Although convolutional networks have been the dominant architecture for vision tasks for many years, recent experiments have shown that Transformer-based models, most notably the Vision Transformer (ViT), may exceed their performance in some settings. However, due to the quadratic runtime of the self-attention layers in Transformers, ViTs require the use of patch embeddings, which group together small regions of the image into single input features, in order to be applied to larger image sizes. This raises a question: Is the performance of ViTs due to the inherently-more-powerful Transformer architecture, or is it at least partly due to using patches as the input representation? In this paper, we present some evidence for the latter: specifically, we propose the ConvMixer, an extremely simple model that is similar in spirit to the ViT and the even-more-basic MLP-Mixer in that it operates directly on patches as input, separates the mixing of spatial and channel dimensions, and maintains equal size and resolution throughout the network. In contrast, however, the ConvMixer uses only standard convolutions to achieve the mixing steps. Despite its simplicity, we show that the ConvMixer outperforms the ViT, MLP-Mixer, and some of their variants for similar parameter counts and data set sizes, in addition to outperforming classical vision models such as the ResNet. Our code is available at //github.com/locuslab/convmixer.
Many adaptations of transformers have emerged to address the single-modal vision tasks, where self-attention modules are stacked to handle input sources like images. Intuitively, feeding multiple modalities of data to vision transformers could improve the performance, yet the inner-modal attentive weights may also be diluted, which could thus undermine the final performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal token fusion method (TokenFusion), tailored for transformer-based vision tasks. To effectively fuse multiple modalities, TokenFusion dynamically detects uninformative tokens and substitutes these tokens with projected and aggregated inter-modal features. Residual positional alignment is also adopted to enable explicit utilization of the inter-modal alignments after fusion. The design of TokenFusion allows the transformer to learn correlations among multimodal features, while the single-modal transformer architecture remains largely intact. Extensive experiments are conducted on a variety of homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities and demonstrate that TokenFusion surpasses state-of-the-art methods in three typical vision tasks: multimodal image-to-image translation, RGB-depth semantic segmentation, and 3D object detection with point cloud and images.
This paper identifies and addresses a serious design bias of existing salient object detection (SOD) datasets, which unrealistically assume that each image should contain at least one clear and uncluttered salient object. This design bias has led to a saturation in performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. However, these models are still far from satisfactory when applied to real-world scenes. Based on our analyses, we propose a new high-quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specifically, our dataset, called Salient Objects in Clutter~\textbf{(SOC)}, includes images with both salient and non-salient objects from several common object categories. In addition to object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in common scenes, which can help provide deeper insight into the SOD problem. Further, with a given saliency encoder, e.g., the backbone network, existing saliency models are designed to achieve mapping from the training image set to the training ground-truth set. We, therefore, argue that improving the dataset can yield higher performance gains than focusing only on the decoder design. With this in mind, we investigate several dataset-enhancement strategies, including label smoothing to implicitly emphasize salient boundaries, random image augmentation to adapt saliency models to various scenarios, and self-supervised learning as a regularization strategy to learn from small datasets. Our extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of these tricks. We also provide a comprehensive benchmark for SOD, which can be found in our repository: //github.com/DengPingFan/SODBenchmark.
Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, these models usually contain hundreds of millions of parameters, which limits their practicality because of latency requirements in real-world applications. Existing methods train small compressed models via knowledge distillation. However, performance of these small models drops significantly compared with the pre-trained models due to their reduced model capacity. We propose MoEBERT, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts structure to increase model capacity and inference speed. We initialize MoEBERT by adapting the feed-forward neural networks in a pre-trained model into multiple experts. As such, representation power of the pre-trained model is largely retained. During inference, only one of the experts is activated, such that speed can be improved. We also propose a layer-wise distillation method to train MoEBERT. We validate the efficiency and effectiveness of MoEBERT on natural language understanding and question answering tasks. Results show that the proposed method outperforms existing task-specific distillation algorithms. For example, our method outperforms previous approaches by over 2% on the MNLI (mismatched) dataset. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/SimiaoZuo/MoEBERT.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the dominant deep neural network (DNN) architecture for computer vision. Recently, Transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models, such as Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer, started to lead new trends as they showed promising results in the ImageNet classification task. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on these DNN structures and try to understand their respective pros and cons. To ensure a fair comparison, we first develop a unified framework called SPACH which adopts separate modules for spatial and channel processing. Our experiments under the SPACH framework reveal that all structures can achieve competitive performance at a moderate scale. However, they demonstrate distinctive behaviors when the network size scales up. Based on our findings, we propose two hybrid models using convolution and Transformer modules. The resulting Hybrid-MS-S+ model achieves 83.9% top-1 accuracy with 63M parameters and 12.3G FLOPS. It is already on par with the SOTA models with sophisticated designs. The code and models will be made publicly available.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Object detection with transformers (DETR) reaches competitive performance with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a pretext task named random query patch detection to unsupervisedly pre-train DETR (UP-DETR) for object detection. Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the original image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade-off multi-task learning of classification and localization in the pretext task, we freeze the CNN backbone and propose a patch feature reconstruction branch which is jointly optimized with patch detection. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we introduce UP-DETR from single-query patch and extend it to multi-query patches with object query shuffle and attention mask. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher precision on PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. The code will be available soon.
The LSTM network was proposed to overcome the difficulty in learning long-term dependence, and has made significant advancements in applications. With its success and drawbacks in mind, this paper raises the question - do RNN and LSTM have long memory? We answer it partially by proving that RNN and LSTM do not have long memory from a statistical perspective. A new definition for long memory networks is further introduced, and it requires the model weights to decay at a polynomial rate. To verify our theory, we convert RNN and LSTM into long memory networks by making a minimal modification, and their superiority is illustrated in modeling long-term dependence of various datasets.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
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.