Despite the fast progress in training specialized models for various tasks, learning a single general model that works well for many tasks is still challenging for computer vision. Here we introduce multi-task self-training (MuST), which harnesses the knowledge in independent specialized teacher models (e.g., ImageNet model on classification) to train a single general student model. Our approach has three steps. First, we train specialized teachers independently on labeled datasets. We then use the specialized teachers to label an unlabeled dataset to create a multi-task pseudo labeled dataset. Finally, the dataset, which now contains pseudo labels from teacher models trained on different datasets/tasks, is then used to train a student model with multi-task learning. We evaluate the feature representations of the student model on 6 vision tasks including image recognition (classification, detection, segmentation) and 3D geometry estimation (depth and surface normal estimation). MuST is scalable with unlabeled or partially labeled datasets and outperforms both specialized supervised models and self-supervised models when training on large scale datasets. Lastly, we show MuST can improve upon already strong checkpoints trained with billions of examples. The results suggest self-training is a promising direction to aggregate labeled and unlabeled training data for learning general feature representations.
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Contrastive learning methods have significantly narrowed the gap between supervised and unsupervised learning on computer vision tasks. In this paper, we explore their application to geo-located datasets, e.g. remote sensing, where unlabeled data is often abundant but labeled data is scarce. We first show that due to their different characteristics, a non-trivial gap persists between contrastive and supervised learning on standard benchmarks. To close the gap, we propose novel training methods that exploit the spatio-temporal structure of remote sensing data. We leverage spatially aligned images over time to construct temporal positive pairs in contrastive learning and geo-location to design pre-text tasks. Our experiments show that our proposed method closes the gap between contrastive and supervised learning on image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation for remote sensing. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed method can also be applied to geo-tagged ImageNet images, improving downstream performance on various tasks.
Test-time augmentation---the aggregation of predictions across transformed versions of a test input---is a common practice in image classification. Traditionally, predictions are combined using a simple average. In this paper, we present 1) experimental analyses that shed light on cases in which the simple average is suboptimal and 2) a method to address these shortcomings. A key finding is that even when test-time augmentation produces a net improvement in accuracy, it can change many correct predictions into incorrect predictions. We delve into when and why test-time augmentation changes a prediction from being correct to incorrect and vice versa. Building on these insights, we present a learning-based method for aggregating test-time augmentations. Experiments across a diverse set of models, datasets, and augmentations show that our method delivers consistent improvements over existing approaches.
Vulnerability of 3D point cloud (PC) classifiers has become a grave concern due to the popularity of 3D sensors in safety-critical applications. Existing adversarial attacks against 3D PC classifiers are all test-time evasion (TTE) attacks that aim to induce test-time misclassifications using knowledge of the classifier. But since the victim classifier is usually not accessible to the attacker, the threat is largely diminished in practice, as PC TTEs typically have poor transferability. Here, we propose the first backdoor attack (BA) against PC classifiers. Originally proposed for images, BAs poison the victim classifier's training set so that the classifier learns to decide to the attacker's target class whenever the attacker's backdoor pattern is present in a given input sample. Significantly, BAs do not require knowledge of the victim classifier. Different from image BAs, we propose to insert a cluster of points into a PC as a robust backdoor pattern customized for 3D PCs. Such clusters are also consistent with a physical attack (i.e., with a captured object in a scene). We optimize the cluster's location using an independently trained surrogate classifier and choose the cluster's local geometry to evade possible PC preprocessing and PC anomaly detectors (ADs). Experimentally, our BA achieves a uniformly high success rate (>=87%) and shows evasiveness against state-of-the-art PC ADs. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenxianglance/PCBA.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have long been the architecture of choice for computer vision tasks. Recently, Transformer-based architectures like Vision Transformer (ViT) have matched or even surpassed ResNets for image classification. However, details of the Transformer architecture such as the use of non-overlapping patches lead one to wonder whether these networks are as robust. In this paper, we perform an extensive study of a variety of different measures of robustness of ViT models and compare the findings to ResNet baselines. We investigate robustness to input perturbations as well as robustness to model perturbations. We find that when pre-trained with a sufficient amount of data, ViT models are at least as robust as the ResNet counterparts on a broad range of perturbations. We also find that Transformers are robust to the removal of almost any single layer, and that while activations from later layers are highly correlated with each other, they nevertheless play an important role in classification.
