Data mixing augmentation have proved to be effective for improving the generalization ability of deep neural networks. While early methods mix samples by hand-crafted policies (\textit{e.g.}, linear interpolation), recent methods utilize saliency information to match the mixed samples and labels via complex offline optimization. However, there arises a trade-off between precise mixing policies and optimization complexity. To address this challenge, we propose a novel automatic mixup (AutoMix) framework, where the mixup policy is parameterized and serves the ultimate classification goal directly. Specifically, AutoMix reformulates the mixup classification into two sub-tasks (\textit{i.e.}, mixed sample generation and mixup classification) with corresponding sub-networks and solves them in a bi-level optimization framework. For the generation, a learnable lightweight mixup generator, Mix Block, is designed to generate mixed samples by modeling patch-wise relationships under the direct supervision of the corresponding mixed labels. To prevent the degradation and instability of bi-level optimization, we further introduce a momentum pipeline to train AutoMix in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on nine image benchmarks prove the superiority of AutoMix compared with state-of-the-arts in various classification scenarios and downstream tasks.
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This paper proposes a novel out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework named MOODCat for image classifiers. MOODCat masks a random portion of the input image and uses a generative model to synthesize the masked image to a new image conditioned on the classification result. It then calculates the semantic difference between the original image and the synthesized one for OOD detection. Compared to existing solutions, MOODCat naturally learns the semantic information of the in-distribution data with the proposed mask and conditional synthesis strategy, which is critical to identify OODs. Experimental results demonstrate that MOODCat outperforms state-of-the-art OOD detection solutions by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/MOODCat.
There is an increasing need to determine whether inputs are out-of-distribution (OOD) for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world scenario. Typical neural classifiers are based on the closed-world assumption, where the training data and the test data are drawn i.i.d. from the same distribution, and as a result, give over-confident predictions even faced with OOD inputs. For tackling this problem, previous studies either use real outliers for training or generate synthetic OOD data under strong assumptions, which are either costly or intractable to generalize. In this paper, we propose boundary aware learning (BAL), a novel framework that can learn the distribution of OOD features adaptively. The key idea of BAL is to generate OOD features from trivial to hard progressively with a generator, meanwhile, a discriminator is trained for distinguishing these synthetic OOD features and in-distribution (ID) features. Benefiting from the adversarial training scheme, the discriminator can well separate ID and OOD features, allowing more robust OOD detection. The proposed BAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification benchmarks, reducing up to 13.9% FPR95 compared with previous methods.
Towards Calibrated Hyper-Sphere Representation via Distribution Overlap Coefficient for Long-Tailed Learning
PDF ↗Long-tailed learning aims to tackle the crucial challenge that head classes dominate the training procedure under severe class imbalance in real-world scenarios. However, little attention has been given to how to quantify the dominance severity of head classes in the representation space. Motivated by this, we generalize the cosine-based classifiers to a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mixture model, denoted as vMF classifier, which enables to quantitatively measure representation quality upon the hyper-sphere space via calculating distribution overlap coefficient. To our knowledge, this is the first work to measure the representation quality of classifiers and features from the perspective of the distribution overlap coefficient. On top of it, we formulate the inter-class discrepancy and class feature consistency loss terms to alleviate the interference among the classifier weights and align features with classifier weights. Furthermore, a novel post-training calibration algorithm is devised to zero-costly boost the performance via inter-class overlap coefficients. Our models outperform previous work with a large margin and achieve state-of-the-art performance on long-tailed image classification, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks (e.g., we achieve 55.0% overall accuracy with ResNetXt-50 in ImageNet-LT). Our code is available at https://github.com/VipaiLab/vMF_OP.
