SGD and AdamW are the two most used optimizers for fine-tuning large neural networks in computer vision. When the two methods perform the same, SGD is preferable because it uses less memory (12 bytes/parameter with momentum and 8 bytes/parameter without) than AdamW (16 bytes/parameter). However, on a suite of downstream tasks, especially those with distribution shifts, we find that fine-tuning with AdamW performs substantially better than SGD on modern Vision Transformer and ConvNeXt models. We find that large gaps in performance between SGD and AdamW occur when the fine-tuning gradients in the first "embedding" layer are much larger than in the rest of the model. Our analysis suggests an easy fix that works consistently across datasets and models: freezing the embedding layer (less than 1% of the parameters) leads to SGD with or without momentum performing slightly better than AdamW while using less memory (e.g., on ViT-L, SGD uses 33% less GPU memory). Our insights result in state-of-the-art accuracies on five popular distribution shift benchmarks: WILDS-FMoW, WILDS-Camelyon, BREEDS-Living-17, Waterbirds, and DomainNet.
Matching a source to a target probability measure is often solved by instantiating a linear optimal transport (OT) problem, parameterized by a ground cost function that quantifies discrepancy between points. When these measures live in the same metric space, the ground cost often defaults to its distance. When instantiated across two different spaces, however, choosing that cost in the absence of aligned data is a conundrum. As a result, practitioners often resort to solving instead a quadratic Gromow-Wasserstein (GW) problem. We exploit in this work a parallel between GW and cost-regularized OT, the regularized minimization of a linear OT objective parameterized by a ground cost. We use this cost-regularized formulation to match measures across two different Euclidean spaces, where the cost is evaluated between transformed source points and target points. We show that several quadratic OT problems fall in this category, and consider enforcing structure in linear transform (e.g. sparsity), by introducing structure-inducing regularizers. We provide a proximal algorithm to extract such transforms from unaligned data, and demonstrate its applicability to single-cell spatial transcriptomics/multiomics matching tasks.
Enabling real-time communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks is crucial to support autonomous, self-organized and re-configurable industrial automation for Industry 4.0 and the forthcoming Industry 5.0. In this paper, we consider a SIC-assisted real-time IIoT network, in which sensor nodes generate reports according to an event-generation probability that is specific for the monitored phenomena. The reports are delivered over a block-fading channel to a common Access Point (AP) in slotted ALOHA fashion, which leverages the imbalances in the received powers among the contending users and applies successive interference cancellation (SIC) to decode user packets from the collisions. We provide an extensive analytical treatment of the setup, deriving the Age of Information (AoI), throughput and deadline violation probability, when the AP has access to both the perfect as well as the imperfect channel-state information. We show that adopting SIC improves all the performance parameters with respect to the standard slotted ALOHA, as well as to an age-dependent access method. The analytical results agree with the simulation based ones, demonstrating that investing in the SIC capability at the receiver enables this simple access method to support timely and efficient information delivery in IIoT networks.
The real-world data tends to be heavily imbalanced and severely skew the data-driven deep neural networks, which makes Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) a massive challenging task. Existing LTR methods seldom train Vision Transformers (ViTs) with Long-Tailed (LT) data, while the off-the-shelf pretrain weight of ViTs always leads to unfair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically investigate the ViTs' performance in LTR and propose LiVT to train ViTs from scratch only with LT data. With the observation that ViTs suffer more severe LTR problems, we conduct Masked Generative Pretraining (MGP) to learn generalized features. With ample and solid evidence, we show that MGP is more robust than supervised manners. In addition, Binary Cross Entropy (BCE) loss, which shows conspicuous performance with ViTs, encounters predicaments in LTR. We further propose the balanced BCE to ameliorate it with strong theoretical groundings. Specially, we derive the unbiased extension of Sigmoid and compensate extra logit margins to deploy it. Our Bal-BCE contributes to the quick convergence of ViTs in just a few epochs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with MGP and Bal-BCE, LiVT successfully trains ViTs well without any additional data and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods significantly, e.g., our ViT-B achieves 81.0% Top-1 accuracy in iNaturalist 2018 without bells and whistles. Code is available at //github.com/XuZhengzhuo/LiVT.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
One principal approach for illuminating a black-box neural network is feature attribution, i.e. identifying the importance of input features for the network's prediction. The predictive information of features is recently proposed as a proxy for the measure of their importance. So far, the predictive information is only identified for latent features by placing an information bottleneck within the network. We propose a method to identify features with predictive information in the input domain. The method results in fine-grained identification of input features' information and is agnostic to network architecture. The core idea of our method is leveraging a bottleneck on the input that only lets input features associated with predictive latent features pass through. We compare our method with several feature attribution methods using mainstream feature attribution evaluation experiments. The code is publicly available.
Most recent semantic segmentation methods adopt a fully-convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder progressively reduces the spatial resolution and learns more abstract/semantic visual concepts with larger receptive fields. Since context modeling is critical for segmentation, the latest efforts have been focused on increasing the receptive field, through either dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, the encoder-decoder based FCN architecture remains unchanged. In this paper, we aim to provide an alternative perspective by treating semantic segmentation as a sequence-to-sequence prediction task. Specifically, we deploy a pure transformer (ie, without convolution and resolution reduction) to encode an image as a sequence of patches. With the global context modeled in every layer of the transformer, this encoder can be combined with a simple decoder to provide a powerful segmentation model, termed SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR). Extensive experiments show that SETR achieves new state of the art on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU), Pascal Context (55.83% mIoU) and competitive results on Cityscapes. Particularly, we achieve the first (44.42% mIoU) position in the highly competitive ADE20K test server leaderboard.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.