论文检索

Reinforcement Learning/Deep RL

Boyuan Chen, Chuning Zhu, Pulkit Agrawal, Kaiqing Zhang, Abhishek Gupta

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across tasks. Model-based RL, on the other hand, learns task-agnostic models of the world that naturally enables transfer across different reward functions, but struggles to scale to complex environments due to the compounding error. To get the best of both worlds, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning method that enables the transfer of behaviors across tasks with different rewards, while circumventing the challenges of model-based RL. In particular, we show self-supervised pre-training of model-free reinforcement learning with a number of random features as rewards allows implicit modeling of long-horizon environment dynamics. Then, planning techniques like model-predictive control using these implicit models enable fast adaptation to problems with new reward functions. Our method is self-supervised in that it can be trained on offline datasets without reward labels, but can then be quickly deployed on new tasks. We validate that our proposed method enables transfer across tasks on a variety of manipulation and locomotion domains in simulation, opening the door to generalist decision-making agents.

Theory/Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Larry Han, Zhu Shen, Jose Zubizarreta

Federated or multi-site studies have distinct advantages over single-site studies, including increased generalizability, the ability to study underrepresented populations, and the opportunity to study rare exposures and outcomes. However, these studies are complicated by the need to preserve the privacy of each individual's data, heterogeneity in their covariate distributions, and different data structures between sites. We propose a novel federated approach to derive valid causal inferences for a target population using multi-site data. We adjust for covariate shift and accommodate covariate mismatch between sites by developing a multiply-robust and privacy-preserving nuisance function estimation approach. Our methodology incorporates transfer learning to estimate ensemble weights to combine information from source sites. We show that these learned weights are efficient and optimal under different scenarios. We showcase the finite sample advantages of our approach in terms of efficiency and robustness compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. We apply our approach to study the treatment effect of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on the duration of hospitalization for patients experiencing acute myocardial infarction (AMI) with data from the Centers for Medicare \& Medicaid Services (CMS).

Theory/Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Lianghe Shi, Weiwei Liu

Gradual Domain Adaptation (GDA), in which the learner is provided with additional intermediate domains, has been theoretically and empirically studied in many contexts. Despite its vital role in security-critical scenarios, the adversarial robustness of the GDA model remains unexplored. In this paper, we adopt the effective gradual self-training method and replace vanilla self-training with adversarial self-training (AST). AST first predicts labels on the unlabeled data and then adversarially trains the model on the pseudo-labeled distribution. Intriguingly, we find that gradual AST improves not only adversarial accuracy but also clean accuracy on the target domain. We reveal that this is because adversarial training (AT) performs better than standard training when the pseudo-labels contain a portion of incorrect labels. Accordingly, we first present the generalization error bounds for gradual AST in a multiclass classification setting. We then use the optimal value of the Subset Sum Problem to bridge the standard error on a real distribution and the adversarial error on a pseudo-labeled distribution. The result indicates that AT may obtain a tighter bound than standard training on data with incorrect pseudo-labels. We further present an example of a conditional Gaussian distribution to provide more insights into why gradual AST can improve the clean accuracy for GDA.

Theory/Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Zeyinzi Jiang, Chaojie Mao, Ziyuan Huang, Ao Ma, Yiliang Lv, Yujun Shen, Deli Zhao, Jingren Zhou

Parameter-efficient tuning has become a trend in transferring large-scale foundation models to downstream applications. Existing methods typically embed some light-weight tuners into the backbone, where both the design and the learning of the tuners are highly dependent on the base model. This work offers a new tuning paradigm, dubbed Res-Tuning, which intentionally unbinds tuners from the backbone. With both theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that popular tuning approaches have their equivalent counterparts under our unbinding formulation, and hence can be integrated into our framework effortlessly. Thanks to the structural disentanglement, we manage to free the design of tuners from the network architecture, facilitating flexible combination of various tuning strategies. We further propose a memory-efficient variant of Res-Tuning, where the bypass i.e., formed by a sequence of tuners) is effectively detached from the main branch, such that the gradients are back-propagated only to the tuners but not to the backbone. Such a detachment also allows one-time backbone forward for multi-task inference. Extensive experiments on both discriminative and generative tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing alternatives from the perspectives of efficacy and efficiency. Project page: https://res-tuning.github.io/.

