Visual Comfort Assessment for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting

In recent years, visual comfort assessment (VCA) for 3D/stereoscopic content has aroused extensive attention. However, much less work has been done on the perceptual evaluation of stereoscopic image retargeting. In this paper, we first build a Stereoscopic Image Retargeting Database (SIRD), which contains source images and retargeted images produced by four typical stereoscopic retargeting methods. Then, the subjective experiment is conducted to assess four aspects of visual distortion, i.e. visual comfort, image quality, depth quality and the overall quality. Furthermore, we propose a Visual Comfort Assessment metric for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting (VCA-SIR). Based on the characteristics of stereoscopic retargeted images, the proposed model introduces novel features like disparity range, boundary disparity as well as disparity intensity distribution into the assessment model. Experimental results demonstrate that VCA-SIR can achieve high consistency with subjective perception

Empowering Collaborative Filtering with Principled Adversarial Contrastive Loss

Contrastive Learning (CL) has achieved impressive performance in self-supervised learning tasks, showing superior generalization ability. Inspired by the success, adopting CL into collaborative filtering (CF) is prevailing in semi-supervised top-K recommendations. The basic idea is to routinely conduct heuristic-based data augmentation and apply contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE) on the augmented views. Yet, some CF-tailored challenges make this adoption suboptimal, such as the issue of out-of-distribution, the risk of false negatives, and the nature of top-K evaluation. They necessitate the CL-based CF scheme to focus more on mining hard negatives and distinguishing false negatives from the vast unlabeled user-item interactions, for informative contrast signals. Worse still, there is limited understanding of contrastive loss in CF methods, especially w.r.t. its generalization ability. To bridge the gap, we delve into the reasons underpinning the success of contrastive loss in CF, and propose a principled Adversarial InfoNCE loss (AdvInfoNCE), which is a variant of InfoNCE, specially tailored for CF methods. AdvInfoNCE adaptively explores and assigns hardness to each negative instance in an adversarial fashion and further utilizes a fine-grained hardness-aware ranking criterion to empower the recommender's generalization ability. Training CF models with AdvInfoNCE, we validate the effectiveness of AdvInfoNCE on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets, thus showing its generalization ability to mitigate out-of-distribution problems. Given the theoretical guarantees and empirical superiority of AdvInfoNCE over most contrastive loss functions, we advocate its adoption as a standard loss in recommender systems, particularly for the out-of-distribution tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/LehengTHU/AdvInfoNCE.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 202

The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from submitted version

Sciences for The 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST)

The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is a dedicated photometric survey facility under construction jointly by the University of Science and Technology of China and Purple Mountain Observatory. It is equipped with a primary mirror of 2.5m in diameter, an active optical system, and a mosaic CCD camera of 0.73 Gpix on the main focus plane to achieve high-quality imaging over a field of view of 6.5 square degrees. The installation of WFST in the Lenghu observing site is planned to happen in the summer of 2023, and the operation is scheduled to commence within three months afterward. WFST will scan the northern sky in four optical bands (u, g, r, and i) at cadences from hourly/daily to semi-weekly in the deep high-cadence survey (DHS) and the wide field survey (WFS) programs, respectively. WFS reaches a depth of 22.27, 23.32, 22.84, and 22.31 in AB magnitudes in a nominal 30-second exposure in the four bands during a photometric night, respectively, enabling us to search tremendous amount of transients in the low-z universe and systematically investigate the variability of Galactic and extragalactic objects. Intranight 90s exposures as deep as 23 and 24 mag in u and g bands via DHS provide a unique opportunity to facilitate explorations of energetic transients in demand for high sensitivity, including the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave events detected by the second/third-generation GW detectors, supernovae within a few hours of their explosions, tidal disruption events and luminous fast optical transients even beyond a redshift of 1. Meanwhile, the final 6-year co-added images, anticipated to reach g about 25.5 mag in WFS or even deeper by 1.5 mag in DHS, will be of significant value to general Galactic and extragalactic sciences. The highly uniform legacy surveys of WFST will also serve as an indispensable complement to those of LSST which monitors the southern sky.Comment: 46 pages, submitted to SCMP

Erratum: “The eighth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: first data from SDSS-III” (2011, ApJS, 193, 29)

Section 3.5 of Aihara et al. (2011) described various sources of systematic error in the astrometry of the imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In addition to these sources of error, there is an additional and more serious error, which introduces a large systematic shift in the astrometry over a large area around the north celestial pole. The region has irregular boundaries but in places extends as far south as declination δ ≈ 41◦. The sense of the shift is that the positions of all sources in the affected area are offset by roughly 250 mas in a northwest direction. We have updated the SDSS online documentation to reflect these errors, and to provide detailed quality information for each SDSS field

Comparison of Electronic Taxpayer Services in OECD Countries and Recommendations for China Comparison of Electronic Taxpayer Services in OECD Countries and Recommendations for China

Through comparing development trend electronic taxpayer services in OECD countries and analyzing its drawbacks, it gained beneficial experience of electronic taxpayer services. Then, it came up with policy recommendations for China. It is recommended that China should raise the electronic taxpayer services to national strategy level, improve the efficiency of electronic taxpayer services in line with the taxpayer-centered principle, develop ways of electronic taxpayer services with Chinese characteristics, increase convenience for taxpayers on the precondition of guaranteeing information security, make effort to reduce compliance costs of taxpayers, and promote popularization of electronic taxpayer services with the framework of laws

International Comparison, Regional Characteristics and Regulatory Management of Structural Rise in the Prices of Chinese Industrial and Agricultural Products

China's price fluctuations increasingly exhibit significant structural characteristics, and since 2003, there have been several rounds of significant structural price rise. The degree of structural rise in the prices of industrial and agricultural products in China is not only higher than in the general developed countries and developing countries, but also more prominent than in other transition economies. And the structural rise in the prices of Chinese industrial and agricultural products exhibits significant economic zone differences: the structural fluctuations are the greatest in the central and western regions, significantly higher than in the eastern regions as well as the national average. From the perspective of causes of structural rise in the prices of Chinese industrial and agricultural products, the government must aim to coordinate the industrial and agricultural investments and bridge the gap in the industrial and agricultural technologies and supply capacity