We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision. Our method leverages global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively and efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, without the need for expensive operations such as computing attention masks or shifting local windows. In addition, we address the lack of the inductive bias in ViTs, and propose to leverage a modified fused inverted residual blocks in our architecture. Our proposed GC ViT achieves state-of-the-art results across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, the variants of GC ViT with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 85.0% and 85.7% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, at 224 image resolution and without any pre-training, hence surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based MaxViT and Swin Transformer by a large margin. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation using MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently. Specifically, GC ViT with a 4-scale DINO detection head achieves a box AP of 58.3 on MS COCO dataset.
Advanced image tampering techniques are increasingly challenging the trustworthiness of multimedia, leading to the development of Image Manipulation Localization (IML). But what makes a good IML model? The answer lies in the way to capture artifacts. Exploiting artifacts requires the model to extract non-semantic discrepancies between the manipulated and authentic regions, which needs to compare differences between these two areas explicitly. With the self-attention mechanism, naturally, the Transformer is the best candidate. Besides, artifacts are sensitive to image resolution, amplified under multi-scale features, and massive at the manipulation border. Therefore, we formulate the answer to the former question as building a ViT with high-resolution capacity, multi-scale feature extraction capability, and manipulation edge supervision. We term this simple but effective ViT paradigm as the IML-ViT, which has great potential to become a new benchmark for IML. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets verified our model outperforms the state-of-the-art manipulation localization methods. Code and models are available at \url{//github.com/SunnyHaze/IML-ViT}
Recently, with the emergence of numerous Large Language Models (LLMs), the implementation of AI has entered a new era. Irrespective of these models' own capacity and structure, there is a growing demand for LLMs to possess enhanced comprehension of longer and more complex contexts with relatively smaller sizes. Models often encounter an upper limit when processing sequences of sentences that extend beyond their comprehension capacity and result in off-topic or even chaotic responses. While several recent works attempt to address this issue in various ways, they rarely focus on "why models are unable to compensate or strengthen their capabilities on their own". In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the nature of information transfer within LLMs and propose a novel technique called Attention Transition. This technique empowers models to achieve longer and better context comprehension with minimal additional training or impact on generation fluency. Our experiments are conducted on the challenging XSum dataset using LLaMa-7b model with context token length ranging from 800 to 1900. Results demonstrate that we achieve substantial improvements compared with the original generation results evaluated by GPT4.
We propose MAMo, a novel memory and attention frame-work for monocular video depth estimation. MAMo can augment and improve any single-image depth estimation networks into video depth estimation models, enabling them to take advantage of the temporal information to predict more accurate depth. In MAMo, we augment model with memory which aids the depth prediction as the model streams through the video. Specifically, the memory stores learned visual and displacement tokens of the previous time instances. This allows the depth network to cross-reference relevant features from the past when predicting depth on the current frame. We introduce a novel scheme to continuously update the memory, optimizing it to keep tokens that correspond with both the past and the present visual information. We adopt attention-based approach to process memory features where we first learn the spatio-temporal relation among the resultant visual and displacement memory tokens using self-attention module. Further, the output features of self-attention are aggregated with the current visual features through cross-attention. The cross-attended features are finally given to a decoder to predict depth on the current frame. Through extensive experiments on several benchmarks, including KITTI, NYU-Depth V2, and DDAD, we show that MAMo consistently improves monocular depth estimation networks and sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. Notably, our MAMo video depth estimation provides higher accuracy with lower latency, when omparing to SOTA cost-volume-based video depth models.
Recently, Transformer-like deep architectures have shown strong performance on tabular data problems. Unlike traditional models, e.g., MLP, these architectures map scalar values of numerical features to high-dimensional embeddings before mixing them in the main backbone. In this work, we argue that embeddings for numerical features are an underexplored degree of freedom in tabular DL, which allows constructing more powerful DL models and competing with GBDT on some traditionally GBDT-friendly benchmarks. We start by describing two conceptually different approaches to building embedding modules: the first one is based on a piecewise linear encoding of scalar values, and the second one utilizes periodic activations. Then, we empirically demonstrate that these two approaches can lead to significant performance boosts compared to the embeddings based on conventional blocks such as linear layers and ReLU activations. Importantly, we also show that embedding numerical features is beneficial for many backbones, not only for Transformers. Specifically, after proper embeddings, simple MLP-like models can perform on par with the attention-based architectures. Overall, we highlight embeddings for numerical features as an important design aspect with good potential for further improvements in tabular DL.
Image recognition has recently witnessed a paradigm shift, where vision-language models are now used to perform few-shot classification based on textual prompts. Among these, the CLIP model has shown remarkable capabilities for zero-shot transfer by matching an image and a custom textual prompt in its latent space. This has paved the way for several works that focus on engineering or learning textual contexts for maximizing CLIP's classification capabilities. In this paper, we follow this trend by learning an ensemble of prompts for image classification. We show that learning diverse and possibly shorter contexts improves considerably and consistently the results rather than relying on a single trainable prompt. In particular, we report better few-shot capabilities with no additional cost at inference time. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach on 11 different benchmarks.
This paper presents a new vision Transformer, Scale-Aware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed Scale-Aware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multi-scale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224^2 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224^2 and 384^2, respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K.
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.
Transformers have achieved superior performances in many tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, which also intrigues great interests in the time series community. Among multiple advantages of transformers, the ability to capture long-range dependencies and interactions is especially attractive for time series modeling, leading to exciting progress in various time series applications. In this paper, we systematically review transformer schemes for time series modeling by highlighting their strengths as well as limitations through a new taxonomy to summarize existing time series transformers in two perspectives. From the perspective of network modifications, we summarize the adaptations of module level and architecture level of the time series transformers. From the perspective of applications, we categorize time series transformers based on common tasks including forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification. Empirically, we perform robust analysis, model size analysis, and seasonal-trend decomposition analysis to study how Transformers perform in time series. Finally, we discuss and suggest future directions to provide useful research guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to comprehensively and systematically summarize the recent advances of Transformers for modeling time series data. We hope this survey will ignite further research interests in time series Transformers.
Transformer, an attention-based encoder-decoder architecture, has revolutionized the field of natural language processing. Inspired by this significant achievement, some pioneering works have recently been done on adapting Transformerliked architectures to Computer Vision (CV) fields, which have demonstrated their effectiveness on various CV tasks. Relying on competitive modeling capability, visual Transformers have achieved impressive performance on multiple benchmarks such as ImageNet, COCO, and ADE20k as compared with modern Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive review of over one hundred different visual Transformers for three fundamental CV tasks (classification, detection, and segmentation), where a taxonomy is proposed to organize these methods according to their motivations, structures, and usage scenarios. Because of the differences in training settings and oriented tasks, we have also evaluated these methods on different configurations for easy and intuitive comparison instead of only various benchmarks. Furthermore, we have revealed a series of essential but unexploited aspects that may empower Transformer to stand out from numerous architectures, e.g., slack high-level semantic embeddings to bridge the gap between visual and sequential Transformers. Finally, three promising future research directions are suggested for further investment.
Object detection with transformers (DETR) reaches competitive performance with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a pretext task named random query patch detection to unsupervisedly pre-train DETR (UP-DETR) for object detection. Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the original image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade-off multi-task learning of classification and localization in the pretext task, we freeze the CNN backbone and propose a patch feature reconstruction branch which is jointly optimized with patch detection. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we introduce UP-DETR from single-query patch and extend it to multi-query patches with object query shuffle and attention mask. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher precision on PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. The code will be available soon.