Recent advancements in post-hoc and inherently interpretable methods have markedly enhanced the explanations of black box classifier models. These methods operate either through post-analysis or by integrating concept learning during model training. Although being effective in bridging the semantic gap between a model's latent space and human interpretation these explanation methods only partially reveal the model's decision-making process. The outcome is typically limited to high-level semantics derived from the last feature map. We argue that the explanations lacking insights into the decision processes at low and mid-level features are neither fully faithful nor useful. Addressing this gap we introduce the Multi-Level Concept Prototypes Classifier (MCPNet) an inherently interpretable model. MCPNet autonomously learns meaningful concept prototypes across multiple feature map levels using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss and an energy-based weighted PCA mechanism and it does so without reliance on predefined concept labels. Further we propose a novel classifier paradigm that learns and aligns multi-level concept prototype distributions for classification purposes via Class-aware Concept Distribution (CCD) loss. Our experiments reveal that our proposed MCPNet while being adaptable to various model architectures offers comprehensive multi-level explanations while maintaining classification accuracy. Additionally its concept distribution-based classification approach shows improved generalization capabilities in few-shot classification scenarios.
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SlowFormer: Adversarial Attack on Compute and Energy Consumption of Efficient Vision Transformers
PDF ↗Recently there has been a lot of progress in reducing the computation of deep models at inference time. These methods can reduce both the computational needs and power usage of deep models. Some of these approaches adaptively scale the compute based on the input instance. We show that such models can be vulnerable to a universal adversarial patch attack where the attacker optimizes for a patch that when pasted on any image can increase the compute and power consumption of the model. We run experiments with three different efficient vision transformer methods showing that in some cases the attacker can increase the computation to the maximum possible level by simply pasting a patch that occupies only 8% of the image area. We also show that a standard adversarial training defense method can reduce some of the attack's success. We believe adaptive efficient methods will be necessary for the future to lower the power usage of expensive deep models so we hope our paper encourages the community to study the robustness of these methods and develop better defense methods for the proposed attack. Code is available at: https://github.com/UCDvision/SlowFormer.
Reg-PTQ: Regression-specialized Post-training Quantization for Fully Quantized Object Detector
PDF ↗Although deep learning based object detection is of great significance for various applications it faces challenges when deployed on edge devices due to the computation and energy limitations. Post-training quantization (PTQ) can improve inference efficiency through integer computing. However they suffer from severe performance degradation when performing full quantization due to overlooking the unique characteristics of regression tasks in object detection. In this paper we are the first to explore regression-friendly quantization and conduct full quantization on various detectors. We reveal the intrinsic reason behind the difficulty of quantizing regressors with empirical and theoretical justifications and introduce a novel Regression-specialized Post-Training Quantization (Reg-PTQ) scheme. It includes Filtered Global Loss Integration Calibration to combine the global loss with a two-step filtering mechanism mitigating the adverse impact of false positive bounding boxes and Learnable Logarithmic-Affine Quantizer tailored for the non-uniform distributed parameters in regression structures. Extensive experiments on prevalent detectors showcase the effectiveness of the well-designed Reg-PTQ. Notably our Reg-PTQ achieves 7.6 times and 5.4 times reduction in computation and storage consumption under INT4 with little performance degradation which indicates the immense potential of fully quantized detectors in real-world object detection applications.
Low-precision quantization is recognized for its efficacy in neural network optimization. Our analysis reveals that non-quantized elementwise operations which are prevalent in layers such as parameterized activation functions batch normalization and quantization scaling dominate the inference cost of low-precision models. These non-quantized elementwise operations are commonly overlooked in SOTA efficiency metrics such as Arithmetic Computation Effort (ACE). In this paper we propose ACEv2 - an extended version of ACE which offers a better alignment with the inference cost of quantized models and their energy consumption on ML hardware. Moreover we introduce PikeLPN a model that addresses these efficiency issues by applying quantization to both elementwise operations and multiply-accumulate operations. In particular we present a novel quantization technique for batch normalization layers named QuantNorm which allows for quantizing the batch normalization parameters without compromising the model performance. Additionally we propose applying Double Quantization where the quantization scaling parameters are quantized. Furthermore we recognize and resolve the issue of distribution mismatch in Separable Convolution layers by introducing Distribution-Heterogeneous Quantization which enables quantizing them to low-precision. PikeLPN achieves Pareto-optimality in efficiency-accuracy trade-off with up to 3X efficiency improvement compared to SOTA low-precision models.
