Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning Training Procedure Augmentations

Recent advances in Deep Learning have greatly improved performance on various tasks such as object detection, image segmentation, sentiment analysis. The focus of most research directions up until very recently has been on beating state-of-the-art results. This has materialized in the utilization of bigger and bigger models and techniques which help the training procedure to extract more predictive power out of a given dataset. While this has lead to great results, many of which with real-world applications, other relevant aspects of deep learning have remained neglected and unknown. In this work, we will present several novel deep learning training techniques which, while capable of offering significant performance gains they also reveal several interesting analysis results regarding convergence speed, optimization landscape smoothness, and adversarial robustness. The methods presented in this work are the following: $\bullet$ Perfect Ordering Approximation; a generalized model agnostic curriculum learning approach. The results show the effectiveness of the technique for improving training time as well as offer some new insight into the training process of deep networks. $\bullet$ Cascading Sum Augmentation; an extension of mixup capable of utilizing more data points for linear interpolation by leveraging a smoother optimization landscape. This can be used for computer vision tasks in order to improve both prediction performance as well as improve passive model robustness.
Text-Aware Dual Routing Network for Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging task to provide an accurate natural language answer given an image and a natural language question about the image. It involves multi-modal learning, i.e., computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), as well as flexible answer prediction for free-form and open-ended answers. Existing approaches often fail in cases that require reading and understanding text in images to answer questions. In practice, they cannot effectively handle the answer sequence derived from text tokens because the visual features are not text-oriented. To address the above issues, we propose a Text-Aware Dual Routing Network (TDR) which simultaneously handles the VQA cases with and without understanding text information in the input images. Specifically, we build a two-branch answer prediction network that contains a specific branch for each case and further develop a dual routing scheme to dynamically determine which branch should be chosen. In the branch that involves text understanding, we incorporate the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features into the model to help understand the text in the images. Extensive experiments on the VQA v2.0 dataset demonstrate that our proposed TDR outperforms existing methods, especially on the ''number'' related VQA questions.
Rethinking Alignment and Uniformity in Unsupervised Image Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised image semantic segmentation(UISS) aims to match low-level visual features with semantic-level representations without outer supervision. In this paper, we address the critical properties from the view of feature alignments and feature uniformity for UISS models. We also make a comparison between UISS and image-wise representation learning. Based on the analysis, we argue that the existing MI-based methods in UISS suffer from representation collapse. By this, we proposed a robust network called Semantic Attention Network(SAN), in which a new module Semantic Attention(SEAT) is proposed to generate pixel-wise and semantic features dynamically. Experimental results on multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks show that our unsupervised segmentation framework specializes in catching semantic representations, which outperforms all the unpretrained and even several pretrained methods.
Siamese Object Tracking for Vision-Based UAM Approaching with Pairwise Scale-Channel Attention

Although the manipulating of the unmanned aerial manipulator (UAM) has been widely studied, vision-based UAM approaching, which is crucial to the subsequent manipulating, generally lacks effective design. The key to the visual UAM approaching lies in object tracking, while current UAM tracking typically relies on costly model-based methods. Besides, UAM approaching often confronts more severe object scale variation issues, which makes it inappropriate to directly employ state-of-the-art model-free Siamese-based methods from the object tracking field. To address the above problems, this work proposes a novel Siamese network with pairwise scale-channel attention (SiamSA) for vision-based UAM approaching. Specifically, SiamSA consists of a pairwise scale-channel attention network (PSAN) and a scale-aware anchor proposal network (SA-APN). PSAN acquires valuable scale information for feature processing, while SA-APN mainly attaches scale awareness to anchor proposing. Moreover, a new tracking benchmark for UAM approaching, namely UAMT100, is recorded with 35K frames on a flying UAM platform for evaluation. Exhaustive experiments on the benchmarks and real-world tests validate the efficiency and practicality of SiamSA with a promising speed. Both the code and UAMT100 benchmark are now available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/SiamSA.
Estimation and inference for transfer learning with high-dimensional quantile regression

