the TPD for OBL framework. In a response to Philipsen et al.’s work, this paper provides advice on practical actions teachers can take to develop their ability to engage in critical pedagogy, both from the TPD for OBL lens and from an equity lens. This paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the meta-aggregative review, including the lack of an explicitly critical framework, and it provides suggestions for how the work could be improved, especially as regards a discussion of equity for teachers and students. Future research in this area should focus on methods for disrupting educational inequity regarding online and blended learning.

Local-Global Fusion Network for Video Super-Resolution

The goal of video super-resolution technique is to address the problem of effectively restoring high-resolution (HR) videos from low-resolution (LR) ones. Previous methods commonly used optical flow to perform frame alignment and designed a framework from the perspective of space and time. However, inaccurate optical flow estimation may occur easily which leads to inferior restoration effects. In addition, how to effectively fuse the features of various video frames remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Local-Global Fusion Network (LGFN) to solve the above issues from a novel viewpoint. As an alternative to optical flow, deformable convolutions (DCs) with decreased multi-dilation convolution units (DMDCUs) are applied for efficient implicit alignment. Moreover, a structure with two branches, consisting of a Local Fusion Module (LFM) and a Global Fusion Module (GFM), is proposed to combine information from two different aspects. Specifically, LFM focuses on the relationship between adjacent frames and maintains the temporal consistency while GFM attempts to take advantage of all related features globally with a video shuffle strategy. Benefiting from our advanced network, experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our LGFN can not only achieve comparative performance with state-of-the-art methods but also possess reliable ability on restoring a variety of video frames. The results on benchmark datasets of our LGFN are presented on https://github.com/BIOINSu/LGFN and the source code will be released as soon as the paper is accepted.

Propriété et possession dans le chapitre 89, « Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish » de Moby-Dick

In the cetological chapter 89 of Moby-Dick, Ishmael launches into a jocular disquisition about maritime laws aimed at settling litigations between ships claiming possession of the same whale. Dubbed “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish”, the law under scrutiny is ostensibly extolled as the peaceful means to solve all whaling disputes. Yet, what emerges from the cases cited is that the law invariably grants the entire ownership of a contested prey to the party who last got hold of it. The judicial construct of property, Ishmael cannot but admit, amounts to legitimizing the right of the strongest: the idea that “possession is the whole of the law” ultimately extends to all human jurisprudence, justifying worldwide systems of exploitation. Such seems to be Ishmael’s orthodox indictment of the law as a mere instrument of power. However, the question of legal property ties in with the motif of self-ownership, crucial in the novel, notably via Ahab’s memorable claims to self-sovereignty but also via the more subdued issue of slavery. This article interrogates the implicit alignment of the law of property with the ontological issue of self-ownership, which wryly tends to exculpate human legal construct on the ground that it would merely emanate from a metaphysical law of generalized predation and appropriation—which also applies to literature, and most notoriously to Melville’s Moby-Dick, as a summa of plagiarized archives.

The Dialectics of Free Energy Minimization

Karl Friston’s free energy minimization has been received with great enthusiasm. With good reason: it not only makes the bold claim to a unifying theory of the brain, but it is presented as an a priori principle applicable to living systems in general. In this article, we set out to show how the breadth of scope of Friston’s framework converges with the dialectics of Georg Hegel. Through an appeal to the work of Catherine Malabou, we aim to demonstrate how Friston not only reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from the perspective of neuroscience, but that the implicit alignment with Hegel necessitates a reading of free energy minimization from the perspective of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It is this reading that moves beyond the discussion between cognitivism and enactivism surrounding Friston’s framework; beyond the question whether the organism is a secluded entity separated from its surroundings, or whether it is a dynamical system characterized by perpetual openness and mutual exchange. From a Hegelian perspective, it is the tension between both positions itself that is operative at the level of the organism; as a contradiction the organism sustains over the course of its life. Not only does the organism’s secluded existence depend on a perpetual relation with its surroundings, but the condition for there to be such a relation is the existence of a secluded entity. We intend to show how this contradiction—tension internalized—is at the center of Friston’s anticipatory organism; how it is this contradiction that grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization.

Conversation Strategy Comparison between Explicit Request and Implicit Alignment in Object Reference Conversation

Conversation Strategy Comparison between Explicit Request and Implicit Alignment in Object Reference Conversation

Self-propelled hard disks: implicit alignment and transition to collective motion

We formulate a model of self-propelled hard disks whose dynamics is governed by mutually coupled vectors for velocity and body orientation. Numerical integration at low densities reveals that the expected transition from isotropic to aligned collective motion is present. However, the transition at the Landau mean-field level is strongly first-order, while it is continuous in the Vicsek model. We show that this difference is rooted in the completely opposite effect that individual scattering events have on alignment. We argue that such differences will generically hold for systems of self-propelled particles with repulsive short-ranged interactions. We obtain these results by matching the numerical results to the framework of Boltzmann theory, based on the statistics of binary scattering properties, always assuming that the system is small enough to stay homogeneous. We further show that the presence of noise in the dynamics can change the nature of the transition from discontinuous to continuous.

