Datasets:

charlieoneill

/

cs.LG

like 0

A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection

In this work, we present OpenSeeD, a simple Open-vocabulary Segmentation and Detection framework that learns from different segmentation and detection datasets. To bridge the gap of vocabulary and annotation granularity, we first introduce a pretrained text encoder to encode all the visual concepts in two tasks and learn a common semantic space for them. This gives us reasonably good results compared with the counterparts trained on segmentation task only. To further reconcile them, we locate two discrepancies: i) task discrepancy -- segmentation requires extracting masks for both foreground objects and background stuff, while detection merely cares about the former; ii) data discrepancy -- box and mask annotations are with different spatial granularity, and thus not directly interchangeable. We propose a decoupled foreground/background decoding and a conditioned mask decoding to address these issues, respectively. To this end, we develop a simple encoder-decoder model encompassing all three techniques and train it jointly on COCO and Objects365. After pretraining, our model exhibits competitive or stronger zero-shot transferability for both segmentation and detection. Specifically, OpenSeeD beats the state-of-the-art method for open-vocabulary instance and panoptic segmentation across 5 datasets, and outperforms previous work for open-vocabulary detection on LVIS and ODinW under similar settings. When transferred to specific tasks, our model achieves new SoTA on panoptic segmentation on COCO and ADE20K, and instance segmentation on ADE20K and Cityscapes. Finally, we note that OpenSeed is the first to explore the potential of joint training on segmentation and detection, and hope it can be received as a strong baseline for developing a single model for open-vocabulary segmentation and detection.

Hao Zhang, Feng Li, Xueyan Zou, Shilong Liu, Chunyuan Li, Jianwei Yang, Lei Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 1020-1031

iccv

Gradient-based Sampling for Class Imbalanced Semi-supervised Object Detection

Current semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) algorithms typically assume class balanced datasets (PASCAL VOC etc.) or slightly class imbalanced datasets (MSCOCO, etc). This assumption can be easily violated since real world datasets can be extremely class imbalanced in nature, thus making the performance of semi-supervised object detectors far from satisfactory. Besides, the research for this problem in SSOD is severely under-explored. To bridge this research gap, we comprehensively study the class imbalance problem for SSOD under more challenging scenarios, thus forming the first experimental setting for class imbalanced SSOD (CI-SSOD). Moreover, we propose a simple yet effective gradient-based sampling framework that tackles the class imbalance problem from the perspective of two types of confirmation biases. To tackle confirmation bias towards majority classes, the gradient-based reweighting and gradient-based thresholding modules leverage the gradients from each class to fully balance the influence of the majority and minority classes. To tackle the confirmation bias from incorrect pseudo labels of minority classes, the class-rebalancing sampling module resamples unlabeled data following the guidance of the gradient-based reweighting module. Experiments on three proposed sub-tasks, namely MS-COCO, MS-COCO- Object365 and LVIS, suggest that our method outperforms current class imbalanced object detectors by clear margins, serving as a baseline for future research in CISSOD. Code will be available at https://github.com/nightkeepers/CI-SSOD.

Jiaming Li, Xiangru Lin, Wei Zhang, Xiao Tan, Yingying Li, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Guanbin Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 16390-16400

iccv

CT-GAT: Cross-Task Generative Adversarial Attack based on Transferability

Neural network models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and adversarial transferability further increases the risk of adversarial attacks. Current methods based on transferability often rely on substitute models, which can be impractical and costly in real-world scenarios due to the unavailability of training data and the victim model’s structural details. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that directly constructs adversarial examples by extracting transferable features across various tasks. Our key insight is that adversarial transferability can extend across different tasks. Specifically, we train a sequence-to-sequence generative model named CT-GAT (Cross-Task Generative Adversarial Attack) using adversarial sample data collected from multiple tasks to acquire universal adversarial features and generate adversarial examples for different tasks.We conduct experiments on ten distinct datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves superior attack performance with small cost.

Minxuan Lv, Chengwei Dai, Kun Li, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu

emnlp

Data Feedback Loops: Model-driven Amplification of Dataset Biases

Datasets scraped from the internet have been critical to large-scale machine learning. Yet, its success puts the utility of future internet-derived datasets at potential risk, as model outputs begin to replace human annotations as a source of supervision. In this work, we formalize a system where interactions with one model are recorded as history and scraped as training data in the future. We then analyze its stability over time by tracking changes to a test-time bias statistic (e.g. gender bias of model predictions). We find that the degree of bias amplification is closely linked to whether the model’s outputs behave like samples from the training distribution, a behavior which we characterize and define as uniform faithfulness. Experiments in three conditional prediction scenarios – image classification, visual role-labeling, and language generation – demonstrate that models that exhibit a sampling-like behavior are more faithful and thus more stable. Based on this insight, we propose an intervention to help mitigate and stabilize unstable feedback systems.

Rohan Taori, Tatsunori Hashimoto

icml

Not All Semantics are Created Equal: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning with Automatic Temperature Individualization

In this paper, we aim to optimize a contrastive loss with individualized temperatures in a principled manner. The common practice of using a global temperature parameter $\tau$ ignores the fact that “not all semantics are created equal", meaning that different anchor data may have different numbers of samples with similar semantics, especially when data exhibits long-tails. First, we propose a new robust contrastive loss inspired by distributionally robust optimization (DRO), providing us an intuition about the effect of $\tau$ and a mechanism for automatic temperature individualization. Then, we propose an efficient stochastic algorithm for optimizing the robust contrastive loss with a provable convergence guarantee without using large mini-batch sizes. Theoretical and experimental results show that our algorithm automatically learns a suitable $\tau$ for each sample. Specifically, samples with frequent semantics use large temperatures to keep local semantic structures, while samples with rare semantics use small temperatures to induce more separable features. Our method not only outperforms prior strong baselines (e.g., SimCLR, CLIP) on unimodal and bimodal tasks with larger improvements on imbalanced data but also is less sensitive to hyper-parameters. To our best knowledge, this is the first methodical approach to optimizing a contrastive loss with individualized temperatures. Our proposed algorithms are implemented in the LibAUC library at https://libauc.org.

Zi-Hao Qiu, Quanqi Hu, Zhuoning Yuan, Denny Zhou, Lijun Zhang, Tianbao Yang

icml

BARA: Efficient Incentive Mechanism with Online Reward Budget Allocation in Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a prospective distributed machine learning framework that can preserve data privacy. In particular, cross-silo FL can complete model training by making isolated data islands of different organizations collaborate with a parameter server (PS) via exchanging model parameters for multiple communication rounds. In cross-silo FL, an incentive mechanism is indispensable for motivating data owners to contribute their models to FL training. However, how to allocate the reward budget among different rounds is an essential but complicated problem largely overlooked by existing works. The challenge of this problem lies in the opaque feedback between reward budget allocation and model utility improvement of FL, making the optimal reward budget allocation complicated. To address this problem, we design an online reward budget allocation algorithm using Bayesian optimization named BARA (Budget Allocation for Reverse Auction). Specifically, BARA can model the complicated relationship between reward budget allocation and final model accuracy in FL based on historical training records so that the reward budget allocated to each communication round is dynamically optimized so as to maximize the final model utility. We further incorporate the BARA algorithm into reverse auction-based incentive mechanisms to illustrate its effectiveness. Extensive experiments are conducted on real datasets to demonstrate that BARA significantly outperforms competitive baselines by improving model utility with the same amount of reward budget.

Yunchao Yang, Yipeng Zhou, Miao Hu, Di Wu, Quan Z. Sheng

ijcai

Robust Mean Estimation Without Moments for Symmetric Distributions

We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean or location parameter without moment assumptions.Known computationally efficient algorithms rely on strong distributional assumptions, such as sub-Gaussianity, or (certifiably) bounded moments.Moreover, the guarantees that they achieve in the heavy-tailed setting are weaker than those for sub-Gaussian distributions with known covariance.In this work, we show that such a tradeoff, between error guarantees and heavy-tails, is not necessary for symmetric distributions.We show that for a large class of symmetric distributions, the same error as in the Gaussian setting can be achieved efficiently.The distributions we study include products of arbitrary symmetric one-dimensional distributions, such as product Cauchy distributions, as well as elliptical distributions, a vast generalization of the Gaussian distribution.For product distributions and elliptical distributions with known scatter (covariance) matrix, we show that given an $\varepsilon$-corrupted sample, we can with probability at least $1-\delta$ estimate its location up to error $O(\varepsilon \sqrt{\log(1/\varepsilon)})$ using $\tfrac{d\log(d) + \log(1/\delta)}{\varepsilon^2 \log(1/\varepsilon)}$ samples.This result matches the best-known guarantees for the Gaussian distribution and known SQ lower bounds (up to the $\log(d)$ factor).For elliptical distributions with unknown scatter (covariance) matrix, we propose a sequence of efficient algorithms that approaches this optimal error.Specifically, for every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, we design an estimator using time and samples $\tilde{O}({d^k})$ achieving error $O(\varepsilon^{1-\frac{1}{2k}})$.This matches the error and running time guarantees when assuming certifiably bounded moments of order up to $k$.For unknown covariance, such error bounds of $o(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ are not even known for (general) sub-Gaussian distributions.Our algorithms are based on a generalization of the well-known filtering technique [DK22].More specifically, we show how this machinery can be combined with Huber-loss-based techniques to work with projections of the noise that behave more nicely than the initial noise.Moreover, we show how sum-of-squares proofs can be used to obtain algorithmic guarantees even for distributions without a first moment.We believe that this approach may find other applications in future works.

Gleb Novikov, David Steurer, Stefan Tiegel

neurips

Reducing the Label Bias for Timestamp Supervised Temporal Action Segmentation

Timestamp supervised temporal action segmentation (TSTAS) is more cost-effective than fully supervised counterparts. However, previous approaches suffer from severe label bias due to over-reliance on sparse timestamp annotations, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose the Debiasing-TSTAS (D-TSTAS) framework by exploiting unannotated frames to alleviate this bias from two phases: 1) Initialization. To reduce the dependencies on annotated frames, we propose masked timestamp predictions (MTP) to ensure that initialized model captures more contextual information. 2) Refinement. To overcome the limitation of the expressiveness from sparsely annotated timestamps, we propose a center-oriented timestamp expansion (CTE) approach to progressively expand pseudo-timestamp groups which contain semantic-rich motion representation of action segments. Then, these pseudo-timestamp groups and the model output are used to iteratively generate pseudo-labels for refining the model in a fully supervised setup. We further introduce segmental confidence loss to enable the model to have high confidence predictions within the pseudo-timestamp groups and more accurate action boundaries. Our D-TSTAS outperforms the state-of-the-art TSTAS method as well as achieves competitive results compared with fully supervised approaches on three benchmark datasets.

Kaiyuan Liu, Yunheng Li, Shenglan Liu, Chenwei Tan, Zihang Shao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 6503-6513

cvpr

Learning to Parameterize Visual Attributes for Open-set Fine-grained Retrieval

Open-set fine-grained retrieval is an emerging challenging task that allows to retrieve unknown categories beyond the training set. The best solution for handling unknown categories is to represent them using a set of visual attributes learnt from known categories, as widely used in zero-shot learning. Though important, attribute modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and thus is labor-intensive. Therefore, it is worth to investigate how to transform retrieval models trained by image-level supervision from category semantic extraction to attribute modeling. To this end, we propose a novel Visual Attribute Parameterization Network (VAPNet) to learn visual attributes from known categories and parameterize them into the retrieval model, without the involvement of any attribute annotations.In this way, VAPNet could utilize its parameters to parse a set of visual attributes from unknown categories and precisely represent them.Technically, VAPNet explicitly attains some semantics with rich details via making use of local image patches and distills the visual attributes from these discovered semantics. Additionally, it integrates the online refinement of these visual attributes into the training process to iteratively enhance their quality. Simultaneously, VAPNet treats these attributes as supervisory signals to tune the retrieval models, thereby achieving attribute parameterization. Extensive experiments on open-set fine-grained retrieval datasets validate the superior performance of our VAPNet over existing solutions.

Shijie Wang, Jianlong Chang, Haojie Li, Zhihui Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Qi Tian

neurips

Exploring Positional Characteristics of Dual-Pixel Data for Camera Autofocus

In digital photography, autofocus is a key feature that aids high-quality image capture, and modern approaches use the phase patterns arising from dual-pixel sensors as important focus cues. However, dual-pixel data is prone to multiple error sources in its image capturing process, including lens shading or distortions due to the inherent optical characteristics of the lens. We observe that, while these degradations are hard to model using prior knowledge, they are correlated with the spatial position of the pixels within the image sensor area, and we propose a learning-based autofocus model with positional encodings (PE) to capture these patterns. Specifically, we introduce RoI-PE, which encodes the spatial position of our focusing region-of-interest (RoI) on the imaging plane. Learning with RoI-PE allows the model to be more robust to spatially-correlated degradations. In addition, we also propose to encode the current focal position of lens as lens-PE, which allows us to significantly reduce the computational complexity of the autofocus model. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of using the proposed position encodings for automatic focusing based on dual-pixel data.

