Online nonconvex optimization has been an active area of research recently. Previous studies either considered the global regret with full information about the objective functions, or studied the local regret with window-smoothed objective functions, which required access to unlimited number of gradient oracles per time step. In this paper, we focus on the more challenging and practical setting, where access to only a single oracle is allowed per time step, and take the local regret of the original (i.e., unsmoothed) objective functions as the performance metric. Specifically, for both settings respectively with a single exact and stochastic gradient oracle feedback, we derive lower bounds on the local regret and show that the classical online (stochastic) gradient descent algorithms are optimal. Moreover, for the more challenging setting with a single function value oracle feedback, we develop an online algorithm based on a one-point running difference gradient estimator, and show that such an algorithm achieves a local regret that a generic stochastic gradient oracle can best achieve.
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Optimization · Convex
It has been demonstrated that the training problem for a variety of (non) linear two-layer neural networks (such as two-layer perceptrons, convolutional networks, and self-attention) can be posed as equivalent convex optimization problems, with an induced regularizer which encourages low rank. However, this regularizer becomes prohibitively expensive to compute at moderate scales, impeding training convex neural networks. To this end, we propose applying the Burer-Monteiro factorization to convex neural networks, which for the first time enables a Burer-Monteiro perspective on neural networks with non-linearities. This factorization leads to an equivalent yet computationally tractable non-convex alternative with no spurious local minima. We develop a novel relative optimality bound of stationary points of the Burer-Monteiro factorization, providing verifiable conditions under which any stationary point is a global optimum. Further, for the first time, we show that linear self-attention with sufficiently many heads has no spurious local minima. Our experiments validate the novel relative optimality bound and the utility of the Burer-Monteiro factorization for scaling convex neural networks.
Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog
The Conformer has become the most popular encoder model for automatic speech recognition (ASR). It adds convolution modules to a transformer to learn both local and global dependencies. In this work we describe a faster, more memory-efficient, and better-performing transformer, called Zipformer. Modeling changes include: 1) a U-Net-like encoder structure where middle stacks operate at lower frame rates; 2) reorganized block structure with more modules, within which we re-use attention weights for efficiency; 3) a modified form of LayerNorm called BiasNorm allows us to retain some length information; 4) new activation functions SwooshR and SwooshL work better than Swish. We also propose a new optimizer, called ScaledAdam, which scales the update by each tensor's current scale to keep the relative change about the same, and also explictly learns the parameter scale. It achieves faster converge and better performance than Adam. Extensive experiments on LibriSpeech, Aishell-1, and WenetSpeech datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Zipformer over other state-of-the-art ASR models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall.
While bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models can be useful for building high-definition maps (HD-Maps) with less human labor, their results are often unreliable and demonstrate noticeable inconsistencies in the predicted HD-Maps from different viewpoints. This is because BEV perception is typically set up in an "onboard" manner, which restricts the computation and consequently prevents algorithms from reasoning multiple views simultaneously. This paper overcomes these limitations and advocates a more practical "offboard" HD-Map generation setup that removes the computation constraints, based on the fact that HD-Maps are commonly reusable infrastructures built offline in data centers. To this end, we propose a novel offboard pipeline called MV-Map that capitalizes multi-view consistency and can handle an arbitrary number of frames with the key desgin of a "region-centric" framework. In MV-Map, the target HD-Maps are created by aggregating all the frames of onboard predictions, weighted by the confidence scores assigned by an "uncertainty network." To further enhance multi-view consistency, we augment the uncertainty network with the global 3D structure optimized by a voxelized neural radiance field (Voxel-NeRF). Extensive experiments on nuScenes show that our MV-Map significantly improves the quality of HD-Maps, further highlighting the importance of offboard methods for HD-Map generation.
