Transformer is a potentially powerful architecture for vision tasks. Although equipped with more parameters and attention mechanism, its performance is not as dominant as CNN currently. CNN is usually computationally cheaper and still the leading competitor in various vision tasks. One research direction is to adopt the successful ideas of CNN and improve transformer, but it often relies on elaborated and heuristic network design. Observing that transformer and CNN are complementary in representation learning and convergence speed, we propose an efficient training framework called Vision Pair Learning (VPL) for image classification task. VPL builds up a network composed of a transformer branch, a CNN branch and pair learning module. With multi-stage training strategy, VPL enables the branches to learn from their partners during the appropriate stage of the training process, and makes them both achieve better performance with less time cost. Without external data, VPL promotes the top-1 accuracy of ViT-Base and ResNet-50 on the ImageNet-1k validation set to 83.47% and 79.61% respectively. Experiments on other datasets of various domains prove the efficacy of VPL and suggest that transformer performs better when paired with the differently structured CNN in VPL. we also analyze the importance of components through ablation study.
Large-scale multi-label text classification (LMTC) aims to associate a document with its relevant labels from a large candidate set. Most existing LMTC approaches rely on massive human-annotated training data, which are often costly to obtain and suffer from a long-tailed label distribution (i.e., many labels occur only a few times in the training set). In this paper, we study LMTC under the zero-shot setting, which does not require any annotated documents with labels and only relies on label surface names and descriptions. To train a classifier that calculates the similarity score between a document and a label, we propose a novel metadata-induced contrastive learning (MICoL) method. Different from previous text-based contrastive learning techniques, MICoL exploits document metadata (e.g., authors, venues, and references of research papers), which are widely available on the Web, to derive similar document-document pairs. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets show that: (1) MICoL significantly outperforms strong zero-shot text classification and contrastive learning baselines; (2) MICoL is on par with the state-of-the-art supervised metadata-aware LMTC method trained on 10K-200K labeled documents; and (3) MICoL tends to predict more infrequent labels than supervised methods, thus alleviates the deteriorated performance on long-tailed labels.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
Transformers, which are popular for language modeling, have been explored for solving vision tasks recently, \eg, the Vision Transformer (ViT) for image classification. The ViT model splits each image into a sequence of tokens with fixed length and then applies multiple Transformer layers to model their global relation for classification. However, ViT achieves inferior performance to CNNs when trained from scratch on a midsize dataset like ImageNet. We find it is because: 1) the simple tokenization of input images fails to model the important local structure such as edges and lines among neighboring pixels, leading to low training sample efficiency; 2) the redundant attention backbone design of ViT leads to limited feature richness for fixed computation budgets and limited training samples. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new Tokens-To-Token Vision Transformer (T2T-ViT), which incorporates 1) a layer-wise Tokens-to-Token (T2T) transformation to progressively structurize the image to tokens by recursively aggregating neighboring Tokens into one Token (Tokens-to-Token), such that local structure represented by surrounding tokens can be modeled and tokens length can be reduced; 2) an efficient backbone with a deep-narrow structure for vision transformer motivated by CNN architecture design after empirical study. Notably, T2T-ViT reduces the parameter count and MACs of vanilla ViT by half, while achieving more than 3.0\% improvement when trained from scratch on ImageNet. It also outperforms ResNets and achieves comparable performance with MobileNets by directly training on ImageNet. For example, T2T-ViT with comparable size to ResNet50 (21.5M parameters) can achieve 83.3\% top1 accuracy in image resolution 384$\times$384 on ImageNet. (Code: //github.com/yitu-opensource/T2T-ViT)
Compared with single-label image classification, multi-label image classification is more practical and challenging. Some recent studies attempted to leverage the semantic information of categories for improving multi-label image classification performance. However, these semantic-based methods only take semantic information as type of complements for visual representation without further exploitation. In this paper, we present a innovative path towards the solution of the multi-label image classification which considers it as a dictionary learning task. A novel end-to-end model named Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning (DSDL) is designed. In DSDL, an auto-encoder is applied to generate the semantic dictionary from class-level semantics and then such dictionary is utilized for representing the visual features extracted by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with label embeddings. The DSDL provides a simple but elegant way to exploit and reconcile the label, semantic and visual spaces simultaneously via conducting the dictionary learning among them. Moreover, inspired by iterative optimization of traditional dictionary learning, we further devise a novel training strategy named Alternately Parameters Update Strategy (APUS) for optimizing DSDL, which alteratively optimizes the representation coefficients and the semantic dictionary in forward and backward propagation. Extensive experimental results on three popular benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves promising performances in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Our codes and models are available at //github.com/ZFT-CQU/DSDL.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a classifier that generalizes well even when trained with a limited number of training instances per class. The recently introduced meta-learning approaches tackle this problem by learning a generic classifier across a large number of multiclass classification tasks and generalizing the model to a new task. Yet, even with such meta-learning, the low-data problem in the novel classification task still remains. In this paper, we propose Transductive Propagation Network (TPN), a novel meta-learning framework for transductive inference that classifies the entire test set at once to alleviate the low-data problem. Specifically, we propose to learn to propagate labels from labeled instances to unlabeled test instances, by learning a graph construction module that exploits the manifold structure in the data. TPN jointly learns both the parameters of feature embedding and the graph construction in an end-to-end manner. We validate TPN on multiple benchmark datasets, on which it largely outperforms existing few-shot learning approaches and achieves the state-of-the-art results.
Image manipulation detection is different from traditional semantic object detection because it pays more attention to tampering artifacts than to image content, which suggests that richer features need to be learned. We propose a two-stream Faster R-CNN network and train it endto- end to detect the tampered regions given a manipulated image. One of the two streams is an RGB stream whose purpose is to extract features from the RGB image input to find tampering artifacts like strong contrast difference, unnatural tampered boundaries, and so on. The other is a noise stream that leverages the noise features extracted from a steganalysis rich model filter layer to discover the noise inconsistency between authentic and tampered regions. We then fuse features from the two streams through a bilinear pooling layer to further incorporate spatial co-occurrence of these two modalities. Experiments on four standard image manipulation datasets demonstrate that our two-stream framework outperforms each individual stream, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to alternative methods with robustness to resizing and compression.
Image-to-image translation tasks have been widely investigated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and dual learning. However, existing models lack the ability to control the translated results in the target domain and their results usually lack of diversity in the sense that a fixed image usually leads to (almost) deterministic translation result. In this paper, we study a new problem, conditional image-to-image translation, which is to translate an image from the source domain to the target domain conditioned on a given image in the target domain. It requires that the generated image should inherit some domain-specific features of the conditional image from the target domain. Therefore, changing the conditional image in the target domain will lead to diverse translation results for a fixed input image from the source domain, and therefore the conditional input image helps to control the translation results. We tackle this problem with unpaired data based on GANs and dual learning. We twist two conditional translation models (one translation from A domain to B domain, and the other one from B domain to A domain) together for inputs combination and reconstruction while preserving domain independent features. We carry out experiments on men's faces from-to women's faces translation and edges to shoes&bags translations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.