Myungsub Choi, Hana Lee, Hyong-euk Lee; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 13158-13168

iccv

PreDiff: Precipitation Nowcasting with Latent Diffusion Models

Earth system forecasting has traditionally relied on complex physical models that are computationally expensive and require significant domain expertise.In the past decade, the unprecedented increase in spatiotemporal Earth observation data has enabled data-driven forecasting models using deep learning techniques.These models have shown promise for diverse Earth system forecasting tasks but either struggle with handling uncertainty or neglect domain-specific prior knowledge, resulting in averaging possible futures to blurred forecasts or generating physically implausible predictions.To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage pipeline for probabilistic spatiotemporal forecasting: 1) We develop PreDiff, a conditional latent diffusion model capable of probabilistic forecasts. 2) We incorporate an explicit knowledge alignment mechanism to align forecasts with domain-specific physical constraints. This is achieved by estimating the deviation from imposed constraints at each denoising step and adjusting the transition distribution accordingly.We conduct empirical studies on two datasets: N-body MNIST, a synthetic dataset with chaotic behavior, and SEVIR, a real-world precipitation nowcasting dataset. Specifically, we impose the law of conservation of energy in N-body MNIST and anticipated precipitation intensity in SEVIR. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PreDiff in handling uncertainty, incorporating domain-specific prior knowledge, and generating forecasts that exhibit high operational utility.

Zhihan Gao, Xingjian Shi, Boran Han, Hao Wang, Xiaoyong Jin, Danielle Maddix, Yi Zhu, Mu Li, Yuyang (Bernie) Wang

neurips

Efficient Meta Neural Heuristic for Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization

Recently, neural heuristics based on deep reinforcement learning have exhibited promise in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). However, they are still struggling to achieve high learning efficiency and solution quality. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient meta neural heuristic (EMNH), in which a meta-model is first trained and then fine-tuned with a few steps to solve corresponding single-objective subproblems. Specifically, for the training process, a (partial) architecture-shared multi-task model is leveraged to achieve parallel learning for the meta-model, so as to speed up the training; meanwhile, a scaled symmetric sampling method with respect to the weight vectors is designed to stabilize the training. For the fine-tuning process, an efficient hierarchical method is proposed to systematically tackle all the subproblems. Experimental results on the multi-objective traveling salesman problem (MOTSP), multi-objective capacitated vehicle routing problem (MOCVRP), and multi-objective knapsack problem (MOKP) show that, EMNH is able to outperform the state-of-the-art neural heuristics in terms of solution quality and learning efficiency, and yield competitive solutions to the strong traditional heuristics while consuming much shorter time.

Jinbiao Chen, Jiahai Wang, Zizhen Zhang, Zhiguang Cao, Te Ye, Siyuan Chen

neurips

SLAN: Self-Locator Aided Network for Vision-Language Understanding

Learning fine-grained interplay between vision and language contributes to a more accurate understanding for Vision-Language tasks. However, it remains challenging to extract key image regions according to the texts for semantic alignments. Most existing works are either limited by text-agnostic and redundant regions obtained with the frozen detectors, or failing to scale further due to their heavy reliance on scarce grounding (gold) data to pre-train detectors. To solve these problems, we propose Self-Locator Aided Network (SLAN) for vision-language understanding tasks without any extra gold data. SLAN consists of a region filter and a region adaptor to localize regions of interest conditioned on different texts. By aggregating vision-language information, the region filter selects key regions and the region adaptor updates their coordinates with text guidance. With detailed region-word alignments, SLAN can be easily generalized to many downstream tasks. It achieves fairly competitive results on five vision-language understanding tasks (e.g., 85.7% and 69.2% on COCO image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, surpassing previous SOTA methods). SLAN also demonstrates strong zero-shot and fine-tuned transferability to two localization tasks.

Jiang-Tian Zhai, Qi Zhang, Tong Wu, Xing-Yu Chen, Jiang-Jiang Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 21949-21958

iccv

Generating Visual Scenes from Touch

An emerging line of work has sought to generate plausible imagery from touch. Existing approaches, however, tackle only narrow aspects of the visuo-tactile synthesis problem, and lag significantly behind the quality of cross-modal synthesis methods in other domains. We draw on recent advances in latent diffusion to create a model for synthesizing images from tactile signals (and vice versa) and apply it to a number of visuo-tactile synthesis tasks. Using this model, we significantly outperform prior work on the tactile-driven stylization problem, i.e., manipulating an image to match a touch signal, and we are the first to successfully generate images from touch without additional sources of information about the scene. We also successfully use our model to address two novel synthesis problems: generating images that do not contain the touch sensor or the hand holding it, and estimating an image's shading from its reflectance and touch.

Fengyu Yang, Jiacheng Zhang, Andrew Owens; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 22070-22080

iccv

Data-Copying in Generative Models: A Formal Framework

There has been some recent interest in detecting and addressing memorization of training data by deep neural networks. A formal framework for memorization in generative models, called “data-copying” was proposed by Meehan et. al (2020). We build upon their work to show that their framework may fail to detect certain kinds of blatant memorization. Motivated by this and the theory of non-parametric methods, we provide an alternative definition of data-copying that applies more locally. We provide a method to detect data-copying, and provably show that it works with high probability when enough data is available. We also provide lower bounds that characterize the sample requirement for reliable detection.

Robi Bhattacharjee, Sanjoy Dasgupta, Kamalika Chaudhuri

icml

CleanCLIP: Mitigating Data Poisoning Attacks in Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Multimodal contrastive pretraining has been used to train multimodal representation models, such as CLIP, on large amounts of paired image-text data. However, previous studies have revealed that such models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, when trained on backdoored examples, CLIP learns spurious correlations between the embedded backdoor trigger and the target label, aligning their representations in the joint embedding space. Injecting even a small number of poisoned examples, such as 75 examples in 3 million pretraining data, can significantly manipulate the model's behavior, making it difficult to detect or unlearn such correlations. To address this issue, we propose CleanCLIP, a finetuning framework that weakens the learned spurious associations introduced by backdoor attacks by independently re-aligning the representations for individual modalities. We demonstrate that unsupervised finetuning using a combination of multimodal contrastive and unimodal self-supervised objectives for individual modalities can significantly reduce the impact of the backdoor attack. Additionally, we show that supervised finetuning on task-specific labeled image data removes the backdoor trigger from the CLIP vision encoder. We show empirically that CleanCLIP maintains model performance on benign examples while erasing a range of backdoor attacks on multimodal contrastive learning.

Hritik Bansal, Nishad Singhi, Yu Yang, Fan Yin, Aditya Grover, Kai-Wei Chang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 112-123

iccv

Variational Distribution Learning for Unsupervised Text-to-Image Generation

We propose a text-to-image generation algorithm based on deep neural networks when text captions for images are unavailable during training. In this work, instead of simply generating pseudo-ground-truth sentences of training images using existing image captioning methods, we employ a pretrained CLIP model, which is capable of properly aligning embeddings of images and corresponding texts in a joint space and, consequently, works well on zero-shot recognition tasks. We optimize a text-to-image generation model by maximizing the data log-likelihood conditioned on pairs of image-text CLIP embeddings. To better align data in the two domains, we employ a principled way based on a variational inference, which efficiently estimates an approximate posterior of the hidden text embedding given an image and its CLIP feature. Experimental results validate that the proposed framework outperforms existing approaches by large margins under unsupervised and semi-supervised text-to-image generation settings.

Minsoo Kang, Doyup Lee, Jiseob Kim, Saehoon Kim, Bohyung Han; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 23380-23389

cvpr

Learning Efficient Surrogate Dynamic Models with Graph Spline Networks

While complex simulations of physical systems have been widely used in engineering and scientific computing, lowering their often prohibitive computational requirements has only recently been tackled by deep learning approaches. In this paper, we present GraphSplineNets, a novel deep-learning method to speed up the forecasting of physical systems by reducing the grid size and number of iteration steps of deep surrogate models. Our method uses two differentiable orthogonal spline collocation methods to efficiently predict response at any location in time and space. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive collocation strategy in space to prioritize sampling from the most important regions. GraphSplineNets improve the accuracy-speedup tradeoff in forecasting various dynamical systems with increasing complexity, including the heat equation, damped wave propagation, Navier-Stokes equations, and real-world ocean currents in both regular and irregular domains.

Chuanbo Hua, Federico Berto, Michael Poli, Stefano Massaroli, Jinkyoo Park

neurips

Dual Self-Awareness Value Decomposition Framework without Individual Global Max for Cooperative MARL

Value decomposition methods have gained popularity in the field of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, almost all existing methods follow the principle of Individual Global Max (IGM) or its variants, which limits their problem-solving capabilities. To address this, we propose a dual self-awareness value decomposition framework, inspired by the notion of dual self-awareness in psychology, that entirely rejects the IGM premise. Each agent consists of an ego policy for action selection and an alter ego value function to solve the credit assignment problem. The value function factorization can ignore the IGM assumption by utilizing an explicit search procedure. On the basis of the above, we also suggest a novel anti-ego exploration mechanism to avoid the algorithm becoming stuck in a local optimum. As the first fully IGM-free value decomposition method, our proposed framework achieves desirable performance in various cooperative tasks.

Zhiwei Xu, Bin Zhang, dapeng li, Guangchong Zhou, Zeren Zhang, Guoliang Fan

neurips

Class Overwhelms: Mutual Conditional Blended-Target Domain Adaptation

Current methods of blended targets domain adaptation (BTDA) usually infer or consider domain label information but underemphasize hybrid categorical feature structures of targets, which yields limited performance, especially under the label distribution shift. We demonstrate that domain labels are not directly necessary for BTDA if categorical distributions of various domains are sufficiently aligned even facing the imbalance of domains and the label distribution shift of classes. However, we observe that the cluster assumption in BTDA does not comprehensively hold. The hybrid categorical feature space hinders the modeling of categorical distributions and the generation of reliable pseudo labels for categorical alignment. To address these, we propose a categorical domain discriminator guided by uncertainty to explicitly model and directly align categorical distributions P(Z|Y). Simultaneously, we utilize the low-level features to augment the single source features with diverse target styles to rectify the biased classifier P(Y|Z) among diverse targets. Such a mutual conditional alignment of P(Z|Y) and P(Y|Z) forms a mutual reinforced mechanism. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in BTDA even compared with methods utilizing domain labels, especially under the label distribution shift, and in single target DA on DomainNet.

Pengcheng Xu, Boyu Wang, Charles Ling

aaai

Federated Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Federated learning-based semantic segmentation (FSS) has drawn widespread attention via decentralized training on local clients. However, most FSS models assume categories are fxed in advance, thus heavily undergoing forgetting on old categories in practical applications where local clients receive new categories incrementally while have no memory storage to access old classes. Moreover, new clients collecting novel classes may join in the global training of FSS, which further exacerbates catastrophic forgetting. To surmount the above challenges, we propose a Forgetting-Balanced Learning (FBL) model to address heterogeneous forgetting on old classes from both intra-client and inter-client aspects. Specifically, under the guidance of pseudo labels generated via adaptive class-balanced pseudo labeling, we develop a forgetting-balanced semantic compensation loss and a forgetting-balanced relation consistency loss to rectify intra-client heterogeneous forgetting of old categories with background shift. It performs balanced gradient propagation and relation consistency distillation within local clients. Moreover, to tackle heterogeneous forgetting from inter-client aspect, we propose a task transition monitor. It can identify new classes under privacy protection and store the latest old global model for relation distillation. Qualitative experiments reveal large improvement of our model against comparison methods. The code is available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/FISS.

Jiahua Dong, Duzhen Zhang, Yang Cong, Wei Cong, Henghui Ding, Dengxin Dai; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 3934-3943

cvpr

CluB: Cluster Meets BEV for LiDAR-Based 3D Object Detection

Currently, LiDAR-based 3D detectors are broadly categorized into two groups, namely, BEV-based detectors and cluster-based detectors.BEV-based detectors capture the contextual information from the Bird's Eye View (BEV) and fill their center voxels via feature diffusion with a stack of convolution layers, which, however, weakens the capability of presenting an object with the center point.On the other hand, cluster-based detectors exploit the voting mechanism and aggregate the foreground points into object-centric clusters for further prediction.In this paper, we explore how to effectively combine these two complementary representations into a unified framework.Specifically, we propose a new 3D object detection framework, referred to as CluB, which incorporates an auxiliary cluster-based branch into the BEV-based detector by enriching the object representation at both feature and query levels.Technically, CluB is comprised of two steps.First, we construct a cluster feature diffusion module to establish the association between cluster features and BEV features in a subtle and adaptive fashion. Based on that, an imitation loss is introduced to distill object-centric knowledge from the cluster features to the BEV features.Second, we design a cluster query generation module to leverage the voting centers directly from the cluster branch, thus enriching the diversity of object queries.Meanwhile, a direction loss is employed to encourage a more accurate voting center for each cluster.Extensive experiments are conducted on Waymo and nuScenes datasets, and our CluB achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmarks.

