arXiv subjects

Bihan Wen

Publications and source records attributed to Bihan Wen.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Recent Advances in Adversarial Training for Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches defending against adversarial examples for deep learning models. Unlike other defense strategies, adversarial training aims to promote the robustness of models intrinsically. During the last few years, adversarial training has been studied and discussed from various aspects. A variety of improvements and developments of adversarial training are proposed, which were, however, neglected in existing surveys. For the first time in this survey, we systematically review the recent progress on adversarial training for adversarial robustness with a novel taxonomy. Then we discuss the generalization problems in adversarial training from three perspectives. Finally, we highlight the challenges which are not fully tackled and present potential future directions.

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arXiv2021

Systematic Analysis and Removal of Circular Artifacts for StyleGAN

StyleGAN is one of the state-of-the-art image generators which is well-known for synthesizing high-resolution and hyper-realistic face images. Though images generated by vanilla StyleGAN model are visually appealing, they sometimes contain prominent circular artifacts which severely degrade the quality of generated images. In this work, we provide a systematic investigation on how those circular artifacts are formed by studying the functionalities of different stages of vanilla StyleGAN architecture, with both mechanism analysis and extensive experiments. The key modules of vanilla StyleGAN that promote such undesired artifacts are highlighted. Our investigation also explains why the artifacts are usually circular, relatively small and rarely split into 2 or more parts. Besides, we propose a simple yet effective solution to remove the prominent circular artifacts for vanilla StyleGAN, by applying a novel pixel-instance normalization (PIN) layer.

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arXiv2021

Joint Dimensionality Reduction for Separable Embedding Estimation

Low-dimensional embeddings for data from disparate sources play critical roles in multi-modal machine learning, multimedia information retrieval, and bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose a supervised dimensionality reduction method that learns linear embeddings jointly for two feature vectors representing data of different modalities or data from distinct types of entities. We also propose an efficient feature selection method that complements, and can be applied prior to, our joint dimensionality reduction method. Assuming that there exist true linear embeddings for these features, our analysis of the error in the learned linear embeddings provides theoretical guarantees that the dimensionality reduction method accurately estimates the true embeddings when certain technical conditions are satisfied and the number of samples is sufficiently large. The derived sample complexity results are echoed by numerical experiments. We apply the proposed dimensionality reduction method to gene-disease association, and predict unknown associations using kernel regression on the dimension-reduced feature vectors. Our approach compares favorably against other dimensionality reduction methods, and against a state-of-the-art method of bilinear regression for predicting gene-disease associations.

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arXiv2020

Attentive Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize the model from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, i.e. node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN model achieves the promising results, comparing to the state-of-the-art GNN- and CNN-based methods for few-shot learning tasks, over the mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet benchmarks, under ConvNet-4 and ResNet-based backbone with both inductive and transductive settings. The codes will be made publicly available.

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arXiv2020

Feature Distillation With Guided Adversarial Contrastive Learning

Deep learning models are shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Though adversarial training can enhance model robustness, typical approaches are computationally expensive. Recent works proposed to transfer the robustness to adversarial attacks across different tasks or models with soft labels.Compared to soft labels, feature contains rich semantic information and holds the potential to be applied to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Guided Adversarial Contrastive Distillation (GACD), to effectively transfer adversarial robustness from teacher to student with features. We first formulate this objective as contrastive learning and connect it with mutual information. With a well-trained teacher model as an anchor, students are expected to extract features similar to the teacher. Then considering the potential errors made by teachers, we propose sample reweighted estimation to eliminate the negative effects from teachers. With GACD, the student not only learns to extract robust features, but also captures structural knowledge from the teacher. By extensive experiments evaluating over popular datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and STL-10, we demonstrate that our approach can effectively transfer robustness across different models and even different tasks, and achieve comparable or better results than existing methods. Besides, we provide a detailed analysis of various methods, showing that students produced by our approach capture more structural knowledge from teachers and learn more robust features under adversarial attacks.

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arXiv2020

Removing Backdoor-Based Watermarks in Neural Networks with Limited Data

Deep neural networks have been widely applied and achieved great success in various fields. As training deep models usually consumes massive data and computational resources, trading the trained deep models is highly demanded and lucrative nowadays. Unfortunately, the naive trading schemes typically involves potential risks related to copyright and trustworthiness issues, e.g., a sold model can be illegally resold to others without further authorization to reap huge profits. To tackle this problem, various watermarking techniques are proposed to protect the model intellectual property, amongst which the backdoor-based watermarking is the most commonly-used one. However, the robustness of these watermarking approaches is not well evaluated under realistic settings, such as limited in-distribution data availability and agnostic of watermarking patterns. In this paper, we benchmark the robustness of watermarking, and propose a novel backdoor-based watermark removal framework using limited data, dubbed WILD. The proposed WILD removes the watermarks of deep models with only a small portion of training data, and the output model can perform the same as models trained from scratch without watermarks injected. In particular, a novel data augmentation method is utilized to mimic the behavior of watermark triggers. Combining with the distribution alignment between the normal and perturbed (e.g., occluded) data in the feature space, our approach generalizes well on all typical types of trigger contents. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can effectively remove the watermarks without compromising the deep model performance for the original task with the limited access to training data.

