3D perception based on the representations learned from multi-camera bird's-eye-view (BEV) is trending as cameras are cost-effective for mass production in autonomous driving industry. However, there exists a distinct performance gap between multi-camera BEV and LiDAR based 3D object detection. One key reason is that LiDAR captures accurate depth and other geometry measurements, while it is notoriously challenging to infer such 3D information from merely image input. In this work, we propose to boost the representation learning of a multi-camera BEV based student detector by training it to imitate the features of a well-trained LiDAR based teacher detector. We propose effective balancing strategy to enforce the student to focus on learning the crucial features from the teacher, and generalize knowledge transfer to multi-scale layers with temporal fusion. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple representative models of multi-camera BEV. Experiments reveal that our approach renders significant improvement over the student models, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on the popular benchmark nuScenes.
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a central problem in causal inference. Methods based on potential outcomes framework solve this problem by exploiting inductive biases and heuristics from causal inference. Each of these methods addresses a specific aspect of causal effect estimation, such as controlling propensity score, enforcing randomization, etc., by designing neural network (NN) architectures and regularizers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method called Neurosymbolic Causal Effect Estimator (NESTER), a generalized method for causal effect estimation. NESTER integrates the ideas used in existing methods based on multi-head NNs for causal effect estimation into one framework. We design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) tailored for causal effect estimation based on causal inductive biases used in literature. We conduct a theoretical analysis to investigate NESTER's efficacy in estimating causal effects. Our comprehensive empirical results show that NESTER performs better than state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Deep learning-based models are at the forefront of most driver observation benchmarks due to their remarkable accuracies but are also associated with high computational costs. This is challenging, as resources are often limited in real-world driving scenarios. This paper introduces a lightweight framework for resource-efficient driver activity recognition. The framework enhances 3D MobileNet, a neural architecture optimized for speed in video classification, by incorporating knowledge distillation and model quantization to balance model accuracy and computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation helps maintain accuracy while reducing the model size by leveraging soft labels from a larger teacher model (I3D), instead of relying solely on original ground truth data. Model quantization significantly lowers memory and computation demands by using lower precision integers for model weights and activations. Extensive testing on a public dataset for in-vehicle monitoring during autonomous driving demonstrates that this new framework achieves a threefold reduction in model size and a 1.4-fold improvement in inference time, compared to an already optimized architecture. The code for this study is available at //github.com/calvintanama/qd-driver-activity-reco.
Recent research indicates that frequent model communication stands as a major bottleneck to the efficiency of decentralized machine learning (ML), particularly for large-scale and over-parameterized neural networks (NNs). In this paper, we introduce MALCOM-PSGD, a new decentralized ML algorithm that strategically integrates gradient compression techniques with model sparsification. MALCOM-PSGD leverages proximal stochastic gradient descent to handle the non-smoothness resulting from the $\ell_1$ regularization in model sparsification. Furthermore, we adapt vector source coding and dithering-based quantization for compressed gradient communication of sparsified models. Our analysis shows that decentralized proximal stochastic gradient descent with compressed communication has a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(\ln(t)/\sqrt{t}\right)$ assuming a diminishing learning rate and where $t$ denotes the number of iterations. Numerical results verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our method reduces communication costs by approximately $75\%$ when compared to the state-of-the-art method.
Sharing knowledge between information extraction tasks has always been a challenge due to the diverse data formats and task variations. Meanwhile, this divergence leads to information waste and increases difficulties in building complex applications in real scenarios. Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem. However, such a paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. To this end, we reorganize IE problems into unified multi-slot tuples and propose a universal framework for various IE tasks, namely Mirror. Specifically, we recast existing IE tasks as a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and devise a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step. It is worth noting that this graph structure is incredibly versatile, and it supports not only complex IE tasks, but also machine reading comprehension and classification tasks. We manually construct a corpus containing 57 datasets for model pretraining, and conduct experiments on 30 datasets across 8 downstream tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our model has decent compatibility and outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings. The code, model weights, and pretraining corpus are available at //github.com/Spico197/Mirror .
In recent years, audio-driven 3D facial animation has gained significant attention, particularly in applications such as virtual reality, gaming, and video conferencing. However, accurately modeling the intricate and subtle dynamics of facial expressions remains a challenge. Most existing studies approach the facial animation task as a single regression problem, which often fail to capture the intrinsic inter-modal relationship between speech signals and 3D facial animation and overlook their inherent consistency. Moreover, due to the limited availability of 3D-audio-visual datasets, approaches learning with small-size samples have poor generalizability that decreases the performance. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a cross-modal dual-learning framework, termed DualTalker, aiming at improving data usage efficiency as well as relating cross-modal dependencies. The framework is trained jointly with the primary task (audio-driven facial animation) and its dual task (lip reading) and shares common audio/motion encoder components. Our joint training framework facilitates more efficient data usage by leveraging information from both tasks and explicitly capitalizing on the complementary relationship between facial motion and audio to improve performance. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary cross-modal consistency loss to mitigate the potential over-smoothing underlying the cross-modal complementary representations, enhancing the mapping of subtle facial expression dynamics. Through extensive experiments and a perceptual user study conducted on the VOCA and BIWI datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We have made our code and video demonstrations available at //github.com/sabrina-su/iadf.git.
The recent popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DM) can largely be attributed to the intuitive interface they provide to users. The intended generation can be expressed in natural language, with the model producing faithful interpretations of text prompts. However, expressing complex or nuanced ideas in text alone can be difficult. To ease image generation, we propose MultiFusion that allows one to express complex and nuanced concepts with arbitrarily interleaved inputs of multiple modalities and languages. MutliFusion leverages pre-trained models and aligns them for integration into a cohesive system, thereby avoiding the need for extensive training from scratch. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficient transfer of capabilities from individual modules to the downstream model. Specifically, the fusion of all independent components allows the image generation module to utilize multilingual, interleaved multimodal inputs despite being trained solely on monomodal data in a single language.
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.
Fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) is a longstanding and fundamental problem in computer vision and pattern recognition, and underpins a diverse set of real-world applications. The task of FGIA targets analyzing visual objects from subordinate categories, e.g., species of birds or models of cars. The small inter-class and large intra-class variation inherent to fine-grained image analysis makes it a challenging problem. Capitalizing on advances in deep learning, in recent years we have witnessed remarkable progress in deep learning powered FGIA. In this paper we present a systematic survey of these advances, where we attempt to re-define and broaden the field of FGIA by consolidating two fundamental fine-grained research areas -- fine-grained image recognition and fine-grained image retrieval. In addition, we also review other key issues of FGIA, such as publicly available benchmark datasets and related domain-specific applications. We conclude by highlighting several research directions and open problems which need further exploration from the community.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.
Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN/CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02% on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets.