论文检索

Theory · Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Cheng Han, Qifan Wang, Yiming Cui, Wenguan Wang, Lifu Huang, Siyuan Qi, Dongfang Liu

As the scale of vision models continues to grow, the emergence of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as a parameter-efficient transfer learning technique has gained attention due to its superior performance compared to traditional full-finetuning. However, the conditions favoring VPT (the "when") and the underlying rationale (the "why") remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis across 19 distinct datasets and tasks. To understand the "when" aspect, we identify the scenarios where VPT proves favorable by two dimensions: task objectives and data distributions. We find that VPT is preferrable when there is 1) a substantial disparity between the original and the downstream task objectives ($e.g.$, transitioning from classification to counting), or 2) a notable similarity in data distributions between the two tasks ($e.g.$, both involve natural images). In exploring the "why" dimension, our results indicate VPT's success cannot be attributed solely to overfitting and optimization considerations. The unique way VPT preserves original features and adds parameters appears to be a pivotal factor. Our study provides insights into VPT's mechanisms, and offers guidance for its optimal utilization.

Applications · Computer Vision

Lingfeng Liu, Dong Ni, Hangjie Yuan

Bandwidth constraints during signal acquisition frequently impede real-time detection applications. Hyperspectral data is a notable example, whose vast volume compromises real-time hyperspectral detection. To tackle this hurdle, we introduce a novel approach leveraging pre-acquisition modulation to reduce the acquisition volume. This modulation process is governed by a deep learning model, utilizing prior information. Central to our approach is LUM-ViT, a Vision Transformer variant. Uniquely, LUM-ViT incorporates a learnable under-sampling mask tailored for pre-acquisition modulation. To further optimize for optical calculations, we propose a kernel-level weight binarization technique and a three-stage fine-tuning strategy. Our evaluations reveal that, by sampling a mere 10\% of the original image pixels, LUM-ViT maintains the accuracy loss within 1.8\% on the ImageNet classification task. The method sustains near-original accuracy when implemented on real-world optical hardware, demonstrating its practicality. Code will be available at [https://github.com/MaxLLF/LUM-ViT](https://github.com/MaxLLF/LUM-ViT).

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency and Interpretability

DIPANJYOTI PAUL, Arpita Chowdhury, Xinqi Xiong, Feng-Ju Chang, David Carlyn, Samuel Stevens, Kaiya Provost, Anuj Karpatne, Bryan Carstens, Daniel Rubenstein 等

We present a novel usage of Transformers to make image classification interpretable. Unlike mainstream classifiers that wait until the last fully connected layer to incorporate class information to make predictions, we investigate a proactive approach, asking each class to search for itself in an image. We realize this idea via a Transformer encoder-decoder inspired by DEtection TRansformer (DETR). We learn ''class-specific'' queries (one for each class) as input to the decoder, enabling each class to localize its patterns in an image via cross-attention. We name our approach INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), which is fairly easy to implement and exhibits several compelling properties. We show that INTR intrinsically encourages each class to attend distinctively; the cross-attention weights thus provide a faithful interpretation of the prediction. Interestingly, via ''multi-head'' cross-attention, INTR could identify different ''attributes'' of a class, making it particularly suitable for fine-grained classification and analysis, which we demonstrate on eight datasets. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly accessible at the Imageomics Institute GitHub site: https://github.com/Imageomics/INTR.

Applications · Computer Vision

Boya Shi, Zhengqin Xu, Shuai Jia, Chao Ma

Multimodal pre-trained models have shown impressive potential in enhancing performance on downstream tasks. However, existing fusion strategies for modalities primarily rely on explicit interaction structures that fail to capture the diverse aspects and patterns inherent in input data. This yields limited performance in zero-shot contexts, especially when fine-grained classifications and abstract interpretations are required. To address this, we propose an effective approach, namely Prompt Learning with Quaternion Networks (QNet), for semantic alignment across diverse modalities. QNet employs a quaternion hidden space where the mutually orthogonal imaginary axes capture rich intermodal semantic spatial correlations from various perspectives. Hierarchical features across multilayers are utilized to encode intricate interdependencies within various modalities with reduced parameters. Our experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate that QNet outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning techniques in base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and domain transfer scenarios with fewer learnable parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/VISION-SJTU/QNet.