Yingjie Wang, Jiajun Deng, Yuenan Hou, Yao Li, Yu Zhang, Jianmin Ji, Wanli Ouyang, Yanyong Zhang

neurips

CHEFin the Language Kitchen: A Generative Data Augmentation LeveragingKorean Morpheme Ingredients

Korean morphological variations present unique opportunities and challenges in natural language processing (NLP), necessitating an advanced understanding of morpheme-based sentence construction. The complexity of morphological variations allows for diverse sentence forms based on the syntactic-semantic integration of functional morphemes (i.e., affixes) to lexical morphemes (i.e., roots). With this in mind, we propose a method - CHEF, replicating the morphological transformations inherent in sentences based on lexical and functional morpheme combinations through generative data augmentation. CHEF operates using a morpheme blender and a label discriminator, thereby enhancing the diversity of Korean sentence forms by capturing the properties of agglutination while maintaining label consistency. We conduct experiments on Korean multiple classification datasets, improving model performance in full- and few-shot settings. Our proposed method boosts performance beyond the preceding data augmentation methods without incurring external data usage. We demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable results yielded by augmentation techniques that use large language models (LLMs).

Jaehyung Seo, Hyeonseok Moon, Jaewook Lee, Sugyeong Eo, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

emnlp

Fairness-guided Few-shot Prompting for Large Language Models

Large language models have demonstrated surprising ability to perform in-context learning, i.e., these models can be directly applied to solve numerous downstream tasks by conditioning on a prompt constructed by a few input-output examples. However, prior research has shown that in-context learning can suffer from high instability due to variations in training examples, example order, and prompt formats. Therefore, the construction of an appropriate prompt is essential for improving the performance of in-context learning. In this paper, we revisit this problem from the view of predictive bias. Specifically, we introduce a metric to evaluate the predictive bias of a fixed prompt against labels or a given attributes. Then we empirically show that prompts with higher bias always lead to unsatisfactory predictive quality. Based on this observation, we propose a novel search strategy based on the greedy search to identify the near-optimal prompt for improving the performance of in-context learning. We perform comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art mainstream models such as GPT-3 on various downstream tasks. Our results indicate that our method can enhance the model's in-context learning performance in an effective and interpretable manner.

Huan Ma, Changqing Zhang, Yatao Bian, Lemao Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Peilin Zhao, Shu Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Qinghua Hu, Bingzhe Wu

neurips

Boosting Learning for LDPC Codes to Improve the Error-Floor Performance

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been successfully commercialized in communication systems due to their strong error correction capabilities and simple decoding process. However, the error-floor phenomenon of LDPC codes, in which the error rate stops decreasing rapidly at a certain level, presents challenges for achieving extremely low error rates and deploying LDPC codes in scenarios demanding ultra-high reliability. In this work, we propose training methods for neural min-sum (NMS) decoders to eliminate the error-floor effect. First, by leveraging the boosting learning technique of ensemble networks, we divide the decoding network into two neural decoders and train the post decoder to be specialized for uncorrected words that the first decoder fails to correct. Secondly, to address the vanishing gradient issue in training, we introduce a block-wise training schedule that locally trains a block of weights while retraining the preceding block. Lastly, we show that assigning different weights to unsatisfied check nodes effectively lowers the error-floor with a minimal number of weights. By applying these training methods to standard LDPC codes, we achieve the best error-floor performance compared to other decoding methods. The proposed NMS decoder, optimized solely through novel training methods without additional modules, can be integrated into existing LDPC decoders without incurring extra hardware costs. The source code is available at https://github.com/ghy1228/LDPCErrorFloor.

Hee-Youl Kwak, Dae-Young Yun, Yongjune Kim, Sang-Hyo Kim, Jong-Seon No

neurips

NPC: Neural Point Characters from Video

High-fidelity human 3D models can now be learned directly from videos, typically by combining a template-based surface model with neural representations. However, obtaining a template surface requires expensive multi-view capture systems, laser scans, or strictly controlled conditions. Previous methods avoid using a template but rely on a costly or ill-posed mapping from observation to canonical space. We propose a hybrid point-based representation for animatable humans that does not require an explicit surface model, while being generalizable to novel poses. For a given video, our method automatically produces an explicit set of 3D points representing approximate canonical geometry, and learns an articulated deformation model that produces pose-dependent point transformations. The points serve both as a scaffold for high-frequency neural features and an anchor for efficiently mapping between observation and canonical space. We demonstrate on established benchmarks that our representation overcomes limitations of prior work operating in either canonical or in observation space. Moreover, our automatic point extraction approach enables learning models of human and animal characters alike, matching the performance of the methods using rigged surface templates despite being more general. Project website: https: //lemonatsu.github.io/npc/.

Shih-Yang Su, Timur Bagautdinov, Helge Rhodin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 14795-14805

iccv

SHUNIT: Style Harmonization for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

We propose a novel solution for unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation. To translate complex images with a wide range of objects to a different domain, recent approaches often use the object annotations to perform per-class source-to-target style mapping. However, there remains a point for us to exploit in the I2I. An object in each class consists of multiple components, and all the sub-object components have different characteristics. For example, a car in CAR class consists of a car body, tires, windows and head and tail lamps, etc., and they should be handled separately for realistic I2I translation. The simplest solution to the problem will be to use more detailed annotations with sub-object component annotations than the simple object annotations, but it is not possible. The key idea of this paper is to bypass the sub-object component annotations by leveraging the original style of the input image because the original style will include the information about the characteristics of the sub-object components. Specifically, for each pixel, we use not only the per-class style gap between the source and target domains but also the pixel’s original style to determine the target style of a pixel. To this end, we present Style Harmonization for unpaired I2I translation (SHUNIT). Our SHUNIT generates a new style by harmonizing the target domain style retrieved from a class memory and an original source image style. Instead of direct source-to-target style mapping, we aim for source and target styles harmonization. We validate our method with extensive experiments and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark sets. The source code is available online: https://github.com/bluejangbaljang/SHUNIT.

Seokbeom Song, Suhyeon Lee, Hongje Seong, Kyoungwon Min, Euntai Kim

aaai

Syntactic Substitutability as Unsupervised Dependency Syntax

Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention distributions and propose a new method to induce these structures theory-agnostically. Instead of modeling syntactic relations as defined by annotation schemata, we model a more general property implicit in the definition of dependency relations, syntactic substitutability. This property captures the fact that words at either end of a dependency can be substituted with words from the same category. Substitutions can be used to generate a set of syntactically invariant sentences whose representations are then used for parsing. We show that increasing the number of substitutions used improves parsing accuracy on natural data. On long-distance subject-verb agreement constructions, our method achieves 79.5% recall compared to 8.9% using a previous method. Our method also provides improvements when transferred to a different parsing setup, demonstrating that it generalizes.

Jasper Jian, Siva Reddy

emnlp

Breaking Immutable: Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration for Few-Shot Object Detection

Few-shot object detection, expecting detectors to detect novel classes with a few instances, has made conspicuous progress. However, the prototypes extracted by existing meta-learning based methods still suffer from insufficient representative information and lack awareness of query images, which cannot be adaptively tailored to different query images. Firstly, only the support images are involved for extracting prototypes, resulting in scarce perceptual information of query images. Secondly, all pixels of all support images are treated equally when aggregating features into prototype vectors, thus the salient objects are overwhelmed by the cluttered background. In this paper, we propose an Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration (ICPE) method to generate specific and representative prototypes for each query image. Concretely, a conditional information coupling module is introduced to couple information from the query branch to the support branch, strengthening the query-perceptual information in support features. Besides, we design a prototype dynamic aggregation module that dynamically adjusts intra-image and inter-image aggregation weights to highlight the salient information useful for detecting query images. Experimental results on both Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in almost all settings. Code will be available at: https://github.com/lxn96/ICPE.

Xiaonan Lu, Wenhui Diao, Yongqiang Mao, Junxi Li, Peijin Wang, Xian Sun, Kun Fu

aaai

InstanceFormer: An Online Video Instance Segmentation Framework

Recent transformer-based offline video instance segmentation (VIS) approaches achieve encouraging results and significantly outperform online approaches. However, their reliance on the whole video and the immense computational complexity caused by full Spatio-temporal attention limit them in real-life applications such as processing lengthy videos. In this paper, we propose a single-stage transformer-based efficient online VIS framework named InstanceFormer, which is especially suitable for long and challenging videos. We propose three novel components to model short-term and long-term dependency and temporal coherence. First, we propagate the representation, location, and semantic information of prior instances to model short-term changes. Second, we propose a novel memory cross-attention in the decoder, which allows the network to look into earlier instances within a certain temporal window. Finally, we employ a temporal contrastive loss to impose coherence in the representation of an instance across all frames. Memory attention and temporal coherence are particularly beneficial to long-range dependency modeling, including challenging scenarios like occlusion. The proposed InstanceFormer outperforms previous online benchmark methods by a large margin across multiple datasets. Most importantly, InstanceFormer surpasses offline approaches for challenging and long datasets such as YouTube-VIS-2021 and OVIS. Code is available at https://github.com/rajatkoner08/InstanceFormer.

Rajat Koner, Tanveer Hannan, Suprosanna Shit, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Matthias Schubert, Thomas Seidl, Volker Tresp

aaai

SSDA3D: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is an indispensable task in advanced autonomous driving systems. Though impressive detection results have been achieved by superior 3D detectors, they suffer from significant performance degeneration when facing unseen domains, such as different LiDAR configurations, different cities, and weather conditions. The mainstream approaches tend to solve these challenges by leveraging unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) techniques. However, these UDA solutions just yield unsatisfactory 3D detection results when there is a severe domain shift, e.g., from Waymo (64-beam) to nuScenes (32-beam). To address this, we present a novel Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation method for 3D object detection (SSDA3D), where only a few labeled target data is available, yet can significantly improve the adaptation performance. In particular, our SSDA3D includes an Inter-domain Adaptation stage and an Intra-domain Generalization stage. In the first stage, an Inter-domain Point-CutMix module is presented to efficiently align the point cloud distribution across domains. The Point-CutMix generates mixed samples of an intermediate domain, thus encouraging to learn domain-invariant knowledge. Then, in the second stage, we further enhance the model for better generalization on the unlabeled target set. This is achieved by exploring Intra-domain Point-MixUp in semi-supervised learning, which essentially regularizes the pseudo label distribution. Experiments from Waymo to nuScenes show that, with only 10% labeled target data, our SSDA3D can surpass the fully-supervised oracle model with 100% target label. Our code is available at https://github.com/yinjunbo/SSDA3D.

Yan Wang, Junbo Yin, Wei Li, Pascal Frossard, Ruigang Yang, Jianbing Shen

aaai

On Certified Generalization in Structured Prediction

In structured prediction, target objects have rich internal structure which does not factorize into independent components and violates common i.i.d. assumptions. This challenge becomes apparent through the exponentially large output space in applications such as image segmentation or scene graph generation.We present a novel PAC-Bayesian risk bound for structured prediction wherein the rate of generalization scales not only with the number of structured examples but also with their size.The underlying assumption, conforming to ongoing research on generative models, is that data are generated by the Knothe-Rosenblatt rearrangement of a factorizing reference measure. This allows to explicitly distill the structure between random output variables into a Wasserstein dependency matrix. Our work makes a preliminary step towards leveraging powerful generative models to establish generalization bounds for discriminative downstream tasks in the challenging setting of structured prediction.

Bastian Boll, Christoph Schnörr

neurips

Mx2M: Masked Cross-Modality Modeling in Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation

Existing methods of cross-modal domain adaptation for 3D semantic segmentation predict results only via 2D-3D complementarity that is obtained by cross-modal feature matching. However, as lacking supervision in the target domain, the complementarity is not always reliable. The results are not ideal when the domain gap is large. To solve the problem of lacking supervision, we introduce masked modeling into this task and propose a method Mx2M, which utilizes masked cross-modality modeling to reduce the large domain gap. Our Mx2M contains two components. One is the core solution, cross-modal removal and prediction (xMRP), which makes the Mx2M adapt to various scenarios and provides cross-modal self-supervision. The other is a new way of cross-modal feature matching, the dynamic cross-modal filter (DxMF) that ensures the whole method dynamically uses more suitable 2D-3D complementarity. Evaluation of the Mx2M on three DA scenarios, including Day/Night, USA/Singapore, and A2D2/SemanticKITTI, brings large improvements over previous methods on many metrics.

Boxiang Zhang, Zunran Wang, Yonggen Ling, Yuanyuan Guan, Shenghao Zhang, Wenhui Li

aaai

Improving Graph Generation by Restricting Graph Bandwidth

Deep graph generative modeling has proven capable of learning the distribution of complex, multi-scale structures characterizing real-world graphs. However, one of the main limitations of existing methods is their large output space, which limits generation scalability and hinders accurate modeling of the underlying distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach that significantly reduces the output space of existing graph generative models. Specifically, starting from the observation that many real-world graphs have low graph bandwidth, we restrict graph bandwidth during training and generation. Our strategy improves both generation scalability and quality without increasing architectural complexity or reducing expressiveness. Our approach is compatible with existing graph generative methods, and we describe its application to both autoregressive and one-shot models. We extensively validate our strategy on synthetic and real datasets, including molecular graphs. Our experiments show that, in addition to improving generation efficiency, our approach consistently improves generation quality and reconstruction accuracy. The implementation is made available.

