mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning with Free Object Segments for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation
Authors: Tai-Yu Pan, Tianle Chen, Jike Zhong, Wenjin Fu, Wei-Lun Chao Cheng Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: One fundamental challenge in building an instance segmentation model for a large number of classes in complex scenes is the lack of training examples, especially for rare objects. In this paper, we explore the possibility to increase the training examples without laborious data collection and annotation. We find that an abundance of instance segments can potentially be obtained freely from object-centric images, according to two insights: (i) an object-centric image usually contains one salient object in a simple background; (ii) objects from the same class often share similar appearances or similar contrasts to the background. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple and scalable framework FreeSeg for extracting and leveraging these "free" object foreground segments to facilitate model training in long-tailed instance segmentation. Concretely, we investigate the similarity among object-centric images of the same class to propose candidate segments of foreground instances, followed by a novel ranking of segment quality. The resulting high-quality object segments can then be used to augment the existing long-tailed datasets, e.g., by copying and pasting the segments onto the original training images. Extensive experiments show that FreeSeg yields substantial improvements on top of strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for segmenting rare object categories. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/czhang0528/FreeSeg.
Autoregressive Uncertainty Modeling for 3D Bounding Box Prediction
Authors: Nikhil Mishra, Maximilian Sieb, Yide Shentu, Pieter Abbeel, Xi Chen YuXuan Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "3D bounding boxes are a widespread intermediate representation in many computer vision applications. However, predicting them is a challenging task, largely due to partial observability, which motivates the need for a strong sense of uncertainty. While many recent methods have explored better architectures for consuming sparse and unstructured point cloud data, we hypothesize that there is room for improvement in the modeling of the output distribution and explore how this can be achieved using an autoregressive prediction head. Additionally, we release a simulated dataset, COB-3D, which highlights new types of ambiguity that arise in real-world robotics applications, where 3D bounding box prediction has largely been underexplored. We propose methods for leveraging our autoregressive model to make high confidence predictions and meaningful uncertainty measures, achieving strong results on SUN-RGBD, Scannet, KITTI, and our new dataset. Code and dataset are available at https://bbox.yuxuanliu.com."
3D Random Occlusion and Multi-layer Projection for Deep Multi-Camera Pedestrian Localization
Authors: Ming Xu, Yuyao Yan, Jeremy S. Smith, Xi Yang Rui Qiu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Although deep-learning based methods for monocular pedestrian detection have made a great progress, they are still vulnerable to heavy occlusions. Using multi-view information fusion is a potential solution but has limited applications, due to the lack of annotated training samples in existing multi-view datasets, which increases the risk of overfitting. To address this problem, a data augmentation method is proposed to randomly generate 3D cylinder occlusions, on the ground plane, which are of the average size of pedestrians and projected to multiple views, to relieve the impact of overfitting in the training. Moreover, the feature map of each view is projected to multiple parallel planes at different heights, by using homographies, which allows the CNNs to fully utilize the features across the height of each pedestrian to infer the locations of pedestrians on the ground plane. The proposed 3DROM method has a greatly improved performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art deep-learning based methods for multi-view pedestrian detection."
A Simple Single-Scale Vision Transformer for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation
Authors: Xianzhi Du, Fan Yang, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Tsung-Yi Lin, Huizhong Chen, Jing Li, Xiaodan Song, Zhangyang Wang, Denny Zhou Wuyang Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This work presents a simple vision transformer design as a strong baseline for object localization and instance segmentation tasks. Transformers recently demonstrate competitive performance in image classification tasks. To adopt ViT to object detection and dense prediction tasks, many works inherit the multistage design from convolutional networks and highly customized ViT architectures. Behind this design, the goal is to pursue a better trade-off between computational cost and effective aggregation of multiscale global contexts. However, existing works adopt multistage architectural design as a black-box solution without a clear understanding of its true benefits. In this paper, we comprehensively study three architecture design choices on ViT -- spatial reduction, doubled channels, and multiscale features -- and demonstrate that a vanilla ViT architecture can fulfill this goal without handcrafting multiscale features, maintaining the original ViT design philosophy. We further complete a scaling rule to optimize our model’s trade-off on accuracy and computation cost / model size. By leveraging a constant feature resolution and hidden size throughout the encoder blocks, we propose a simple and compact ViT architecture called Universal Vision Transformer (UViT) that achieves strong performance on COCO object detection and instance segmentation benchmark. Our code will be released upon acceptance."
Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers
Authors: Alexey Gritsenko, Austin Stone, Maxim Neumann, Dirk Weissenborn, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Aravindh Mahendran, Anurag Arnab, Mostafa Dehghani, Zhuoran Shen, Xiao Wang, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Kipf, Neil Houlsby Matthias Minderer
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively scarce. In this paper, we propose a strong recipe for transferring image-text models to open-vocabulary object detection. We use a standard Vision Transformer architecture with minimal modifications, contrastive image-text pre-training, and end-to-end detection fine-tuning. Our analysis of the scaling properties of this setup shows that increasing image-level pre-training and model size yield consistent improvements on the downstream detection task. We provide the adaptation strategies and regularizations needed to attain very strong performance on zero-shot text-conditioned and one-shot image-conditioned object detection. Code and models will be made available on GitHub."
"A Simple Approach and Benchmark for 21,000-Category Object Detection"
Authors: Chen Li, Yue Cao, Zheng Zhang, Jianfeng Wang, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Han Hu Yutong Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Current object detection systems and benchmarks typically handle a limited number of categories, up to about a thousand categories. This paper scales the number of categories for object detection systems and benchmarks up to 21,000, by leveraging existing object detection and image classification data. Unlike previous efforts that usually transfer knowledge from base detectors to image classification data, we propose to rely more on a reverse information flow from a base image classifier to object detection data. In this framework, the large-vocabulary classification capability is first learnt thoroughly using only the image classification data. In this step, the image classification problem is reformulated as a special configuration of object detection that treats the entire image as a special RoI. Then, a simple multi-task learning approach is used to join the image classification and object detection data, with the backbone and the RoI classification branch shared between two tasks. This two-stage approach, though very simple without a sophisticated process such as multi-instance learning (MIL) to generate pseudo labels for object proposals on the image classification data, performs rather strongly that it surpasses previous large-vocabulary object detection systems on a standard evaluation protocol of tailored LVIS. Considering that the tailored LVIS evaluation only accounts for a few hundred novel object categories, we present a new evaluation benchmark that assesses the detection of all 21,841 object classes in the ImageNet-21K dataset. The baseline approach and evaluation benchmark will be publicly available at https://github.com/SwinTransformer/Simple-21K-Detection. We hope these would ease future research on large-vocabulary object detection."
Knowledge Condensation Distillation
Authors: Mingbao Lin, Zhiyuan Ding, Nie Lin, Yihong Zhuang, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding, Liujuan Cao Chenxin Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers the knowledge from a high-capacity teacher network to strengthen a smaller student. Existing methods focus on excavating the knowledge hints and transferring the whole knowledge to the student. However, the knowledge redundancy arises since the knowledge shows different values to the student at different learning stages. In this paper, we propose Knowledge Condensation Distillation (KCD). Specifically, the knowledge value on each sample is dynamically estimated, based on which an Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework is forged to iteratively condense a compact knowledge set from the teacher to guide the student learning. Our approach is easy to build on top of the off-the-shelf KD methods, with no extra training parameters and negligible computation overhead. Thus, it presents one new perspective for KD, in which the student that actively identifies teacher’s knowledge in line with its aptitude can learn to learn more effectively and efficiently. Experiments on standard benchmarks manifest that the proposed KCD can well boost the performance of student model with even higher distillation efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/dzy3/KCD."
Reducing Information Loss for Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Yuanpei Chen, Liwen Zhang, YingLei Wang, Xiaode Liu, Xinyi Tong, Yuanyuan Ou, Xuhui Huang, Zhe Ma Yufei Guo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has attracted more and more attention recently. It adopts binary spike signals to transmit information. Benefitting from the information passing paradigm of SNNs, the multiplications of activations and weights can be replaced by additions, which are more energy-efficient. However, its “Hard Reset" mechanism for the firing activity would ignore the difference among membrane potentials when the membrane potential is above the firing threshold, causing information loss. Meanwhile, quantifying the membrane potential to 0/1 spikes at the firing instants will inevitably introduce the quantization error thus bringing about information loss too. To address these problems, we propose a “Soft Reset" mechanism for the supervised training-based SNNs, which will drive the membrane potential to a dynamic reset potential according to its magnitude, and Membrane Potential Rectifier (MPR) to reduce the quantization error via redistributing the membrane potential to a range close to the spikes. Experimental results show that the SNNs with the proposed “Soft Reset" mechanism and MPR outperform their vanilla counterparts on both static and dynamic datasets.
Masked Generative Distillation
Authors: Zhe Li, Mingqi Shao, Dachuan Shi, Zehuan Yuan, Chun Yuan Zhendong Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Knowledge distillation has been applied to various tasks successfully. The current distillation algorithm usually improves students’ performance by imitating the output of the teacher. This paper shows that teachers can also improve students’ representation power by guiding students’ feature recovery. From this point of view, we propose Masked Generative Distillation (MGD), which is simple: we mask random pixels of the student’s feature and force it to generate the teacher’s full feature through a simple block. MGD is a truly general feature-based distillation method, which can be utilized on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. We experiment on different models with extensive datasets and the results show that all the students achieve excellent improvements. Notably, we boost ResNet-18 from 69.90% to 71.69% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 backbone from 37.4 to 41.0 Boundingbox mAP, SOLO based on ResNet-50 from 33.1 to 36.2 Mask mAP and DeepLabV3 based on ResNet-18 from 73.20 to 76.02 mIoU. Our codes are available at https://github.com/yzd-v/MGD."
Fine-Grained Data Distribution Alignment for Post-Training Quantization
Authors: Mingbao Lin, Mengzhao Chen, Ke Li, Yunhang Shen, Fei Chao, Yongjian Wu, Rongrong Ji Yunshan Zhong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "While post-training quantization receives popularity mostly due to its evasion in accessing the original complete training dataset, its poor performance also stems from scarce images. To alleviate this limitation, in this paper, we leverage the synthetic data introduced by zero-shot quantization with calibration dataset and propose a fine-grained data distribution alignment (FDDA) method to boost the performance of post-training quantization. The method is based on two important properties of batch normalization statistics (BNS) we observed in deep layers of the trained network, i.e., inter-class separation and intra-class incohesion. To preserve this fine-grained distribution information: 1) We calculate the per-class BNS of the calibration dataset as the BNS centers of each class and propose a BNS-centralized loss to force the synthetic data distributions of different classes to be close to their own centers. 2) We add Gaussian noise into the centers to imitate the incohesion and propose a BNS-distorted loss to force the synthetic data distribution of the same class to be close to the distorted centers. By utilizing these two fine-grained losses, our method manifests the state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet, especially when both the first and last layers are quantized to the low-bit."
Learning with Recoverable Forgetting
Authors: Yifang Fu, Jie Song, Xingyi Yang, Songhua Liu, Xin Jin, Mingli Song, Xinchao Wang Jingwen Ye
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Life-long learning aims at learning a sequence of tasks without forgetting the previously acquired knowledge. However, the involved training data may not be life-long legitimate due to privacy or copyright reasons. In practical scenarios, for instance, the model owner may wish to enable or disable the knowledge of specific tasks or specific samples from time to time. Such flexible control over knowledge transfer, unfortunately, has been largely overlooked in previous incremental or decremental learning methods, even at a problem-setup level. In this paper, we explore a novel learning scheme, termed as \textbf{L}earning w\textbf{I}th \textbf{R}ecoverable \textbf{F}orgetting (LIRF), that explicitly handles the task- or sample-specific knowledge removal and recovery. Specifically, LIRF brings in two innovative schemes, namely knowledge \emph{deposit} and \emph{withdrawal}, which allow for isolating user-designated knowledge from a pre-trained network and injecting it back when necessary. During the knowledge deposit process, the specified knowledge is extracted from the target network and stored in a deposit module, while the insensitive or general knowledge of the target network is preserved and further augmented. During knowledge withdrawal, the taken-off knowledge is added back to the target network. The deposit and withdraw processes only demand for a few epochs of finetuning on the removal data, ensuring both data and time efficiency. We conduct experiments on several datasets, and demonstrate that the proposed LIRF strategy yields encouraging results with gratifying generalization capability."