We present a method for reconstructing 3D shape of arbitrary Lambertian objects based on measurements by miniature energy-efficient low-cost single-photon cameras. These cameras operating as time resolved image sensors illuminate the scene with a very fast pulse of diffuse light and record the shape of that pulse as it returns back from the scene at a high temporal resolution. We propose to model this image formation process account for its non-idealities and adapt neural rendering to reconstruct 3D geometry from a set of spatially distributed sensors with known poses. We show that our approach can successfully recover complex 3D shapes from simulated data. We further demonstrate 3D object reconstruction from real-world captures utilizing measurements from a commodity proximity sensor. Our work draws a connection between image-based modeling and active range scanning and offers a step towards 3D vision with single-photon cameras.
Two-view correspondence learning has recently focused on considering the coherence and smoothness of the motion field between an image pair. Dominant schemes include controlling the complexity of the field function with regularization or smoothing the field with local filters but the former suffers from heavy computational burden and the latter fails to accommodate discontinuities in the case of large scene disparities. In this paper inspired by Fourier expansion we propose a novel network called DeMatch which decomposes the motion field to retain its main "low-frequency" and smooth part. This achieves implicit regularization with lower computational cost and generates piecewise smoothness naturally. Specifically we first decompose the rough motion field that is contaminated by false matches into several different sub-fields which are highly smooth and contain the main energy of the original field. Then with these smooth sub-fields we recover a cleaner motion field from which correct motion vectors are subsequently derived. We also design a special masked decomposition strategy to further mitigate the negative influence of false matches. All the mentioned processes are finally implemented in a discrete and learnable manner avoiding the difficulty of calculating real dense fields. Extensive experiments reveal that DeMatch outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multiple tasks and shows promising low computational usage and piecewise smoothness property. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/SuhZhang/DeMatch.
We present a novel theory that establishes the relationship between light transport in visible and thermal infrared and heat transport in solids. We show that heat generated due to light absorption can be estimated by modeling heat transport using a thermal camera. For situations where heat conduction is negligible we analytically solve the heat transport equation to derive a simple expression relating the change in thermal image intensity to the absorbed light intensity and heat capacity of the material. Next we prove that intrinsic image decomposition for Lambertian scenes becomes a well-posed problem if one has access to the absorbed light. Our theory generalizes to arbitrary shapes and unstructured illumination. Our theory is based on applying energy conservation principle at each pixel independently. We validate our theory using real-world experiments on diffuse objects made of different materials that exhibit both direct and global components (inter-reflections) of light transport under unknown complex lighting.
Feature matching is a crucial task in the field of computer vision which involves finding correspondences between images. Previous studies achieve remarkable performance using learning-based feature comparison. However the pervasive presence of matching redundancy between images gives rise to unnecessary and error-prone computations in these methods imposing limitations on their accuracy. To address this issue we propose MESA a novel approach to establish precise area (or region) matches for efficient matching redundancy reduction. MESA first leverages the advanced image understanding capability of SAM a state-of-the-art foundation model for image segmentation to obtain image areas with implicit semantic. Then a multi-relational graph is proposed to model the spatial structure of these areas and construct their scale hierarchy. Based on graphical models derived from the graph the area matching is reformulated as an energy minimization task and effectively resolved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MESA yields substantial precision improvement for multiple point matchers in indoor and outdoor downstream tasks e.g. +13.61% for DKM in indoor pose estimation.
Video Motion Magnification (VMM) aims to reveal subtle and imperceptible motion information of objects in the macroscopic world. Prior methods directly model the motion field from the Eulerian perspective by Representation Learning that separates shape and texture or Multi-domain Learning from phase fluctuations. Inspired by the frequency spectrum we observe that the low-frequency components with stable energy always possess spatial structure and less noise making them suitable for modeling the subtle motion field. To this end we present FD4MM a new paradigm of Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification with a Multi-level Isomorphic Architecture to capture multi-level high-frequency details and a stable low-frequency structure (motion field) in video space. Since high-frequency details and subtle motions are susceptible to information degradation due to their inherent subtlety and unavoidable external interference from noise we carefully design Sparse High/Low-pass Filters to enhance the integrity of details and motion structures and a Sparse Frequency Mixer to promote seamless recoupling. Besides we innovatively design a contrastive regularization for this task to strengthen the model's ability to discriminate irrelevant features reducing undesired motion magnification. Extensive experiments on both Real-world and Synthetic Datasets show that our FD4MM outperforms SOTA methods. Meanwhile FD4MM reduces FLOPs by 1.63xand boosts inference speed by 1.68xthan the latest method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiafei127/FD4MM.
