The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2018 is the sixth annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of over eighty trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis and a “real-time” experiment simulating a situation where a tracker processes images as if provided by a continuously running sensor. A long-term tracking subchallenge has been introduced to the set of standard VOT sub-challenges. The new subchallenge focuses on long-term tracking properties, namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. A new dataset has been compiled and a performance evaluation methodology that focuses on long-term tracking capabilities has been adopted. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard short-term and the new long-term tracking subchallenges. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website ( http://votchallenge.net ).

Body joints, directly obtained from a pose estimation model, have proven effective for action recognition. Existing works focus on analyzing the dynamics of human joints. However, except joints, humans also explore motions of limbs for understanding actions. Given this observation, we investigate the dynamics of human limbs for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we represent an edge in a graph of a human skeleton by integrating its spatial neighboring edges (for encoding the cooperation between different limbs) and its temporal neighboring edges (for achieving the consistency of movements in an action). Based on this new edge representation, we devise a graph edge convolutional neural network (CNN). Considering the complementarity between graph node convolution and edge convolution, we further construct two hybrid networks by introducing different shared intermediate layers to integrate graph node and edge CNNs. Our contributions are twofold, graph edge convolution and hybrid networks for integrating the proposed edge convolution and the conventional node convolution. Experimental results on the Kinetics and NTU-RGB+D data sets demonstrate that our graph edge convolution is effective at capturing the characteristics of actions and that our graph edge CNN significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art skeleton-based action recognition methods.

The design of fast algorithms for combinatorial optimization greatly contributes to a plethora of domains such as logistics, finance, and chemistry. Quantum approximate optimization algorithms (QAOAs), which utilize the power of quantum machines and inherit the spirit of adiabatic evolution, are approaches to tackle combinatorial problems with potential runtime speedups. However, hurdled by the limited quantum resources nowadays, QAOAs are infeasible to manipulate large-scale problems. To address this issue, here we revisit the MaxCut problem via the divide-and-conquer heuristic: seek the solutions of subgraphs in parallel and then merge these solutions to obtain the global solution. Because of the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry in MaxCut, we prove that the merging process can be further cast into a new MaxCut problem and thus be addressed by QAOAs or other MaxCut solvers. In view of this, we propose QAOA-in-QAOA (${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$) to solve arbitrary large-scale MaxCut problems using small quantum machines. We also prove that the performance of ${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$ is lower bounded with respect to the divide-and-conquer process. Experiment results illustrate that, under different graph settings, ${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$ attains a competitive or even better performance over classical algorithms when the node count is around $2000$. Our method can be seamlessly embedded into other advanced strategies to enhance the capability of QAOAs in large-scale combinatorial optimization problems.

We propose a Deep Boosting Framework (DBF) for real-world image denoising by integrating the deep learning technique into the boosting algorithm. The DBF replaces conventional handcrafted boosting units by elaborate convolutional neural networks, which brings notable advantages in terms of both performance and speed. We design a lightweight Dense Dilated Fusion Network (DDFN) as an embodiment of the boosting unit, which addresses the vanishing of gradients during training due to the cascading of networks while promoting the efficiency of limited parameters. The capabilities of the proposed method are first validated on several representative simulation tasks including non-blind and blind Gaussian denoising and JPEG image deblocking. We then focus on a practical scenario to tackle with the complex and challenging real-world noise. To facilitate leaning-based methods including ours, we build a new Real-world Image Denoising (RID) dataset, which contains 200 pairs of high-resolution images with diverse scene content under various shooting conditions. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive analysis on the domain shift issue for real-world denoising and propose an effective one-shot domain transfer scheme to address this issue. Comprehensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method significantly surpasses existing methods on the task of real-world image denoising.

The field of deep learning has witnessed significant progress in recent times, particularly in areas such as computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and speech. The use of large-scale models trained on vast amounts of data holds immense promise for practical applications, enhancing industrial productivity and facilitating social development. However, it suffers extremely from the unstable training process and stringent requirements of computational resources. With the increasing demands on the adaption of computational capacity, though numerous studies have explored the efficient training field to a certain extent, a comprehensive summarization/guideline on those general acceleration techniques of training large-scale deep learning models is still much anticipated. In this survey, we present a detailed review of the general techniques for training acceleration. We consider the fundamental update formulation and split its basic components into five main perspectives: (1) “data-centric,” including dataset regularization, data sampling, and data-centric curriculum learning techniques, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the data samples; (2) “model-centric,” including acceleration of basic modules, compression training, model initialization, and model-centric curriculum learning techniques, which focus on accelerating the training via reducing the calculations on parameters and providing better initialization; (3) “optimization-centric,” including the selection of learning rate, the employment of large batch size, the designs of efficient objectives, and model average techniques, which pay attention to the training policy and improving the generality for the large-scale models; (4) “budgeted training,” including some distinctive acceleration methods on source-constrained situations, e.g., for limitation on the total iterations; and (5) “system-centric,” including some efficient distributed frameworks and open source libraries that provide adequate hardware support for the implementation of the above-mentioned acceleration algorithms. By presenting this comprehensive taxonomy, our survey presents a comprehensive review to understand the general mechanisms within each component and their joint interaction. Meanwhile, we further provide a detailed analysis and discussion of future works on the development of general acceleration techniques, which could inspire us to re-think and design novel efficient paradigms. Overall, we hope that this survey will serve as a valuable guideline for general efficient training.