Efficient One Pass Self-Distillation with Zipf’s Label Smoothing
Authors: Linze Li, Zhaodong Bing, Borui Zhao, Yao Tang, Bo Lin, Haoqiang Fan Jiajun Liang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Self-distillation exploits non-uniform soft supervision from itself during training and improves performance without any runtime cost. However, the overhead during training is often overlooked, and yet reducing time and memory overhead during training is increasingly important in the giant models’ era. This paper proposes an efficient self-distillation method named Zipf’s Label Smoothing (Zipf’s LS), which uses the on-the-fly prediction of a network to generate soft supervision that conforms to Zipf distribution without using any contrastive samples or auxiliary parameters. Our idea comes from an empirical observation that when the network is duly trained the output values of a network’s final softmax layer, after sorting by the magnitude and averaged across samples, should follow a distribution reminiscent to Zipf’s Law in the word frequency statistics of natural languages. By enforcing this property on the sample level and throughout the whole training period, we find that the prediction accuracy can be greatly improved. Using ResNet50 on the INAT21 fine-grained classification dataset, our technique achieves +3.61% accuracy gain compared to the vanilla baseline, and 0.88% more gain against the previous label smoothing or self-distillation strategies. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/megvii-research/zipfls."
Prune Your Model before Distill It
Authors: Albert No Jinhyuk Park
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Knowledge distillation transfers the knowledge from a cumbersome teacher to a small student. Recent results suggest that the student-friendly teacher is more appropriate to distill since it provides more transferrable knowledge. In this work, we propose the novel framework, “prune, then distill,” that prunes the model first to make it more transferrable and then distill it to the student. We provide several exploratory examples where the pruned teacher teaches better than the original unpruned networks. We further show theoretically that the pruned teacher plays the role of regularizer in distillation, which reduces the generalization error. Based on this result, we propose a novel neural network compression scheme where the student network is formed based on the pruned teacher and then apply the “prune, then distill” strategy. The code is available at https://github.com/ososos888/prune-then-distill."
Deep Partial Updating: Towards Communication Efficient Updating for On-Device Inference
Authors: Cong Liu, Lothar Thiele Zhongnan Qu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Emerging edge intelligence applications require the server to retrain and update deep neural networks deployed on remote edge nodes to leverage newly collected data samples. Unfortunately, it may be impossible in practice to continuously send fully updated weights to these edge nodes due to the highly constrained communication resource. In this paper, we propose the weight-wise deep partial updating paradigm, which smartly selects a small subset of weights to update in each server-to-edge communication round, while achieving a similar performance compared to full updating. Our method is established through analytically upper-bounding the loss difference between partial updating and full updating, and only updates the weights which make the largest contributions to the upper bound. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our partial updating methodology which achieves a high inference accuracy while updating a rather small number of weights."
Patch Similarity Aware Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers
Authors: Liping Ma, Mengjuan Chen, Junrui Xiao, Qingyi Gu Zhikai Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Vision transformers have recently gained great success on various computer vision tasks; nevertheless, their high model complexity makes it challenging to deploy on resource-constrained devices. Quantization is an effective approach to reduce model complexity, and data-free quantization, which can address data privacy and security concerns during model deployment, has received widespread interest. Unfortunately, all existing methods, such as BN regularization, were designed for convolutional neural networks and cannot be applied to vision transformers with significantly different model architectures. In this paper, we propose PSAQ-ViT, a Patch Similarity Aware data-free Quantization framework for Vision Transformers, to enable the generation of "realistic" samples based on the vision transformer’s unique properties for calibrating the quantization parameters. Specifically, we analyze the self-attention module’s properties and reveal a general difference (patch similarity) in its processing of Gaussian noise and real images. The above insights guide us to design a relative value metric to optimize the Gaussian noise to approximate the real images, which are then utilized to calibrate the quantization parameters. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on various benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of PSAQ-ViT, which can even outperform the real-data-driven methods.
"L3: Accelerator-Friendly Lossless Image Format for High-Resolution, High-Throughput DNN Training"
Authors: Woohyeon Baek, Tae Jun Ham, Jae W. Lee Jonghyun Bae
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The training process of deep neural networks (DNNs) is usually pipelined with stages for data preparation on CPUs followed by gradient computation on accelerators like GPUs. In an ideal pipeline, the end-to-end training throughput is eventually limited by the throughput of the accelerator, not by that of data preparation. In the past, the DNN training pipeline achieved a near-optimal throughput by utilizing datasets encoded with a lightweight, lossy image format like JPEG. However, as high-resolution, losslessly-encoded datasets become more popular for applications requiring high accuracy, a performance problem arises in the data preparation stage due to low-throughput image decoding on the CPU. Thus, we propose L3, a custom lightweight, lossless image format for high-resolution, high-throughput DNN training. The decoding process of L3 is effectively parallelized on the accelerator, thus minimizing CPU intervention for data preparation during DNN training. L3 achieves a 9.29x higher data preparation throughput than PNG, the most popular lossless image format, for the Cityscapes dataset on NVIDIA A100 GPU, which leads to 1.71x higher end-to-end training throughput. Compared to JPEG and WebP, two popular lossy image formats, L3 provides up to 1.77x and 2.87x higher end-to-end training throughput for ImageNet, respectively, at equivalent metric performance."