Applications · Time Series

Jingyun Xiao, Ran Liu, Eva Dyer

Analyzing multivariate time series is important in many domains. However, it has been difficult to learn robust and generalizable representations within multivariate datasets due to complex inter-channel relationships and dynamic shifts. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for learning spatiotemporal structure and using it to improve the application of transformers to timeseries datasets. Our framework learns a set of group tokens, and builds an instance-specific group embedding (GE) layer that assigns input tokens to a small number of group tokens to incorporate structure into learning. We then introduce a novel architecture, Group-Aware transFormer (GAFormer), which incorporates both spatial and temporal group embeddings to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a number of time-series classification and regression tasks. In evaluations on a number of diverse timeseries datasets, we show that GE on its own can provide a nice enhancement to a number of backbones, and that by coupling spatial and temporal group embeddings, the GAFormer can outperform the existing baselines. Finally, we show how our approach discerns latent structures in data even without information about the spatial ordering of channels, and yields a more interpretable decomposition of spatial and temporal structure underlying complex multivariate datasets.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Tommaso Salvatori, Yuhang Song, Yordan Yordanov, Beren Millidge, Lei Sha, Cornelius Emde, Zhenghua Xu, Rafal Bogacz, Thomas Lukasiewicz

Predictive coding networks are neuroscience-inspired models with roots in both Bayesian statistics and neuroscience. Training such models, however, is quite inefficient and unstable. In this work, we show how by simply changing the temporal scheduling of the update rule for the synaptic weights leads to an algorithm that is much more efficient and stable than the original one, and has theoretical guarantees in terms of convergence. The proposed algorithm, that we call incremental predictive coding (iPC) is also more biologically plausible than the original one, as it it fully automatic. In an extensive set of experiments, we show that iPC constantly performs better than the original formulation on a large number of benchmarks for image classification, as well as for the training of both conditional and masked language models, in terms of test accuracy, efficiency, and convergence with respect to a large set of hyperparameters.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Changyou Chen, Han Ding, Bunyamin Sisman, Yi Xu, Ouye Xie, Benjamin Yao, son tran, Belinda Zeng

Diffusion-based generative modeling has been achieving state-of-the-art results on various generation tasks. Most diffusion models, however, are limited to a single-generation modeling. Can we generalize diffusion models with the ability of multi-modal generative training for more generalizable modeling? In this paper, we propose a principled way to define a diffusion model by constructing a unified multi-modal diffusion model in a common {\em diffusion space}. We define the forward diffusion process to be driven by an information aggregation from multiple types of task-data, {\it e.g.}, images for a generation task and labels for a classification task. In the reverse process, we enforce information sharing by parameterizing a shared backbone denoising network with additional modality-specific decoder heads. Such a structure can simultaneously learn to generate different types of multi-modal data with a multi-task loss, which is derived from a new multi-modal variational lower bound that generalizes the standard diffusion model. We propose several multi-modal generation settings to verify our framework, including image transition, masked-image training, joint image-label and joint image-representation generative modeling. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet indicate the effectiveness of our framework for various multi-modal generative modeling, which we believe is an important research direction worthy of more future explorations.

Deep Learning · Other Representation Learning

Chenxiang Ma, Jibin Wu, Chenyang Si, KC Tan

Deep neural networks are typically trained using global error signals that backpropagate (BP) end-to-end, which is not only biologically implausible but also suffers from the update locking problem and requires huge memory consumption. Local learning, which updates each layer independently with a gradient-isolated auxiliary network, offers a promising alternative to address the above problems. However, existing local learning methods are confronted with a large accuracy gap with the BP counterpart, particularly for large-scale networks. This is due to the weak coupling between local layers and their subsequent network layers, as there is no gradient communication across layers. To tackle this issue, we put forward an augmented local learning method, dubbed AugLocal. AugLocal constructs each hidden layer’s auxiliary network by uniformly selecting a small subset of layers from its subsequent network layers to enhance their synergy. We also propose to linearly reduce the depth of auxiliary networks as the hidden layer goes deeper, ensuring sufficient network capacity while reducing the computational cost of auxiliary networks. Our extensive experiments on four image classification datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, SVHN, STL-10, and ImageNet) demonstrate that AugLocal can effectively scale up to tens of local layers with a comparable accuracy to BP-trained networks while reducing GPU memory usage by around 40%. The proposed AugLocal method, therefore, opens up a myriad of opportunities for training high-performance deep neural networks on resource-constrained platforms. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChenxiangMA/AugLocal}.

