GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
PT4AL: Using Self-Supervised Pretext Tasks for Active Learning
Authors: John Seon Keun Yi; Minseok Seo; Jongchan Park; Dong-Geol Choi
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Labeling a large set of data is expensive. Active learning aims to tackle this problem by asking to annotate only the most informative data from the unlabeled set. We propose a novel active learning approach that utilizes self-supervised pretext tasks and a unique data sampler to select data that are both difficult and representative. We discover that the loss of a simple self-supervised pretext task, such as rotation prediction, is closely correlated to the downstream task loss. Before the active learning iterations, the pretext task learner is trained on the unlabeled set, and the unlabeled data are sorted and split into batches by their pretext task losses. In each active learning iteration, the main task model is used to sample the most uncertain data in a batch to be annotated. We evaluate our method on various image classification and segmentation benchmarks and achieve compelling performances on CIFAR10, Caltech-101, ImageNet, and Cityscapes. We further show that our method performs well on imbalanced datasets, and can be an effective solution to the cold-start problem where active learning performance is affected by the randomly sampled initial labeled set."
ParC-Net: Position Aware Circular Convolution with Merits from ConvNets and Transformer
Authors: Haokui Zhang; Wenze Hu; Xiaoyu Wang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Recently, vision transformers started to show impressive results which outperform large convolution based models significantly. However, in the area of small models for mobile or resource constrained devices, ConvNet still has its own advantages in both performance and model complexity. We propose ParC-Net, a pure ConvNet based backbone model that further strengthens these advantages by fusing the merits of vision transformers into ConvNets. Specifically, we propose position aware circular convolution (ParC), a light-weight convolution op which boasts a global receptive field while producing location sensitive features as in local convolutions. We combine the ParCs and squeeze-exictation ops to form a meta-former like model block, which further has the attention mechanism like transformers. The aforementioned block can be used in plug-and-play manner to replace relevant blocks in ConvNets or transformers. Experiment results show that the proposed ParC-Net achieves better performance than popular light-weight ConvNets and vision transformer based models in common vision tasks and datasets, while having fewer parameters and faster inference speed. For classification on ImageNet-1k, ParC-Net achieves 78.6% top-1 accuracy with about 5.0 million parameters, saving 11% parameters and 13% computational cost but gaining 0.2% higher accuracy and 23% faster inference speed (on ARM based Rockchip RK3288) compared with MobileViT, and uses only 0.5× parameters but gaining 2.7% accuracy compared with DeIT. On MS-COCO object detection and PASCAL VOC segmentation tasks, ParC-Net also shows better performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/hkzhang91/ParC-Net"
DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning
Authors: Zifeng Wang; Zizhao Zhang; Sayna Ebrahimi; Ruoxi Sun; Han Zhang; Chen-Yu Lee; Xiaoqi Ren; Guolong Su; Vincent Perot; Jennifer Dy; Tomas Pfister
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: Continual learning aims at enabling a single model to learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Top-performing methods usually require a rehearsal buffer to store past pristine examples for experience replay, which, however, limits their practical values due to privacy and memory constraints. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework, DualPrompt, which learns a tiny set of parameters, called prompt, to properly instruct a pre-trained model to learn tasks arriving sequentially, without buffering past examples. DualPrompt presents a novel approach to attach complementary prompts to the pre-trained backbone, and then formulates the objective as learning task-invariant and task-specific "instructions". With extensive experimental validation, DualPrompt consistently sets state-of-the-art performance under the challenging class-incremental setting. In particular, DualPrompt outperforms recent advanced continual learning methods with relatively large buffer size. We also introduce a more challenging benchmark, Split ImageNet-R, to help generalize rehearsal-free continual learning research. Source code is available at https://github.com/google-research/l2p.
Unifying Visual Contrastive Learning for Object Recognition from a Graph Perspective
Authors: Shixiang Tang; Feng Zhu; Lei Bai; Rui Zhao; Chenyu Wang; Wanli Ouyang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Recent contrastive based unsupervised object recognition methods leverage a Siamese architecture, which has two branches composed of a backbone, a projector layer, and an optional predictor layer in each branch. To learn the parameters of the backbone, existing methods have a similar projector layer design, while the major difference among them lies in the predictor layer. In this paper, we propose to \underline{Uni}fy existing unsupervised \underline{V}isual \underline{C}ontrastive \underline{L}earning methods by using a GCN layer as the predictor layer (UniVCL), which deserves two merits to unsupervised learning in object recognition. First, by treating different designs of predictors in the existing methods as its special cases, our fair and comprehensive experiments reveal the critical importance of neighborhood aggregation in the GCN predictor. Second, by viewing the predictor from the graph perspective, we can bridge the vision self-supervised learning with the graph representation learning area, which facilitates us to introduce the augmentations from the graph representation learning to unsupervised object recognition and further improves the unsupervised object recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments on linear evaluation and the semi-supervised learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of UniVCL and the introduced graph augmentations. Code will be released upon acceptance."