ReLeaPS : Reinforcement Learning-based Illumination Planning for Generalized Photometric Stereo
PDF ↗Illumination planning in photometric stereo aims to find a balance between tween surface normal estimation accuracy and image capturing efficiency by selecting optimal light configurations. It depends on factors such as the unknown shape and general reflectance of the target object, global illumination, and the choice of photometric stereo backbones, which are too complex to be handled by existing methods based on handcrafted illumination planning rules. This paper proposes a learning-based illumination planning method that jointly considers these factors via integrating a neural network and a generalized image formation model. As it is impractical to supervise illumination planning due to the enormous search space for ground truth light configurations, we formulate illumination planning using reinforcement learning, which explores the light space in a photometric stereo-aware and reward-driven manner. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that photometric stereo under the 20-light configurations from our method is comparable to, or even surpasses that of using lights from all available directions.
Distributed Bundle Adjustment with Block-Based Sparse Matrix Compression for Super Large Scale Datasets
PDF ↗We propose a distributed bundle adjustment (DBA) method using the exact Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm for super large-scale datasets. Most of the existing methods partition the global map to small ones and conduct bundle adjustment in the submaps. In order to fit the parallel framework, they use approximate solutions instead of the LM algorithm. However, those methods often give sub-optimal results. Different from them, we utilize the exact LM algorithm to conduct global bundle adjustment where the formation of the reduced camera system (RCS) is actually parallelized and executed in a distributed way. To store the large RCS, we compress it with a block-based sparse matrix compression format (BSMC), which fully exploits its block feature. The BSMC format also enables the distributed storage and updating of the global RCS. The proposed method is extensively evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art pipelines using both synthetic and real datasets. Preliminary results demonstrate the efficient memory usage and vast scalability of the proposed method compared with the baselines. For the first time, we conducted parallel bundle adjustment using LM algorithm on a real datasets with 1.18 million images and a synthetic dataset with 10 million images (about 500 times that of the state-of-the-art LM-based BA) on a distributed computing system.
Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new task, zero-shot text-to-video generation, and propose a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain. Our key modifications include (i) enriching the latent codes of the generated frames with motion dynamics to keep the global scene and the background time consistent; and (ii) reprogramming frame-level self-attention using a new cross-frame attention of each frame on the first frame, to preserve the context, appearance, and identity of the foreground object. Experiments show that this leads to low overhead, yet high-quality and remarkably consistent video generation. Moreover, our approach is not limited to text-to-video synthesis but is also applicable to other tasks such as conditional and content-specialized video generation, and Video Instruct-Pix2Pix, i.e., instruction-guided video editing. As experiments show, our method performs comparably or sometimes better than recent approaches, despite not being trained on additional video data. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero .
Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance, they are vulnerable to adversarial patches that introduce perceptible and localized perturbations to the input. Generating adversarial patches on images has received much attention, while adversarial patches on videos have not been well investigated. Further, decision-based attacks, where attackers only access the predicted hard labels by querying threat models, have not been well explored on video models either, even if they are practical in real-world video recognition scenes. The absence of such studies leads to a huge gap in the robustness assessment for video models. To bridge this gap, this work first explores decision-based patch attacks on video models. We analyze that the huge parameter space brought by videos and the minimal information returned by decision-based models both greatly increase the attack difficulty and query burden. To achieve a query-efficient attack, we propose a spatial-temporal differential evolution (STDE) framework. First, STDE introduces target videos as patch textures and only adds patches on keyframes that are adaptively selected by temporal difference. Second, STDE takes minimizing the patch area as the optimization objective and adopts spatial-temporal mutation and crossover to search for the global optimum without falling into the local optimum. Experiments show STDE has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in terms of threat, efficiency and imperceptibility. Hence, STDE has the potential to be a powerful tool for evaluating the robustness of video recognition models.