Where to Focus: Investigating Hierarchical Attention Relationship for Fine-Grained Visual Classification
PDF ↗Object categories are often grouped into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy. Classifying objects at coarser-grained hierarchy requires global and common characteristics, while finer-grained hierarchy classification relies on local and discriminative features. Therefore, humans should also subconsciously focus on different object regions when classifying different hierarchies. This granularity-wise attention is confirmed by our collected human real-time gaze data on different hierarchy classifications. To leverage this mechanism, we propose a Cross-Hierarchical Region Feature (CHRF) learning framework. Specifically, we first design a region feature mining module that imitates humans to learn different granularity-wise attention regions with multi-grained classification tasks. To explore how human attention shifts from one hierarchy to another, we further present a cross-hierarchical orthogonal fusion module to enhance the region feature representation by blending the original feature and an orthogonal component extracted from adjacent hierarchies. Experiments on five hierarchical fine-grained datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CHRF compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Ablation study and visualization results also consistently verify the advantages of our human attention-oriented modules. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/visiondom/CHRF.
Machine learning models fail to perform well on real-world applications when 1) the category distribution P(Y) of the training dataset suffers from long-tailed distribution and 2) the test data is drawn from different conditional distributions P(X|Y). Existing approaches cannot handle the scenario where both issues exist, which however is common for real-world applications. In this study, we took a step forward and looked into the problem of long-tailed classification under domain shifts. We designed three novel core functional blocks including Distribution Calibrated Classification Loss, Visual-Semantic Mapping and Semantic-Similarity Guided Augmentation. Furthermore, we adopted a meta-learning framework which integrates these three blocks to improve domain generalization on unseen target domains. Two new datasets were proposed for this problem, named AWA2-LTS and ImageNet-LTS. We evaluated our method on the two datasets and extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve superior performance over state-of-the-art long-tailed/domain generalization approaches and the combinations. Source codes and datasets can be found at our project page https://xiaogu.site/LTDS.
Models trained in federated settings often suffer from degraded performances and fail at generalizing, especially when facing heterogeneous scenarios. In this work, we investigate such behavior through the lens of geometry of the loss and Hessian eigenspectrum, linking the model’s lack of generalization capacity to the sharpness of the solution. Motivated by prior studies connecting the sharpness of the loss surface and the generalization gap, we show that i) training clients locally with Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) or its adaptive version (ASAM) and ii) averaging stochastic weights (SWA) on the server-side can substantially improve generalization in Federated Learning and help bridging the gap with centralized models. By seeking parameters in neighborhoods having uniform low loss, the model converges towards flatter minima and its generalization significantly improves in both homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of those optimizers across a variety of benchmark vision datasets (e.g. CIFAR, Landmarks-User-160k, IDDA) and tasks (large scale classification, semantic segmentation, domain generalization).
Recent decades have witnessed great advances of deep learning in tackling various problems such as classification and decision making. The rapid development gave rise to a novel framework, Learning-to-Learn (L2L), in which an automatic optimization algorithm (optimizer) modeled by neural networks is expected to learn rules for updating the target objective function (optimizee). Despite its advantages for specific problems, L2L still cannot replace classic methods due to its instability. Unlike hand-engineered algorithms, neural optimizers may suffer from the instability issue---under distinct but similar states, the same neural optimizer can produce quite different updates. Motivated by the stability property that should be satisfied by an ideal optimizer, we propose a regularization term that can enforce the smoothness and stability of the learned optimizers. Comprehensive experiments on the neural network training tasks demonstrate that the proposed regularization consistently improve the learned neural optimizers even when transferring to tasks with different architectures and datasets. Furthermore, we show that our smoothness-inducing regularizer can improve the performance of neural optimizers on few-shot learning tasks. Code can be found at https://github.com/xyh97/SmoothedOptimizer.