Decoupled Contrastive Learning
Authors: Chun-Hsiao Yeh; Cheng-Yao Hong; Yen-Chi Hsu; Tyng-Luh Liu; Yubei Chen; Yann LeCun
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Contrastive learning (CL) is one of the most successful paradigms for self-supervised learning (SSL). In a principled way, it considers two augmented views of the same image as positive to be pulled closer, and all other images negative to be pushed further apart. However, behind the impressive success of CL-based techniques, their formulation often relies on heavy-computation settings, including large sample batches, extensive training epochs, etc. We are thus motivated to tackle these issues and establish a simple, efficient, yet competitive baseline of contrastive learning. Specifically, we identify, from theoretical and empirical studies, a noticeable negative-positive-coupling (NPC) effect in the widely used InfoNCE loss, leading to unsuitable learning efficiency concerning the batch size. By removing the NPC effect, we propose decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss, which removes the positive term from the denominator and significantly improves the learning efficiency. DCL achieves competitive performance with less sensitivity to sub-optimal hyperparameters, requiring neither large batches in SimCLR, momentum encoding in MoCo, or large epochs. We demonstrate with various benchmarks while manifesting robustness as much less sensitive to suboptimal hyperparameters. Notably, SimCLR with DCL achieves 68.2% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy using batch size 256 within 200 epochs pre-training, outperforming its SimCLR baseline by 6.4%. Further, DCL can be combined with the SOTA contrastive learning method, NNCLR, to achieve 72.3% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy with 512 batch size in 400 epochs, which represents a new SOTA in contrastive learning. We believe DCL provides a valuable baseline for future contrastive SSL studies."
Joint Learning of Localized Representations from Medical Images and Reports
Authors: Philip Müller; Georgios Kaissis; Congyu Zou; Daniel Rueckert
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Contrastive learning has proven effective for pre-training image models on unlabeled data with promising results for tasks such as medical image classification. Using paired text (like radiological reports) during pre-training improves the results even further. Still, most existing methods target image classification downstream tasks and may not be optimal for localized tasks like semantic segmentation or object detection. We therefore propose Localized representation learning from Vision and Text (LoVT), a text-supervised pre-training method that explicitly targets localized medical imaging tasks. Our method combines instance-level image-report contrastive learning with local contrastive learning on image region and report sentence representations. We evaluate LoVT and commonly used pre-training methods on an evaluation framework of 18 localized tasks on chest X-rays from five public datasets. LoVT performs best on 10 of the 18 studied tasks making it the preferred method of choice for localized tasks."
The Challenges of Continuous Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Senthil Purushwalkam; Pedro Morgado; Abhinav Gupta
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to eliminate one of the major bottlenecks in representation learning - the need for human annotations. As a result, SSL holds the promise to learn representations from data in-the-wild, i.e., without the need for finite and static datasets. Instead, true SSL algorithms should be able to exploit the continuous stream of data being generated on the internet or by agents exploring their environments. But do traditional self-supervised learning approaches work in this setup? In this work, we investigate this question by conducting experiments on the continuous self-supervised learning problem. While learning in the wild, we expect to see a continuous (infinite) non-IID data stream that follows a non-stationary distribution of visual concepts. The goal is to learn a representation that can be robust, adaptive yet not forgetful of concepts seen in the past. We show that a direct application of current methods to such continuous setup is 1) inefficient both computationally and in the amount of data required, 2) leads to inferior representations due to temporal correlations (non-IID data) in some sources of streaming data and 3) exhibits signs of catastrophic forgetting when trained on sources with non-stationary data distributions. We propose the use of replay buffers as an approach to alleviate the issues of inefficiency and temporal correlations. We further propose a novel method to enhance the replay buffer by maintaining the least redundant samples. Minimum redundancy (MinRed) buffers allow us to learn effective representations even in the most challenging streaming scenarios composed of sequential visual data obtained from a single embodied agent, and alleviates the problem of catastrophic forgetting when learning from data with non-stationary semantic distributions."