We introduce the first Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method to find a better transformer architecture for image recognition. Recently, transformers without CNN-based backbones are found to achieve impressive performance for image recognition. However, the transformer is designed for NLP tasks and thus could be sub-optimal when directly used for image recognition. In order to improve the visual representation ability for transformers, we propose a new search space and searching algorithm. Specifically, we introduce a locality module that models the local correlations in images explicitly with fewer computational cost. With the locality module, our search space is defined to let the search algorithm freely trade off between global and local information as well as optimizing the low-level design choice in each module. To tackle the problem caused by huge search space, a hierarchical neural architecture search method is proposed to search the optimal vision transformer from two levels separately with the evolutionary algorithm. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our method can find more discriminative and efficient transformer variants than the ResNet family (e.g., ResNet101) and the baseline ViT for image classification.
In recent years, deep learning moves video-based Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) significantly forward. Currently, a typical network combination for CSLR includes a visual module, which focuses on spatial and short-temporal information, followed by a contextual module, which focuses on long-temporal information, and the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss is adopted to train the network. However, due to the limitation of chain rules in back-propagation, the visual module is hard to adjust for seeking optimized visual features. As a result, it enforces that the contextual module focuses on contextual information optimization only rather than balancing efficient visual and contextual information. In this paper, we propose a Self-Mutual Knowledge Distillation (SMKD) method, which enforces the visual and contextual modules to focus on short-term and long-term information and enhances the discriminative power of both modules simultaneously. Specifically, the visual and contextual modules share the weights of their corresponding classifiers, and train with CTC loss simultaneously. Moreover, the spike phenomenon widely exists with CTC loss. Although it can help us choose a few of the key frames of a gloss, it does drop other frames in a gloss and makes the visual feature saturation in the early stage. A gloss segmentation is developed to relieve the spike phenomenon and decrease saturation in the visual module. We conduct experiments on two CSLR benchmarks: PHOENIX14 and PHOENIX14-T. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SMKD.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with only image-level labels, which has better scalability and practicability than fully supervised methods in the actual deployment. However, with only image-level labels, learning object classification models tends to activate object parts and ignore the whole object, while expanding object parts into the whole object may deteriorate classification performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose foreground activation maps (FAM), whose aim is to optimize object localization and classification jointly via an object-aware attention module and a part-aware attention module in a unified model, where the two tasks can complement and enhance each other. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can achieve remarkable performance for both tasks by optimizing them jointly via FAM for WSOL. Besides, the designed two modules can effectively highlight foreground objects for localization and discover discriminative parts for classification. Extensive experiments with four backbones on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our FAM performs favorably against state-of-the-art WSOL methods.
Real-world data is often unbalanced and long-tailed, but deep models struggle to recognize rare classes in the presence of frequent classes. To address unbalanced data, most studies try balancing the data, the loss, or the classifier to reduce classification bias towards head classes. Far less attention has been given to the latent representations learned with unbalanced data. We show that the feature extractor part of deep networks suffers greatly from this bias. We propose a new loss based on robustness theory, which encourages the model to learn high-quality representations for both head and tail classes. While the general form of the robustness loss may be hard to compute, we further derive an easy-to-compute upper bound that can be minimized efficiently. This procedure reduces representation bias towards head classes in the feature space and achieves new SOTA results on CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist long-tail benchmarks. We find that training with robustness increases recognition accuracy of tail classes while largely maintaining the accuracy of head classes. The new robustness loss can be combined with various classifier balancing techniques and can be applied to representations at several layers of the deep model.
In this paper, given a small bag of images, each containing a common but latent predicate, we are interested in localizing visual subject-object pairs connected via the common predicate in each of the images. We refer to this novel problem as visual relationship co-localization or VRC as an abbreviation. VRC is a challenging task, even more so than the well-studied object co-localization task. This becomes further challenging when using just a few images, the model has to learn to co-localize visual subject-object pairs connected via unseen predicates. To solve VRC, we propose an optimization framework to select a common visual relationship in each image of the bag. The goal of the optimization framework is to find the optimal solution by learning visual relationship similarity across images in a few-shot setting. To obtain robust visual relationship representation, we utilize a simple yet effective technique that learns relationship embedding as a translation vector from visual subject to visual object in a shared space. Further, to learn visual relationship similarity, we utilize a proven meta-learning technique commonly used for few-shot classification tasks. Finally, to tackle the combinatorial complexity challenge arising from an exponential number of feasible solutions, we use a greedy approximation inference algorithm that selects approximately the best solution. We extensively evaluate our proposed framework on variations of bag sizes obtained from two challenging public datasets, namely VrR-VG and VG-150, and achieve impressive visual co-localization performance.