Increasingly, autoregressive approaches are being used to serialize observed variables based on specific criteria. The Neural Processes (NPs) model variable distribution as a continuous function and provide quick solutions for different tasks using a meta-learning framework. This paper proposes an autoregressive-based framework for NPs, based on their autoregressive properties. This framework leverages the autoregressive stacking effects of various variables to enhance the representation of the latent distribution, concurrently refining local and global relationships within the positional representation through the use of a sliding window mechanism. Autoregression improves function approximations in a stacked fashion, thereby raising the upper bound of the optimization. We have designated this framework as Autoregressive Neural Processes (AENPs) or Conditional Autoregressive Neural Processes (CAENPs). Traditional NP models and their variants aim to capture relationships between the context sample points, without addressing either local or global considerations. Specifically, we capture contextual relationships in the deterministic path and introduce sliding window attention and global attention to reconcile local and global relationships in the context sample points. Autoregressive constraints exist between multiple latent variables in the latent paths, thus building a complex global structure that allows our model to learn complex distributions. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the NPs or CFANPs models for 1D data, Bayesian optimization, and 2D data.
We present a novel camera path optimization framework for the task of online video stabilization. Typically, a stabilization pipeline consists of three steps: motion estimating, path smoothing, and novel view rendering. Most previous methods concentrate on motion estimation, proposing various global or local motion models. In contrast, path optimization receives relatively less attention, especially in the important online setting, where no future frames are available. In this work, we adopt recent off-the-shelf high-quality deep motion models for motion estimation to recover the camera trajectory and focus on the latter two steps. Our network takes a short 2D camera path in a sliding window as input and outputs the stabilizing warp field of the last frame in the window, which warps the coming frame to its stabilized position. A hybrid loss is well-defined to constrain the spatial and temporal consistency. In addition, we build a motion dataset that contains stable and unstable motion pairs for the training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art online methods both qualitatively and quantitatively and achieves comparable performance to offline methods.
Large vocabulary object detectors are often faced with the long-tailed label distributions, seriously degrading their ability to detect rarely seen categories. On one hand, the rare objects are prone to be misclassified as frequent categories. On the other hand, due to the limitation on the total number of detections per image, detectors usually rank all the confidence scores globally and filter out the lower-ranking ones. This may result in missed detection during inference, especially for the rare categories that naturally come with lower scores. Existing methods mainly focus on the former problem and design various classification loss to enhance the object-level classification accuracy, but largely overlook the global-level ranking task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that Reconciles Object-level and Global-level (ROG) objectives to address both problems. As a multi-task learning framework, ROG simultaneously trains the model with two tasks: classifying each object proposal individually and ranking all the confidence scores globally. Specifically, complementary to the object-level classification loss for model discrimination, we design a generalized average precision (GAP) loss to explicitly optimize the global-level score ranking across different objects. For each category, GAP loss generates balanced gradients to rectify the ranking errors. In experiments, we show that GAP loss is highly versatile to be plugged into various advanced methods and brings considerable benefits.
We introduce a novel method to estimate the essential matrix for two-view Structure from Motion (SfM). We show that every 3 by 3 essential matrix can be embedded in a 4 by 4 rotation, having its bottom right entry fixed to zero; we call the latter the quintessential matrix. This embedding leads to rich relations with the space of 4-D rotations, quaternions, and the classical twisted-pair ambiguity in two-view SfM. We use this structure to derive a succession of semidefinite relaxations that require fewer parameters than the existing non-minimal solvers and yield faster convergence with certifiable optimality. We then exploit the low-rank geometry of these relaxations to reduce them to an equivalent optimization on a Riemannian manifold and solve them via the Riemannian Staircase method. The experimental evaluation confirms that our algorithm always finds the globally optimal solution and outperforms the existing non-minimal methods. We make our implementations open source.
Deep Fusion Transformer Network with Weighted Vector-Wise Keypoints Voting for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation
PDF ↗One critical challenge in 6D object pose estimation from a single RGBD image is efficient integration of two different modalities, i.e., color and depth. In this work, we tackle this problem by a novel Deep Fusion Transformer (DFTr) block that can aggregate cross-modality features for improving pose estimation. Unlike existing fusion methods, the proposed DFTr can better model cross-modality semantic correlation by leveraging their semantic similarity, such that globally enhanced features from different modalities can be better integrated for improved information extraction. Moreover, to further improve robustness and efficiency, we introduce a novel weighted vector-wise voting algorithm that employs a non-iterative global optimization strategy for precise 3D keypoint localization while achieving near real-time inference. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of our proposed 3D keypoint voting algorithm. Results on four widely used benchmarks also demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.