Transfer learning has become an essential technique to exploit information from the source domain to boost performance of the target task. Despite the prevalence in high-dimensional data, heterogeneity and heavy tails are insufficiently accounted for by current transfer learning approaches and thus may undermine the resulting performance. We propose a transfer learning procedure in the framework of high-dimensional quantile regression models to accommodate heterogeneity and heavy tails in the source and target domains. We establish error bounds of transfer learning estimator based on delicately selected transferable source domains, showing that lower error bounds can be achieved for critical selection criterion and larger sample size of source tasks. We further propose valid confidence interval and hypothesis test procedures for individual component of high-dimensional quantile regression coefficients by advocating a double transfer learning estimator, which is one-step debiased estimator for the transfer learning estimator wherein the technique of transfer learning is designed again. By adopting data-splitting technique, we advocate a transferability detection approach that guarantees to circumvent negative transfer and identify transferable sources with high probability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits some favorable and compelling performances and the practical utility is further illustrated by analyzing a real example.
Ensemble Multi-Quantiles: Adaptively Flexible Distribution Prediction for Uncertainty Quantification

We propose a novel, succinct, and effective approach for distribution prediction to quantify uncertainty in machine learning. It incorporates adaptively flexible distribution prediction of $\mathbb{P}(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{X}=x)$ in regression tasks. This conditional distribution's quantiles of probability levels spreading the interval $(0,1)$ are boosted by additive models which are designed by us with intuitions and interpretability. We seek an adaptive balance between the structural integrity and the flexibility for $\mathbb{P}(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{X}=x)$, while Gaussian assumption results in a lack of flexibility for real data and highly flexible approaches (e.g., estimating the quantiles separately without a distribution structure) inevitably have drawbacks and may not lead to good generalization. This ensemble multi-quantiles approach called EMQ proposed by us is totally data-driven, and can gradually depart from Gaussian and discover the optimal conditional distribution in the boosting. On extensive regression tasks from UCI datasets, we show that EMQ achieves state-of-the-art performance comparing to many recent uncertainty quantification methods. Visualization results further illustrate the necessity and the merits of such an ensemble model.
DynaGAN: Dynamic Few-shot Adaptation of GANs to Multiple Domains

Few-shot domain adaptation to multiple domains aims to learn a complex image distribution across multiple domains from a few training images. A na\"ive solution here is to train a separate model for each domain using few-shot domain adaptation methods. Unfortunately, this approach mandates linearly-scaled computational resources both in memory and computation time and, more importantly, such separate models cannot exploit the shared knowledge between target domains. In this paper, we propose DynaGAN, a novel few-shot domain-adaptation method for multiple target domains. DynaGAN has an adaptation module, which is a hyper-network that dynamically adapts a pretrained GAN model into the multiple target domains. Hence, we can fully exploit the shared knowledge across target domains and avoid the linearly-scaled computational requirements. As it is still computationally challenging to adapt a large-size GAN model, we design our adaptation module light-weight using the rank-1 tensor decomposition. Lastly, we propose a contrastive-adaptation loss suitable for multi-domain few-shot adaptation. We validate the effectiveness of our method through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
1st Place Solution to NeurIPS 2022 Challenge on Visual Domain Adaptation

The Visual Domain Adaptation(VisDA) 2022 Challenge calls for an unsupervised domain adaptive model in semantic segmentation tasks for industrial waste sorting. In this paper, we introduce the SIA_Adapt method, which incorporates several methods for domain adaptive models. The core of our method in the transferable representation from large-scale pre-training. In this process, we choose a network architecture that differs from the state-of-the-art for domain adaptation. After that, self-training using pseudo-labels helps to make the initial adaptation model more adaptable to the target domain. Finally, the model soup scheme helped to improve the generalization performance in the target domain. Our method SIA_Adapt achieves 1st place in the VisDA2022 challenge. The code is available on https: //github.com/DaehanKim-Korea/VisDA2022_Winner_Solution.
Compressing bipartite graphs with a dual reordering scheme

In order to manage massive graphs in practice, it is often necessary to resort to graph compression, which aims at reducing the memory used when storing and processing the graph. Efficient compression methods have been proposed in the literature, especially for web graphs. In most cases, they are combined with a vertex reordering pre-processing step which significantly improves the compression rate. However, these techniques are not as efficient when considering other kinds of graphs. In this paper, we focus on the class of bipartite graphs and adapt the vertex reordering phase to their specific structure by proposing a dual reordering scheme. By reordering each group of vertices in the purpose of minimizing a specific score, we show that we can reach better compression rates. We also suggest that this approach can be further refined to make the node orderings more adapted to the compression phase that follows the ordering phase.
The distribution of syntactic dependency distances