Theory/Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Dheeraj Baby, Saurabh Garg, Tzu-Ching Yen, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Zachary Lipton, Yu-Xiang Wang

This paper focuses on supervised and unsupervised online label shift,where the class marginals $Q(y)$ variesbut the class-conditionals $Q(x|y)$ remain invariant. In the unsupervised setting, our goal is to adapt a learner, trained on some offline labeled data, to changing label distributions given unlabeled online data. In the supervised setting, we must both learn a classifier and adapt to the dynamically evolving class marginals given only labeled online data. We develop novel algorithms that reduce the adaptation problem to online regression and guarantee optimal dynamic regret without any prior knowledge of the extent of drift in the label distribution. Our solution is based on bootstrapping the estimates of *online regression oracles* that track the drifting proportions. Experiments across numerous simulated and real-world online label shift scenarios demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approaches, often achieving 1-3% improvement in accuracy while being sample and computationally efficient. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anon-djiwh/OnlineLabelShift

Applications/Computer Vision

Zhiqing Xiao, Haobo Wang, Ying Jin, Lei Feng, Gang Chen, Fei Huang, Junbo Zhao

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a pivotal form in machine learning to extend the in-domain model to the distinctive target domains where the data distributions differ. Most prior works focus on capturing the inter-domain transferability but largely overlook rich intra-domain structures, which empirically results in even worse discriminability. In this work, we introduce a novel graph SPectral Alignment (SPA) framework to tackle the tradeoff. The core of our method is briefly condensed as follows: (i)-by casting the DA problem to graph primitives, SPA composes a coarse graph alignment mechanism with a novel spectral regularizer towards aligning the domain graphs in eigenspaces; (ii)-we further develop a fine-grained message propagation module --- upon a novel neighbor-aware self-training mechanism --- in order for enhanced discriminability in the target domain. On standardized benchmarks, the extensive experiments of SPA demonstrate that its performance has surpassed the existing cutting-edge DA methods. Coupled with dense model analysis, we conclude that our approach indeed possesses superior efficacy, robustness, discriminability, and transferability. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/CrownX/SPA.

Theory/Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Laura F. Nern, Harsh Raj, Maurice André Georgi, Yash Sharma

As large-scale training regimes have gained popularity, the use of pretrained models for downstream tasks has become common practice in machine learning. While pretraining has been shown to enhance the performance of models in practice, the transfer of robustness properties from pretraining to downstream tasks remains poorly understood. In this study, we demonstrate that the robustness of a linear predictor on downstream tasks can be constrained by the robustness of its underlying representation, regardless of the protocol used for pretraining. We prove (i) a bound on the loss that holds independent of any downstream task, as well as (ii) a criterion for robust classification in particular. We validate our theoretical results in practical applications, show how our results can be used for calibrating expectations of downstream robustness, and when our results are useful for optimal transfer learning. Taken together, our results offer an initial step towards characterizing the requirements of the representation function for reliable post-adaptation performance.

Eun Sun Lee, Junho Kim, SangWon Park, Young Min Kim

We propose a domain adaptation method, MoDA, which adapts a pretrained embodied agent to a new, noisy environment without ground-truth supervision. Map-based memory provides important contextual information for visual navigation, and exhibits unique spatial structure mainly composed of flat walls and rectangular obstacles. Our adaptation approach encourages the inherent regularities on the estimated maps to guide the agent to overcome the prevalent domain discrepancy in a novel environment. Specifically, we propose an efficient learning curriculum to handle the visual and dynamics corruptions in an online manner, self-supervised with pseudo clean maps generated by style transfer networks. Because the map-based representation provides spatial knowledge for the agent’s policy, our formulation can deploy the pretrained policy networks from simulators in a new setting. We evaluate MoDA in various practical scenarios and show that our proposed method quickly enhances the agent’s performance in downstream tasks including localization, mapping, exploration, and point-goal navigation.