Coarse-to-Fine: Learning Compact Discriminative Representation for Single-Stage Image Retrieval
PDF ↗Image retrieval targets to find images from a database that are visually similar to the query image. Two-stage methods following retrieve-and-rerank paradigm have achieved excellent performance, but their separate local and global modules are inefficient to real-world applications. To better trade-off retrieval efficiency and accuracy, some approaches fuse global and local feature into a joint representation to perform single-stage image retrieval. However, they are still challenging due to various situations to tackle, e.g., background, occlusion and viewpoint. In this work, we design a Coarse-to-Fine framework to learn Compact Discriminative representation (CFCD) for end-to-end single-stage image retrieval-requiring only image-level labels. Specifically, we first design a novel adaptive softmax-based loss which dynamically tunes its scale and margin within each mini-batch and increases them progressively to strengthen supervision during training and intra-class compactness. Furthermore, we propose a mechanism which attentively selects prominent local descriptors and infuse fine-grained semantic relations into the global representation by a hard negative sampling strategy to optimize inter-class distinctiveness at a global scale. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art single-stage image retrieval performance on benchmarks such as Revisited Oxford and Revisited Paris. Code is available at https://github.com/bassyess/CFCD.
Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer
PDF ↗Image retrieval-based cross-view localization methods often lead to very coarse camera pose estimation, due to the limited sampling density of the database satellite images. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the accuracy of a ground camera's location and orientation by estimating the relative rotation and translation between the ground-level image and its matched/retrieved satellite image. Our approach designs a geometry-guided cross-view transformer that combines the benefits of conventional geometry and learnable cross-view transformers to map the ground-view observations to an overhead view. Given the synthesized overhead view and observed satellite feature maps, we construct a neural pose optimizer with strong global information embedding ability to estimate the relative rotation between them. After aligning their rotations, we develop an uncertainty-guided spatial correlation to generate a probability map of the vehicle locations, from which the relative translation can be determined. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Notably, the likelihood of restricting the vehicle lateral pose to be within 1m of its Ground Truth (GT) value on the cross-view KITTI dataset has been improved from 35.54% to 76.44%, and the likelihood of restricting the vehicle orientation to be within 1 degree of its GT value has been improved from 19.64% to 99.10%.
Image retrieval systems conventionally use a two-stage paradigm, leveraging global features for initial retrieval and local features for reranking. However, the scalability of this method is often limited due to the significant storage and computation cost incurred by local feature matching in the reranking stage. In this paper, we present SuperGlobal, a novel approach that exclusively employs global features for both stages, improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. SuperGlobal introduces key enhancements to the retrieval system, specifically focusing on the global feature extraction and reranking processes. For extraction, we identify sub-optimal performance when the widely-used ArcFace loss and Generalized Mean (GeM) pooling methods are combined and propose several new modules to improve GeM pooling. In the reranking stage, we introduce a novel method to update the global features of the query and top-ranked images by only considering feature refinement with a small set of images, thus being very compute and memory efficient. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements compared to the state of the art in standard benchmarks. Notably, on the Revisited Oxford+1M Hard dataset, our single-stage results improve by 7.1%, while our two-stage gain reaches 3.7% with a strong 64,865x speedup. Our two-stage system surpasses the current single-stage state-of-the-art by 16.3%, offering a scalable, accurate alternative for high-performing image retrieval systems with minimal time overhead. Code: https://github.com/ShihaoShao-GH/SuperGlobal.
ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation
PDF ↗In addition to the unprecedented ability in imaginary creation, large text-to-image models are expected to take customized concepts in image generation. Existing works generally learn such concepts in an optimization-based manner, yet bringing excessive computation or memory burden. In this paper, we instead propose a learning-based encoder, which consists of a global and a local mapping networks for fast and accurate customized text-to-image generation. In specific, the global mapping network projects the hierarchical features of a given image into multiple "new" words in the textual word embedding space, i.e., one primary word for well-editable concept and other auxiliary words to exclude irrelevant disturbances (e.g., background). In the meantime, a local mapping network injects the encoded patch features into cross attention layers to provide omitted details, without sacrificing the editability of primary concepts. We compare our method with existing optimization-based approaches on a variety of user-defined concepts, and demonstrate that our method enables highfidelity inversion and more robust editability with a significantly faster encoding process. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/csyxwei/ELITE.
Neural Deformable Models for 3D Bi-Ventricular Heart Shape Reconstruction and Modeling from 2D Sparse Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging
PDF ↗We propose a novel neural deformable model (NDM) targeting at the reconstruction and modeling of 3D bi-ventricular shape of the heart from 2D sparse cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging data. We model the bi-ventricular shape using blended deformable superquadrics, which are parameterized by a set of geometric parameter functions and are capable of deforming globally and locally. While global geometric parameter functions and deformations capture gross shape features from visual data, local deformations, parameterized as neural diffeomorphic point flows, can be learned to recover the detailed heart shape. Different from iterative optimization methods used in conventional deformable model formulations, NDMs can be trained to learn such geometric parameter functions, global and local deformations from a shape distribution manifold. Our NDM can learn to densify a sparse cardiac point cloud with arbitrary scales and generate high-quality triangular meshes automatically. It also enables the implicit learning of dense correspondences among different heart shape instances for accurate cardiac shape registration. Furthermore, the parameters of NDM are intuitive, and can be used by a physician without sophisticated post-processing. Experimental results on a large CMR dataset demonstrate the improved performance of NDM over traditional methods.
Recent video recognition models utilize Transformer models for long-range spatio-temporal context modeling. Video transformer designs are based on self-attention that can model global context at a high computational cost. In comparison, convolutional designs for videos offer an efficient alternative but lack long-range dependency modeling. Towards achieving the best of both designs, this work proposes Video-FocalNet, an effective and efficient architecture for video recognition that models both local and global contexts. Video-FocalNet is based on a spatio-temporal focal modulation architecture that reverses the interaction and aggregation steps of self-attention for better efficiency. Further, the aggregation step and the interaction step are both implemented using efficient convolution and element-wise multiplication operations that are computationally less expensive than their self-attention counterparts on video representations. We extensively explore the design space of focal modulation-based spatio-temporal context modeling and demonstrate our parallel spatial and temporal encoding design to be the optimal choice. Video-FocalNets perform favorably well against the state-of-the-art transformer-based models for video recognition on five large-scale datasets (Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, SS-v2, Diving-48, and ActivityNet-1.3) at a lower computational cost. Our code/models are released at https://github.com/TalalWasim/Video-FocalNets.
The success of deep learning models on structured data has generated significant interest in extending their application to non-Euclidean domains. In this work, we introduce a novel intrinsic operator suitable for representation learning on 3D meshes. Our operator is specifically tailored to adapt its behavior to the irregular structure of the underlying graph and effectively utilize its long-range dependencies, while at the same time ensuring computational efficiency and ease of optimization. In particular, inspired by the framework of Spiral Convolution, which extracts and transforms the vertices in the 3D mesh following a local spiral ordering, we propose a general operator that dynamically adjusts the length of the spiral trajectory and the parameters of the transformation for each processed vertex and mesh. Then, we use polyadic decomposition to factorize its dense weight tensor into a sequence of lighter linear layers that separately process features and vertices information, hence significantly reducing the computational complexity without introducing any stringent inductive biases. Notably, we leverage dynamic gating to achieve spatial adaptivity and induce global reasoning with constant time complexity benefitting from an efficient dynamic pooling mechanism based on Summed-Area-tables. Used as a drop-in replacement on existing architectures for shape correspondence our operator significantly improves the performance-efficiency trade-off, and in 3D shape generation with morphable models achieves state-of-the-art performance with a three-fold reduction in the number of parameters required. Project page: https://github.com/Fb2221/DFC