In this paper, we propose an instance similarity learning (ISL) method for unsupervised feature representation. Conventional methods assign close instance pairs in the feature space with high similarity, which usually leads to wrong pairwise relationship for large neighborhoods because the Euclidean distance fails to depict the true semantic similarity on the feature manifold. On the contrary, our method mines the feature manifold in an unsupervised manner, through which the semantic similarity among instances is learned in order to obtain discriminative representations. Specifically, we employ the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to mine the underlying feature manifold, where the generated features are applied as the proxies to progressively explore the feature manifold so that the semantic similarity among instances is acquired as reliable pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments on image classification demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/ISL.git.
Knowledge distillation has become one of the most important model compression techniques by distilling knowledge from larger teacher networks to smaller student ones. Although great success has been achieved by prior distillation methods via delicately designing various types of knowledge, they overlook the functional properties of neural networks, which makes the process of applying those techniques to new tasks unreliable and non-trivial. To alleviate such problem, in this paper, we initially leverage Lipschitz continuity to better represent the functional characteristic of neural networks and guide the knowledge distillation process. In particular, we propose a novel Lipschitz Continuity Guided Knowledge Distillation framework to faithfully distill knowledge by minimizing the distance between two neural networks' Lipschitz constants, which enables teacher networks to better regularize student networks and improve the corresponding performance. We derive an explainable approximation algorithm with an explicit theoretical derivation to address the NP-hard problem of calculating the Lipschitz constant. Experimental results have shown that our method outperforms other benchmarks over several knowledge distillation tasks (e.g., classification, segmentation and object detection) on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and PASCAL VOC datasets.
We design a family of image classification architectures that optimize the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in a high-speed regime. Our work exploits recent findings in attention-based architectures, which are competitive on highly parallel processing hardware. We revisit principles from the extensive literature on convolutional neural networks to apply them to transformers, in particular activation maps with decreasing resolutions. We also introduce the attention bias, a new way to integrate positional information in vision transformers. As a result, we propose LeViT: a hybrid neural network for fast inference image classification. We consider different measures of efficiency on different hardware platforms, so as to best reflect a wide range of application scenarios. Our extensive experiments empirically validate our technical choices and show they are suitable to most architectures. Overall, LeViT significantly outperforms existing convnets and vision transformers with respect to the speed/accuracy tradeoff. For example, at 80% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, LeViT is 5 times faster than EfficientNet on CPU. We release the code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LeViT.
There has been a booming demand for integrating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) powered functionalities into Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices to enable ubiquitous intelligent "IoT cameras". However, more extensive applications of such IoT systems are still limited by two challenges. First, some applications, especially medicine- and wearable-related ones, impose stringent requirements on the camera form factor. Second, powerful CNNs often require considerable storage and energy cost, whereas IoT devices often suffer from limited resources. PhlatCam, with its form factor potentially reduced by orders of magnitude, has emerged as a promising solution to the first aforementioned challenge, while the second one remains a bottleneck. Existing compression techniques, which can potentially tackle the second challenge, are far from realizing the full potential in storage and energy reduction, because they mostly focus on the CNN algorithm itself. To this end, this work proposes SACoD, a Sensor Algorithm Co-Design framework to develop more efficient CNN-powered PhlatCam. In particular, the mask coded in the PhlatCam sensor and the backend CNN model are jointly optimized in terms of both model parameters and architectures via differential neural architecture search. Extensive experiments including both simulation and physical measurement on manufactured masks show that the proposed SACoD framework achieves aggressive model compression and energy savings while maintaining or even boosting the task accuracy, when benchmarking over two state-of-the-art (SOTA) designs with six datasets across four different vision tasks including classification, segmentation, image translation, and face recognition. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/RICE-EIC/SACoD.
In structure-from-motion the viewing graph is a graph where vertices correspond to cameras and edges represent fundamental matrices. We provide a new formulation and an algorithm for establishing whether a viewing graph is solvable, i.e. it uniquely determines a set of projective cameras. Known theoretical conditions either do not fully characterize the solvability of all viewing graphs, or are exceedingly hard to compute for they involve solving a system of polynomial equations with a large number of unknowns. The main result of this paper is a method for reducing the number of unknowns by exploiting the cycle consistency. We advance the understanding of the solvability by (i) finishing the classification of all previously undecided minimal graphs up to 9 nodes, (ii) extending the practical solvability testing up to minimal graphs with up to 90 nodes, and (iii) definitely answering an open research question by showing that the finite solvability is not equivalent to the solvability. Finally, we present an experiment on real data showing that unsolvable graphs are appearing in practical situations.