U.S. congressional hearings significantly influence the national economy and social fabric, impacting individual lives. Despite their importance, there is a lack of comprehensive datasets for analyzing these discourses. To address this, we propose the **Co**ngress **Co**mmittee **H**earing **D**ataset (CoCoHD), covering hearings from 1997 to 2024 across 86 committees, with 32,697 records. This dataset enables researchers to study policy language on critical issues like healthcare, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate justice. We demonstrate its potential with a case study on 1,000 energy-related sentences, analyzing the Energy and Commerce Committee’s stance on fossil fuel consumption. By fine-tuning pre-trained language models, we create energy-relevant measures for each hearing. Our market analysis shows that natural language analysis using CoCoHD can predict and highlight trends in the energy sector.
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20%-50% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.
Evaluating Large Language Models on Time Series Feature Understanding: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Benchmark
PDF ↗Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for automatic time series analysis and reporting, which is a critical task across many domains, spanning healthcare, finance, climate, energy, and many more. In this paper, we propose a framework for rigorously evaluating the capabilities of LLMs on time series understanding, encompassing both univariate and multivariate forms. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of time series features, a critical framework that delineates various characteristics inherent in time series data. Leveraging this taxonomy, we have systematically designed and synthesized a diverse dataset of time series, embodying the different outlined features, each accompanied by textual descriptions. This dataset acts as a solid foundation for assessing the proficiency of LLMs in comprehending time series. Our experiments shed light on the strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs in time series understanding, revealing which features these models readily comprehend effectively and where they falter. In addition, we uncover the sensitivity of LLMs to factors including the formatting of the data, the position of points queried within a series and the overall time series length.
Generative Models
Material discovery is a critical area of research with the potential to revolutionize various fields, including carbon capture, renewable energy, and electronics. However, the immense scale of the chemical space makes it challenging to explore all possible materials experimentally. In this paper, we introduce FlowLLM, a novel generative model that combines large language models (LLMs) and Riemannian flow matching (RFM) to design novel crystalline materials. FlowLLM first fine-tunes an LLM to learn an effective base distribution of meta-stable crystals in a text representation. After converting to a graph representation, the RFM model takes samples from the LLM and iteratively refines the coordinates and lattice parameters. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, increasing the generation rate of stable materials by over three times and increasing the rate for stable, unique, and novel crystals by $\sim50$% – a huge improvement on a difficult problem. Additionally, the crystals generated by FlowLLM are much closer to their relaxed state when compared with another leading model, significantly reducing post-hoc computational cost.
Graph Neural Networks
In domains with interdependent data, such as graphs, quantifying the epistemic uncertainty of a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is challenging as uncertainty can arise at different structural scales. Existing techniques neglect this issue or only distinguish between structure-aware and structure-agnostic uncertainty without combining them into a single measure. We propose GEBM, an energy-based model (EBM) that provides high-quality uncertainty estimates by aggregating energy at different structural levels that naturally arise from graph diffusion. In contrast to logit-based EBMs, we provably induce an integrable density in the data space by regularizing the energy function. We introduce an evidential interpretation of our EBM that significantly improves the predictive robustness of the GNN. Our framework is a simple and effective post hoc method applicable to any pre-trained GNN that is sensitive to various distribution shifts. It consistently achieves the best separation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on 6 out of 7 anomaly types while having the best average rank over shifts on *all* datasets.
Physical Models · Physics
Neural wave functions accomplished unprecedented accuracies in approximating the ground state of many-electron systems, though at a high computational cost. Recent works proposed amortizing the cost by learning generalized wave functions across different structures and compounds instead of solving each problem independently. Enforcing the permutation antisymmetry of electrons in such generalized neural wave functions remained challenging as existing methods require discrete orbital selection via non-learnable hand-crafted algorithms. This work tackles the problem by defining overparametrized, fully learnable neural wave functions suitable for generalization across molecules. We achieve this by relying on Pfaffians rather than Slater determinants. The Pfaffian allows us to enforce the antisymmetry on arbitrary electronic systems without any constraint on electronic spin configurations or molecular structure. Our empirical evaluation finds that a single neural Pfaffian calculates the ground state and ionization energies with chemical accuracy across various systems. On the TinyMol dataset, we outperform the `gold-standard' CCSD(T) CBS reference energies by 1.9m$E_h$ and reduce energy errors compared to previous generalized neural wave functions by up to an order of magnitude.