Nathaniel Lee Diamant, Alex M Tseng, Kangway V. Chuang, Tommaso Biancalani, Gabriele Scalia

icml

TDG4Crowd:Test Data Generation for Evaluation of Aggregation Algorithms in Crowdsourcing

In crowdsourcing, existing efforts mainly use real datasets collected from crowdsourcing as test datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of aggregation algorithms. However, these work ignore the fact that the datasets obtained by crowdsourcing are usually sparse and imbalanced due to limited budget. As a result, applying the same aggregation algorithm on different datasets often show contradicting conclusions. For example, on the RTE dataset, Dawid and Skene model performs significantly better than Majority Voting, while on the LableMe dataset, the experiments give the opposite conclusion. It is challenging to obtain comprehensive and balanced datasets at a low cost. To our best knowledge, little effort have been made to the fair evaluation of aggregation algorithms. To fill in this gap, we propose a novel method named TDG4Crowd that can automatically generate comprehensive and balanced datasets. Using Kullback Leibler divergence and Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the experiment results show the superior of our method compared with others. Aggregation algorithms also perform more consistently on the synthetic datasets generated using our method.

Yili Fang, Chaojie Shen, Huamao Gu, Tao Han, Xinyi Ding

ijcai

FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU

The high computational and memory requirements of large language model (LLM) inference make it feasible only with multiple high-end accelerators. Motivated by the emerging demand for latency-insensitive tasks with batched processing, this paper initiates the study of high-throughput LLM inference using limited resources, such as a single commodity GPU. We present FlexGen, a high-throughput generation engine for running LLMs with limited GPU memory. FlexGen can be flexibly configured under various hardware resource constraints by aggregating memory and computation from the GPU, CPU, and disk. By solving a linear programming problem, it searches for efficient patterns to store and access tensors. FlexGen further compresses the weights and the attention cache to 4 bits with negligible accuracy loss. These techniques enable FlexGen to have a larger space of batch size choices and thus significantly increase maximum throughput. As a result, when running OPT-175B on a single 16GB GPU, FlexGen achieves significantly higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art offloading systems, reaching a generation throughput of 1 token/s for the first time with an effective batch size of 144. On the HELM benchmark, FlexGen can benchmark a 30B model with a 16GB GPU on 7 representative sub-scenarios in 21 hours. The code is available at https://github.com/FMInference/FlexGen.

Ying Sheng, Lianmin Zheng, Binhang Yuan, Zhuohan Li, Max Ryabinin, Beidi Chen, Percy Liang, Christopher Re, Ion Stoica, Ce Zhang

icml

Active Observing in Continuous-time Control

The control of continuous-time environments while actively deciding when to take costly observations in time is a crucial yet unexplored problem, particularly relevant to real-world scenarios such as medicine, low-power systems, and resource management. Existing approaches either rely on continuous-time control methods that take regular, expensive observations in time or discrete-time control with costly observation methods, which are inapplicable to continuous-time settings due to the compounding discretization errors introduced by time discretization. In this work, we are the first to formalize the continuous-time control problem with costly observations. Our key theoretical contribution shows that observing at regular time intervals is not optimal in certain environments, while irregular observation policies yield higher expected utility. This perspective paves the way for the development of novel methods that can take irregular observations in continuous-time control with costly observations. We empirically validate our theoretical findings in various continuous-time environments, including a cancer simulation, by constructing a simple initial method to solve this new problem, with a heuristic threshold on the variance of reward rollouts in an offline continuous-time model-based model predictive control (MPC) planner. Although determining the optimal method remains an open problem, our work offers valuable insights and understanding of this unique problem, laying the foundation for future research in this area.

Samuel Holt, Alihan Hüyük, Mihaela van der Schaar

neurips

CP-SLAM: Collaborative Neural Point-based SLAM System

This paper presents a collaborative implicit neural simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system with RGB-D image sequences, which consists of complete front-end and back-end modules including odometry, loop detection, sub-map fusion, and global refinement. In order to enable all these modules in a unified framework, we propose a novel neural point based 3D scene representation in which each point maintains a learnable neural feature for scene encoding and is associated with a certain keyframe. Moreover, a distributed-to-centralized learning strategy is proposed for the collaborative implicit SLAM to improve consistency and cooperation. A novel global optimization framework is also proposed to improve the system accuracy like traditional bundle adjustment. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both camera tracking and mapping.

Jiarui Hu, Mao Mao, Hujun Bao, Guofeng Zhang, Zhaopeng Cui

neurips

Language-Assisted 3D Feature Learning for Semantic Scene Understanding

Learning descriptive 3D features is crucial for understanding 3D scenes with diverse objects and complex structures. However, it is usually unknown whether important geometric attributes and scene context obtain enough emphasis in an end-to-end trained 3D scene understanding network. To guide 3D feature learning toward important geometric attributes and scene context, we explore the help of textual scene descriptions. Given some free-form descriptions paired with 3D scenes, we extract the knowledge regarding the object relationships and object attributes. We then inject the knowledge to 3D feature learning through three classification-based auxiliary tasks. This language-assisted training can be combined with modern object detection and instance segmentation methods to promote 3D semantic scene understanding, especially in a label-deficient regime. Moreover, the 3D feature learned with language assistance is better aligned with the language features, which can benefit various 3D-language multimodal tasks. Experiments on several benchmarks of 3D-only and 3D-language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our language-assisted 3D feature learning. Code is available at https://github.com/Asterisci/Language-Assisted-3D.

Junbo Zhang, Guofan Fan, Guanghan Wang, Zhengyuan Su, Kaisheng Ma, Li Yi

aaai

OvarNet: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Attribute Recognition

In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously detecting objects and inferring their visual attributes in an image, even for those with no manual annotations provided at the training stage, resembling an open-vocabulary scenario. To achieve this goal, we make the following contributions: (i) we start with a naive two-stage approach for open-vocabulary object detection and attribute classification, termed CLIP-Attr. The candidate objects are first proposed with an offline RPN and later classified for semantic category and attributes; (ii) we combine all available datasets and train with a federated strategy to finetune the CLIP model, aligning the visual representation with attributes, additionally, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging freely available online image-caption pairs under weakly supervised learning; (iii) in pursuit of efficiency, we train a Faster-RCNN type model end-to-end with knowledge distillation, that performs class-agnostic object proposals and classification on semantic categories and attributes with classifiers generated from a text encoder; Finally, (iv) we conduct extensive experiments on VAW, MS-COCO, LSA, and OVAD datasets, and show that recognition of semantic category and attributes is complementary for visual scene understanding, i.e., jointly training object detection and attributes prediction largely outperform existing approaches that treat the two tasks independently, demonstrating strong generalization ability to novel attributes and categories.

Keyan Chen, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu, Xu Tang, Yan Gao, Jianqi Chen, Weidi Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 23518-23527

cvpr

Target-Free Text-Guided Image Manipulation

We tackle the problem of target-free text-guided image manipulation, which requires one to modify the input reference image based on the given text instruction, while no ground truth target image is observed during training. To address this challenging task, we propose a Cyclic-Manipulation GAN (cManiGAN) in this paper, which is able to realize where and how to edit the image regions of interest. Specifically, the image editor in cManiGAN learns to identify and complete the input image, while cross-modal interpreter and reasoner are deployed to verify the semantic correctness of the output image based on the input instruction. While the former utilizes factual/counterfactual description learning for authenticating the image semantics, the latter predicts the "undo" instruction and provides pixel-level supervision for the training of cManiGAN. With the above operational cycle-consistency, our cManiGAN can be trained in the above weakly supervised setting. We conduct extensive experiments on the datasets of CLEVR and COCO datasets, and the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method can be successfully verified. Project page: sites.google.com/view/wancyuanfan/projects/cmanigan.

Wan-Cyuan Fan, Cheng-Fu Yang, Chiao-An Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

aaai

Towards Data-Agnostic Pruning At Initialization: What Makes a Good Sparse Mask?

Pruning at initialization (PaI) aims to remove weights of neural networks before training in pursuit of training efficiency besides the inference. While off-the-shelf PaI methods manage to find trainable subnetworks that outperform random pruning, their performance in terms of both accuracy and computational reduction is far from satisfactory compared to post-training pruning and the understanding of PaI is missing. For instance, recent studies show that existing PaI methods only able to find good layerwise sparsities not weights, as the discovered subnetworks are surprisingly resilient against layerwise random mask shuffling and weight re-initialization.In this paper, we study PaI from a brand-new perspective -- the topology of subnetworks. In particular, we propose a principled framework for analyzing the performance of Pruning and Initialization (PaI) methods with two quantities, namely, the number of effective paths and effective nodes. These quantities allow for a more comprehensive understanding of PaI methods, giving us an accurate assessment of different subnetworks at initialization. We systematically analyze the behavior of various PaI methods through our framework and observe a guiding principle for constructing effective subnetworks: *at a specific sparsity, the top-performing subnetwork always presents a good balance between the number of effective nodes and the number of effective paths.*Inspired by this observation, we present a novel data-agnostic pruning method by solving a multi-objective optimization problem. By conducting extensive experiments across different architectures and datasets, our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art PaI methods while it is able to discover subnetworks that have much lower inference FLOPs (up to 3.4$\times$). Code will be fully released.

Hoang Pham, The Anh Ta, Shiwei Liu, Lichuan Xiang, Dung Le, Hongkai Wen, Long Tran-Thanh

neurips

3D-POP - An Automated Annotation Approach to Facilitate Markerless 2D-3D Tracking of Freely Moving Birds With Marker-Based Motion Capture

Recent advances in machine learning and computer vision are revolutionizing the field of animal behavior by enabling researchers to track the poses and locations of freely moving animals without any marker attachment. However, large datasets of annotated images of animals for markerless pose tracking, especially high-resolution images taken from multiple angles with accurate 3D annotations, are still scant. Here, we propose a method that uses a motion capture (mo-cap) system to obtain a large amount of annotated data on animal movement and posture (2D and 3D) in a semi-automatic manner. Our method is novel in that it extracts the 3D positions of morphological keypoints (e.g eyes, beak, tail) in reference to the positions of markers attached to the animals. Using this method, we obtained, and offer here, a new dataset - 3D-POP with approximately 300k annotated frames (4 million instances) in the form of videos having groups of one to ten freely moving birds from 4 different camera views in a 3.6m x 4.2m area. 3D-POP is the first dataset of flocking birds with accurate keypoint annotations in 2D and 3D along with bounding box and individual identities and will facilitate the development of solutions for problems of 2D to 3D markerless pose, trajectory tracking, and identification in birds.

Hemal Naik, Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Junran Yang, Mathilde Delacoux, Iain D. Couzin, Fumihiro Kano, Máté Nagy; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 21274-21284

cvpr

F2-NeRF: Fast Neural Radiance Field Training With Free Camera Trajectories

This paper presents a novel grid-based NeRF called F^2-NeRF (Fast-Free-NeRF) for novel view synthesis, which enables arbitrary input camera trajectories and only costs a few minutes for training. Existing fast grid-based NeRF training frameworks, like Instant-NGP, Plenoxels, DVGO, or TensoRF, are mainly designed for bounded scenes and rely on space warping to handle unbounded scenes. Existing two widely-used space-warping methods are only designed for the forward-facing trajectory or the 360deg object-centric trajectory but cannot process arbitrary trajectories. In this paper, we delve deep into the mechanism of space warping to handle unbounded scenes. Based on our analysis, we further propose a novel space-warping method called perspective warping, which allows us to handle arbitrary trajectories in the grid-based NeRF framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F^2-NeRF is able to use the same perspective warping to render high-quality images on two standard datasets and a new free trajectory dataset collected by us.

Peng Wang, Yuan Liu, Zhaoxi Chen, Lingjie Liu, Ziwei Liu, Taku Komura, Christian Theobalt, Wenping Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 4150-4159

cvpr

GloptiNets: Scalable Non-Convex Optimization with Certificates

We present a novel approach to non-convex optimization with certificates, which handles smooth functions on the hypercube or on the torus. Unlike traditional methods that rely on algebraic properties, our algorithm exploits the regularity of the target function intrinsic in the decay of its Fourier spectrum. By defining a tractable family of models, we allow {\em at the same time} to obtain precise certificates and to leverage the advanced and powerful computational techniques developed to optimize neural networks. In this way the scalability of our approach is naturally enhanced by parallel computing with GPUs. Our approach, when applied to the case of polynomials of moderate dimensions but with thousands of coefficients, outperforms the state-of-the-art optimization methods with certificates, as the ones based on Lasserre's hierarchy, addressing problems intractable for the competitors.

Gaspard Beugnot, Julien Mairal, Alessandro Rudi

neurips

CB2: Collaborative Natural Language Interaction Research Platform

CB2 is a multi-agent platform to study collaborative natural language interaction in a grounded task-oriented scenario. It includes a 3D game environment, a backend server designed to serve trained models to human agents, and various tools and processes to enable scalable studies. We deploy CB2 at

Jacob Sharf, Mustafa Omer Gul, Yoav Artzi

acl

Learning Globally Smooth Functions on Manifolds

Smoothness and low dimensional structures play central roles in improving generalization and stability in learning and statistics. This work combines techniques from semi-infinite constrained learning and manifold regularization to learn representations that are globally smooth on a manifold. To do so, it shows that under typical conditions the problem of learning a Lipschitz continuous function on a manifold is equivalent to a dynamically weighted manifold regularization problem. This observation leads to a practical algorithm based on a weighted Laplacian penalty whose weights are adapted using stochastic gradient techniques. It is shown that under mild conditions, this method estimates the Lipschitz constant of the solution, learning a globally smooth solution as a byproduct. Experiments on real world data illustrate the advantages of the proposed method relative to existing alternatives. Our code is available at https://github.com/JuanCervino/smoothbench.