Zhaoning Sun, Nico Messikommer, Daniel Gehrig, Davide Scaramuzza

Retrieving accurate semantic information in challenging high dynamic range (HDR) and high-speed conditions remains an open challenge for image-based algorithms due to severe image degradations. Event cameras promise to address these challenges since they feature a much higher dynamic range and are resilient to motion blur. Nonetheless, semantic segmentation with event cameras is still in its infancy which is chiefly due to the lack of high-quality, labeled datasets. In this work, we introduce ESS (Event-based Semantic Segmentation), which tackles this problem by directly transferring the semantic segmentation task from existing labeled image datasets to unlabeled events via unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Compared to existing UDA methods, our approach aligns recurrent, motion-invariant event embeddings with image embeddings. For this reason, our method neither requires video data nor per-pixel alignment between images and events and, crucially, does not need to hallucinate motion from still images. Additionally, we introduce DSEC-Semantic, the first large-scale event-based dataset with fine-grained labels. We show that using image labels alone, ESS outperforms existing UDA approaches, and when combined with event labels, it even outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches on both DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic. Finally, ESS is general-purpose, which unlocks the vast amount of existing labeled image datasets and paves the way for new and exciting research directions in new fields previously inaccessible for event cameras.

Xinhao Li, Jingjing Li, Zhekai Du, Lei Zhu, Wen Li

Open-set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to recognize classes in the target domain that are seen in the source domain while rejecting other unseen target-exclusive classes into an unknown class, which ignores the diversity of the latter and is therefore incapable of their interpretation. The recently-proposed Semantic Recovery OSDA (SR-OSDA) brings in semantic attributes and attacks the challenge via partial alignment and visual-semantic projection, marking the first step towards interpretable OSDA. Following that line, in this work, we propose a representation learning framework termed Angular Margin Separation (AMS) that unveils the power of discriminative and robust representation for both open-set domain adaptation and cross-domain semantic recovery. Our core idea is to exploit an additive angular margin with regularization for both robust feature fine-tuning and discriminative joint feature alignment, which turns out advantageous to learning an accurate and less biased visual-semantic projection. Further, we propose a post-training re-projection that boosts the performance of seen classes interpretation without deterioration on unseen classes. Verified by extensive experiments, AMS achieves a notable improvement over the existing SR-OSDA baseline, with an average 7.6% increment in semantic recovery accuracy of unseen classes in multiple transfer tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/LeoXinhaoLee/AMS.

Donghyun Kim, Kaihong Wang, Stan Sclaroff, Kate Saenko

Deep models must learn robust and transferable representations in order to perform well on new domains. While domain transfer methods (\eg, domain adaptation, domain generalization) have been proposed to learn transferable representations across domains, they are typically applied to ResNet backbones pre-trained on ImageNet. Thus, existing works pay little attention to the effects of pre-training on domain transfer tasks. In this paper, we provide a broad study and in-depth analysis of pre-training for domain adaptation and generalization, namely: network architectures, size, pre-training loss, and datasets. We observe that simply using a state-of-the-art backbone outperforms existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation baselines and set new baselines on Office-Home and DomainNet improving by 10.7% and 5.5%. We hope that this work can provide more insights for future domain transfer research.

Donghyun Kim, Kaihong Wang, Kate Saenko, Margrit Betke, Stan Sclaroff

While pose estimation is an important computer vision task, it requires expensive annotation and suffers from domain shift. In this paper, we investigate the problem of domain adaptive 2D pose estimation that transfers knowledge learned on a synthetic source domain to a target domain without supervision. While several domain adaptive pose estimation models have been proposed recently, they are not generic but only focus on either human pose or animal pose estimation, and thus their effectiveness is somewhat limited to specific scenarios. In this work, we propose a unified framework that generalizes well on various domain adaptive pose estimation problems. We propose to align representations using both input-level and output-level cues (pixels and pose labels, respectively), which facilitates the knowledge transfer from the source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under various domain shifts. Our method outperforms existing baselines on human pose estimation by up to 4.5 percent points (pp), hand pose estimation by up to 7.4 pp, and animal pose estimation by up to 4.8 pp for dogs and 3.3 pp for sheep. These results suggest that our method is able to mitigate domain shift on diverse tasks and even unseen domains and objects (e.g., trained on horse and tested on dog). Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/VisionLearningGroup/UDA_PoseEstimation.