Physical Models · Physics
Neural wave functions accomplished unprecedented accuracies in approximating the ground state of many-electron systems, though at a high computational cost. Recent works proposed amortizing the cost by learning generalized wave functions across different structures and compounds instead of solving each problem independently. Enforcing the permutation antisymmetry of electrons in such generalized neural wave functions remained challenging as existing methods require discrete orbital selection via non-learnable hand-crafted algorithms. This work tackles the problem by defining overparametrized, fully learnable neural wave functions suitable for generalization across molecules. We achieve this by relying on Pfaffians rather than Slater determinants. The Pfaffian allows us to enforce the antisymmetry on arbitrary electronic systems without any constraint on electronic spin configurations or molecular structure. Our empirical evaluation finds that a single neural Pfaffian calculates the ground state and ionization energies with chemical accuracy across various systems. On the TinyMol dataset, we outperform the `gold-standard' CCSD(T) CBS reference energies by 1.9m$E_h$ and reduce energy errors compared to previous generalized neural wave functions by up to an order of magnitude.
Reinforcement Learning · Planning
Controlling the evolution of complex physical systems is a fundamental task across science and engineering. Classical techniques suffer from limited applicability or huge computational costs. On the other hand, recent deep learning and reinforcement learning-based approaches often struggle to optimize long-term control sequences under the constraints of system dynamics. In this work, we introduce Diffusion Physical systems Control (DiffPhyCon), a new class of method to address the physical systems control problem. DiffPhyCon excels by simultaneously minimizing both the learned generative energy function and the predefined control objectives across the entire trajectory and control sequence. Thus, it can explore globally and plan near-optimal control sequences. Moreover, we enhance DiffPhyCon with prior reweighting, enabling the discovery of control sequences that significantly deviate from the training distribution. We test our method on three tasks: 1D Burgers' equation, 2D jellyfish movement control, and 2D high-dimensional smoke control, where our generated jellyfish dataset is released as a benchmark for complex physical system control research. Our method outperforms widely applied classical approaches and state-of-the-art deep learning and reinforcement learning methods. Notably, DiffPhyCon unveils an intriguing fast-close-slow-open pattern observed in the jellyfish, aligning with established findings in the field of fluid dynamics. The project website, jellyfish dataset, and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/diffphycon.
Computer Vision
We introduce GaussianCut, a new method for interactive multiview segmentation of scenes represented as 3D Gaussians. Our approach allows for selecting the objects to be segmented by interacting with a single view. It accepts intuitive user input, such as point clicks, coarse scribbles, or text. Using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as the underlying scene representation simplifies the extraction of objects of interest which are considered to be a subset of the scene's Gaussians. Our key idea is to represent the scene as a graph and use the graph-cut algorithm to minimize an energy function to effectively partition the Gaussians into foreground and background. To achieve this, we construct a graph based on scene Gaussians and devise a segmentation-aligned energy function on the graph to combine user inputs with scene properties. To obtain an initial coarse segmentation, we leverage 2D image/video segmentation models and further refine these coarse estimates using our graph construction. Our empirical evaluations show the adaptability of GaussianCut across a diverse set of scenes. GaussianCut achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches for 3D segmentation without requiring any additional segmentation-aware training
Generative Models · Diffusion models
Diffusion models generate new samples by progressively decreasing the noise from the initially provided random distribution. This inference procedure generally utilizes a trained neural network numerous times to obtain the final output, creating significant latency and energy consumption on digital electronic hardware such as GPUs. In this study, we demonstrate that the propagation of a light beam through a transparent medium can be programmed to implement a denoising diffusion model on image samples. This framework projects noisy image patterns through passive diffractive optical layers, which collectively only transmit the predicted noise term in the image. The optical transparent layers, which are trained with an online training approach, backpropagating the error to the analytical model of the system, are passive and kept the same across different steps of denoising. Hence this method enables high-speed image generation with minimal power consumption, benefiting from the bandwidth and energy efficiency of optical information processing.
Deep Learning · Algorithms
Computational intensiveness of deep learning has motivated low-precision arithmetic designs. However, the current quantized/binarized training approaches are limited by: (1) significant performance loss due to arbitrary approximations of the latent weight gradient through its discretization/binarization function, and (2) training computational intensiveness due to the reliance on full-precision latent weights. This paper proposes a novel mathematical principle by introducing the notion of Boolean variation such that neurons made of Boolean weights and/or activations can be trained ---for the first time--- natively in Boolean domain instead of latent-weight gradient descent and real arithmetic. We explore its convergence, conduct extensively experimental benchmarking, and provide consistent complexity evaluation by considering chip architecture, memory hierarchy, dataflow, and arithmetic precision. Our approach achieves baseline full-precision accuracy in ImageNet classification and surpasses state-of-the-art results in semantic segmentation, with notable performance in image super-resolution, and natural language understanding with transformer-based models. Moreover, it significantly reduces energy consumption during both training and inference.