Deep generative models are a class of techniques that train deep neural networks to model the distribution of training samples. Research has fragmented into various interconnected approaches, each of which make trade-offs including run-time, diversity, and architectural restrictions. In particular, this compendium covers energy-based models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models, normalizing flows, in addition to numerous hybrid approaches. These techniques are compared and contrasted, explaining the premises behind each and how they are interrelated, while reviewing current state-of-the-art advances and implementations.

Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Human Action Recognition (HAR) for CCTV-oriented applications is still a challenging problem. Real-world scenarios HAR implementations is difficult because of the gap between Deep Learning data requirements and what the CCTV-based frameworks can offer in terms of data recording equipments. We propose to reduce this gap by exploiting human poses provided by the OpenPose, which has been already proven to be an effective detector in CCTV-like recordings for tracking applications. Therefore, in this work, we first propose ActionXPose: a novel 2D pose-based approach for pose-level HAR. ActionXPose extracts low- and high-level features from body poses which are provided to a Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network and a 1D Convolutional Neural Network for the classification. We provide a new dataset, named ISLD, for realistic pose-level HAR in a CCTV-like environment, recorded in the Intelligent Sensing Lab. ActionXPose is extensively tested on ISLD under multiple experimental settings, e.g. Dataset Augmentation and Cross-Dataset setting, as well as revising other existing datasets for HAR. ActionXPose achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, very high robustness to occlusions and missing data, and promising results for practical implementation in real-world applications.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an important technology for the monitoring, management, and control of communication systems. In recent years, machine learning approaches are becoming popular to improve the effectiveness of AMC for radio signals. However, the automatic modulation open-set recognition (AMOSR) scheme that aims to identify the known modulation types and recognize the unknown modulation signals is not well studied. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal marginal prototype framework for radio frequency (RF) signals ( MMPRF ) to improve AMOSR performance. First, MMPRF addresses the problem of simultaneous recognition of closed and open sets by partitioning the feature space in the way of one versus other and marginal restrictions. Second, we exploit the wireless signal domain knowledge to extract a series of signal-related features to enhance the AMOSR capability. In addition, we propose a GAN-based unknown sample generation strategy to allow the model to understand the unknown world. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several publicly available radio modulation data, and experimental results show that our proposed MMPRF outperforms the state-of-the-art AMOSR methods.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods typically rely on the reprojection error to capture geometric relationships between successive frames in static environments. However, this assumption does not hold in dynamic objects in scenarios, leading to errors during the view synthesis stage, such as feature mismatch and occlusion, which can significantly reduce the accuracy of the generated depth maps. To address this problem, we propose a novel dynamic cost volume that exploits residual optical flow to describe moving objects, improving incorrectly occluded regions in static cost volumes used in previous work. Nevertheless, the dynamic cost volume inevitably generates extra occlusions and noise, thus we alleviate this by designing a fusion module that makes static and dynamic cost volumes compensate for each other. In other words, occlusion from the static volume is refined by the dynamic volume, and incorrect information from the dynamic volume is eliminated by the static volume. Furthermore, we propose a pyramid distillation loss to reduce photometric error inaccuracy at low resolutions and an adaptive photometric error loss to alleviate the flow direction of the large gradient in the occlusion regions. We conducted extensive experiments on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model outperforms previously published baselines for self-supervised monocular depth estimation.