Due to their inference, data representation and reconstruction properties, Variational Autoencoders (VAE) have been successfully used in continual learning classification tasks. However, their ability to generate images with specifications corresponding to the classes and databases learned during Continual Learning (CL) is not well understood and catastrophic forgetting remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we firstly analyze the forgetting behaviour of VAEs by developing a new theoretical framework that formulates CL as a dynamic optimal transport problem. This framework proves approximate bounds to the data likelihood without requiring the task information and explains how the prior knowledge is lost during the training process. We then propose a novel memory buffering approach, namely the Online Cooperative Memorization (OCM) framework, which consists of a Short-Term Memory (STM) that continually stores recent samples to provide future information for the model, and a Long-Term Memory (LTM) aiming to preserve a wide diversity of samples. The proposed OCM transfers certain samples from STM to LTM according to the information diversity selection criterion without requiring any supervised signals. The OCM framework is then combined with a dynamic VAE expansion mixture network for further enhancing its performance.
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) struggles with catastrophic forgetting when learning new knowledge, and Data-Free CIL (DFCIL) is even more challenging without access to the training data of previously learned classes. Though recent DFCIL works introduce techniques such as model inversion to synthesize data for previous classes, they fail to overcome forgetting due to the severe domain gap between the synthetic and real data. To address this issue, this paper proposes relation-guided representation learning (RRL) for DFCIL, dubbed R-DFCIL. In RRL, we introduce relational knowledge distillation to flexibly transfer the structural relation of new data from the old model to the current model. Our RRL-boosted DFCIL can guide the current model to learn representations of new classes better compatible with representations of previous classes, which greatly reduces forgetting while improving plasticity. To avoid the mutual interference between representation and classifier learning, we employ local rather than global classification loss during RRL. After RRL, the classification head is refined with global class-balanced classification loss to address the data imbalance issue as well as learn the decision boundaries between new and previous classes. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100, Tiny-ImageNet200, and ImageNet100 demonstrate that our R-DFCIL significantly surpasses previous approaches and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance for DFCIL.
Despite the rapid progress made by existing graph matching methods, expensive or even unrealistic node-level correspondence labels are often required. Inspired by recent progress in self-supervised contrastive learning, we propose an end-to-end label-free self-supervised contrastive graph matching framework (SCGM). Unlike in vision tasks like classification and segmentation, where the backbone is often forced to extract object instance-level or pixel-level information, we design an extra objective function at node-level on graph data which also considers both the visual appearance and graph structure by node embedding. Further, we propose two-stage augmentation functions on both raw images and extracted graphs to increase the variance, which has been shown effective in self-supervised learning. We conduct experiments on standard graph matching benchmarks, where our method boosts previous state-of-the-arts under both label-free self-supervised and fine-tune settings. Without the ground truth labels for node matching nor the graph/image-level category information, our proposed framework SCGM outperforms several deep graph matching methods. By proper fine-tuning, SCGM can surpass the state-of-the-art supervised deep graph matching methods.
Compared with the feature normalization methods that are widely used in deep neural network (DNN) training, feature whitening methods take the correlation of features into consideration, which can help to learn more effective features. However, existing feature whitening methods have a few limitations, such as the large computation and memory cost, incapability to adopt pre-trained DNN models, the introduction of additional parameters, etc., making them impractical to use in optimizing DNNs. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a novel Embedded Feature Whitening (EFW) approach to DNN optimization. EFW only adjusts the gradient of weight by using the whitening matrix without changing any part of the network so that it can be easily adopted to optimize pre-trained and well-defined DNN architectures. We consequently develop the associated momentum, adaptive damping and gradient norm recovery techniques w.r.t. EFW, which can be implemented efficiently with acceptable extra computation and memory cost. We apply EFW to the two most commonly used DNN optimizers, i.e., SGDM and Adam, and name them W-SGDM and W-Adam. Extensive experimental results on various vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, segmentation and person ReID, demonstrate the superiority of W-SGDM and W-Adam to their original counterparts.