Theory · Learning Theory

Mohammadreza Mousavi Kalan, Samory Kpotufe

A critical barrier to learning an accurate decision rule for outlier detection is the scarcity of outlier data. As such, practitioners often turn to the use of similar but imperfect outlier data from which they might \emph{transfer} information to the target outlier detection task. Despite the recent empirical success of transfer learning in outlier detection, a fundamental understanding of when and how knowledge can be transferred from a source to a target in outlier detection remains elusive. In this work, we adopt the traditional framework of Neyman-Pearson classification---which formalizes \emph{supervised outlier detection}, i.e., unbalanced classification---with the added assumption that we have access to both source and (some or no) target outlier data. Our main results are then as follows:We first determine the information-theoretic limits of the problem under a measure of discrepancy that extends some existing notions from traditional balanced classification; interestingly, unlike in balanced classification, seemingly very dissimilar sources can provide much information about a target, thus resulting in fast transfer.We then show that, in principle, these information-theoretic limits are achievable by \emph{adaptive} procedures, i.e., procedures with no a priori information on the discrepancy between source and target distributions.

Deep Learning · Self-Supervised Learning

Guodong Wang, Yunhong Wang, Xiuguo Bao, Di Huang

One-class classification (OCC) involves predicting whether a new data is normal or anomalous based solely on the data from a single class during training. Various attempts have been made to learn suitable representations for OCC within a self-supervised framework. Notably, discriminative methods that use geometric visual transformations, such as rotation, to generate pseudo-anomaly samples have exhibited impressive detection performance. Although rotation is commonly viewed as a distribution-shifting transformation and is widely used in the literature, the cause of its effectiveness remains a mystery. In this study, we are the first to make a surprising observation: there exists a strong linear relationship (Pearson's Correlation, $r > 0.9$) between the accuracy of rotation prediction and the performance of OCC. This suggests that a classifier that effectively distinguishes different rotations is more likely to excel in OCC, and vice versa. The root cause of this phenomenon can be attributed to the transformation bias in the dataset, where representations learned from transformations already present in the dataset tend to be less effective, making it essential to accurately estimate the transformation distribution before utilizing pretext tasks involving these transformations for reliable self-supervised representation learning. To the end, we propose a novel two-stage method to estimate the transformation distribution within the dataset. In the first stage, we learn general representations through standard contrastive pre-training. In the second stage, we select potentially semantics-preserving samples from the entire augmented dataset, which includes all rotations, by employing density matching with the provided reference distribution. By sorting samples based on semantics-preserving versus shifting transformations, we achieve improved performance on OCC benchmarks.

Applications · Computer Vision

Yuanwen Yue, Sabarinath Mahadevan, Jonas Schult, Francis Engelmann, Bastian Leibe, Konrad Schindler, Theodora Kontogianni

During interactive segmentation, a model and a user work together to delineate objects of interest in a 3D point cloud. In an iterative process, the model assigns each data point to an object (or the background), while the user corrects errors in the resulting segmentation and feeds them back into the model. The current best practice formulates the problem as binary classification and segments objects one at a time. The model expects the user to provide positive clicks to indicate regions wrongly assigned to the background and negative clicks on regions wrongly assigned to the object. Sequentially visiting objects is wasteful since it disregards synergies between objects: a positive click for a given object can, by definition, serve as a negative click for nearby objects. Moreover, a direct competition between adjacent objects can speed up the identification of their common boundary. We introduce AGILE3D, an efficient, attention-based model that (1) supports simultaneous segmentation of multiple 3D objects, (2) yields more accurate segmentation masks with fewer user clicks, and (3) offers faster inference. Our core idea is to encode user clicks as spatial-temporal queries and enable explicit interactions between click queries as well as between them and the 3D scene through a click attention module. Every time new clicks are added, we only need to run a lightweight decoder that produces updated segmentation masks. In experiments with four different 3D point cloud datasets, AGILE3D sets a new state-of-the-art. Moreover, we also verify its practicality in real-world setups with real user studies. Project page: https://ywyue.github.io/AGILE3D.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Fran Jelenić, Josip Jukić, Martin Tutek, Mate Puljiz, Jan Snajder

Effective out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for reliable machine learning models, yet most current methods are limited in practical use due to requirements like access to training data or intervention in training. We present a novel method for detecting OOD data in Transformers based on transformation smoothness between intermediate layers of a network (BLOOD), which is applicable to pre-trained models without access to training data. BLOOD utilizes the tendency of between-layer representation transformations of in-distribution (ID) data to be smoother than the corresponding transformations of OOD data, a property that we also demonstrate empirically. We evaluate BLOOD on several text classification tasks with Transformer networks and demonstrate that it outperforms methods with comparable resource requirements. Our analysis also suggests that when learning simpler tasks, OOD data transformations maintain their original sharpness, whereas sharpness increases with more complex tasks.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Zhikai Chen, Haitao Mao, Hongzhi Wen, Haoyu Han, Wei Jin, Haiyang Zhang, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang

In recent years, there have been remarkable advancements in node classification achieved by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, they necessitate abundant high-quality labels to ensure promising performance. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero-shot proficiency on text-attributed graphs. Yet, they face challenges in efficiently processing structural data and suffer from high inference costs. In light of these observations, this work introduces a label-free node classification on graphs with LLMs pipeline, LLM-GNN. It amalgamates the strengths of both GNNs and LLMs while mitigating their limitations. Specifically, LLMs are leveraged to annotate a small portion of nodes and then GNNs are trained on LLMs' annotations to make predictions for the remaining large portion of nodes. The implementation of LLM-GNN faces a unique challenge: how can we actively select nodes for LLMs to annotate and consequently enhance the GNN training? How can we leverage LLMs to obtain annotations of high quality, representativeness, and diversity, thereby enhancing GNN performance with less cost?To tackle this challenge, we develop an annotation quality heuristic and leverage the confidence scores derived from LLMs to advanced node selection. Comprehensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of LLM-GNN. In particular, LLM-GNN can achieve an accuracy of 74.9\% on a vast-scale dataset \products with a cost less than 1 dollar.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Moritz Imfeld, Jacopo Graldi, Marco Giordano, Thomas Hofmann, Sotiris Anagnostidis, Sidak Pal Singh

Fusion is a technique for merging multiple independently-trained neural networks in order to combine their capabilities. Past attempts have been restricted to the case of fully-connected, convolutional, and residual networks. This paper presents a systematic approach for fusing two or more transformer-based networks exploiting Optimal Transport to (soft-)align the various architectural components. We flesh out an abstraction for layer alignment, that can generalize to arbitrary architectures -- in principle -- and we apply this to the key ingredients of Transformers such as multi-head self-attention, layer-normalization, and residual connections, and we discuss how to handle them via various ablation studies. Furthermore, our method allows the fusion of models of different sizes (heterogeneous fusion), providing a new and efficient way to compress Transformers. The proposed approach is evaluated on both image classification tasks via Vision Transformer and natural language modeling tasks using BERT. Our approach consistently outperforms vanilla fusion, and, after a surprisingly short finetuning, also outperforms the individual converged parent models.In our analysis, we uncover intriguing insights about the significant role of soft alignment in the case of Transformers. Our results showcase the potential of fusing multiple Transformers, thus compounding their expertise, in the budding paradigm of model fusion and recombination. Code is available at https://github.com/graldij/transformer-fusion.

Theory · Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Hongwei Wen, Annika Betken, Hanyuan Hang

We consider the domain adaptation problem in the context of label shift, where the label distributions between source and target domain differ, but the conditional distributions of features given the label are the same. To solve the label shift adaption problem, we develop a novel matching framework named \textit{class probability matching} (\textit{CPM}). It is inspired by a new understanding of the source domain's class probability, as well as a specific relationship between class probability ratios and feature probability ratios between the source and target domains. CPM is able to maintain the same theoretical guarantee with the existing feature probability matching framework, while significantly improving the computational efficiency due to directly matching the probabilities of the label variable. Within the CPM framework, we propose an algorithm named \textit{class probability matching with calibrated networks} (\textit{CPMCN}) for target domain classification. From the theoretical perspective, we establish the generalization bound of the CPMCN method in order to explain the benefits of introducing calibrated networks. From the experimental perspective, real data comparisons show that CPMCN outperforms existing matching-based and EM-based algorithms.

Social Aspects · Privacy-preserving Statistics and Machine Learning

Weiqiang He, Hendrik Fichtenberger, Pan Peng

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for recovering clusters in well-clustered graphs, which are graphs whose vertex set can be partitioned into a small number of sets, each inducing a subgraph of high inner conductance and small outer conductance. Such graphs have widespread application as a benchmark in the theoretical analysis of spectral clustering.We provide an efficient ($\epsilon$,$\delta$)-DP algorithm tailored specifically for such graphs. Our algorithm draws inspiration from the recent work of Chen et al., who developed DP algorithms for recovery of stochastic block models in cases where the graph comprises exactly two nearly-balanced clusters. Our algorithm works for well-clustered graphs with $k$ nearly-balanced clusters, and the misclassification ratio almost matches the one of the best-known non-private algorithms. We conduct experimental evaluations on datasets with known ground truth clusters to substantiate the prowess of our algorithm. We also show that any (pure) $\epsilon$-DP algorithm would result in substantial error.