Kun-Yu Lin, Jiaming Zhou, Yukun Qiu, Wei-Shi Zheng

Unsupervised partial domain adaptation (PDA) is a unsupervised domain adaptation problem which assumes that the source label space subsumes the target label space. A critical challenge of PDA is the negative transfer problem, which is triggered by learning to match the whole source and target domains. To mitigate negative transfer, we note a fact that, it is impossible for a source sample of outlier classes to find a target sample of the same category due to the absence of outlier classes in the target domain, while it is possible for a source sample of shared classes. Inspired by this fact, we exploit the cycle inconsistency, i.e., category discrepancy between the original features and features after cycle transformations, to distinguish outlier classes apart from shared classes in the source domain. Accordingly, we propose to filter out source samples of outlier classes by weight suppression and align the distributions of shared classes between the source and target domains by adversarial learning. To learn accurate weight assignment for filtering out outlier classes, we design cycle transformations based on domain prototypes and soft nearest neighbor, where center losses are introduced in individual domains to reduce the intra-class variation. Experiment results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Jian Hu, Haowen Zhong, Fei Yang, Shaogang Gong, Guile Wu, Junchi Yan

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled or a less labeled but related target domain. Ideally, the source and target distributions should be aligned to each other equally to achieve unbiased knowledge transfer. However, due to the significant imbalance between the amount of annotated data in the source and target domains, usually only the target distribution is aligned to the source domain, leading to adapting unnecessary source specific knowledge to the target domain, i.e., biased domain adaptation. To resolve this problem, in this work, we delve into the transferability estimation problem in domain adaptation, proposing a non-intrusive Unbiased Transferability Estimation Plug-in (UTEP) by modeling the uncertainty of a discriminator in adversarial-based DA methods to optimize unbiased transfer. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach for unbiased transferability learning in DA. Furthermore, to alleviate the impact of imbalanced annotated data, we utilize the estimated uncertainty for pseudo label selection of unlabeled samples in the target domain, which helps achieve better marginal and conditional distribution alignments between domains. Extensive experimental results on a high variety of DA benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach can be readily incorporated into various adversarial-based DA methods, achieving compelling performance against the state-of-the-art methods.

Shuo Lei, Xuchao Zhang, Jianfeng He, Fanglan Chen, Bowen Du, Chang-Tien Lu

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims at learning to segment a novel object class with only a few annotated examples. Most existing methods consider a setting where base classes are sampled from the same domain as the novel classes. However, in many applications, collecting sufficient training data for meta-learning is infeasible or impossible. In this paper, we extend few-shot semantic segmentation to a new task, called Cross-Domain Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (CD-FSS), which aims to generalize the meta-knowledge from domains with sufficient training labels to low-resource domains. Moreover, a new benchmark for the CD-FSS task is established and characterized by a task difficulty measurement. We evaluate both representative few-shot segmentation methods and transfer learning based methods on the proposed benchmark and find that current few-shot segmentation methods fail to address CD-FSS. To tackle the challenging CD-FSS problem, we propose a novel Pyramid-Anchor-Transformation based few-shot segmentation network (PATNet), in which domain-specific features are transformed into domain-agnostic ones for downstream segmentation modules to fast adapt to unseen domains. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation method in CD-FSS by 8.49% and 10.61% average accuracies in 1-shot and 5-shot, respectively.

Geon Lee, Chanho Eom, Wonkyung Lee, Hyekang Park, Bumsub Ham

We present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for semantic segmentation that generalizes a model trained with source images and corresponding ground-truth labels to a target domain. A key to domain adaptive semantic segmentation is to learn domain-invariant and discriminative features without target ground-truth labels. To this end, we propose a bi-directional pixel-prototype contrastive learning framework that minimizes intra-class variations of features for the same object class, while maximizing inter-class variations for different ones, regardless of domains. Specifically, our framework aligns pixel-level features and a prototype of the same object class in target and source images (i.e., positive pairs), respectively, sets them apart for different classes (i.e., negative pairs), and performs the alignment and separation processes toward the other direction with pixel-level features in the source image and a prototype in the target image. The cross-domain matching encourages domain-invariant feature representations, while the bidirectional pixel-prototype correspondences aggregate features for the same object class, providing discriminative features. To establish training pairs for contrastive learning, we propose to generate dynamic pseudo labels of target images using a non-parametric label transfer, that is, pixel-prototype correspondences across different domains. We also present a calibration method compensating class-wise domain biases of prototypes gradually during training. Experimental results on standard benchmarks including GTA5 to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Prashant W Patil, Sunil Gupta, Santu Rana, Svetha Venkatesh