Juan Cervino, Luiz F. O. Chamon, Benjamin David Haeffele, Rene Vidal, Alejandro Ribeiro

icml

Diffusion Model for Graph Inverse Problems: Towards Effective Source Localization on Complex Networks

Information diffusion problems, such as the spread of epidemics or rumors, are widespread in society. The inverse problems of graph diffusion, which involve locating the sources and identifying the paths of diffusion based on currently observed diffusion graphs, are crucial to controlling the spread of information. The problem of localizing the source of diffusion is highly ill-posed, presenting a major obstacle in accurately assessing the uncertainty involved. Besides, while comprehending how information diffuses through a graph is crucial, there is a scarcity of research on reconstructing the paths of information propagation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a probabilistic model called DDMSL (Discrete Diffusion Model for Source Localization). Our approach is based on the natural diffusion process of information propagation over complex networks, which can be formulated using a message-passing function. First, we model the forward diffusion of information using Markov chains. Then, we design a reversible residual network to construct a denoising-diffusion model in discrete space for both source localization and reconstruction of information diffusion paths. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees for DDMSL and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets.

Xin Yan, Hui Fang, Qiang He

neurips

A Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue System with Multi-source Knowledge Fusion for Elders with Cognitive Impairment

When communicating with elders with cognitive impairment, cognitive stimulation (CS) help to maintain the cognitive health of elders. Data sparsity is the main challenge in building CS-based dialogue systems, particularly in the Chinese language. To fill this gap, we construct a Chinese CS conversation (CSConv) dataset, which contains about 2.6K groups of dialogues with therapy principles and emotional support strategy labels. Making chit chat while providing emotional support is overlooked by the majority of existing cognitive dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a multi-source knowledge fusion method for CS dialogue (CSD), to generate open-ended responses guided by the therapy principle and emotional support strategy. We first use a progressive mask method based on external knowledge to learn encoders as effective classifiers, which is the prerequisite to predict the therapy principle and emotional support strategy of the target response. Then a decoder interacts with the perceived therapy principle and emotional support strategy to generate responses. Extensive experiments conducted on the CSConv dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, while there is still a large space for improvement compared to human performance.

Jiyue Jiang, Sheng Wang, Qintong Li, Lingpeng Kong, Chuan Wu

acl

Enhancing Computation Efficiency in Large Language Models through Weight and Activation Quantization

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient in natural language processing tasks, but their deployment is often restricted by extensive parameter sizes and computational demands. This paper focuses on post-training quantization (PTQ) in LLMs, specifically 4-bit weight and 8-bit activation (W4A8) quantization, to enhance computational efficiency—a topic less explored compared to weight-only quantization. We present two innovative techniques: activation-quantization-aware scaling (AQAS) and sequence-length-aware calibration (SLAC) to enhance PTQ by considering the combined effects on weights and activations and aligning calibration sequence lengths to target tasks. Moreover, we introduce dINT, a hybrid data format combining integer and denormal representations, to address the underflow issue in W4A8 quantization, where small values are rounded to zero. Through rigorous evaluations of LLMs, including OPT and LLaMA, we demonstrate that our techniques significantly boost task accuracies to levels comparable with full-precision models. By developing arithmetic units compatible with dINT, we further confirm that our methods yield a 2

Janghwan Lee, Minsoo Kim, Seungcheol Baek, Seok Hwang, Wonyong Sung, Jungwook Choi

emnlp

Generating Part-Aware Editable 3D Shapes Without 3D Supervision

Impressive progress in generative models and implicit representations gave rise to methods that can generate 3D shapes of high quality. However, being able to locally control and edit shapes is another essential property that can unlock several content creation applications. Local control can be achieved with part-aware models, but existing methods require 3D supervision and cannot produce textures. In this work, we devise PartNeRF, a novel part-aware generative model for editable 3D shape synthesis that does not require any explicit 3D supervision. Our model generates objects as a set of locally defined NeRFs, augmented with an affine transformation. This enables several editing operations such as applying transformations on parts, mixing parts from different objects etc. To ensure distinct, manipulable parts we enforce a hard assignment of rays to parts that makes sure that the color of each ray is only determined by a single NeRF. As a result, altering one part does not affect the appearance of the others. Evaluations on various ShapeNet categories demonstrate the ability of our model to generate editable 3D objects of improved fidelity, compared to previous part-based generative approaches that require 3D supervision or models relying on NeRFs.

Konstantinos Tertikas, Despoina Paschalidou, Boxiao Pan, Jeong Joon Park, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Ioannis Emiris, Yannis Avrithis, Leonidas Guibas; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 4466-4478

cvpr

Meta Optimal Transport

We study the use of amortized optimization to predict optimal transport (OT) maps from the input measures, which we call Meta OT. This helps repeatedly solve similar OT problems between different measures by leveraging the knowledge and information present from past problems to rapidly predict and solve new problems. Otherwise, standard methods ignore the knowledge of the past solutions and suboptimally re-solve each problem from scratch. We instantiate Meta OT models in discrete and continuous settings between grayscale images, spherical data, classification labels, and color palettes and use them to improve the computational time of standard OT solvers. Our source code is available at http://github.com/facebookresearch/meta-ot

Brandon Amos, Giulia Luise, Samuel Cohen, Ievgen Redko

icml

Learning Expressive Priors for Generalization and Uncertainty Estimation in Neural Networks

In this work, we propose a novel prior learning method for advancing generalization and uncertainty estimation in deep neural networks. The key idea is to exploit scalable and structured posteriors of neural networks as informative priors with generalization guarantees. Our learned priors provide expressive probabilistic representations at large scale, like Bayesian counterparts of pre-trained models on ImageNet, and further produce non-vacuous generalization bounds. We also extend this idea to a continual learning framework, where the favorable properties of our priors are desirable. Major enablers are our technical contributions: (1) the sums-of-Kronecker-product computations, and (2) the derivations and optimizations of tractable objectives that lead to improved generalization bounds. Empirically, we exhaustively show the effectiveness of this method for uncertainty estimation and generalization.

Dominik Schnaus, Jongseok Lee, Daniel Cremers, Rudolph Triebel

icml

A General Theory of Correct, Incorrect, and Extrinsic Equivariance

Although equivariant machine learning has proven effective at many tasks, success depends heavily on the assumption that the ground truth function is symmetric over the entire domain matching the symmetry in an equivariant neural network. A missing piece in the equivariant learning literature is the analysis of equivariant networks when symmetry exists only partially in the domain. In this work, we present a general theory for such a situation. We propose pointwise definitions of correct, incorrect, and extrinsic equivariance, which allow us to quantify continuously the degree of each type of equivariance a function displays. We then study the impact of various degrees of incorrect or extrinsic symmetry on model error. We prove error lower bounds for invariant or equivariant networks in classification or regression settings with partially incorrect symmetry. We also analyze the potentially harmful effects of extrinsic equivariance. Experiments validate these results in three different environments.

Dian Wang, Xupeng Zhu, Jung Yeon Park, Mingxi Jia, Guanang Su, Robert Platt, Robin Walters

neurips

Frequency-aware GAN for Adversarial Manipulation Generation

Image manipulation techniques have drawn growing concerns as manipulated images might cause morality and security problems. Various methods have been proposed to detect manipulations and achieved promising performance. However, these methods might be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we design an Adversarial Manipulation Generation (AMG) task to explore the vulnerability of image manipulation detectors. We first propose an optimal loss function and extend existing attacks to generate adversarial examples. We observe that existing spatial attacks cause large degradation in image quality and find the loss of high-frequency detailed components might be its major reason. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel adversarial attack that incorporates both spatial and frequency features into the GAN architecture to generate adversarial examples. We further design an encoder-decoder architecture with skip connections of high-frequency components to preserve fine details. We evaluated our method on three image manipulation detectors (FCN, ManTra-Net and MVSS-Net) with three benchmark datasets (DEFACTO, CASIAv2 and COVER). Experiments show that our method generates adversarial examples significantly fast (0.01s per image), preserves better image quality (PSNR 30% higher than spatial attacks) and achieves a high attack success rate. We also observe that the examples generated by AMG can fool both classification and segmentation models, which indicates better transferability among different tasks.

Peifei Zhu, Genki Osada, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Tsubasa Takahashi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 4315-4324

iccv

Faster approximate subgraph counts with privacy

One of the most common problems studied in the context of differential privacy for graph data is counting the number of non-induced embeddings of a subgraph in a given graph. These counts have very high global sensitivity. Therefore, adding noise based on powerful alternative techniques, such as smooth sensitivity and higher-order local sensitivity have been shown to give significantly better accuracy. However, all these alternatives to global sensitivity become computationally very expensive, and to date efficient polynomial time algorithms are known only for few selected subgraphs, such as triangles, $k$-triangles, and $k$-stars.In this paper, we show that good approximations to these sensitivity metrics can be still used to get private algorithms.Using this approach, we much faster algorithms for privately counting the number of triangles in real-world social networks, which can be easily parallelized.We also give a private polynomial time algorithm for counting any constant size subgraph using less noise than the global sensitivity; we show this can be improved significantly for counting paths in special classes of graphs.

Dung Nguyen, Mahantesh Halappanavar, Venkatesh Srinivasan, Anil Vullikanti

neurips

Convolutional Visual Prompt for Robust Visual Perception

Vision models are often vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples without adapting. While visual prompts offer a lightweight method of input-space adaptation for large-scale vision models, they rely on a high-dimensional additive vector and labeled data. This leads to overfitting when adapting models in a self-supervised test-time setting without labels. We introduce convolutional visual prompts (CVP) for label-free test-time adaptation for robust visual perception. The structured nature of CVP demands fewer trainable parameters, less than 1\% compared to standard visual prompts, combating overfitting. Extensive experiments and analysis on a wide variety of OOD visual perception tasks show that our approach is effective, improving robustness by up to 5.87\% over several large-scale models.

Yun-Yun Tsai, Chengzhi Mao, Junfeng Yang

neurips

Animal3D: A Comprehensive Dataset of 3D Animal Pose and Shape

Accurately estimating the 3D pose and shape is an essential step towards understanding animal behavior, and can potentially benefit many downstream applications, such as wildlife conservation. However, research in this area is held back by the lack of a comprehensive and diverse dataset with high-quality 3D pose and shape annotations. In this paper, we propose Animal3D, the first comprehensive dataset for mammal animal 3D pose and shape estimation. Animal3D consists of 3379 images collected from 40 mammal species, high-quality annotations of 26 keypoints, and importantly the pose and shape parameters of the SMAL model. All annotations were labeled and checked manually in a multi-stage process to ensure highest quality results. Based on the Animal3D dataset, we benchmark representative shape and pose estimation models at: (1) supervised learning from only the Animal3D data, (2) synthetic to real transfer from synthetically generated images, and (3) fine-tuning human pose and shape estimation models. Our experimental results demonstrate that predicting the 3D shape and pose of animals across species remains a very challenging task, despite significant advances in human pose estimation and animal pose estimation for specific species. Our results further demonstrate that synthetic pre-training is a viable strategy to boost the model performance. Overall, Animal3D opens new directions for facilitating future research in animal 3D pose and shape estimation, and is publicly available.

Jiacong Xu, Yi Zhang, Jiawei Peng, Wufei Ma, Artur Jesslen, Pengliang Ji, Qixin Hu, Jiehua Zhang, Qihao Liu, Jiahao Wang, Wei Ji, Chen Wang, Xiaoding Yuan, Prakhar Kaushik, Guofeng Zhang, Jie Liu, Yushan Xie, Yawen Cui, Alan Yuille, Adam Kortylewski; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 9099-9109

iccv

Biomechanics-Guided Facial Action Unit Detection Through Force Modeling

Existing AU detection algorithms are mainly based on appearance information extracted from 2D images, and well-established facial biomechanics that governs 3D facial skin deformation is rarely considered. In this paper, we propose a biomechanics-guided AU detection approach, where facial muscle activation forces are modelled, and are employed to predict AU activation. Specifically, our model consists of two branches: 3D physics branch and 2D image branch. In 3D physics branch, we first derive the Euler-Lagrange equation governing facial deformation. The Euler-Lagrange equation represented as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) is embedded into a differentiable ODE solver. Muscle activation forces together with other physics parameters are firstly regressed, and then are utilized to simulate 3D deformation by solving the ODE. By leveraging facial biomechanics, we obtain physically plausible facial muscle activation forces. 2D image branch compensates 3D physics branch by employing additional appearance information from 2D images. Both estimated forces and appearance features are employed for AU detection. The proposed approach achieves competitive AU detection performance on two benchmark datasets. Furthermore, by leveraging biomechanics, our approach achieves outstanding performance with reduced training data.