Streaming Multiscale Deep Equilibrium Models
Authors: Emre Akbas, Ramazan Gokberk Cinbis Can Ufuk Ertenli
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We present StreamDEQ, a method that infers frame-wise representations on videos with minimal per-frame computation. In contrast to conventional methods where compute time grows at least linearly with the network depth, we aim to update the representations in a continuous manner. For this purpose, we leverage the recently emerging implicit layer model which infers the representation of an image by solving a fixed-point problem. Our main insight is to leverage the slowly changing nature of videos and use the previous frame representation as an initial condition on each frame. This scheme effectively recycles the recent inference computations and greatly reduces the needed processing time. Through extensive experimental analysis, we show that StreamDEQ is able to recover near-optimal representations in a few frames time, and maintain an up-to-date representation throughout the video duration. Our experiments on video semantic segmentation and video object detection show that StreamDEQ achieves on par accuracy with the baseline (standard MDEQ) while being more than 3x faster."
Symmetry Regularization and Saturating Nonlinearity for Robust Quantization
Authors: Yeongsang Jang, Eunhyeok Park Sein Park
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Robust quantization improves the tolerance of networks for various implementations, allowing the maintenance of accuracy in a different bit-width or quantization policy. It offers appealing candidates, especially when the target objective (i.e., energy consumption and performance) is not static and implementations are fragmented. In this work, we perform extensive analyses to identify the sources of quantization error and present three insights to robustify the network against quantization: reduction of error propagation, range clamping for error minimization, and inherited robustness against quantization. Based on these insights, we propose two novel methods called symmetry regularization (SymReg) and saturating nonlinearity (SatNL). Applying the proposed methods during training can enhance the robustness of arbitrary neural networks against quantization on existing post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) algorithms, obtaining a single weight flexible enough to maintain the output quality at various conditions. We conduct extensive studies and validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods."
SP-Net: Slowly Progressing Dynamic Inference Networks
Authors: Wenhu Zhang, Shihao Su, Hui Wang, Zhenwei Miao, Xin Zhan, Xi Li Huanyu Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Dynamic inference networks improve computational efficiency by executing a subset of network components, i.e., executing path, conditioned on input sample. Prevalent methods typically assign routers to computational blocks so that a computational block can be skipped or executed. However, such inference mechanisms are prone to suffer instability in the optimization of dynamic inference networks. First, a dynamic inference network is more sensitive to its routers than its computational blocks. Second, the components executed by the network vary with samples, resulting in unstable feature evolution throughout the network. To alleviate the problems above, we propose a slowly progressing dynamic inference network to stabilize the optimization. First, we design a dynamic auxiliary module to slow down the progress in routers. Moreover, we regularize the feature evolution directions across the network to smoothen the feature extraction. As a result, we conduct extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks and show that our proposed SP-Nets achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of efficiency and accuracy."
Equivariance and Invariance Inductive Bias for Learning from Insufficient Data
Authors: Qianru Sun, Sugiri Pranata, Karlekar Jayashree, Hanwang Zhang Tan Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We are interested in learning robust models from insufficient data, without the need for any externally pre-trained checkpoints. First, compared to sufficient data, we show why insufficient data renders the model more easily biased to the limited training environments that are usually different from testing. For example, if all the training swan samples are “white”, the model may wrongly use the “white” environment to represent the intrinsic class swan. Then, we justify that equivariance inductive bias can retain the class feature while invariance inductive bias can remove the environmental feature, leaving the class feature that generalizes to any environmental changes in testing. To impose them on learning, for equivariance, we demonstrate that any off-the-shelf contrastive-based self-supervised feature learning method can be deployed; for invariance, we propose a class-wise invariant risk minimization (IRM) that efficiently tackles the challenge of missing environmental annotation in conventional IRM. State-of-the-art experimental results on real-world benchmarks (VIPriors, ImageNet100 and NICO) validate the great potential of equivariance and invariance in data-efficient learning. The code is available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/EqInv."