Restoration of weather degraded videos is a challenging problem due to diverse weather conditions e.g., rain, haze, snow, etc. Existing works handle video restoration for each weather using a different custom-designed architecture. This approach has many limitations. First, a custom-designed architecture for each weather condition requires domain-specific knowledge. Second, disparate network architectures across weather conditions prevent easy knowledge transfer to novel weather conditions where we do not have a lot of data to train a model from scratch. For example, while there is a lot of common knowledge to exploit between the models of different weather conditions at day or night time, it is difficult to do such adaptation. To this end, we propose a generic architecture that is effective for any weather condition due to the ability to extract robust feature maps without any domain-specific knowledge. This is achieved by novel components: spatio-temporal feature modulation, multi-level feature aggregation, and recurrent guidance decoder. Next, we propose a meta-learning based adaptation of our deep architecture to the restoration of videos in data-poor conditions (night-time videos). We show comprehensive results on video de-hazing and de-raining datasets in addition to the meta-learning based adaptation results on night-time video restoration tasks. Our results clearly outperform the state-of-the-art weather degraded video restoration methods.

Xinyi Wu, Zhenyao Wu, Jin Wan, Lili Ju, Song Wang

Video semantic segmentation is a fundamental and important task in computer vision, and it usually requires large-scale labeled data for training deep neural network models. To avoid laborious manual labeling, domain adaptive video segmentation approaches were recently introduced by transferring the knowledge from the source domain of self-labeled simulated videos to the target domain of unlabeled real-world videos. However, it leads to an interesting question -- while video-to-video adaptation is a natural idea, does the source data require to be videos? In this paper, we argue that it is not necessary to transfer temporal knowledge since the temporal continuity of video segmentation in the target domain can be estimated and enforced without reference to videos in the source domain. This motivates a new framework of Image-to-Video Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (I2VDA), where the source domain is a set of images without temporal information. Under this setting, we bridge the domain gap via adversarial training based on only the spatial knowledge, and develop a novel temporal augmentation strategy, through which the temporal consistency in the target domain is well-exploited and learned. In addition, we introduce a new training scheme by leveraging a proxy network to produce pseudo-labels on-the-fly, which is very effective to improve the stability of adversarial training. Experimental results on two synthetic-to-real scenarios show that the proposed I2VDA method can achieve even better performance on video semantic segmentation than existing state-of-the-art video-to-video domain adaption approaches.

Xinyi Zou, Yan Yan, Jing-Hao Xue, Si Chen, Hanzi Wang

Most existing compound facial expression recognition (FER) methods rely on large-scale labeled compound expression data for training. However, collecting such data is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we address the compound FER task in the cross-domain few-shot learning (FSL) setting, which requires only a few samples of compound expressions in the target domain. Specifically, we propose a novel cascaded decomposition network (CDNet), which cascades several learn-to-decompose modules with shared parameters based on a sequential decomposition mechanism, to obtain a transferable feature space. To alleviate the overfitting problem caused by limited base classes in our task, a partial regularization strategy is designed to effectively exploit the best of both episodic training and batch training. By training across similar tasks on multiple basic expression datasets, CDNet learns the ability of learn-to-decompose that can be easily adapted to identify unseen compound expressions. Extensive experiments on both in-the-lab and in-the-wild compound expression datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CDNet against several state-of-the-art FSL methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zouxinyi0625/CDNet.

Hyejin Lee, Daehee Kim, Daeun Lee, Jinkyu Kim, Jaekoo Lee

We propose a novel automatic colorization technique that learns domain-invariance across multiple source domains and is able to leverage such invariance to colorize grayscale images in unseen target domains. This would be particularly useful for colorizing sketches, line arts, or line drawings, which are generally difficult to colorize due to a lack of data. To address this issue, we first apply existing domain generalization (DG) techniques, which, however, produce less compelling desaturated images due to the network’s over-emphasis on learning domain-invariant contents (or shapes). Thus, we propose a new domain generalizable colorization model, which consists of two modules: (i) a domain-invariant content-biased feature encoder and (ii) a source-domain-specific color generator. To mitigate the issue of insufficient source domain-specific color information in domain-invariant features, we propose a skip connection that can transfer content feature statistics via adaptive instance normalization. Our experiments with publicly available PACS and Office-Home DG benchmarks confirm that our model is indeed able to produce perceptually reasonable colorized images. Further, we conduct a user study where human evaluators are asked to (1) answer whether the generated image looks naturally colored and to (2) choose the best-generated images against alternatives. Our model significantly outperforms the alternatives, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Lhyejin/DG-Colorization}.