The efficient, automated search for well-performing neural architectures (NAS) has drawn increasing attention in the recent past. Thereby, the predominant research objective is to reduce the necessity of costly evaluations of neural architectures while efficiently exploring large search spaces. To this aim, surrogate models embed architectures in a latent space and predict their performance, while generative models for neural architectures enable optimization-based search within the latent space the generator draws from. Both, surrogate and generative models, have the aim of facilitating query-efficient search in a well-structured latent space. In this paper, we further improve the trade-off between query-efficiency and promising architecture generation by leveraging advantages from both, efficient surrogate models and generative design. To this end, we propose a generative model, paired with a surrogate predictor, that iteratively learns to generate samples from increasingly promising latent subspaces. This approach leads to very effective and efficient architecture search, while keeping the query amount low. In addition, our approach allows in a straightforward manner to jointly optimize for multiple objectives such as accuracy and hardware latency. We show the benefit of this approach not only w.r.t. the optimization of architectures for highest classification accuracy but also in the context of hardware constraints and outperform state-of-the-art methods on several NAS benchmarks for single and multiple objectives. We also achieve state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/jovitalukasik/AG-Net.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied in modeling diverse image distributions. However, despite its impressive applications, the structure of the latent space in GANs largely remains as a black-box, leaving its controllable generation an open problem, especially when spurious correlations between different semantic attributes exist in the image distributions. To address this problem, previous methods typically learn linear directions or individual channels that control semantic attributes in the image space. However, they often suffer from imperfect disentanglement, or are unable to obtain multi-directional controls. In this work, in light of the above challenges, we propose a novel approach that discovers nonlinear controls, which enables multi-directional manipulation as well as effective disentanglement, based on gradient information in the learned GAN latent space. More specifically, we first learn interpolation directions by following the gradients from classification networks trained separately on the attributes, and then navigate the latent space by exclusively controlling channels activated for the target attribute in the learned directions. Empirically, with small training data, our approach is able to gain fine-grained controls over a diverse set of bi-directional and multi-directional attributes, and we showcase its ability to achieve disentanglement significantly better than state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Current multi-category Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) metrics use class labels to group tracking results for per-class evaluation. Similarly, MOT methods typically only associate objects with the same class predictions. These two prevalent strategies in MOT implicitly assume that the classification performance is near-perfect. However, this is far from the case in recent large-scale MOT datasets, which contain large numbers of classes with many rare or semantically similar categories. Therefore, the resulting inaccurate classification leads to sub-optimal tracking and inadequate benchmarking of trackers. We address these issues by disentangling classification from tracking. We introduce a new metric, Track Every Thing Accuracy (TETA), breaking tracking measurement into three sub-factors: localization, association, and classification, allowing comprehensive benchmarking of tracking performance even under inaccurate classification. TETA also deals with the challenging incomplete annotation problem in large-scale tracking datasets. We further introduce a Track Every Thing tracker (TETer), that performs association using Class Exemplar Matching (CEM). Our experiments show that TETA evaluates trackers more comprehensively, and TETer achieves significant improvements on the challenging large-scale datasets BDD100K and TAO compared to the state-of-the-art.
For autonomous driving systems, the storage cost and transmission speed of the large-scale point clouds become an important bottleneck because of their large volume. In this paper, we propose a range image-based three-stage framework to compress the scanning LiDAR’s point clouds using the entropy model. In our three-stage framework, we refine the coarser range image by converting the regression problem into the limited classification problem to improve the performance of generating accurate point clouds. And in the feature extraction part, we propose a novel attention Conv layer to fuse the voxel-based 3D features in the 2D range image. Compared with the Octree-based compression methods, the range image compression with the entropy model performs better in the autonomous driving scene. Experiments on LiDARs with different lines and in different scenarios show that our proposed compression scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in reconstruction quality and downstream tasks by a wide margin.