Mixed-Precision Neural Network Quantization via Learned Layer-Wise Importance
Authors: Kai Ouyang, Zhi Wang, Yifei Zhu, Wen Ji, Yaowei Wang, Wenwu Zhu Chen Tang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The exponentially large discrete search space in mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) makes it hard to determine the optimal bit-width for each layer. Previous works usually resort to iterative search methods on the training set, which consume hundreds or even thousands of GPU-hours. In this study, we reveal that some unique learnable parameters in quantization, namely the scale factors in the quantizer, can serve as importance indicators of a layer, reflecting the contribution of that layer to the final accuracy at certain bit-widths. These importance indicators naturally perceive the numerical transformation during quantization-aware training, which can precisely provide quantization sensitivity metrics of layers. However, a deep network always contains hundreds of such indicators, and training them one by one would lead to an excessive time cost. To overcome this issue, we propose a joint training scheme that can obtain all indicators at once. It considerably speeds up the indicators training process by parallelizing the original sequential training processes. With these learned importance indicators, we formulate the MPQ search problem as a one-time integer linear programming (ILP) problem. That avoids the iterative search and significantly reduces search time without limiting the bit-width search space. For example, MPQ search on ResNet18 with our indicators takes only 0.06 seconds, which improves time efficiency exponentially compared to iterative search methods. Also, extensive experiments show our approach can achieve SOTA accuracy on ImageNet for far-ranging models with various constraints (e.g., BitOps, compress rate)."
Event Neural Networks
Authors: Yin Li, Mohit Gupta Matthew Dutson
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Video data is often repetitive; for example, the contents of adjacent frames are usually strongly correlated. Such redundancy occurs at multiple levels of complexity, from low-level pixel values to textures and high-level semantics. We propose Event Neural Networks (EvNets), which leverage this redundancy to achieve considerable computation savings during video inference. A defining characteristic of EvNets is that each neuron has state variables that provide it with long-term memory, which allows low-cost, high-accuracy inference even in the presence of significant camera motion. We show that it is possible to transform a wide range of neural networks into EvNets without re-training. We demonstrate our method on state-of-the-art architectures for both high- and low-level visual processing, including pose recognition, object detection, optical flow, and image enhancement. We observe roughly an order-of-magnitude reduction in computational costs compared to conventional networks, with minimal reductions in model accuracy."
EdgeViTs: Competing Light-Weight CNNs on Mobile Devices with Vision Transformers
Authors: Adrian Bulat, Fuwen Tan, Xiatian Zhu, Lukasz Dudziak, Hongsheng Li, Georgios Tzimiropoulos, Brais Martinez Junting Pan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Self-attention based models such as vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a very competitive architecture alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. Despite increasingly stronger variants with ever-higher recognition accuracies, due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, existing ViTs are typically demanding in computation and model size. Although several successful design choices (e.g., the convolutions and hierarchical multi-stage structure) of prior CNNs have been reintroduced into recent ViTs, they are still not sufficient to meet the limited resource requirements of mobile devices. This motivates a very recent attempt to develop light ViTs based on the state-of-the-art MobileNet-v2, but still leaves a performance gap behind. In this work, pushing further along this under-studied direction we introduce EdgeViTs, a new family of light-weight ViTs that, for the first time, enable attention-based vision models to compete with the best light-weight CNNs in the tradeoff between accuracy and on-device efficiency. This is realized by introducing a highly cost-effective local-global-local (LGL) information exchange bottleneck based on optimal integration of self-attention and convolutions. For device-dedicated evaluation, rather than relying on inaccurate proxies like the number of FLOPs or parameters, we adopt a practical approach of focusing directly on on-device latency and, for the first time, energy efficiency. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation validate the high efficiency of our EdgeViTs when compared to the state-of-the-art efficient CNNs and ViTs in terms of accuracy-efficiency tradeoff on mobile hardware. Specifically, we show that our models are Pareto-optimal when both accuracy-latency and accuracy-energy tradeoffs are considered, achieving strict dominance over other ViTs in almost all cases and competing with the most efficient CNNs."