The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two syntactically linked words can be defined as the difference between their positions. Here we want to contribute to the characterization of the actual distribution of syntactic dependency distances, and unveil its relationship with short-term memory limitations. We propose a new double-exponential model in which decay in probability is allowed to change after a break-point. This transition could mirror the transition from the processing of words chunks to higher-level structures. We find that a two-regime model -- where the first regime follows either an exponential or a power-law decay -- is the most likely one in all 20 languages we considered, independently of sentence length and annotation style. Moreover, the break-point is fairly stable across languages and averages values of 4-5 words, suggesting that the amount of words that can be simultaneously processed abstracts from the specific language to a high degree. Finally, we give an account of the relation between the best estimated model and the closeness of syntactic dependencies, as measured by a recently introduced optimality score.
Spatial Perspective Transform Estimation from Fourier Spectrum Analysis of 2D Patterns in 3D Space

A novel approach to 3D surface imaging is proposed, allowing for the continuous sampling of 3D surfaces to extract localized perspective transformation coefficients from Fourier spectrum analysis of projected patterns. The mathematical relationship for Spatial-Fourier Transformation Pairs is derived, defining the transformation of spatial transformed planar surfaces in the Discrete Fourier Transform spectrum. The mathematical relationship for the twelve degrees of freedom in perspective transformation is defined and validated, asserting congruity with independent and uniform transform pairs for spatial Euclidean, similarity, affine and perspective transformations. This work expands on previously derived affine Spatial-Fourier Transformation Pairs and characterizes its implications towards 3D surface imaging as a means of augmenting (X,Y,Z)-(R,G,B) point-clouds to include additional information from localized sampling of pattern transformations.
Neural Network Verification as Piecewise Linear Optimization: Formulations for the Composition of Staircase Functions

We present a technique for neural network verification using mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations. We derive a \emph{strong formulation} for each neuron in a network using piecewise linear activation functions. Additionally, as in general, these formulations may require an exponential number of inequalities, we also derive a separation procedure that runs in super-linear time in the input dimension. We first introduce and develop our technique on the class of \emph{staircase} functions, which generalizes the ReLU, binarized, and quantized activation functions. We then use results for staircase activation functions to obtain a separation method for general piecewise linear activation functions. Empirically, using our strong formulation and separation technique, we can reduce the computational time in exact verification settings based on MIP and improve the false negative rate for inexact verifiers relying on the relaxation of the MIP formulation.
Class-aware Information for Logit-based Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge to the student model by utilizing the predictions/features of the teacher model, and feature-based distillation has recently shown its superiority over logit-based distillation. However, due to the cumbersome computation and storage of extra feature transformation, the training overhead of feature-based methods is much higher than that of logit-based distillation. In this work, we revisit the logit-based knowledge distillation, and observe that the existing logit-based distillation methods treat the prediction logits only in the instance level, while many other useful semantic information is overlooked. To address this issue, we propose a Class-aware Logit Knowledge Distillation (CLKD) method, that extents the logit distillation in both instance-level and class-level. CLKD enables the student model mimic higher semantic information from the teacher model, hence improving the distillation performance. We further introduce a novel loss called Class Correlation Loss to force the student learn the inherent class-level correlation of the teacher. Empirical comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several prevailing logit-based methods and feature-based methods, in which CLKD achieves compelling results on various visual classification tasks and outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.
Puffy: A Step-by-step Guide to Craft Bio-inspired Artifacts with Interactive Materiality

