End-to-end generative methods are considered a more promising solution for image restoration in physics-based vision compared with the traditional deconstructive methods based on handcrafted composition models. However, existing generative methods still have plenty of room for improvement in quantitative performance. More crucially, these methods are considered black boxes due to weak interpretability and there is rarely a theory trying to explain their mechanism and learning process. In this study, we try to re-interpret these generative methods for image restoration tasks using information theory. Different from conventional understanding, we analyzed the information flow of these methods and identified three sources of information (extracted high-level information, retained low-level information, and external information that is absent from the source inputs) are involved and optimized respectively in generating the restoration results. We further derived their learning behaviors, optimization objectives, and the corresponding information boundaries by extending the information bottleneck principle. Based on this theoretic framework, we found that many existing generative methods tend to be direct applications of the general models designed for conventional generation tasks, which may suffer from problems including over-invested abstraction processes, inherent details loss, and vanishing gradients or imbalance in training. We analyzed these issues with both intuitive and theoretical explanations and proved them with empirical evidence respectively. Ultimately, we proposed general solutions or ideas to address the above issue and validated these approaches with performance boosts on six datasets of three different image restoration tasks.
相關內容
The specifics of data layout can be important for the efficiency of functional programs and interaction with external libraries. In this paper, we develop a type-theoretic approach to data layout that could be used as a typed intermediate language in a compiler or to give a programmer more control. Our starting point is a computational interpretation of the semi-axiomatic sequent calculus for intuitionistic logic that defines abstract notions of cells and addresses. We refine this semantics so addresses have more structure to reflect possible alternative layouts without fundamentally departing from intuitionistic logic. We then add recursive types and explore example programs and properties of the resulting language.
Large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown their remarkable ability to synthesize diverse and high-quality images. However, it is still challenging to directly apply these models for editing real images for two reasons. First, it is hard for users to come up with a perfect text prompt that accurately describes every visual detail in the input image. Second, while existing models can introduce desirable changes in certain regions, they often dramatically alter the input content and introduce unexpected changes in unwanted regions. In this work, we propose pix2pix-zero, an image-to-image translation method that can preserve the content of the original image without manual prompting. We first automatically discover editing directions that reflect desired edits in the text embedding space. To preserve the general content structure after editing, we further propose cross-attention guidance, which aims to retain the cross-attention maps of the input image throughout the diffusion process. In addition, our method does not need additional training for these edits and can directly use the existing pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. We conduct extensive experiments and show that our method outperforms existing and concurrent works for both real and synthetic image editing.
The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of explicitly integrating rigorous theory into this process and focus on the advantages of doing so. By integrating theoretical structure into one's empirical strategy, researchers can quantify the effects of competing mechanisms, consider the ex-ante effects of new policies, extrapolate findings to new environments, estimate model-specific theoretical parameters, evaluate the fit of a theoretical model, and test competing models that aim to explain the same phenomena. As a guide to such a methodology, we provide an overview of structural estimation, including formal definitions, implementation suggestions, examples, and comparisons to other methods.
The conventional understanding of adversarial training in generative adversarial networks (GANs) is that the discriminator is trained to estimate a divergence, and the generator learns to minimize this divergence. We argue that despite the fact that many variants of GANs were developed following this paradigm, the current theoretical understanding of GANs and their practical algorithms are inconsistent. In this paper, we leverage Wasserstein gradient flows which characterize the evolution of particles in the sample space, to gain theoretical insights and algorithmic inspiration of GANs. We introduce a unified generative modeling framework - MonoFlow: the particle evolution is rescaled via a monotonically increasing mapping of the log density ratio. Under our framework, adversarial training can be viewed as a procedure first obtaining MonoFlow's vector field via training the discriminator and the generator learns to draw the particle flow defined by the corresponding vector field. We also reveal the fundamental difference between variational divergence minimization and adversarial training. This analysis helps us to identify what types of generator loss functions can lead to the successful training of GANs and suggest that GANs may have more loss designs beyond the literature (e.g., non-saturated loss), as long as they realize MonoFlow. Consistent empirical studies are included to validate the effectiveness of our framework.
For medical image segmentation, contrastive learning is the dominant practice to improve the quality of visual representations by contrasting semantically similar and dissimilar pairs of samples. This is enabled by the observation that without accessing ground truth label, negative examples with truly dissimilar anatomical features, if sampled, can significantly improve the performance. In reality, however, these samples may come from similar anatomical features and the models may struggle to distinguish the minority tail-class samples, making the tail classes more prone to misclassification, both of which typically lead to model collapse. In this paper, we propose ARCO, a semi-supervised contrastive learning (CL) framework with stratified group sampling theory in medical image segmentation. In particular, we first propose building ARCO through the concept of variance-reduced estimation, and show that certain variance-reduction techniques are particularly beneficial in medical image segmentation tasks with extremely limited labels. Furthermore, we theoretically prove these sampling techniques are universal in variance reduction. Finally, we experimentally validate our approaches on three benchmark datasets with different label settings, and our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art semi- and fully-supervised methods. Additionally, we augment the CL frameworks with these sampling techniques and demonstrate significant gains over previous methods. We believe our work is an important step towards semi-supervised medical image segmentation by quantifying the limitation of current self-supervision objectives for accomplishing medical image analysis tasks.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
Deep Learning algorithms have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for Image Classification and have been used even in security-critical applications, such as biometric recognition systems and self-driving cars. However, recent works have shown those algorithms, which can even surpass the human capabilities, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In Computer Vision, adversarial examples are images containing subtle perturbations generated by malicious optimization algorithms in order to fool classifiers. As an attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities, numerous countermeasures have been constantly proposed in literature. Nevertheless, devising an efficient defense mechanism has proven to be a difficult task, since many approaches have already shown to be ineffective to adaptive attackers. Thus, this self-containing paper aims to provide all readerships with a review of the latest research progress on Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification, however with a defender's perspective. Here, novel taxonomies for categorizing adversarial attacks and defenses are introduced and discussions about the existence of adversarial examples are provided. Further, in contrast to exisiting surveys, it is also given relevant guidance that should be taken into consideration by researchers when devising and evaluating defenses. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, it is discussed some promising paths for future research.
We consider the problem of referring image segmentation. Given an input image and a natural language expression, the goal is to segment the object referred by the language expression in the image. Existing works in this area treat the language expression and the input image separately in their representations. They do not sufficiently capture long-range correlations between these two modalities. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal self-attention (CMSA) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies between linguistic and visual features. Our model can adaptively focus on informative words in the referring expression and important regions in the input image. In addition, we propose a gated multi-level fusion module to selectively integrate self-attentive cross-modal features corresponding to different levels in the image. This module controls the information flow of features at different levels. We validate the proposed approach on four evaluation datasets. Our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191