PalQuant: Accelerating High-Precision Networks on Low-Precision Accelerators
Authors: Gang Li, Qiman Wu, Jian Cheng Qinghao Hu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Recently low-precision deep learning accelerators (DLAs) have become popular due to their advantages in chip area and energy consumption, yet the low-precision quantized models on these DLAs bring in severe accuracy degradation. One way to achieve both high accuracy and efficient inference is to deploy high-precision neural networks on low-precision DLAs, which is rarely studied. In this paper, we propose the PArallel Low-precision Quantization (PalQuant) method that approximates high-precision computations via learning parallel low-precision representations from scratch. In addition, we present a novel cyclic shuffle module to boost the cross-group information communication between parallel low-precision groups. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PalQuant has superior performance to state-of-the-art quantization methods in both accuracy and inference speed, e.g., for ResNet-18 network quantization, PalQuant can obtain 0.52 % higher accuracy and 1.78 times speedup simultaneously over their 4-bit counter-part on a state-of-the-art 2-bit accelerator. Code is available at https://github.com/huqinghao/PalQuant."
Disentangled Differentiable Network Pruning
Authors: Feihu Huang, Yanfu Zhang, Heng Huang Shangqian Gao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In this paper, we propose a novel channel pruning method for compression and acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Many existing channel pruning works try to discover compact sub-networks by optimizing a regularized loss function through differentiable operations. Usually, a learnable parameter is used to characterize each channel, which entangles the width and channel importance. In this setting, the FLOPs or parameter constraints implicitly restrict the search space of the pruned model. To solve the aforementioned problems, we propose optimizing each layer’s width by relaxing the hard equality constraint used in previous works. The relaxation is inspired by the definition of the top-$k$ operation. By doing so, we partially disentangle the learning of width and channel importance, which enables independent parametrization for width and importance and makes pruning more flexible. We also introduce soft top-$k$ to improve the learning of width. Moreover, to make pruning more efficient, we use two neural networks to parameterize the importance and width. The importance generation network considers both inter-channel and inter-layer relationships. The width generation network has similar functions. In addition, our method can be easily optimized by popular SGD methods, which enjoys the benefits of differentiable pruning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet show that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods."
IDa-Det: An Information Discrepancy-Aware Distillation for 1-Bit Detectors
Authors: Yanjing Li, Bohan Zeng, Teli Ma, Baochang Zhang, Xianbin Cao, Peng Gao, Jinhu Lü Sheng Xu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Knowledge distillation (KD) has been proven to be useful for training compact object detection models. However, we observe that KD is often effective when the teacher model and student counterpart share similar proposal information. This explains why existing KD methods are less effective for 1-bit detectors, caused by a significant information discrepancy between the real-valued teacher and the 1-bit student. This paper presents an Information Discrepancy-aware strategy (IDa-Det) to distill 1-bit detectors that can effectively eliminate information discrepancies and significantly reduce the performance gap between a 1-bit detector and its real-valued counterpart. We formulate the distillation process as a bi-level optimization formulation. At the inner level, we select the representative proposals with maximum information discrepancy. We then introduce a novel entropy distillation loss to reduce the disparity based on the selected proposals. Extensive experiments demonstrate IDa-Det’s superiority over state-of-the-art 1-bit detectors and KD methods on both PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. IDa-Det achieves a 76.9\% mAP for a 1-bit Faster-RCNN with ResNet-18 backbone. Our code is open-sourced on https://github.com/SteveTsui/IDa-Det."
Learning to Weight Samples for Dynamic Early-Exiting Networks
Authors: Yifan Pu, Zihang Lai, Chaofei Wang, Shiji Song, Junfeng Cao, Wenhui Huang, Chao Deng, Gao Huang Yizeng Han
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Early exiting is an effective paradigm for improving the inference efficiency of deep networks. By constructing classifiers with varying resource demands (the exits), such networks allow easy samples to be output at early exits, removing the need for executing deeper layers. While existing works mainly focus on the architectural design of multi-exit networks, the training strategies for such models are largely left unexplored. The current state-of-the-art models treat all samples the same during training. However, the early-exiting behavior during testing has been ignored, leading to a gap between training and testing. In this paper, we propose to bridge this gap by sample weighting. Intuitively, easy samples, which generally exit early in the network during inference, should contribute more to training early classifiers. The training of hard samples (mostly exit from deeper layers), however, should be emphasized by the late classifiers. Our work proposes to adopt a weight prediction network to weight the loss of different training samples at each exit. This weight prediction network and the backbone model are jointly optimized under a \emph{meta-learning} framework with a novel optimization objective. By bringing the adaptive behavior during inference into the training phase, we show that the proposed weighting mechanism consistently improves the trade-off between classification accuracy and inference efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/L2W-DEN."
AdaBin: Improving Binary Neural Networks with Adaptive Binary Sets
Authors: Xinghao Chen, Pengju Ren, Yunhe Wang Zhijun Tu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper studies the Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) in which weights and activations are both binarized into 1-bit values, thus greatly reducing the memory usage and computational complexity. Since the modern deep neural networks are of sophisticated design with complex architecture for the accuracy reason, the diversity on distributions of weights and activations is very high. Therefore, the conventional sign function cannot be well used for effectively binarizing full precision values in BNNs. To this end, we present a simple yet effective approach called AdaBin to adaptively obtain the optimal binary sets {b_1, b_2} (b_1, b_2 belong to R) of weights and activations for each layer instead of a fixed set (i.e., {-1, +1}). In this way, the proposed method can better fit different distributions and increase the representation ability of binarized features. In practice, we use the center position and distance of 1-bit values to define a new binary quantization function. For the weights, we propose an equalization method to align the symmetrical center of binary distribution to real-valued distribution, and minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence of them. Meanwhile, we introduce a gradient-based optimization method to get these two parameters for activations, which are jointly trained in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results on benchmark models and datasets demonstrate that the proposed AdaBin is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance. For instance, we obtain a 66.4% Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet using ResNet-18 architecture, and a 69.4 mAP on PASCAL VOC using SSD300."
Adaptive Token Sampling for Efficient Vision Transformers
Authors: Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani, Farnoush Rezaei Jafari, Sunando Sengupta, Hamid Reza Vaezi Joze, Eric Sommerlade, Hamed Pirsiavash, Jürgen Gall Mohsen Fayyaz
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "While state-of-the-art vision transformer models achieve promising results in image classification, they are computationally expensive and require many GFLOPs. Although the GFLOPs of a vision transformer can be decreased by reducing the number of tokens in the network, there is no setting that is optimal for all input images. In this work, we therefore introduce a differentiable parameter-free Adaptive Token Sampler (ATS) module, which can be plugged into any existing vision transformer architecture. ATS empowers vision transformers by scoring and adaptively sampling significant tokens. As a result, the number of tokens is not constant anymore and varies for each input image. By integrating ATS as an additional layer within the current transformer blocks, we can convert them into much more efficient vision transformers with an adaptive number of tokens. Since ATS is a parameter-free module, it can be added to the off-the-shelf pre-trained vision transformers as a plug and play module, thus reducing their GFLOPs without any additional training. Moreover, due to its differentiable design, one can also train a vision transformer equipped with ATS. We evaluate the efficiency of our module in both image and video classification tasks by adding it to multiple SOTA vision transformers. Our proposed module improves the SOTA by reducing their computational costs (GFLOPs) by 2$\times$, while preserving their accuracy on the ImageNet, Kinetics-400, and Kinetics-600 datasets."
Weight Fixing Networks
Authors: Srinandan Dasmahapatra Christopher Subia-Waud
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Modern iterations of deep learning models contain millions (billions) of unique parameters--each represented by a $b$-bit number. Popular attempts at compressing neural networks (such as pruning and quantisation) have shown that many of the parameters are superfluous, which we can remove (pruning) or express with $b’ < b$ bits (quantisation) without hindering performance. Here we look to go much further in minimising the information content of networks. Rather than a channel or layer-wise encoding, we look to lossless whole-network quantisation to minimise the entropy and number of unique parameters in a network. We propose a new method, which we call Weight Fixing Networks (WFN) that we design to realise four model outcome objectives: i) very few unique weights, ii) low-entropy weight encodings, iii) unique weight values which are amenable to energy-saving versions of hardware multiplication, and iv) lossless task-performance. Some of these goals are conflicting. To best balance these conflicts, we combine a few novel (and some well-trodden) tricks; a novel regularisation term, (i, ii) a view of clustering cost as relative distance change (i, ii, iv), and a focus on whole-network re-use of weights (i, iii). Our Imagenet experiments demonstrate lossless compression using 56x fewer unique weights and a 1.9x lower weight-space entropy than SOTA quantisation approaches."