In this work, we propose a Robust, Efficient, and Component-specific makeup transfer method (abbreviated as BeautyREC). A unique departure from prior methods that leverage global attention, simply concatenate features, or implicitly manipulate features in latent space, we propose a component-specific correspondence to directly transfer the makeup style of a reference image to the corresponding components (e.g., skin, lips, eyes) of a source image, making elaborate and accurate local makeup transfer. As an auxiliary, the long-range visual dependencies of Transformer are introduced for effective global makeup transfer. Instead of the commonly used cycle structure that is complex and unstable, we employ a content consistency loss coupled with a content encoder to implement efficient single-path makeup transfer. The key insights of this study are modeling component-specific correspondence for local makeup transfer, capturing long-range dependencies for global makeup transfer, and enabling efficient makeup transfer via a single-path structure. We also contribute BeautyFace, a makeup transfer dataset to supplement existing datasets. This dataset contains 3,000 faces, covering more diverse makeup styles, face poses, and races. Each face has annotated parsing map. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against state-of-the-art methods. Besides, our method is appealing as it is with only 1M parameters, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods (BeautyGAN: 8.43M, PSGAN: 12.62M, SCGAN: 15.30M, CPM: 9.24M, SSAT: 10.48M).
State-of-the-art parametric and non-parametric style transfer approaches are prone to either distorted local style patterns due to global statistics alignment, or unpleasing artifacts resulting from patch mismatching. In this paper, we study a novel semi-parametric neural style transfer framework that alleviates the deficiency of both parametric and non-parametric stylization. The core idea of our approach is to establish accurate and fine-grained content-style correspondences using graph neural networks (GNNs). To this end, we develop an elaborated GNN model with content and style local patches as the graph vertices. The style transfer procedure is then modeled as the attention-based heterogeneous message passing between the style and content nodes in a learnable manner, leading to adaptive many-to-one style-content correlations at the local patch level. In addition, an elaborated deformable graph convolutional operation is introduced for cross-scale style-content matching. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semi-parametric image stylization approach yields encouraging results on the challenging style patterns, preserving both global appearance and exquisite details. Furthermore, by controlling the number of edges at the inference stage, the proposed method also triggers novel functionalities like diversified patch-based stylization with a single model.
Neural network quantization is frequently used to optimize model size, latency and power consumption for on-device deployment of neural networks. In many cases, a target bit-width is set for an entire network, meaning every layer get quantized to the same number of bits. However, for many networks some layers are significantly more robust to quantization noise than others, leaving an important axis of improvement unused. As many hardware solutions provide multiple different bit-width settings, mixed-precision quantization has emerged as a promising solution to find a better performance-efficiency trade-off than homogeneous quantization. However, most existing mixed precision algorithms are rather difficult to use for practitioners as they require access to the training data, have many hyper-parameters to tune or even depend on end-to-end retraining of the entire model. In this work, we present a simple post-training mixed precision algorithm that only requires a small unlabeled calibration dataset to automatically select suitable bit-widths for each layer for desirable on-device performance. Our algorithm requires no hyper-parameter tuning, is robust to data variation and takes into account practical hardware deployment constraints making it a great candidate for practical use. We experimentally validate our proposed method on several computer vision tasks, natural language processing tasks and many different networks, and show that we can find mixed precision networks that provide a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency than their homogeneous bit-width equivalents.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
The content based image retrieval aims to find the similar images from a large scale dataset against a query image. Generally, the similarity between the representative features of the query image and dataset images is used to rank the images for retrieval. In early days, various hand designed feature descriptors have been investigated based on the visual cues such as color, texture, shape, etc. that represent the images. However, the deep learning has emerged as a dominating alternative of hand-designed feature engineering from a decade. It learns the features automatically from the data. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning based developments in the past decade for content based image retrieval. The categorization of existing state-of-the-art methods from different perspectives is also performed for greater understanding of the progress. The taxonomy used in this survey covers different supervision, different networks, different descriptor type and different retrieval type. A performance analysis is also performed using the state-of-the-art methods. The insights are also presented for the benefit of the researchers to observe the progress and to make the best choices. The survey presented in this paper will help in further research progress in image retrieval using deep learning.
Transformer model architectures have garnered immense interest lately due to their effectiveness across a range of domains like language, vision and reinforcement learning. In the field of natural language processing for example, Transformers have become an indispensable staple in the modern deep learning stack. Recently, a dizzying number of "X-former" models have been proposed - Reformer, Linformer, Performer, Longformer, to name a few - which improve upon the original Transformer architecture, many of which make improvements around computational and memory efficiency. With the aim of helping the avid researcher navigate this flurry, this paper characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent efficiency-flavored "X-former" models, providing an organized and comprehensive overview of existing work and models across multiple domains.
Geometry and shape are fundamental aspects of visual style. Existing style transfer methods focus on texture-like components of style, ignoring geometry. We propose deformable style transfer (DST), an optimization-based approach that integrates texture and geometry style transfer. Our method is the first to allow geometry-aware stylization not restricted to any domain and not requiring training sets of matching style/content pairs. We demonstrate our method on a diverse set of content and style images including portraits, animals, objects, scenes, and paintings.