6 research outputs found
Trading-off Mutual Information on Feature Aggregation for Face Recognition
Despite the advances in the field of Face Recognition (FR), the precision of
these methods is not yet sufficient. To improve the FR performance, this paper
proposes a technique to aggregate the outputs of two state-of-the-art (SOTA)
deep FR models, namely ArcFace and AdaFace. In our approach, we leverage the
transformer attention mechanism to exploit the relationship between different
parts of two feature maps. By doing so, we aim to enhance the overall
discriminative power of the FR system. One of the challenges in feature
aggregation is the effective modeling of both local and global dependencies.
Conventional transformers are known for their ability to capture long-range
dependencies, but they often struggle with modeling local dependencies
accurately. To address this limitation, we augment the self-attention mechanism
to capture both local and global dependencies effectively. This allows our
model to take advantage of the overlapping receptive fields present in
corresponding locations of the feature maps. However, fusing two feature maps
from different FR models might introduce redundancies to the face embedding.
Since these models often share identical backbone architectures, the resulting
feature maps may contain overlapping information, which can mislead the
training process. To overcome this problem, we leverage the principle of
Information Bottleneck to obtain a maximally informative facial representation.
This ensures that the aggregated features retain the most relevant and
discriminative information while minimizing redundant or misleading details. To
evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on
popular benchmarks and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms.
The consistent improvement we observed in these benchmarks demonstrates the
efficacy of our approach in enhancing FR performance.Comment: Accepted to 22 IEEE International Conference on Machine
Learning and Applications 2023 (ICMLA
Frequency Disentangled Features in Neural Image Compression
The design of a neural image compression network is governed by how well the
entropy model matches the true distribution of the latent code. Apart from the
model capacity, this ability is indirectly under the effect of how close the
relaxed quantization is to the actual hard quantization. Optimizing the
parameters of a rate-distortion variational autoencoder (R-D VAE) is ruled by
this approximated quantization scheme. In this paper, we propose a
feature-level frequency disentanglement to help the relaxed scalar quantization
achieve lower bit rates by guiding the high entropy latent features to include
most of the low-frequency texture of the image. In addition, to strengthen the
de-correlating power of the transformer-based analysis/synthesis transform, an
augmented self-attention score calculation based on the Hadamard product is
utilized during both encoding and decoding. Channel-wise autoregressive entropy
modeling takes advantage of the proposed frequency separation as it inherently
directs high-informational low-frequency channels to the first chunks and
conditions the future chunks on it. The proposed network not only outperforms
hand-engineered codecs, but also neural network-based codecs built on
computation-heavy spatially autoregressive entropy models.Comment: Accepted to 30 IEEE International Conference on Image
Processing (ICIP 2023
Multi-Context Dual Hyper-Prior Neural Image Compression
Transform and entropy models are the two core components in deep image
compression neural networks. Most existing learning-based image compression
methods utilize convolutional-based transform, which lacks the ability to model
long-range dependencies, primarily due to the limited receptive field of the
convolution operation. To address this limitation, we propose a
Transformer-based nonlinear transform. This transform has the remarkable
ability to efficiently capture both local and global information from the input
image, leading to a more decorrelated latent representation. In addition, we
introduce a novel entropy model that incorporates two different hyperpriors to
model cross-channel and spatial dependencies of the latent representation. To
further improve the entropy model, we add a global context that leverages
distant relationships to predict the current latent more accurately. This
global context employs a causal attention mechanism to extract long-range
information in a content-dependent manner. Our experiments show that our
proposed framework performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in terms
of rate-distortion performance.Comment: Accepted to IEEE 22 International Conference on Machine Learning
and Applications 2023 (ICMLA) - Selected for Oral Presentatio
AAFACE: Attribute-aware Attentional Network for Face Recognition
In this paper, we present a new multi-branch neural network that
simultaneously performs soft biometric (SB) prediction as an auxiliary modality
and face recognition (FR) as the main task. Our proposed network named AAFace
utilizes SB attributes to enhance the discriminative ability of FR
representation. To achieve this goal, we propose an attribute-aware attentional
integration (AAI) module to perform weighted integration of FR with SB feature
maps. Our proposed AAI module is not only fully context-aware but also capable
of learning complex relationships between input features by means of the
sequential multi-scale channel and spatial sub-modules. Experimental results
verify the superiority of our proposed network compared with the
state-of-the-art (SoTA) SB prediction and FR methods.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Image
Processing (ICIP 2023) as an oral presentatio
The exact synchronization timing between the cleavage embryo stage and duration of progesterone therapy-improved pregnancy rates in frozen embryo transfer cycles: A cross-sectional study
Background: Synchronization between the embryonic stage and the uterine endometrial lining is important in the outcomes of the vitrified-warmed embryo transfer (ET) cycles.
Objective: The aim was to investigate the effect of the exact synchronization between the cleavage stage of embryos and the duration of progesterone administration on the improvement of clinical outcomes in frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycles.
Materials and Methods: 312 FET cycles were categorized into two groups: (A) day- 3 ET after three days of progesterone administration (n = 177) and (B) day-2 or -4 ET after three days of progesterone administration (n = 135). Group B was further divided into two subgroups: B1: day-2 ET cycles, that the stage of embryos were less than the administrated progesterone and B2: day-4 ET cycles, that the stage of embryos were more than the administrated progesterone. The clinical outcome measures were compared between the groups.
Results: The pregnancy outcomes between groups A and B showed a significant differences in the chemical (40.1% vs 27.4%; p = 0.010) and clinical pregnancies (32.8% vs 22.2%; p = 0.040), respectively. The rate of miscarriage tended to be higher and live birth rate tended to be lower in group B than in group A. Also, significantly higher rates were noted in chemical pregnancy, clinical pregnancy, and live birth in group A when compared with subgroup B2.
Conclusion: Higher rates of pregnancy and live birth were achieved in day-3 ET after three days of progesterone administration in FET cycles.
Key words: Endometrium, Embryo transfer, Pregnancy, Live birth, Progesterone
The Exact Synchronization Timing Between the Cleavage Embryo Stage and Duration of Progesterone Therapy-improved Pregnancy Rates in Frozen Embryo Transfer Cycles: A Cross-sectional Study
Background: Synchronization between the embryonic stage and the uterine endometrial lining is important in the outcomes of the vitrified-warmed embryo transfer (ET) cycles.
Objective: The aim was to investigate the effect of the exact synchronization between the cleavage stage of embryos and the duration of progesterone administration on the improvement of clinical outcomes in frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycles.
Materials and Methods: 312 FET cycles were categorized into two groups: (A) day- 3 ET after three days of progesterone administration (n = 177) and (B) day-2 or -4 ET after three days of progesterone administration (n = 135). Group B was further divided into two subgroups: B1: day-2 ET cycles, that the stage of embryos were less than the administrated progesterone and B2: day-4 ET cycles, that the stage of embryos were more than the administrated progesterone. The clinical outcome measures were compared between the groups.
Results: The pregnancy outcomes between groups A and B showed a significant differences in the chemical (40.1% vs 27.4%; p = 0.010) and clinical pregnancies (32.8% vs 22.2%; p = 0.040), respectively. The rate of miscarriage tended to be higher and live birth rate tended to be lower in group B than in group A. Also, significantly higher rates were noted in chemical pregnancy, clinical pregnancy, and live birth in group A when compared with subgroup B2.
Conclusion: Higher rates of pregnancy and live birth were achieved in day-3 ET after three days of progesterone administration in FET cycles.
Key words: Endometrium, Embryo transfer, Pregnancy, Live birth, Progesterone