Conditional Stroke Recovery for Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Authors: Zhixin Ling; Zhen Xing; Jian Zhou; Xiangdong Zhou
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "The key to Fine-Grained Sketch Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) is to establish fine-grained correspondence between sketches and images. Since sketches only consist of abstract strokes, stroke recognition ability plays an important role in FG-SBIR. However, existing works usually ignore the unique feature of sketches and treat images and sketches equally. Targeting at this problem, we propose Conditional Stroke Recovery (CSR) to enhance stroke recognition ability for FG-SBIR, in which we introduce an auxiliary task that requires the network recover the strokes using the paired image as condition. In this way, the network learns better to match the strokes with corresponding image elements. To complete the auxiliary task, we propose an unsupervised stroke disorder algorithm, which does well in stroke extraction and sketch augmentation. In addition, we figure out two weaknesses of the common triplet loss and propose double-anchor InfoNCE loss to reduce cosine distances between sketch-image pairs. Comprehensive experiments using various backbones are conducted on four datasets (i.e., QMUL-Shoe, QMUL-Chair, QMUL-ShoeV2, and Sketchy). In terms of acc@1, our method outperforms previous works by a great margin."
Identifying Hard Noise in Long-Tailed Sample Distribution
Authors: Xuanyu Yi; Kaihua Tang; Xian-Sheng Hua; Joo-Hwee Lim; Hanwang Zhang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Conventional de-noising methods rely on the assumption that the noisy samples are independent and identically distributed, so the resultant classifier, though disturbed by noise, can still easily identify the noises as outliers. However, the assumption is unrealistic in large-scale data that is inevitably long-tailed. Such imbalance makes a classifier less discriminative for the tail classes, whose previously “easy” noises are now turned into “hard” ones--they are almost as outliers as the tail samples. We introduce this new challenge as Noisy Long-Tailed Classification (NLT). Not surprisingly, we find that most de-noising methods fail to identify the hard noises, resulting in significant performance drop on the three proposed NLT benchmarks: ImageNet-NLT, Animal10-NLT, and Food101-NLT. To this end, we design an iterative noisy learning framework called Hard-to-Easy (H2E). Our bootstrapping philosophy is to first learn a classifier as noise identifier invariant to the class and context distributional change, reducing “hard” noises to “easy” ones, whose removal further improves the invariance. Experimental results show that our H2E outperforms state-of-the-art de-noising methods and their ablations on long-tailed settings while maintaining a stable performance on balanced ones. Codes are in Appendix."
Relative Contrastive Loss for Unsupervised Representation Learning
Authors: Shixiang Tang; Feng Zhu; Lei Bai; Rui Zhao; Wanli Ouyang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Defining positive and negative samples is critical for learning visual variations of the semantic classes in an unsupervised manner. Previous methods either construct positive sample pairs as different data augmentations on the same image (i.e., single-instance-positive) or estimate a class prototype by clustering (i.e., prototype-positive), both ignoring the relative nature of positive/negative concepts in the real world. Motivated by the ability of humans in recognizing relatively positive/negative samples, we propose the Relative Contrastive Loss (RCL) to learn feature representation from relatively positive/negative pairs, which not only learns more real world semantic variations than the single-instance-positive methods but also respects positive-negative relativeness compared with absolute prototype-positive methods. The proposed RCL improves the linear evaluation for MoCo v3 by \textbf{+2.0\%} on ImageNet. Code will be released publicly upon acceptance."
Fine-Grained Fashion Representation Learning by Online Deep Clustering
Authors: Yang Jiao; Ning Xie; Yan Gao; Chien-chih Wang; Yi Sun
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Fashion designs are rich in visual details associated with various visual attributes at both global and local levels. As a result, effective modeling and analyzing fashion requires fine-grained representations for individual attributes. In this work, we present a deep learning based online clustering method to jointly learn fine-grained fashion representations for all attributes at both instance and cluster level, where the attribute-specific cluster centers are online estimated. Based on the similarity between fine-grained representations and cluster centers, attribute-specific embedding spaces are further segmented into class-specific embedding spaces for fine-grained fashion retrieval. To better regulate the learning process, we design a three-stage learning scheme, to progressively incorporate different supervisions at both instance and cluster level, from both original and augmented data, and with ground-truth and pseudo labels. Experiments on FashionAI and DARN datasets in retrieval task demonstrated the efficacy of our method compared with competing baselines."