Ru Peng, Heming Zou, Haobo Wang, Yawen Zeng, Zenan Huang, Junbo Zhao

The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real-world applications.The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal prediction pipeline of the testing performance without the presence of ground-truth labels.Despite its recent successes, the AutoEval frameworks still suffer from an overconfidence issue, substantial storage and computational cost.In that regard, we propose a novel measure --- Meta-Distribution Energy (MDE) that allows the AutoEval framework to be both more efficient and effective.The core of the MDE is to establish a meta-distribution statistic, on the information (energy) associated with individual samples, then offer a smoother representation enabled by energy-based learning.We further provide our theoretical insights by connecting the MDE with the classification loss.We provide extensive experiments across modalities, datasets and different architectural backbones to validate MDE's validity, together with its superiority compared with prior approaches.We also prove MDE's versatility by showing its seamless integration with large-scale models, and easy adaption to learning scenarios with noisy- or imbalanced- labels.

Theory · Deep Learning

Yiting Chen, Zhanpeng Zhou, Junchi Yan

The behavior of neural networks still remains opaque, and a recently widely noted phenomenon is that networks often achieve similar performance when initialized with different random parameters. This phenomenon has attracted significant attention in measuring the similarity between features learned by distinct networks. However, feature similarity could be vague in describing the same feature since equivalent features hardly exist. In this paper, we expand the concept of equivalent feature and provide the definition of what we call *functionally equivalent features*. These features produce equivalent output under certain transformations. Using this definition, we aim to derive a more intrinsic metric for the so-called *feature complexity* regarding the redundancy of features learned by a neural network at each layer. We offer a formal interpretation of our approach through the lens of category theory, a well-developed area in mathematics. To quantify the feature complexity, we further propose an efficient algorithm named Iterative Feature Merging. Our experimental results validate our ideas and theories from various perspectives. We empirically demonstrate that the functionally equivalence widely exists among different features learned by the same neural network and we could reduce the number of parameters of the network without affecting the performance. We have also drawn several interesting empirical findings, including: 1) the larger the network, the more redundant features it learns; 2) in particular, we show how to prune the networks based on our finding using direct equivalent feature merging, without fine-tuning which is often needed in peer network pruning methods; 3) same structured networks with higher feature complexity achieve better performance; 4) through the layers of a neural network, the feature complexity first increase then decrease; 5) for the image classification task, a group of functionally equivalent features may correspond to a specific semantic meaning. Source code will be made publicly available.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Supervised Learning

Harikrishna Narasimhan, Aditya Krishna Menon, Wittawat Jitkrittum, Sanjiv Kumar

Real-world classifiers can benefit from the option of abstaining from predicting on samples where they have low confidence. Such abstention is particularly useful on samples which are close to the learned decision boundary, or which are outliers with respect to the training sample. These settings have been the subject of extensive but disjoint study in the selective classification (SC) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection literature. Recent work on selective classification with OOD detection (SCOD) has argued for the unified study of these problems; however, the formal underpinnings of this problem are still nascent, and existing techniques are heuristic in nature. In this paper, we propose new plugin estimators for SCOD that are theoretically grounded, effective, and generalise existing approaches from the SC and OOD detection literature. In the course of our analysis, we formally explicate how naïve use of existing SC and OOD detection baselines may be inadequate for SCOD. We empirically demonstrate that our approaches yields competitive SC and OOD detection trade-offs compared to common baselines.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Ali Hatamizadeh, Greg Heinrich, Hongxu Yin, Andrew Tao, Jose M. Alvarez, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-level attention with reduced computational costs. We benefit from efficient window-based self-attention. Each window has access to dedicated carrier tokens that participate in local and global representation learning. At a high level, global self-attentions enable the efficient cross-window communication at lower costs. FasterViT achieves a SOTA Pareto-front in terms of accuracy and image throughput. We have extensively validated its effectiveness on various CV tasks including classification, object detection and segmentation. We also show that HAT can be used as a plug-and-play module for existing networks and enhance them. We further demonstrate significantly faster and more accurate performance than competitive counterparts for images with high resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FasterViT.