Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a query image with only a few annotated examples in support images. Although progress has been made recently by combining prototype-based metric learning, existing methods still face two main challenges. First, various intra-class objects between the support and query images or semantically similar inter-class objects can seriously harm the segmentation performance due to their poor feature representations. Second, the latent novel classes are treated as the background in most methods, leading to a learning bias, whereby these novel classes are difficult to correctly segment as foreground. To solve these problems, we propose a dual-branch learning method. The class-specific branch encourages representations of objects to be more distinguishable by increasing the inter-class distance while decreasing the intra-class distance. In parallel, the class-agnostic branch focuses on minimizing the foreground class feature distribution and maximizing the features between the foreground and background, thus increasing the generalizability to novel classes in the test stage. Furthermore, to obtain more representative features, pixel-level and prototype-level semantic learning are both involved in the two branches. The method is evaluated on PASCAL-5 ⁱ 1-shot, PASCAL-5 ⁱ 5-shot, COCO-20 ⁱ 1-shot, and COCO-20 ⁱ 5-shot, and extensive experiments show that our approach is effective for few-shot semantic segmentation despite its simplicity.

Text sentiment analysis is an important task in natural language processing and has always been a hot research topic. However, in low-resource regions such as South Asia, where languages like Bengali are widely used, the research interest is relatively low compared to high-resource regions due to limited computational resources, flexible word order, and high inflectional nature of the language. With the development of quantum technology, quantum machine learning models leverage the superposition property of qubits to enhance model expressiveness and achieve faster computation compared to classical systems. To promote the development of quantum machine learning in low-resource language domains, we propose a quantum-classical hybrid architecture. This architecture utilizes a pre-trained multilingual BERT model to obtain vector representations of words and combines the proposed Batched Upload Quantum Recurrent Neural Network (BUQRNN) and Parameter Non-shared Batched Upload Quantum Recurrent Neural Network (PN-BUQRNN) as feature extraction models for sentiment analysis in Bengali. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed BUQRNN structure achieves a maximum accuracy improvement of 0.993% in Bengali text classification tasks while reducing average model complexity by 12%. The PN-BUQRNN structure surpasses the BUQRNN structure once again and outperforms classical architectures in certain tasks.

Deep learning has been widely used in remote sensing image segmentation, while a lack of training data remains a significant issue. The few-shot segmentation of remote sensing images refers to the segmenting of novel classes with a few annotated samples. Although the few-shot segmentation of remote sensing images method based on meta-learning can get rid of the dependence on large data training, the generalization ability of the model is still low. This work presents a few-shot segmentation of remote sensing images with a self-supervised background learner to boost the generalization capacity for unseen categories to handle this challenge. The methodology in this paper is divided into two main modules: a meta learner and a background learner. The background learner supervises the feature extractor to learning latent categories in the image background. The meta learner expands on the classic metric learning framework by optimizing feature representation through contrastive learning between target classes and latent classes acquired from the background learner. Experiments on the Vaihingen dataset and the Zurich Summer dataset show that our model has satisfactory in-domain and cross-domain transferring abilities. In addition, broad experimental evaluations on PASCAL-5ⁱ and COCO-20ⁱ demonstrate that our model outperforms the prior works of few-shot segmentation. Our approach surpassed previous methods by 1.1% with ResNet-101 in a 1-way 5-shot setting.

Recently, memory-based methods have exhibited remarkable performance in Video Object Segmentation (VOS) by employing non-local pixel-wise matching between the query and memory. Nevertheless, these methods suffer from two limitations: 1) Non-local pixel-wise matching can result in the incorrect segmentation of background distractor objects, and 2) memory features with substantial temporal redundancy consume significant computing resources and reduce the inference speed. To address the limitations, we first propose a local attention mechanism to suppress background features, and we introduce a novel training framework based on contrast learning to ensure the network learns reliable and robust pixel-wise correspondence between query and memory. We adaptively determine whether to update the memory based on the variation of foreground objects. Next, we propose a dynamic memory bank, which utilizes a lightweight and differentiable soft modulation gate to determine the number of memory features to remove along the temporal dimension. This allows efficient and flexible management of memory features. Our network achieves competitive results (e.g., 92.1% on DAVIS 2016 val, 87.6%/81.3% on DAVIS 2017 val/test, 87.0% on YouTube-VOS 2018 val) compared with the state-of-the-art methods while maintaining a faster inference speed of 25+FPS. Moreover, our network demonstrates a favorable balance between performance and speed when dealing with the long-time video dataset.