NashAE: Disentangling Representations through Adversarial Covariance Minimization
Authors: Eric Yeats; Frank Liu; David Womble; Hai Li
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "We present a self-supervised method to disentangle factors of variation in high-dimensional data that does not rely on prior knowledge of the underlying variation profile (e.g., no assumptions on the number or distribution of the individual variables to be extracted). In this method which we call NashAE, high-dimensional feature disentanglement is accomplished in the low-dimensional latent space of a standard autoencoder (AE) by promoting the discrepancy between each encoding element and information of the element recovered from all other encoding elements. Disentanglement is promoted efficiently by framing this as a minmax game between the AE and an ensemble of regression networks which each provide an estimate of an element conditioned on an observation of all other elements. We quantitatively compare our approach with leading disentanglement methods using existing disentanglement metrics. Furthermore, we show that NashAE has increased reliability and increased capacity to capture salient data characteristics in the learned latent representation."
A Gyrovector Space Approach for Symmetric Positive Semi-Definite Matrix Learning
Authors: Xuan Son Nguyen
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Representation learning with Symmetric Positive Semi-definite (SPSD) matrices has proven effective in many machine learning problems. Recently, some SPSD neural networks have been proposed and shown promising performance. While these works share a common idea of generalizing some basic operations in deep neural networks (DNNs) to the SPSD manifold setting, their proposed generalizations are usually designed in an ad hoc manner. In this work, we make an attempt to propose a principled framework for building such generalizations. Our method is motivated by the success of hyperbolic neural networks (HNNs) that have demonstrated impressive performance in a variety of applications. At the heart of HNNs is the theory of gyrovector spaces that provides a powerful tool for studying hyperbolic geometry. Here we consider connecting the theory of gyrovector spaces and the Riemannian geometry of SPSD manifolds. We first propose a method to define basic operations, i.e., binary operation and scalar multiplication in gyrovector spaces of (full-rank) Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices. We then extend these operations to the low-rank SPSD manifold setting. Finally, we present an approach for building SPSD neural networks. Experimentl evaluations on three benchmarks for human activity recognition demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework."
Learning Visual Representation from Modality-Shared Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training
Authors: Haoxuan You; Luowei Zhou; Bin Xiao; Noel Codella; Yu Cheng; Ruochen Xu; Shih-Fu Chang; Lu Yuan
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Large-scale multi-modal contrastive pre-training has demonstrated great utility to learn transferable features for a range of downstream tasks by mapping multiple modalities into a shared embedding space. Typically, this has employed separate encoders for each modality. However, recent work suggests that transformers can support learning across multiple modalities and allow knowledge sharing. Inspired by this, we investigate a variety of Modality-Shared Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (MS-CLIP) frameworks. More specifically, we question how many parameters of a transformer model can be shared across modalities during contrastive pre-training, and rigorously examine architectural design choices that position the proportion of parameters shared along a spectrum. In studied conditions, we observe that a mostly unified encoder for vision and language signals outperforms all other variations that separate more parameters. Additionally, we find that light-weight modality-specific parallel modules further improve performance. Experimental results show that the proposed MS-CLIP approach outperforms vanilla CLIP by up to 13% relative in zero-shot ImageNet classification (pre-trained on YFCC-100M), while simultaneously supporting a reduction of parameters. In addition, our approach outperforms vanilla CLIP by 1.6 points in linear probing on a collection of 24 downstream vision tasks. Furthermore, we discover that sharing parameters leads to semantic concepts from different modalities being encoded more closely in the embedding space, facilitating the transferring of common semantic structure (e.g., attention patterns) from language to vision. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/MSCLIP."
Contrasting Quadratic Assignments for Set-Based Representation Learning
Authors: Artem Moskalev; Ivan Sosnovik; Volker Fischer; Arnold Smeulders
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "The standard approach to contrastive learning is to maximize the agreement between different views of the data. The views are ordered in pairs, such that they are either positive, encoding different views of the same object, or negative, corresponding to views of different objects. The supervisory signal comes from maximizing the total similarity over positive pairs, while the negative pairs are needed to avoid collapse. In this work, we note that the approach of considering individual pairs cannot account for both intra-set and inter-set similarities when the sets are formed from the views of the data. It thus limits the information content of the supervisory signal available to train representations. We propose to go beyond contrasting individual pairs of objects by focusing on contrasting objects as sets. For this, we use combinatorial quadratic assignment theory designed to evaluate set and graph similarities and derive set-contrastive objective as a regularizer for contrastive learning methods. We conduct experiments and demonstrate that our method improves learned representations for the tasks of metric learning and self-supervised classification."