This paper presents a new Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture Multi-Scale Vision Longformer, which significantly enhances the ViT of [??] for encoding high-resolution images using two techniques. The first is the multi-scale model structure, which provides image encodings at multiple scales with manageable computational cost. The second is the attention mechanism of Vision Longformer, which is a variant of Longformer [??], originally developed for natural language processing, and achieves a linear complexity w.r.t. the number of input tokens. A comprehensive empirical study shows that the new ViT significantly outperforms several strong baselines, including the existing ViT models and their ResNet counterparts, and the Pyramid Vision Transformer from a concurrent work [??], on a range of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation. The models and source code are released at https://github.com/microsoft/vision-longformer.
Online Continual Learning With Natural Distribution Shifts: An Empirical Study With Visual Data
PDF ↗Continual learning is the problem of learning and retaining knowledge through time over multiple tasks and environments. Research has primarily focused on the incremental classification setting, where new tasks/classes are added at discrete time intervals. Such an "offline" setting does not evaluate the ability of agents to learn effectively and efficiently, since an agent can perform multiple learning epochs without any time limitation when a task is added. We argue that "online" continual learning, where data is a single continuous stream without task boundaries, enables evaluating both information retention and online learning efficacy. In online continual learning, each incoming small batch of data is first used for testing and then added to the training set, making the problem truly online. Trained models are later evaluated on historical data to assess information retention. We introduce a new benchmark for online continual visual learning that exhibits large scale and natural distribution shifts. Through a large-scale analysis, we identify critical and previously unobserved phenomena of gradient-based optimization in continual learning, and propose effective strategies for improving gradient-based online continual learning with real data. The source code and dataset are available in: https://github.com/ IntelLabs/continuallearning.
Gradient-based meta-learning relates task-specific models to a meta-model by gradients. By this design, an algorithm first optimizes the task-specific models by an inner loop and then backpropagates meta-gradients through the loop to update the meta-model. The number of inner-loop optimization steps has to be small (e.g., one step) to avoid high-order derivatives, big memory footprints, and the risk of vanishing or exploding meta-gradients. We propose an intuitive teacher-student scheme to enable the gradient-based meta-learning algorithms to explore long horizons by the inner loop. The key idea is to employ a student network to adequately explore the search space of task-specific models (e.g., by more than ten steps), and a teacher then takes a "leap" toward the regions probed by the student. The teacher not only arrives at a high-quality model but also defines a lightweight computation graph for meta-gradients. Our approach is generic; it performs well when applied to four meta-learning algorithms over three tasks: few-shot learning, long-tailed classification, and meta-attack.
We present DetCo, a simple yet effective self-supervised approach for object detection. Unsupervised pre-training methods have been recently designed for object detection, but they are usually deficient in image classification, or the opposite. Unlike them, DetCo transfers well on downstream instance-level dense prediction tasks, while maintaining competitive image-level classification accuracy. The advantages are derived from (1) multi-level supervision to intermediate representations, (2) contrastive learning between global image and local patches. These two designs facilitate discriminative and consistent global and local representation at each level of feature pyramid, improving detection and classification, simultaneously. Extensive experiments on VOC, COCO, Cityscapes, and ImageNet demonstrate that DetCo not only outperforms recent methods on a series of 2D and 3D instance-level detection tasks, but also competitive on image classification. For example, on ImageNet classification, DetCo is 6.9% and 5.0% top-1 accuracy better than InsLoc and DenseCL, which are two contemporary works designed for object detection. Moreover, on COCO detection, DetCo is 6.9 AP better than SwAV with Mask R-CNN C4. Notably, DetCo largely boosts up Sparse R-CNN, a recent strong detector, from 45.0 AP to 46.5 AP (+1.5 AP), establishing a new SOTA on COCO. Code is available.
Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) enables finding an object using a dataset without any localization information. By simply training a classification model using only image-level annotations, the feature map of a model can be utilized as a score map for localization. In spite of many WSOL methods proposing novel strategies, there has not been any de facto standards about how to normalize the class activation map (CAM). Consequently, many WSOL methods have failed to fully exploit their own capacity because of the misuse of a normalization method. In this paper, we review many existing normalization methods and point out that they should be used according to the property of the given dataset. Additionally, we propose a new normalization method which substantially enhances the performance of any CAM-based WSOL methods. Using the proposed normalization method, we provide a comprehensive evaluation over three datasets (CUB, ImageNet and OpenImages) on three different architectures and observe significant performance gains over the conventional normalization methods in all the evaluated cases.