The lack of out-of-domain generalization is a critical weakness of deep networks for semantic segmentation. Previous studies relied on the assumption of a static model, i. e., once the training process is complete, model parameters remain fixed at test time. In this work, we challenge this premise with a self-adaptive approach for semantic segmentation that adjusts the inference process to each input sample. Self-adaptation operates on two levels. First, it fine-tunes the parameters of convolutional layers to the input image using consistency regularization. Second, in Batch Normalization layers, self-adaptation interpolates between the training and the reference distribution derived from a single test sample. Despite both techniques being well known in the literature, their combination sets new state-of-the-art accuracy on synthetic-to-real generalization benchmarks. Our empirical study suggests that self-adaptation may complement the established practice of model regularization at training time for improving deep network generalization to out-of-domain data. Our code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/visinf/self-adaptive.
Deep neural network-based systems have significantly improved the performance of speaker diarization tasks. However, end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) systems often struggle to generalize to scenarios with an unseen number of speakers, while target speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD) systems tend to be overly complex. In this paper, we propose a simple attention-based encoder-decoder network for end-to-end neural diarization (AED-EEND). In our training process, we introduce a teacher-forcing strategy to address the speaker permutation problem, leading to faster model convergence. For evaluation, we propose an iterative decoding method that outputs diarization results for each speaker sequentially. Additionally, we propose an Enhancer module to enhance the frame-level speaker embeddings, enabling the model to handle scenarios with an unseen number of speakers. We also explore replacing the transformer encoder with a Conformer architecture, which better models local information. Furthermore, we discovered that commonly used simulation datasets for speaker diarization have a much higher overlap ratio compared to real data. We found that using simulated training data that is more consistent with real data can achieve an improvement in consistency. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed methodologies. Our best system achieved a new state-of-the-art diarization error rate (DER) performance on all the CALLHOME (10.08%), DIHARD II (24.64%), and AMI (13.00%) evaluation benchmarks, when no oracle voice activity detection (VAD) is used. Beyond speaker diarization, our AED-EEND system also shows remarkable competitiveness as a speech type detection model.
Face rendering using neural radiance fields (NeRF) is a rapidly developing research area in computer vision. While recent methods primarily focus on controlling facial attributes such as identity and expression, they often overlook the crucial aspect of modeling eyeball rotation, which holds importance for various downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to learn a face NeRF model that is sensitive to eye movements from multi-view images. We address two key challenges in eye-aware face NeRF learning: how to effectively capture eyeball rotation for training and how to construct a manifold for representing eyeball rotation. To accomplish this, we first fit FLAME, a well-established parametric face model, to the multi-view images considering multi-view consistency. Subsequently, we introduce a new Dynamic Eye-aware NeRF (DeNeRF). DeNeRF transforms 3D points from different views into a canonical space to learn a unified face NeRF model. We design an eye deformation field for the transformation, including rigid transformation, e.g., eyeball rotation, and non-rigid transformation. Through experiments conducted on the ETH-XGaze dataset, we demonstrate that our model is capable of generating high-fidelity images with accurate eyeball rotation and non-rigid periocular deformation, even under novel viewing angles. Furthermore, we show that utilizing the rendered images can effectively enhance gaze estimation performance.
While recent years have witnessed a dramatic upsurge of exploiting deep neural networks toward solving image denoising, existing methods mostly rely on simple noise assumptions, such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), JPEG compression noise and camera sensor noise, and a general-purpose blind denoising method for real images remains unsolved. In this paper, we attempt to solve this problem from the perspective of network architecture design and training data synthesis. Specifically, for the network architecture design, we propose a swin-conv block to incorporate the local modeling ability of residual convolutional layer and non-local modeling ability of swin transformer block, and then plug it as the main building block into the widely-used image-to-image translation UNet architecture. For the training data synthesis, we design a practical noise degradation model which takes into consideration different kinds of noise (including Gaussian, Poisson, speckle, JPEG compression, and processed camera sensor noises) and resizing, and also involves a random shuffle strategy and a double degradation strategy. Extensive experiments on AGWN removal and real image denoising demonstrate that the new network architecture design achieves state-of-the-art performance and the new degradation model can help to significantly improve the practicability. We believe our work can provide useful insights into current denoising research.
Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to protected categories like race and gender in models trained on datasets intended to obscure these features. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and industrial applications. Moreover, insightful views on the opportunities and challenges of efficiency are also highly required for the entire community. While general surveys on the efficiency issue of DNNs have been done from various perspectives, as far as we are aware, scarcely any of them focused on visual recognition systematically, and thus it is unclear which progresses are applicable to it and what else should be concerned. In this paper, we present the review of the recent advances with our suggestions on the new possible directions towards improving the efficiency of DNN-related visual recognition approaches. We investigate not only from the model but also the data point of view (which is not the case in existing surveys), and focus on three most studied data types (images, videos and points). This paper attempts to provide a systematic summary via a comprehensive survey which can serve as a valuable reference and inspire both researchers and practitioners who work on visual recognition problems.
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is more parameter efficient. In this paper, we design ensembles not only over weights, but over hyperparameters to improve the state of the art in both settings. For best performance independent of budget, we propose hyper-deep ensembles, a simple procedure that involves a random search over different hyperparameters, themselves stratified across multiple random initializations. Its strong performance highlights the benefit of combining models with both weight and hyperparameter diversity. We further propose a parameter efficient version, hyper-batch ensembles, which builds on the layer structure of batch ensembles and self-tuning networks. The computational and memory costs of our method are notably lower than typical ensembles. On image classification tasks, with MLP, LeNet, and Wide ResNet 28-10 architectures, our methodology improves upon both deep and batch ensembles.
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.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.