Zijun Cui, Chenyi Kuang, Tian Gao, Kartik Talamadupula, Qiang Ji; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 8694-8703

cvpr

Fine-tuning Happens in Tiny Subspaces: Exploring Intrinsic Task-specific Subspaces of Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to be overly parameterized and have significant redundancy, indicating a small degree of freedom of the PLMs. Motivated by the observation, in this paper, we study the problem of re-parameterizing and fine-tuning PLMs from a new perspective: Discovery of intrinsic task-specific subspace. Specifically, by exploiting the dynamics of the fine-tuning process for a given task, the parameter optimization trajectory is learned to uncover its intrinsic task-specific subspace. A key finding is that PLMs can be effectively fine-tuned in the subspace with a small number of free parameters. Beyond, we observe some outlier dimensions emerging during fine-tuning in the subspace. Disabling these dimensions degrades the model performance significantly. This suggests that these dimensions are crucial to induce task-specific knowledge to downstream tasks.

Zhong Zhang, Bang Liu, Junming Shao

acl

Dynamic Residual Classifier for Class Incremental Learning

The rehearsal strategy is widely used to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in class incremental learning (CIL) by preserving limited exemplars from previous tasks. With imbalanced sample numbers between old and new classes, the classifier learning can be biased. Existing CIL methods exploit the long-tailed (LT) recognition techniques, e.g., the adjusted losses and the data re-sampling methods, to handle the data imbalance issue within each increment task. In this work, the dynamic nature of data imbalance in CIL is shown and a novel Dynamic Residual Classifier (DRC) is proposed to handle this challenging scenario. Specifically, DRC is built upon a recent advance residual classifier with the branch layer merging to handle the model-growing problem. Moreover, DRC is compatible with different CIL pipelines and substantially improves them. Combining DRC with the model adaptation and fusion (MAF) pipeline, this method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the conventional CIL and the LT-CIL benchmarks. Extensive experiments are also conducted for a detailed analysis. The code is publicly available.

Xiuwei Chen, Xiaobin Chang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 18743-18752

iccv

Self-Supervised Blind Motion Deblurring With Deep Expectation Maximization

When taking a picture, any camera shake during the shutter time can result in a blurred image. Recovering a sharp image from the one blurred by camera shake is a challenging yet important problem. Most existing deep learning methods use supervised learning to train a deep neural network (DNN) on a dataset of many pairs of blurred/latent images. In contrast, this paper presents a dataset-free deep learning method for removing uniform and non-uniform blur effects from images of static scenes. Our method involves a DNN-based re-parametrization of the latent image, and we propose a Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization (MCEM) approach to train the DNN without requiring any latent images. The Monte Carlo simulation is implemented via Langevin dynamics. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms existing methods significantly in removing motion blur from images of static scenes.

Ji Li, Weixi Wang, Yuesong Nan, Hui Ji; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 13986-13996

cvpr

Deformable Neural Radiance Fields using RGB and Event Cameras

Modeling Neural Radiance Fields for fast-moving deformable objects from visual data alone is a challenging problem. A major issue arises due to the high deformation and low acquisition rates. To address this problem, we propose to use event cameras that offer very fast acquisition of visual change in an asynchronous manner. In this work, we develop a novel method to model the deformable neural radiance fields using RGB and Event cameras. The proposed method uses the asynchronous stream of events and calibrated sparse RGB frames. In this setup, the pose of the individual events --required to integrate them into the radiance fields-- remains to be unknown. Our method jointly optimizes the pose and the radiance field, in an efficient manner by leveraging the collection of events at once and actively sampling the events during learning. Experiments conducted on both realistically rendered and real-world datasets demonstrate a significant benefit of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art and the compared baseline. This shows a promising direction for modeling deformable neural radiance fields in real-world dynamic scenes. Our code and data will be publicly available.

Qi Ma, Danda Pani Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 3590-3600

iccv

What can online reinforcement learning with function approximation benefit from general coverage conditions?

In online reinforcement learning (RL), instead of employing standard structural assumptions on Markov decision processes (MDPs), using a certain coverage condition (original from offline RL) is enough to ensure sample-efficient guarantees (Xie et al. 2023). In this work, we focus on this new direction by digging more possible and general coverage conditions, and study the potential and the utility of them in efficient online RL. We identify more concepts, including the $L^p$ variant of concentrability, the density ratio realizability, and trade-off on the partial/rest coverage condition, that can be also beneficial to sample-efficient online RL, achieving improved regret bound. Furthermore, if exploratory offline data are used, under our coverage conditions, both statistically and computationally efficient guarantees can be achieved for online RL. Besides, even though the MDP structure is given, e.g., linear MDP, we elucidate that, good coverage conditions are still beneficial to obtain faster regret bound beyond $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ and even a logarithmic order regret. These results provide a good justification for the usage of general coverage conditions in efficient online RL.

Fanghui Liu, Luca Viano, Volkan Cevher

icml

MEFLUT: Unsupervised 1D Lookup Tables for Multi-exposure Image Fusion

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for high-quality multi-exposure image fusion (MEF). We show that the fusion weights of an exposure can be encoded into a 1D lookup table (LUT), which takes pixel intensity value as input and produces fusion weight as output. We learn one 1D LUT for each exposure, then all the pixels from different exposures can query 1D LUT of that exposure independently for high-quality and efficient fusion. Specifically, to learn these 1D LUTs, we involve attention mechanism in various dimensions including frame, channel and spatial ones into the MEF task so as to bring us significant quality improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA). In addition, we collect a new MEF dataset consisting of 960 samples, 155 of which are manually tuned by professionals as ground-truth for evaluation. Our network is trained by this dataset in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of all the newly proposed components, and results show that our approach outperforms the SOTA in our and another representative dataset SICE, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our 1D LUT approach takes less than 4ms to run a 4K image on a PC GPU. Given its high quality, efficiency and robustness, our method has been shipped into millions of Android mobiles across multiple brands world-wide. Code is available at: https://github.com/Hedlen/MEFLUT.

Ting Jiang, Chuan Wang, Xinpeng Li, Ru Li, Haoqiang Fan, Shuaicheng Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 10542-10551

iccv

Transformer-Based Learned Optimization

We propose a new approach to learned optimization where we represent the computation of an optimizer's update step using a neural network. The parameters of the optimizer are then learned by training on a set of optimization tasks with the objective to perform minimization efficiently. Our innovation is a new neural network architecture, Optimus, for the learned optimizer inspired by the classic BFGS algorithm. As in BFGS, we estimate a preconditioning matrix as a sum of rank-one updates but use a Transformer-based neural network to predict these updates jointly with the step length and direction. In contrast to several recent learned optimization-based approaches, our formulation allows for conditioning across the dimensions of the parameter space of the target problem while remaining applicable to optimization tasks of variable dimensionality without retraining. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on a benchmark composed of objective functions traditionally used for the evaluation of optimization algorithms, as well as on the real world-task of physics-based visual reconstruction of articulated 3d human motion.

Erik Gärtner, Luke Metz, Mykhaylo Andriluka, C. Daniel Freeman, Cristian Sminchisescu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 11970-11979

cvpr

Benchmarking and Analyzing 3D-aware Image Synthesis with a Modularized Codebase

Despite the rapid advance of 3D-aware image synthesis, existing studies usually adopt a mixture of techniques and tricks, leaving it unclear how each part contributes to the final performance in terms of generality. Following the most popular and effective paradigm in this field, which incorporates a neural radiance field (NeRF) into the generator of a generative adversarial network (GAN), we builda well-structured codebase through modularizing the generation process. Such a design allows researchers to develop and replace each module independently, and hence offers an opportunity to fairly compare various approaches and recognize their contributions from the module perspective. The reproduction of a range of cutting-edge algorithms demonstrates the availability of our modularized codebase. We also perform a variety of in-depth analyses, such as the comparison across different types of point feature, the necessity of the tailing upsampler in the generator, the reliance on the camera pose prior, etc., which deepen our understanding of existing methods and point out some further directions of the research work. Code and models will be made publicly available to facilitate the development and evaluation of this field.

Qiuyu Wang, Zifan Shi, Kecheng Zheng, Yinghao Xu, Sida Peng, Yujun Shen

neurips

SG-Former: Self-guided Transformer with Evolving Token Reallocation

Vision Transformer has demonstrated impressive success across various vision tasks. However, its heavy computation cost, which grows quadratically with respect to the token sequence length, largely limits its power in handling large feature maps. To alleviate the computation cost, previous works rely on either fine-grained self-attentions restricted to local small regions, or global self-attentions but to shorten the sequence length resulting in coarse granularity. In this paper, we propose a novel model, termed as Self-guided Transformer (SG-Former), towards effective global self-attention with adaptive fine granularity. At the heart of our approach is to utilize a significance map, which is estimated through hybrid-scale self-attention and evolves itself during training, to reallocate tokens based on the significance of each region. Intuitively, we assign more tokens to the salient regions for achieving fine-grained attention, while allocating fewer tokens to the minor regions in exchange for efficiency and global receptive fields. The proposed SG-Former achieves performance superior to state of the art: our base size model achieves 84.7% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 51.2mAP bbAP on CoCo, 52.7mIoU on ADE20K surpassing the Swin Transformer by +1.3% / +2.7 mAP/ +3 mIoU, with lower computation costs and fewer parameters.

Sucheng Ren, Xingyi Yang, Songhua Liu, Xinchao Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 6003-6014

iccv

Rethinking Visual Reconstruction: Experience-Based Content Completion Guided by Visual Cues

Decoding seen images from brain activities has been an absorbing field. However, the reconstructed images still suffer from low quality with existing studies. This can be because our visual system is not like a camera that ”remembers” every pixel. Instead, only part of the information can be perceived with our selective attention, and the brain ”guesses” the rest to form what we think we see. Most existing approaches ignored the brain completion mechanism. In this work, we propose to reconstruct seen images with both the visual perception and the brain completion process, and design a simple, yet effective visual decoding framework to achieve this goal. Specifically, we first construct a shared discrete representation space for both brain signals and images. Then, a novel self-supervised token-to-token inpainting network is designed to implement visual content completion by building context and prior knowledge about the visual objects from the discrete latent space. Our approach improved the quality of visual reconstruction significantly and achieved state-of-the-art.

Jiaxuan Chen, Yu Qi, Gang Pan

icml

A Study on Transformer Configuration and Training Objective

Transformer-based models have delivered impressive results on many tasks, particularly vision and language tasks. In many model training situations, conventional configurations are often adopted. For example, we usually set the base model with hidden size (i.e. model width) to be 768 and the number of transformer layers (i.e. model depth) to be 12. In this paper, we revisit these conventional configurations by studying the the relationship between transformer configuration and training objective. We show that the optimal transformer configuration is closely related to the training objective. Specifically, compared with the simple classification objective, the masked autoencoder is effective in alleviating the over-smoothing issue in deep transformer training. Based on this finding, we propose “Bamboo”, a notion of using deeper and narrower transformer configurations, for masked autoencoder training. On ImageNet, with such a simple change in configuration, the re-designed Base-level transformer achieves 84.2% top-1 accuracy and outperforms SoTA models like MAE by $0.9%$. On language tasks, re-designed model outperforms BERT with the default setting by 1.1 points on average, on GLUE benchmark with 8 datasets.

Fuzhao Xue, Jianghai Chen, Aixin Sun, Xiaozhe Ren, Zangwei Zheng, Xiaoxin He, Yongming Chen, Xin Jiang, Yang You

icml

Privacy Preserving Localization via Coordinate Permutations

Recent methods on privacy-preserving image-based localization use a random line parameterization to protect the privacy of query images and database maps. The lifting of points to lines effectively drops one of the two geometric constraints traditionally used with point-to-point correspondences in structure-based localization. This leads to a significant loss of accuracy for the privacy-preserving methods. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by devising a coordinate permutation scheme that allows for recovering the original point positions during pose estimation. The recovered points provide the full 2D geometric constraints and enable us to close the gap between privacy-preserving and traditional methods in terms of accuracy. Another limitation of random line methods is their vulnerability to density based 3D line cloud inversion attacks. Our method not only provides better accuracy than the original random line based approach but also provides stronger privacy guarantees against these recently proposed attacks. Extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate these improvements consistently across both scenarios of protecting the privacy of query images as well as the database map.

Linfei Pan, Johannes L. Schönberger, Viktor Larsson, Marc Pollefeys; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 18174-18183

iccv

Auto-Differentiation of Relational Computations for Very Large Scale Machine Learning

The relational data model was designed to facilitate large-scale data management and analytics. We consider the problem of how to differentiate computations expressed relationally. We show experimentally that a relational engine running an auto-differentiated relational algorithm can easily scale to very large datasets, and is competitive with state-of-the-art, special-purpose systems for large-scale distributed machine learning.

Yuxin Tang, Zhimin Ding, Dimitrije Jankov, Binhang Yuan, Daniel Bourgeois, Chris Jermaine

icml

Spatiotemporal Deformation Perception for Fisheye Video Rectification

Although the distortion correction of fisheye images has been extensively studied, the correction of fisheye videos is still an elusive challenge. For different frames of the fisheye video, the existing image correction methods ignore the correlation of sequences, resulting in temporal jitter in the corrected video. To solve this problem, we propose a temporal weighting scheme to get a plausible global optical flow, which mitigates the jitter effect by progressively reducing the weight of frames. Subsequently, we observe that the inter-frame optical flow of the video is facilitated to perceive the local spatial deformation of the fisheye video. Therefore, we derive the spatial deformation through the flows of fisheye and distorted-free videos, thereby enhancing the local accuracy of the predicted result. However, the independent correction for each frame disrupts the temporal correlation. Due to the property of fisheye video, a distorted moving object may be able to find its distorted-free pattern at another moment. To this end, a temporal deformation aggregator is designed to reconstruct the deformation correlation between frames and provide a reliable global feature. Our method achieves an end-to-end correction and demonstrates superiority in correction quality and stability compared with the SOTA correction methods.

Shangrong Yang, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Yao Zhao

aaai

Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a widely-used tool for information seeking, but their generated outputs are prone to hallucination. In this work, our aim is to allow LLMs to generate text with citations, improving their factual correctness and verifiability. Existing work mainly relies on commercial search engines and human evaluation, making it challenging to reproduce and compare different modeling approaches. We propose ALCE, the first benchmark for Automatic LLMs’ Citation Evaluation. ALCE collects a diverse set of questions and retrieval corpora and requires building end-to-end systems to retrieve supporting evidence and generate answers with citations. We develop automatic metrics along three dimensions—fluency, correctness, and citation quality—and demonstrate their strong correlation with human judgements. Our experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs and novel prompting strategies show that current systems have considerable room for improvement—For example, on the ELI5 dataset, even the best models lack complete citation support 50% of the time. Our analyses further highlight promising future directions, including developing better retrievers, advancing long-context LLMs, and improving the ability to synthesize information from multiple sources.

Tianyu Gao, Howard Yen, Jiatong Yu, Danqi Chen

emnlp

Exploring Geometry of Blind Spots in Vision models

Despite the remarkable success of deep neural networks in a myriad of settings, several works have demonstrated their overwhelming sensitivity to near-imperceptible perturbations, known as adversarial attacks. On the other hand, prior works have also observed that deep networks can be under-sensitive, wherein large-magnitude perturbations in input space do not induce appreciable changes to network activations. In this work, we study in detail the phenomenon of under-sensitivity in vision models such as CNNs and Transformers, and present techniques to study the geometry and extent of “equi-confidence” level sets of such networks. We propose a Level Set Traversal algorithm that iteratively explores regions of high confidence with respect to the input space using orthogonal components of the local gradients. Given a source image, we use this algorithm to identify inputs that lie in the same equi-confidence level set as the source image despite being perceptually similar to arbitrary images from other classes. We further observe that the source image is linearly connected by a high-confidence path to these inputs, uncovering a star-like structure for level sets of deep networks. Furthermore, we attempt to identify and estimate the extent of these connected higher-dimensional regions over which the model maintains a high degree of confidence.

Sriram Balasubramanian, Gaurang Sriramanan, Vinu Sankar Sadasivan, Soheil Feizi

neurips

IPCC-TP: Utilizing Incremental Pearson Correlation Coefficient for Joint Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction

Reliable multi-agent trajectory prediction is crucial for the safe planning and control of autonomous systems. Compared with single-agent cases, the major challenge in simultaneously processing multiple agents lies in modeling complex social interactions caused by various driving intentions and road conditions. Previous methods typically leverage graph-based message propagation or attention mechanism to encapsulate such interactions in the format of marginal probabilistic distributions. However, it is inherently sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose IPCC-TP, a novel relevance-aware module based on Incremental Pearson Correlation Coefficient to improve multi-agent interaction modeling. IPCC-TP learns pairwise joint Gaussian Distributions through the tightly-coupled estimation of the means and covariances according to interactive incremental movements. Our module can be conveniently embedded into existing multi-agent prediction methods to extend original motion distribution decoders. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that IPCC-TP improves the performance of baselines by a large margin.

Dekai Zhu, Guangyao Zhai, Yan Di, Fabian Manhardt, Hendrik Berkemeyer, Tuan Tran, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari, Benjamin Busam; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 5507-5516

cvpr

Discover and Cure: Concept-aware Mitigation of Spurious Correlation

Deep neural networks often rely on spurious correlations to make predictions, which hinders generalization beyond training environments. For instance, models that associate cats with bed backgrounds can fail to predict the existence of cats in other environments without beds. Mitigating spurious correlations is crucial in building trustworthy models. However, the existing works lack transparency to offer insights into the mitigation process. In this work, we propose an interpretable framework, Discover and Cure (DISC), to tackle the issue. With human-interpretable concepts, DISC iteratively 1) discovers unstable concepts across different environments as spurious attributes, then 2) intervenes on the training data using the discovered concepts to reduce spurious correlation. Across systematic experiments, DISC provides superior generalization ability and interpretability than the existing approaches. Specifically, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on an object recognition task and a skin-lesion classification task by 7.5% and 9.6%, respectively. Additionally, we offer theoretical analysis and guarantees to understand the benefits of models trained by DISC. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Wuyxin/DISC.

Shirley Wu, Mert Yuksekgonul, Linjun Zhang, James Zou

icml

Policy Contrastive Imitation Learning

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) is a popular method that has recently achieved much success. However, the performance of AIL is still unsatisfactory on the more challenging tasks. We find that one of the major reasons is due to the low quality of AIL discriminator representation. Since the AIL discriminator is trained via binary classification that does not necessarily discriminate the policy from the expert in a meaningful way, the resulting reward might not be meaningful either. We propose a new method called Policy Contrastive Imitation Learning (PCIL) to resolve this issue. PCIL learns a contrastive representation space by anchoring on different policies and uses a smooth cosine-similarity-based reward to encourage imitation learning. Our proposed representation learning objective can be viewed as a stronger version of the AIL objective and provide a more meaningful comparison between the agent and the policy. From a theoretical perspective, we show the validity of our method using the apprenticeship learning framework. Furthermore, our empirical evaluation on the DeepMind Control suite demonstrates that PCIL can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Finally, qualitative results suggest that PCIL builds a smoother and more meaningful representation space for imitation learning.

Jialei Huang, Zhao-Heng Yin, Yingdong Hu, Yang Gao

icml

A3FL: Adversarially Adaptive Backdoor Attacks to Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to train a global model collaboratively without sharing their local training data. Due to its distributed nature, many studies have shown that it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. However, existing studies usually used a predetermined, fixed backdoor trigger or optimized it based solely on the local data and model without considering the global training dynamics. This leads to sub-optimal and less durable attack effectiveness, i.e., their attack success rate is low when the attack budget is limited and decreases quickly if the attacker can no longer perform attacks anymore. To address these limitations, we propose A3FL, a new backdoor attack which adversarially adapts the backdoor trigger to make it less likely to be removed by the global training dynamics. Our key intuition is that the difference between the global model and the local model in FL makes the local-optimized trigger much less effective when transferred to the global model. We solve this by optimizing the trigger to even survive the worst-case scenario where the global model was trained to directly unlearn the trigger. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted for twelve existing defenses to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of our A3FL. Our code is available at https://github.com/hfzhang31/A3FL.

Hangfan Zhang, Jinyuan Jia, Jinghui Chen, Lu Lin, Dinghao Wu

neurips

Dynamic Top-k Estimation Consolidates Disagreement between Feature Attribution Methods

Feature attribution scores are used for explaining the prediction of a text classifier to users by highlighting a k number of tokens. In this work, we propose a way to determine the number of optimal k tokens that should be displayed from sequential properties of the attribution scores. Our approach is dynamic across sentences, method-agnostic, and deals with sentence length bias. We compare agreement between multiple methods and humans on an NLI task, using fixed k and dynamic k. We find that perturbation-based methods and Vanilla Gradient exhibit highest agreement on most method–method and method–human agreement metrics with a static k. Their advantage over other methods disappears with dynamic ks which mainly improve Integrated Gradient and GradientXInput. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that sequential properties of attribution scores are informative for consolidating attribution signals for human interpretation.

Jonathan Kamp, Lisa Beinborn, Antske Fokkens

emnlp

StyleTalk: One-Shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

Yifeng Ma, Suzhen Wang, Zhipeng Hu, Changjie Fan, Tangjie Lv, Yu Ding, Zhidong Deng, Xin Yu

aaai

Controlled Text Generation with Natural Language Instructions

Large language models can be prompted to pro- duce fluent output for a wide range of tasks without being specifically trained to do so. Nevertheless, it is notoriously difficult to control their generation in such a way that it satisfies user-specified constraints. In this paper, we present InstructCTG, a simple controlled text generation framework that incorporates different constraints by verbalizing them as natural language instructions. We annotate natural texts through a combination of off-the-shelf NLP tools and simple heuristics with the linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints they satisfy. Then, we verbalize the constraints into natural language instructions to form weakly supervised training data, i.e., we prepend the natural language verbalizations of the constraints in front of their corresponding natural language sentences. Next, we fine-tune a pre-trained language model on the augmented corpus. Compared to existing methods, InstructCTG is more flexible in terms of the types of constraints it allows the practitioner to use. It also does not require any modification of the decoding procedure. Finally, InstructCTG allows the model to adapt to new constraints without re-training through the use of in-context learning.

Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Ethan Wilcox, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan

icml

Towards Data-Algorithm Dependent Generalization: a Case Study on Overparameterized Linear Regression

One of the major open problems in machine learning is to characterize generalization in the overparameterized regime, where most traditional generalization bounds become inconsistent even for overparameterized linear regression. In many scenarios, this failure can be attributed to obscuring the crucial interplay between the training algorithm and the underlying data distribution. This paper demonstrate that the generalization behavior of overparameterized model should be analyzed in a both data-relevant and algorithm-relevant manner. To make a formal characterization, We introduce a notion called data-algorithm compatibility, which considers the generalization behavior of the entire data-dependent training trajectory, instead of traditional last-iterate analysis. We validate our claim by studying the setting of solving overparameterized linear regression with gradient descent. Specifically, we perform a data-dependent trajectory analysis and derive a sufficient condition for compatibility in such a setting. Our theoretical results demonstrate that if we take early stopping iterates into consideration, generalization can hold with significantly weaker restrictions on the problem instance than the previous last-iterate analysis.

Jing Xu, Jiaye Teng, Yang Yuan, Andrew Yao

neurips

Revisiting Rolling Shutter Bundle Adjustment: Toward Accurate and Fast Solution

We propose a robust and fast bundle adjustment solution that estimates the 6-DoF pose of the camera and the geometry of the environment based on measurements from a rolling shutter (RS) camera. This tackles the challenges in the existing works, namely relying on additional sensors, high frame rate video as input, restrictive assumptions on camera motion, readout direction, and poor efficiency. To this end, we first investigate the influence of normalization to the image point on RSBA performance and show its better approximation in modelling the real 6-DoF camera motion. Then we present a novel analytical model for the visual residual covariance, which can be used to standardize the reprojection error during the optimization, consequently improving the overall accuracy. More importantly, the combination of normalization and covariance standardization weighting in RSBA (NW-RSBA) can avoid common planar degeneracy without needing to constrain the filming manner. Besides, we propose an acceleration strategy for NW-RSBA based on the sparsity of its Jacobian matrix and Schur complement. The extensive synthetic and real data experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art works. We also demonstrate the proposed method can be easily implemented and plug-in famous GSSfM and GSSLAM systems as completed RSSfM and RSSLAM solutions.

Bangyan Liao, Delin Qu, Yifei Xue, Huiqing Zhang, Yizhen Lao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 4863-4871

cvpr

Why does Throwing Away Data Improve Worst-Group Error?

When facing data with imbalanced classes or groups, practitioners follow an intriguing strategy to achieve best results. They throw away examples until the classes or groups are balanced in size, and then perform empirical risk minimization on the reduced training set. This opposes common wisdom in learning theory, where the expected error is supposed to decrease as the dataset grows in size. In this work, we leverage extreme value theory to address this apparent contradiction. Our results show that the tails of the data distribution play an important role in determining the worst-group-accuracy of linear classifiers. When learning on data with heavy tails, throwing away data restores the geometric symmetry of the resulting classifier, and therefore improves its worst-group generalization.

Kamalika Chaudhuri, Kartik Ahuja, Martin Arjovsky, David Lopez-Paz

icml

Lovász Principle for Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning

This paper focuses on graph-level representation learning that aims to represent graphs as vectors that can be directly utilized in downstream tasks such as graph classification. We propose a novel graph-level representation learning principle called Lovász principle, which is motivated by the Lovász number in graph theory. The Lovász number of a graph is a real number that is an upper bound for graph Shannon capacity and is strongly connected with various global characteristics of the graph. Specifically, we show that the handle vector for computing the Lovász number is potentially a suitable choice for graph representation, as it captures a graph's global properties, though a direct application of the handle vector is difficult and problematic. We propose to use neural networks to address the problems and hence provide the Lovász principle. Moreover, we propose an enhanced Lovász principle that is able to exploit the subgraph Lovász numbers directly and efficiently. The experiments demonstrate that our Lovász principles achieve competitive performance compared to the baselines in unsupervised and semi-supervised graph-level representation learning tasks. The code of our Lovász principles is publicly available on GitHub.

Ziheng Sun, Chris Ding, Jicong Fan

neurips

CiteTracker: Correlating Image and Text for Visual Tracking

Existing visual tracking methods typically take an image patch as the reference of the target to perform tracking. However, a single image patch cannot provide a complete and precise concept of the target object as images are limited in their ability to abstract and can be ambiguous, which makes it difficult to track targets with drastic variations. In this paper, we propose the CiteTracking algorithm to enhance target modeling and inference in visual tracking by connecting images and text. Specifically, we develop a text generation module to convert the target image patch into a descriptive text containing its class and attribute information, providing a comprehensive reference point for the target. In addition, a dynamic description module is designed to adapt to target variations for more effective target representation. We then associate the target description and the search image using an attention-based correlation module to generate the correlated features for target state reference. Extensive experiments on five diverse datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm and the favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed tracking method. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.