EMBEDDED FINGERPRINT MATCHING ON SMART CARD

This paper describes an embedded minutia-based matching algorithm using the reference point neighborhoods minutiae. The proposed matching algorithm is implemented in restricted environments such as smart card devices requiring careful monitoring of both memory and processing time usage. The proposed algorithm uses a circular tessellation to encode fingerprint features in neighborhood minutia localization binary codes. The objective of the present study is the development of a new matching approach which reduces both computing time and required space memory for fingerprint matching on Java Card. The main advantage of our approach is avoiding the implicit alignment of fingerprint images during the matching process while improving the fingerprint verification accuracy. Tests carried out on the public fingerprint databases DB1-a and DB2-a of FVC2002 have shown the effectiveness of our approach.

Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self

Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 296 + xii pages. $65.Misty Anderson's study of how Methodism was represented in eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, relationship between Christianity and secular, and, indeed, very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question-not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in eighteenth century-Anderson's analysis of print texts from novel to hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as the self. This is a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an openeyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in history of the modern.Of course, as introduction amply documents, Anderson's focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in midst of historical debates over social relationships between various types of Christianity and alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as the Protestant ethic while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its realist aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about dominance of skepticism by taking seriously proposition that Methodism, largest new religious movement in period and at heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in 'a secular age,' which redefines rather than destroys modern belief (6). This is to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as key to understanding formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is not that secular and religious capture complete horizon of possibility in project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines era (11).The concept of self is central to Anderson's cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for subjectivity. Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman's The Making of Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of term back to John Locke's conscious, thinking thing, individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. …

A Fingerprint Recognizer Using Interminutiae Binary Constraint Graph

The main aim of this paper is to describe an inter-minutiae binary network-based global matching algorithm. It exploits absolute minutiae features represented by a binary constraint graph. A dynamic tolerance area in the neighborhood of the minutiae combined with the search-rearrangement method on the binary constraint graph is used to perform the global matching. Tests on the public fingerprint databases DB1 and DB2 FVC2002 showed that our approach outperforms those based on the forward tracking search only. The most relevant aspect of this algorithm is that it does not require implicit alignment of the two fingerprint images due to the strong dependencies between minutiae described by the constraint graph.

Comparative modeling without implicit sequence alignments

The number of known protein sequences is about thousand times larger than the number of experimentally solved 3D structures. For more than half of the protein sequences a close or distant structural analog could be identified. The key starting point in a classical comparative modeling is to generate the best possible sequence alignment with a template or templates. With decreasing sequence similarity, the number of errors in the alignments increases and these errors are the main causes of the decreasing accuracy of the molecular models generated. Here we propose a new approach to comparative modeling, which does not require the implicit alignment - the model building phase explores geometric, evolutionary and physical properties of a template (or templates). The proposed method requires prior identification of a template, although the initial sequence alignment is ignored. The model is built using a very efficient reduced representation search engine CABS to find the best possible superposition of the query protein onto the template represented as a 3D multi-featured scaffold. The criteria used include: sequence similarity, predicted secondary structure consistency, local geometric features and hydrophobicity profile. For more difficult cases, the new method qualitatively outperforms existing schemes of comparative modeling. The algorithm unifies de novo modeling, 3D threading and sequence-based methods. The main idea is general and could be easily combined with other efficient modeling tools as Rosetta, UNRES and others.

Europe: The Partial Partner

I American-European relations may now best be described as a partnership-a character- ization that suggests the currently protean quality of Atlantic ties. Partial may mean favoring or inclined to favor one party over another; or it may signify a part of a greater whole; or it may simply convey the sense of something that is not general or total, something incomplete or otherwise disengaged. The term partner, similarly, implies several gradations of alliance cohesion, ranging from silent and grudging partnership to visible and active coopera- tion. These distinctions are useful in differentiating the similar and divergent responses of the United States and the European states to a series of regional and functional issues and to assess from these varied reactions whether the Atlantic Alliance is apt and able to meet the common problems confronting the Western democracies in concert or, as Aldo Moro once suggested, through parallel convergencies of actions and policies. On some questions the European states can be expected to be partial to United States leadership and to subordinate their qualms and qualifications to American wishes. Though this is most commonly the case on questions of European defense and deterrence, even here great variations in interests, perspectives, and commitments are detectable. On other questions European and American actions will be different but will converge on impact as parts of a greater policy whole. The Berlin and German accords of the early 1970s illustrate this level of cooperation. On still other issues, usually those of lesser urgency, there will be little need for alignment. Burden sharing within the European Community budget comes within this rubric although at one time such a question would have risen to the level of Atlantic concern, just as the question of enlarging the Atlantic Alliance has today. On still other questions-and increasingly this appears to be the case-Europeans will be inclined to change partners, preferring third world states or even implicit alignment with the Soviet Union over the United States. Or, they will stand apart, either feigning to be impartial observers or unsolicitedly advancing themselves as inferlocufeurs valables where they may not be wanted, as in the