Attention-Aware Face Hallucination via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Face hallucination is a domain-specific super-resolution problem with the goal to generate high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) input images. In contrast to existing methods that often learn a single patch-to-patch mapping from LR to HR images and are regardless of the contextual interdependency between patches, we propose a novel Attention-aware Face Hallucination (Attention-FH) framework which resorts to deep reinforcement learning for sequentially discovering attended patches and then performing the facial part enhancement by fully exploiting the global interdependency of the image. Specifically, in each time step, the recurrent policy network is proposed to dynamically specify a new attended region by incorporating what happened in the past. The state (i.e., face hallucination result for the whole image) can thus be exploited and updated by the local enhancement network on the selected region. The Attention-FH approach jointly learns the recurrent policy network and local enhancement network through maximizing the long-term reward that reflects the hallucination performance over the whole image. Therefore, our proposed Attention-FH is capable of adaptively personalizing an optimal searching path for each face image according to its own characteristic. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-arts on in-the-wild faces with large pose and illumination variations

Gender Differences in Depressive Symptoms Among HIV-Positive Concordant and Discordant Heterosexual Couples in China.

HIV seropositive individuals and their heterosexual partners/spouses, either seropositive or seronegative, are facing several mental health challenges. The objective of this study was to examine gender differences in depressive symptoms among HIV-positive concordant and HIV-discordant couples. We identified heterosexual couples from participants of a randomized controlled trial conducted in Anhui province, China. A total of 265 couples, comprising 129 HIV+ male/HIV- female couples, 98 HIV- male/HIV+ female couples, and 38 HIV-positive concordant couples, were included in the analyses. We collected data using the computer-assisted personal interview method. We used a linear mixed-effects regression model to assess whether gender differences in depressive symptoms varied across couple types. HIV-positive women reported a significantly higher level of depressive symptoms than their partners/spouses. HIV-positive women with HIV-positive partners had higher depressive symptoms than those with HIV-negative partners, whereas HIV-positive men reported similar levels of depressive symptoms regardless of their partners' serostatus. Among the concordant couples, those with the highest annual family income showed the greatest gender differences in depressive symptoms. We suggest that family interventions should be gender- and couple-type specific and that mental health counseling is warranted not only for HIV-positive women but also for HIV-negative women in an HIV-affected relationship

Antiretroviral Therapy Initiation Following Policy Changes: Observations From China.

China's HIV/AIDS treatment policies have been evolving over the preceding decade. This study describes patterns of antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation for a sample of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) in rural Anhui, China, where most PLHIV were infected via paid plasma donation during the 1990s. A total of 481 PLHIV who were receiving ART were included in our analyses. Times between HIV diagnosis and the initiation of ART were examined relative to the time points when major ART-related policies changed in China. More than half (53%) of PLHIV who had been diagnosed by 2003 received ART within 6 months, whereas 93% of PLHIV who had been diagnosed in 2010 or later received ART within 6 months. The study results provide additional support that the "Four Frees and One Care" policy in 2003 and the relaxation of ART eligibility in 2010 have facilitated the initiation of treatment for PLHIV in China