Xin Li, Yuqing Huang, Zhenyu He, Yaowei Wang, Huchuan Lu, Ming-Hsuan Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 9974-9983

iccv

Im2Hands: Learning Attentive Implicit Representation of Interacting Two-Hand Shapes

We present Implicit Two Hands (Im2Hands), the first neural implicit representation of two interacting hands. Unlike existing methods on two-hand reconstruction that rely on a parametric hand model and/or low-resolution meshes, Im2Hands can produce fine-grained geometry of two hands with high hand-to-hand and hand-to-image coherency. To handle the shape complexity and interaction context between two hands, Im2Hands models the occupancy volume of two hands -- conditioned on an RGB image and coarse 3D keypoints -- by two novel attention-based modules responsible for (1) initial occupancy estimation and (2) context-aware occupancy refinement, respectively. Im2Hands first learns per-hand neural articulated occupancy in the canonical space designed for each hand using query-image attention. It then refines the initial two-hand occupancy in the posed space to enhance the coherency between the two hand shapes using query-anchor attention. In addition, we introduce an optional keypoint refinement module to enable robust two-hand shape estimation from predicted hand keypoints in a single-image reconstruction scenario. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of Im2Hands on two-hand reconstruction in comparison to related methods, where ours achieves state-of-the-art results. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jyunlee/Im2Hands.

Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung, Honggyu Choi, Tae-Kyun Kim; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 21169-21178

cvpr

ParCNetV2: Oversized Kernel with Enhanced Attention

Transformers have shown great potential in various computer vision tasks. By borrowing design concepts from transformers, many studies revolutionized CNNs and showed remarkable results. This paper falls in this line of studies. Specifically, we propose a new convolutional neural network, ParCNetV2, that extends the research line of ParCNetV1 by bridging the gap between CNN and ViT. It introduces two key designs: 1) Oversized Convolution (OC) with twice the size of the input, and 2) Bifurcate Gate Unit (BGU) to ensure that the model is input adaptive. Fusing OC and BGU in a unified CNN, ParCNetV2 is capable of flexibly extracting global features like ViT, while maintaining lower latency and better accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over other convolutional neural networks and hybrid models that combine CNNs and transformers. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/XuRuihan/ParCNetV2.

Ruihan Xu, Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu, Shiliang Zhang, Xiaoyu Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 5752-5762

iccv

Learning Latent Relations for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning aims to predict future facts based on historical data. However, due to the limitations in construction tools and data sources, many important associations between entities may be omitted in TKG. We refer to these missing associations as latent relations. Most existing methods have some drawbacks in explicitly capturing intra-time latent relations between co-occurring entities and inter-time latent relations between entities that appear at different times. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Latent relations Learning method for TKG reasoning, namely L2TKG. Specifically, we first utilize a Structural Encoder (SE) to obtain representations of entities at each timestamp. We then design a Latent Relations Learning (LRL) module to mine and exploit the intra- and inter-time latent relations. Finally, we extract the temporal representations from the output of SE and LRL for entity prediction. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of L2TKG.

Mengqi Zhang, Yuwei Xia, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang

acl

Efficient List-Decodable Regression using Batches

We demonstrate the use of batches in studying list-decodable linear regression, in which only $\alpha\in (0,1]$ fraction of batches contain genuine samples from a common distribution and the rest can contain arbitrary or even adversarial samples. When genuine batches have $\ge \tilde\Omega(1/\alpha)$ samples each, our algorithm can efficiently find a small list of potential regression parameters, with a high probability that one of them is close to the true parameter. This is the first polynomial time algorithm for list-decodable linear regression, and its sample complexity scales nearly linearly with the dimension of the covariates. The polynomial time algorithm is made possible by the batch structure and may not be feasible without it, as suggested by a recent Statistical Query lower bound (Diakonikolas et al., 2021b).

Abhimanyu Das, Ayush Jain, Weihao Kong, Rajat Sen

icml

Language Models are Weak Learners

A central notion in practical and theoretical machine learning is that of a weak learner, classifiers that achieve better-than-random performance (on any given distribution over data), even by a small margin. Such weak learners form the practical basis for canonical machine learning methods such as boosting. In this work, we illustrate that prompt-based large language models can operate effectively as said weak learners. Specifically, we illustrate the use of a large language model (LLM) as a weak learner in a boosting algorithm applied to tabular data. We show that by providing (properly sampled according to the distribution of interest) text descriptions of tabular data samples, LLMs can produce a summary of the samples that serves as a template for classification, and achieves the aim of acting as a weak learner on this task. We incorporate these models into a boosting approach, which in many settings can leverage the knowledge within the LLM to outperform traditional tree-based boosting. The model outperforms both few-shot learning and occasionally even more involved fine-tuning procedures, particularly for some tasks involving small numbers of data points. The results illustrate the potential for prompt-based LLMs to function not just as few-shot learners themselves, but as components of larger machine learning models.

Hariharan Manikandan, Yiding Jiang, J. Zico Kolter

neurips

Invariant Slot Attention: Object Discovery with Slot-Centric Reference Frames

Automatically discovering composable abstractions from raw perceptual data is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. Recent slot-based neural networks that learn about objects in a self-supervised manner have made exciting progress in this direction. However, they typically fall short at adequately capturing spatial symmetries present in the visual world, which leads to sample inefficiency, such as when entangling object appearance and pose. In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective method for incorporating spatial symmetries via slot-centric reference frames. We incorporate equivariance to per-object pose transformations into the attention and generation mechanism of Slot Attention by translating, scaling, and rotating position encodings. These changes result in little computational overhead, are easy to implement, and can result in large gains in terms of data efficiency and overall improvements to object discovery. We evaluate our method on a wide range of synthetic object discovery benchmarks namely CLEVR, Tetrominoes, CLEVRTex, Objects Room and MultiShapeNet, and show promising improvements on the challenging real-world Waymo Open dataset.

Ondrej Biza, Sjoerd Van Steenkiste, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Gamaleldin Fathy Elsayed, Aravindh Mahendran, Thomas Kipf

icml

DyNCA: Real-Time Dynamic Texture Synthesis Using Neural Cellular Automata

Current Dynamic Texture Synthesis (DyTS) models can synthesize realistic videos. However, they require a slow iterative optimization process to synthesize a single fixed-size short video, and they do not offer any post-training control over the synthesis process. We propose Dynamic Neural Cellular Automata (DyNCA), a framework for real-time and controllable dynamic texture synthesis. Our method is built upon the recently introduced NCA models and can synthesize infinitely long and arbitrary-size realistic video textures in real-time. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model and show that our synthesized videos appear more realistic than the existing results. We improve the SOTA DyTS performance by 2 4 orders of magnitude. Moreover, our model offers several real-time video controls including motion speed, motion direction, and an editing brush tool. We exhibit our trained models in an online interactive demo that runs on local hardware and is accessible on personal computers and smartphones.

Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Yitao Xu, Tong Zhang, Sabine Süsstrunk; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 20742-20751

cvpr

Formalizing Preferences Over Runtime Distributions

When trying to solve a computational problem, we are often faced with a choice between algorithms that are guaranteed to return the right answer but differ in their runtime distributions (e.g., SAT solvers, sorting algorithms). This paper aims to lay theoretical foundations for such choices by formalizing preferences over runtime distributions. It might seem that we should simply prefer the algorithm that minimizes expected runtime. However, such preferences would be driven by exactly how slow our algorithm is on bad inputs, whereas in practice we are typically willing to cut off occasional, sufficiently long runs before they finish. We propose a principled alternative, taking a utility-theoretic approach to characterize the scoring functions that describe preferences over algorithms. These functions depend on the way our value for solving our problem decreases with time and on the distribution from which captimes are drawn. We describe examples of realistic utility functions and show how to leverage a maximum-entropy approach for modeling underspecified captime distributions. Finally, we show how to efficiently estimate an algorithm’s expected utility from runtime samples.

Devon R. Graham, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Tim Roughgarden

icml

Spatial-Temporal Concept Based Explanation of 3D ConvNets

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performance on various tasks. Despite its widespread adoption, the decision procedure of the network still lacks transparency and interpretability, making it difficult to enhance the performance further. Hence, there has been considerable interest in providing explanation and interpretability for CNNs over the last few years. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) investigates the relationship between input images or videos and output predictions. Recent studies have achieved outstanding success in explaining 2D image classification ConvNets. On the other hand, due to the high computation cost and complexity of video data, the explanation of 3D video recognition ConvNets is relatively less studied. And none of them are able to produce a high-level explanation. In this paper, we propose a STCE (Spatial-temporal Concept-based Explanation) framework for interpreting 3D ConvNets. In our approach: (1) videos are represented with high-level supervoxels, similar supervoxels are clustered as a concept, which is straightforward for human to understand; and (2) the interpreting framework calculates a score for each concept, which reflects its significance in the ConvNet decision procedure. Experiments on diverse 3D ConvNets demonstrate that our method can identify global concepts with different importance levels, allowing us to investigate the impact of the concepts on a target task, such as action recognition, in-depth. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yingji425/STCE.

Ying Ji, Yu Wang, Jien Kato; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 15444-15453

cvpr

Generative Graph Dictionary Learning

Dictionary learning, which approximates data samples by a set of shared atoms, is a fundamental task in representation learning. However, dictionary learning over graphs, namely graph dictionary learning (GDL), is much more challenging than vectorial data as graphs lie in disparate metric spaces. The sparse literature on GDL formulates the problem from the reconstructive view and often learns linear graph embeddings with a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) Mixture Model named FraMe to address the GDL problem from the generative view. Equipped with the graph generation function based on the radial basis function kernel and FGW distance, FraMe generates nonlinear embedding spaces, which, as we theoretically proved, provide a good approximation of the original graph spaces. A fast solution is further proposed on top of the expectation-maximization algorithm with guaranteed convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained node and graph embeddings, and our algorithm achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

Zhichen Zeng, Ruike Zhu, Yinglong Xia, Hanqing Zeng, Hanghang Tong

icml

Parametric Surface Constrained Upsampler Network for Point Cloud

Designing a point cloud upsampler, which aims to generate a clean and dense point cloud given a sparse point representation, is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision. A line of attempts achieves this goal by establishing a point-to-point mapping function via deep neural networks. However, these approaches are prone to produce outlier points due to the lack of explicit surface-level constraints. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel surface regularizer into the upsampler network by forcing the neural network to learn the underlying parametric surface represented by bicubic functions and rotation functions, where the new generated points are then constrained on the underlying surface. These designs are integrated into two different networks for two tasks that take advantages of upsampling layers -- point cloud upsampling and point cloud completion for evaluation. The state-of-the-art experimental results on both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The implementation code will be available at https://github.com/corecai163/PSCU.

Pingping Cai, Zhenyao Wu, Xinyi Wu, Song Wang

aaai

Actively Testing Your Model While It Learns: Realizing Label-Efficient Learning in Practice

In active learning (AL), we focus on reducing the data annotation cost from the model training perspective. However, "testing'', which often refers to the model evaluation process of using empirical risk to estimate the intractable true generalization risk, also requires data annotations. The annotation cost for "testing'' (model evaluation) is under-explored. Even in works that study active model evaluation or active testing (AT), the learning and testing ends are disconnected. In this paper, we propose a novel active testing while learning (ATL) framework that integrates active learning with active testing. ATL provides an unbiased sample-efficient estimation of the model risk during active learning. It leverages test samples annotated from different periods of a dynamic active learning process to achieve fair model evaluations based on a theoretically guaranteed optimal integration of different test samples. Periodic testing also enables effective early-stopping to further save the total annotation cost. ATL further integrates an "active feedback'' mechanism, which is inspired by human learning, where the teacher (active tester) provides immediate guidance given by the prior performance of the student (active learner). Our theoretical result reveals that active feedback maintains the label complexity of the integrated learning-testing objective, while improving the model's generalization capability. We study the realistic setting where we maximize the performance gain from choosing "testing'' samples for feedback without sacrificing the risk estimation accuracy. An agnostic-style analysis and empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that the ATL framework can effectively improve the annotation efficiency of both active learning and evaluation tasks.

Dayou Yu, Weishi Shi, Qi Yu

neurips

Strategic Classification with Unknown User Manipulations

In many human-centric applications for Machine Learning instances will adapt to a classifier after its deployment. The field of strategic classification deals with this issue by aiming for a classifier that balances the trade-off between correctness and robustness to manipulation. This task is made harder if the underlying manipulation structure (i.e. the set of manipulations available at every instance) is unknown to the learner. We propose a novel batch-learning setting in which we use unlabeled data from previous rounds to estimate the manipulation structure. We show that in this batch-learning setting it is possible to learn a close-to-optimal classifier in terms of the strategic loss even without knowing the feasible manipulations beforehand. In line with recent advances in the strategic classification literature, we do not assume a best-response from agents but only require that observed manipulations are feasible.

Tosca Lechner, Ruth Urner, Shai Ben-David

icml