Most (3D) multi-object tracking methods rely on appearance-based cues for data association. By contrast, we investigate how far we can get by only encoding geometric relationships between objects in 3D space as cues for data-driven data association. We encode 3D detections as nodes in a graph, where spatial and temporal pairwise relations among objects are encoded via localized polar coordinates on graph edges. This representation makes our geometric relations invariant to global transformations and smooth trajectory changes, especially under non-holonomic motion. This allows our graph neural network to learn to effectively encode temporal and spatial interactions and fully leverage contextual and motion cues to obtain final scene interpretation by posing data association as edge classification. We establish a new state-of-the-art on nuScenes dataset and, more importantly, show that our method, PolarMOT, generalizes remarkably well across different locations (Boston, Singapore, Karlsruhe) and datasets (nuScenes and KITTI).
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods have become increasingly popular for classifying gigapixel-sized Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) in digital pathology. Most MIL methods operate at a single WSI magnification, by processing all the tissue patches. Such a formulation induces high computational requirements and constrains the contextualization of the WSI-level representation to a single scale. Certain MIL methods extend to multiple scales, but they are computationally more demanding. In this paper, inspired by the pathological diagnostic process, we propose ZoomMIL, a method that learns to perform multi-level zooming in an end-to-end manner. ZoomMIL builds WSI representations by aggregating tissue-context information from multiple magnifications. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art MIL methods in WSI classification on two large datasets, while significantly reducing computational demands with regard to Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) and processing time by 40-50x. Our code is available at: https://github.com/histocartography/zoommil.
RadioTransformer: A Cascaded Global-Focal Transformer for Visual Attention-Guided Disease Classification
PDF ↗In this work, we present RadioTransformer, a novel visual attention-driven transformer framework, that leverages radiologists’ gaze patterns and models their visuo-cognitive behavior for disease diagnosis on chest radiographs. Domain experts, such as radiologists, rely on visual information for medical image interpretation. On the other hand, deep neural networks have demonstrated significant promise in similar tasks even where visual interpretation is challenging. Eye-gaze tracking has been used to capture the viewing behavior of domain experts, lending insights into the complexity of visual search. However, deep learning frameworks, even those that rely on attention mechanisms, do not leverage this rich domain information. RadioTransformer fills this critical gap by learning from radiologists’ visual search patterns, encoded as ‘human visual attention regions’ in a cascaded global-focal transformer framework. The overall ‘global’ image characteristics and the more detailed ‘local’ features are captured by the proposed global and focal modules, respectively. We experimentally validate the efficacy of our student-teacher approach for 8 datasets involving different disease classification tasks where eye-gaze data is not available during the inference phase. Code: https://github.com/bmi-imaginelab/radiotransformer.
The application of modern machine learning to retinal image analyses offers valuable insights into a broad range of human health conditions beyond ophthalmic diseases. Additionally, data sharing is key to fully realizing the potential of machine learning models by providing a rich and diverse collection of training data. However, the personally-identifying nature of retinal images, encompassing the unique vascular structure of each individual, often prevents this data from being shared openly. While prior works have explored image de-identification strategies based on synthetic averaging of images in other domains (e.g. facial images), existing techniques face difficulty in preserving both privacy and clinical utility in retinal images, as we demonstrate in our work. We therefore introduce k-SALSA, a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based framework for synthesizing retinal fundus images that summarize a given private dataset while satisfying the privacy notion of k-anonymity. k-SALSA brings together state-of-the-art techniques for training and inverting GANs to achieve practical performance on retinal images. Furthermore, k-SALSA leverages a new technique, called local style alignment, to generate a synthetic average that maximizes the retention of fine-grain visual patterns in the source images, thus improving the clinical utility of the generated images. On two benchmark datasets of diabetic retinopathy (EyePACS and APTOS), we demonstrate our improvement upon existing methods with respect to image fidelity, classification performance, and mitigation of membership inference attacks. Our work represents a step toward broader sharing of retinal images for scientific collaboration. Keywords : Medical image privacy, k-anonymity, generative adversarial networks, fundus imaging, synthetic data generation, style transfer