A rising number of HCI scholars have begun to use materiality as a starting point for exploring the design's potential and restrictions. Despite the theoretical flourishing, the practical design process and instruction for beginner practitioners are still in scarcity. We leveraged the pictorial format to illustrate our crafting process of Puffy, a bio-inspired artifact that features a cilia-mimetic surface expressing anthropomorphic qualities through shape changes. Our approach consists of three key activities (i.e., analysis, synthesis, and detailing) interlaced recursively throughout the journey. Using this approach, we analyzed different input sources, synthesized peers’ critiques and self-reflection, and detailed the designed experience with iterative prototypes. Building on a reflective analysis of our approach, we concluded with a set of practical implications and design recommendations to inform other practitioners to initiate their investigations in interactive materiality.
A Faster, Lighter and Stronger Deep Learning-Based Approach for Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition is an essential component of systems for camera localization and loop closure detection, and it has attracted widespread interest in multiple domains such as computer vision, robotics and AR/VR. In this work, we propose a faster, lighter and stronger approach that can generate models with fewer parameters and can spend less time in the inference stage. We designed RepVGG-lite as the backbone network in our architecture, it is more discriminative than other general networks in the Place Recognition task. RepVGG-lite has more speed advantages while achieving higher performance. We extract only one scale patch-level descriptors from global descriptors in the feature extraction stage. Then we design a trainable feature matcher to exploit both spatial relationships of the features and their visual appearance, which is based on the attention mechanism. Comprehensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed method outperforming recent other state-of-the-art learned approaches, and achieving even higher inference speed. Our system has 14 times less params than Patch-NetVLAD, 6.8 times lower theoretical FLOPs, and run faster 21 and 33 times in feature extraction and feature matching. Moreover, the performance of our approach is 0.5\% better than Patch-NetVLAD in Recall@1. We used subsets of Mapillary Street Level Sequences dataset to conduct experiments for all other challenging conditions.
A Kernel Perspective of Skip Connections in Convolutional Networks

Over-parameterized residual networks (ResNets) are amongst the most successful convolutional neural architectures for image processing. Here we study their properties through their Gaussian Process and Neural Tangent kernels. We derive explicit formulas for these kernels, analyze their spectra, and provide bounds on their implied condition numbers. Our results indicate that (1) with ReLU activation, the eigenvalues of these residual kernels decay polynomially at a similar rate compared to the same kernels when skip connections are not used, thus maintaining a similar frequency bias; (2) however, residual kernels are more locally biased. Our analysis further shows that the matrices obtained by these residual kernels yield favorable condition numbers at finite depths than those obtained without the skip connections, enabling therefore faster convergence of training with gradient descent.
Label Alignment Regularization for Distribution Shift

Recent work has highlighted the label alignment property (LAP) in supervised learning, where the vector of all labels in the dataset is mostly in the span of the top few singular vectors of the data matrix. Drawing inspiration from this observation, we propose a regularization method for unsupervised domain adaptation that encourages alignment between the predictions in the target domain and its top singular vectors. Unlike conventional domain adaptation approaches that focus on regularizing representations, we instead regularize the classifier to align with the unsupervised target data, guided by the LAP in both the source and target domains. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under certain assumptions, our solution resides within the span of the top right singular vectors of the target domain data and aligns with the optimal solution. By removing the reliance on the commonly used optimal joint risk assumption found in classic domain adaptation theory, we showcase the effectiveness of our method on addressing problems where traditional domain adaptation methods often fall short due to high joint error. Additionally, we report improved performance over domain adaptation baselines in well-known tasks such as MNIST-USPS domain adaptation and cross-lingual sentiment analysis.
Quasi-symmetries between metric spaces and rough quasi-isometries between their infinite hyperbolic cones

In this paper, we first prove that any power quasi-symmetry of two metric spaces induces a rough quasi-isometry between their infinite hyperbolic cones. Second, we prove that for a complete metric space $Z$, there exists a point $\omega$ in the Gromov boundary of its infinite hyperbolic cone such that $Z$ can be seen as the Gromov boundary relative to $\omega$ of its infinite hyperbolic cone. Third, we prove that for a visual Gromov hyperbolic metric space $X$ and a Gromov boundary point $\omega$, $X$ is roughly similar to the infinite hyperbolic cone of its Gromov boundary relative to $\omega$. These are the generalizations of Theorem 7.4, Theorem 8.1 and Theorem 8.2 in [3] since the underlying spaces are not assumed to be bounded and the hyperbolic cones are infinite.
Imperceptible Adversarial Attack via Invertible Neural Networks

Adding perturbations via utilizing auxiliary gradient information or discarding existing details of the benign images are two common approaches for generating adversarial examples. Though visual imperceptibility is the desired property of adversarial examples, conventional adversarial attacks still generate traceable adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Adversarial Attack via Invertible Neural Networks (AdvINN) method to produce robust and imperceptible adversarial examples. Specifically, AdvINN fully takes advantage of the information preservation property of Invertible Neural Networks and thereby generates adversarial examples by simultaneously adding class-specific semantic information of the target class and dropping discriminant information of the original class. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K demonstrate that the proposed AdvINN method can produce less imperceptible adversarial images than the state-of-the-art methods and AdvINN yields more robust adversarial examples with high confidence compared to other adversarial attacks.