The recently proposed segment anything model (SAM) has made a significant influence in many computer vision tasks. It is becoming a foundation step for many high-level tasks, like image segmentation, image caption, and image editing. However, its huge computation costs prevent it from wider applications in industry scenarios. The computation mainly comes from the Transformer architecture at high-resolution inputs. In this paper, we propose a speed-up alternative method for this fundamental task with comparable performance. By reformulating the task as segments-generation and prompting, we find that a regular CNN detector with an instance segmentation branch can also accomplish this task well. Specifically, we convert this task to the well-studied instance segmentation task and directly train the existing instance segmentation method using only 1/50 of the SA-1B dataset published by SAM authors. With our method, we achieve a comparable performance with the SAM method at 50 times higher run-time speed. We give sufficient experimental results to demonstrate its effectiveness. The codes and demos will be released at //github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FastSAM.
Knowledge distillation (KD) has received much attention due to its success in compressing networks to allow for their deployment in resource-constrained systems. While the problem of adversarial robustness has been studied before in the KD setting, previous works overlook what we term the relative calibration of the student network with respect to its teacher in terms of soft confidences. In particular, we focus on two crucial questions with regard to a teacher-student pair: (i) do the teacher and student disagree at points close to correctly classified dataset examples, and (ii) is the distilled student as confident as the teacher around dataset examples? These are critical questions when considering the deployment of a smaller student network trained from a robust teacher within a safety-critical setting. To address these questions, we introduce a faithful imitation framework to discuss the relative calibration of confidences and provide empirical and certified methods to evaluate the relative calibration of a student w.r.t. its teacher. Further, to verifiably align the relative calibration incentives of the student to those of its teacher, we introduce faithful distillation. Our experiments on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the need for such an analysis and the advantages of the increased verifiability of faithful distillation over alternative adversarial distillation methods.
The recent proliferation of 3D content that can be consumed on hand-held devices necessitates efficient tools for transmitting large geometric data, e.g., 3D meshes, over the Internet. Detailed high-resolution assets can pose a challenge to storage as well as transmission bandwidth, and level-of-detail techniques are often used to transmit an asset using an appropriate bandwidth budget. It is especially desirable for these methods to transmit data progressively, improving the quality of the geometry with more data. Our key insight is that the geometric details of 3D meshes often exhibit similar local patterns even across different shapes, and thus can be effectively represented with a shared learned generative space. We learn this space using a subdivision-based encoder-decoder architecture trained in advance on a large collection of surfaces. We further observe that additional residual features can be transmitted progressively between intermediate levels of subdivision that enable the client to control the tradeoff between bandwidth cost and quality of reconstruction, providing a neural progressive mesh representation. We evaluate our method on a diverse set of complex 3D shapes and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines in terms of compression ratio and reconstruction quality.
This paper shows that masked autoencoders (MAE) are scalable self-supervised learners for computer vision. Our MAE approach is simple: we mask random patches of the input image and reconstruct the missing pixels. It is based on two core designs. First, we develop an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture, with an encoder that operates only on the visible subset of patches (without mask tokens), along with a lightweight decoder that reconstructs the original image from the latent representation and mask tokens. Second, we find that masking a high proportion of the input image, e.g., 75%, yields a nontrivial and meaningful self-supervisory task. Coupling these two designs enables us to train large models efficiently and effectively: we accelerate training (by 3x or more) and improve accuracy. Our scalable approach allows for learning high-capacity models that generalize well: e.g., a vanilla ViT-Huge model achieves the best accuracy (87.8%) among methods that use only ImageNet-1K data. Transfer performance in downstream tasks outperforms supervised pre-training and shows promising scaling behavior.
The information bottleneck (IB) method is a technique for extracting information that is relevant for predicting the target random variable from the source random variable, which is typically implemented by optimizing the IB Lagrangian that balances the compression and prediction terms. However, the IB Lagrangian is hard to optimize, and multiple trials for tuning values of Lagrangian multiplier are required. Moreover, we show that the prediction performance strictly decreases as the compression gets stronger during optimizing the IB Lagrangian. In this paper, we implement the IB method from the perspective of supervised disentangling. Specifically, we introduce Disentangled Information Bottleneck (DisenIB) that is consistent on compressing source maximally without target prediction performance loss (maximum compression). Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that our method is consistent on maximum compression, and performs well in terms of generalization, robustness to adversarial attack, out-of-distribution detection, and supervised disentangling.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
As a field of AI, Machine Reasoning (MR) uses largely symbolic means to formalize and emulate abstract reasoning. Studies in early MR have notably started inquiries into Explainable AI (XAI) -- arguably one of the biggest concerns today for the AI community. Work on explainable MR as well as on MR approaches to explainability in other areas of AI has continued ever since. It is especially potent in modern MR branches, such as argumentation, constraint and logic programming, planning. We hereby aim to provide a selective overview of MR explainability techniques and studies in hopes that insights from this long track of research will complement well the current XAI landscape. This document reports our work in-progress on MR explainability.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
There is a recent large and growing interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs), which offer powerful features for generative modeling, density estimation, and energy function learning. GANs are difficult to train and evaluate but are capable of creating amazingly realistic, though synthetic, image data. Ideas stemming from GANs such as adversarial losses are creating research opportunities for other challenges such as domain adaptation. In this paper, we look at the field of GANs with emphasis on these areas of emerging research. To provide background for adversarial techniques, we survey the field of GANs, looking at the original formulation, training variants, evaluation methods, and extensions. Then we survey recent work on transfer learning, focusing on comparing different adversarial domain adaptation methods. Finally, we take a look forward to identify open research directions for GANs and domain adaptation, including some promising applications such as sensor-based human behavior modeling.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan