Augmented 2D-TAN: A Two-stage Approach for Human-centric Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

We propose an effective two-stage approach to tackle the problem of language-based Human-centric Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (HC-STVG) task. In the first stage, we propose an Augmented 2D Temporal Adjacent Network (Augmented 2D-TAN) to temporally ground the target moment corresponding to the given description. Primarily, we improve the original 2D-TAN from two aspects: First, a temporal context-aware Bi-LSTM Aggregation Module is developed to aggregate clip-level representations, replacing the original max-pooling. Second, we propose to employ Random Concatenation Augmentation (RCA) mechanism during the training phase. In the second stage, we use pretrained MDETR model to generate per-frame bounding boxes via language query, and design a set of hand-crafted rules to select the best matching bounding box outputted by MDETR for each frame within the grounded moment.Comment: Best Paper Award at the 3rd Person in Context (PIC) Challenge CVPR Workshop 202

PyPose v0.6: The Imperative Programming Interface for Robotics

PyPose is an open-source library for robot learning. It combines a learning-based approach with physics-based optimization, which enables seamless end-to-end robot learning. It has been used in many tasks due to its meticulously designed application programming interface (API) and efficient implementation. From its initial launch in early 2022, PyPose has experienced significant enhancements, incorporating a wide variety of new features into its platform. To satisfy the growing demand for understanding and utilizing the library and reduce the learning curve of new users, we present the fundamental design principle of the imperative programming interface, and showcase the flexible usage of diverse functionalities and modules using an extremely simple Dubins car example. We also demonstrate that the PyPose can be easily used to navigate a real quadruped robot with a few lines of code

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Low temperature annealing for vanadium dioxide in photonic integrated circuits

We show at the annealing temperature of vanadium dioxide (VO2) fabricated using atomic layer deposition can be suppressed to 300 °C, significantly improving the compatibility of VO2 with photonic integrated circuits

Metasurface-integrated microring resonators for off-chip vortex beam generation

Vortex beams that carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) have garnered significant attention, as they bring the degree of freedom of OAM to modern optical communication, beyond the traditional degrees of freedom such as amplitude, phase and polarization. Meanwhile, metasurfaces composed of ultra-thin layers of subwavelength structures have also been utilized for light manipulation. Nevertheless, the combination of these two concepts has not been explored in the form of microring resonator-based light emitter. In this work, we demonstrate a Si-based, passive, conjugate symmetry-breaking emitter in numerical simulation. This broken conjugate symmetry enables the emitter to generate OAMs with different topological charges, when it is driven at two opposite input directions

Vanadium dioxide-enabled tunable metasurfaces

We numerically demonstrate output tuning in vanadium dioxide (VO2) metasurfaces at 1550 nm, which is enabled by the phase transition of VO2. The designs could be utilized in applications such as imaging and LiDAR sensing

Optical modulation in a Si microring resonator inspired by biological classical conditioning

In this oral presentation, we propose and numerically demonstrate photonic classical conditioning in a Si microring resonator, to emulate Pavlov’s dog experiment using the insulator-metal transition in a VO2 thin film patch integrated with the resonator

Will climate change make Chinese people more comfortable? A scenario analysis based on the weather preference index

Assessing the climate change impact (CCI) on weather conditions is important for addressing climate change and promoting sustainable development. This study used a weather preference index (WPI) as an indicator to evaluate the CCI on weather conditions in China under different scenarios from 2025 to 2100. First, we analyzed the change in the WPI in China from 1971 to 2013. Then, we estimated the trends in the WPI in China from 2025 to 2100 under different representative concentration pathways (RCPs) based on global climate models. We found that China’s weather conditions improved from 1971 to 2013, as the national average WPI increased from 1.34 to 1.59 with a change rate of 0.03 per decade (0.03/10 a). Under all climate change scenarios, the weather conditions in China will deteriorate. The change rates of the WPI will be −0.19/10 a ∼ − 0.01/10 a. The number of people experiencing deteriorated weather conditions will be 0.71 billion ∼ 1.22 billion, accounting for 53.28% ∼ 91.58% of the total population in China. We also found that the area of the regions with deteriorated weather conditions under all three climate change scenarios will be 2.34 million km ^2 , accounting for 24.31% of China’s total land area. At the same time, as the emissions concentrations increase from RCP2.6 to RCP8.5, the area of the regions with severely deteriorated weather conditions in China will increase from 0 to 3.27 million km ^2 . Therefore, we suggest that China needs to implement effective measures to address climate change in the future and focus on the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change in regions with deteriorated weather conditions

Evaluating the Impacts of Future Urban Expansion on Surface Runoff in an Alpine Basin by Coupling the LUSD-Urban and SCS-CN Models

Effective evaluations of the future urban expansion impacts (UEI) on surface runoff in alpine basins are full of challenges due to the lack of reliable methods. Our objective was to provide a new approach by coupling the Land Use Scenario Dynamics-urban (LUSD-urban) and Soil Conservation Service-Curve Number (SCS-CN) models to estimate the future UEI on surface runoff. Taking the Qinghaihu-Huangshui basin (QHB) in the Tibetan Plateau, China, as an example, we first applied the SCS-CN model to quantify the surface runoff in 2000 and 2018 and analyzed the changes in surface runoff. Next, we applied the LUSD-urban model to simulate urban expansion under five localized shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) from 2018 to 2050. Finally, we assessed the UEI on surface runoff in the QHB from 2018 to 2050. We found that coupling the LUSD-urban and SCS-CN models could effectually evaluate the future UEI on surface runoff. Compared with the combination of the Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) and SCS-CN models, our method reduced the absolute evaluation errors from 3.40% and 11.78% to 0.18% and 4.23%, respectively. In addition, the results showed that future urban expansion will have severe impacts on surface runoff in the valley region. For example, as a result of urban expansion, the surface runoff in the Huangzhong, Xining, and Datong catchments will increase by 4.90–9.01%, 4.25–7.36%, and 2.33–3.95%, respectively. Therefore, we believe that the coupled model can be utilized to evaluate the future UEI on surface runoff in alpine basins. In addition, the local government should pay attention to flood risk prevention, especially in the valley region, and adopt reasonable urban planning with soft and hard adaptation measures to promote the sustainable development of alpine basins under rapid urban expansion