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arXiv2020

Generating Person Images with Appearance-aware Pose Stylizer

Generation of high-quality person images is challenging, due to the sophisticated entanglements among image factors, e.g., appearance, pose, foreground, background, local details, global structures, etc. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end framework to generate realistic person images based on given person poses and appearances. The core of our framework is a novel generator called Appearance-aware Pose Stylizer (APS) which generates human images by coupling the target pose with the conditioned person appearance progressively. The framework is highly flexible and controllable by effectively decoupling various complex person image factors in the encoding phase, followed by re-coupling them in the decoding phase. In addition, we present a new normalization method named adaptive patch normalization, which enables region-specific normalization and shows a good performance when adopted in person image generation model. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method is capable of generating visually appealing and realistic-looking results using arbitrary image and pose inputs.

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arXiv2020

Hyper RPCA: Joint Maximum Correntropy Criterion and Laplacian Scale Mixture Modeling On-the-Fly for Moving Object Detection

Moving object detection is critical for automated video analysis in many vision-related tasks, such as surveillance tracking, video compression coding, etc. Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), as one of the most popular moving object modelling methods, aims to separate the temporally varying (i.e., moving) foreground objects from the static background in video, assuming the background frames to be low-rank while the foreground to be spatially sparse. Classic RPCA imposes sparsity of the foreground component using l1-norm, and minimizes the modeling error via 2-norm. We show that such assumptions can be too restrictive in practice, which limits the effectiveness of the classic RPCA, especially when processing videos with dynamic background, camera jitter, camouflaged moving object, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel RPCA-based model, called Hyper RPCA, to detect moving objects on the fly. Different from classic RPCA, the proposed Hyper RPCA jointly applies the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) for the modeling error, and Laplacian scale mixture (LSM) model for foreground objects. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed Hyper RPCA has competitive performance for foreground detection to the state-of-the-art algorithms on several well-known benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2020

The Power of Triply Complementary Priors for Image Compressive Sensing

Recent works that utilized deep models have achieved superior results in various image restoration applications. Such approach is typically supervised which requires a corpus of training images with distribution similar to the images to be recovered. On the other hand, the shallow methods which are usually unsupervised remain promising performance in many inverse problems, \eg, image compressive sensing (CS), as they can effectively leverage non-local self-similarity priors of natural images. However, most of such methods are patch-based leading to the restored images with various ringing artifacts due to naive patch aggregation. Using either approach alone usually limits performance and generalizability in image restoration tasks. In this paper, we propose a joint low-rank and deep (LRD) image model, which contains a pair of triply complementary priors, namely \textit{external} and \textit{internal}, \textit{deep} and \textit{shallow}, and \textit{local} and \textit{non-local} priors. We then propose a novel hybrid plug-and-play (H-PnP) framework based on the LRD model for image CS. To make the optimization tractable, a simple yet effective algorithm is proposed to solve the proposed H-PnP based image CS problem. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed H-PnP algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques for image CS recovery such as SCSNet and WNNM.

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arXiv2020

A Set-Theoretic Study of the Relationships of Image Models and Priors for Restoration Problems

Image prior modeling is the key issue in image recovery, computational imaging, compresses sensing, and other inverse problems. Recent algorithms combining multiple effective priors such as the sparse or low-rank models, have demonstrated superior performance in various applications. However, the relationships among the popular image models are unclear, and no theory in general is available to demonstrate their connections. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis on the image models, to bridge the gap between applications and image prior understanding, including sparsity, group-wise sparsity, joint sparsity, and low-rankness, etc. We systematically study how effective each image model is for image restoration. Furthermore, we relate the denoising performance improvement by combining multiple models, to the image model relationships. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare the denoising results which are consistent with our analysis. On top of the model-based methods, we quantitatively demonstrate the image properties that are inexplicitly exploited by deep learning method, of which can further boost the denoising performance by combining with its complementary image models.

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arXiv2020

A Benchmark for Sparse Coding: When Group Sparsity Meets Rank Minimization

Sparse coding has achieved a great success in various image processing tasks. However, a benchmark to measure the sparsity of image patch/group is missing since sparse coding is essentially an NP-hard problem. This work attempts to fill the gap from the perspective of rank minimization. More details please see the manuscript....

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arXiv2020

From Rank Estimation to Rank Approximation: Rank Residual Constraint for Image Restoration

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the rank minimization problem, termed rank residual constraint (RRC) model. Different from existing low-rank based approaches, such as the well-known nuclear norm minimization (NNM) and the weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM), which estimate the underlying low-rank matrix directly from the corrupted observations, we progressively approximate the underlying low-rank matrix via minimizing the rank residual. Through integrating the image nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior with the proposed RRC model, we apply it to image restoration tasks, including image denoising and image compression artifacts reduction. Towards this end, we first obtain a good reference of the original image groups by using the image NSS prior, and then the rank residual of the image groups between this reference and the degraded image is minimized to achieve a better estimate to the desired image. In this manner, both the reference and the estimated image are updated gradually and jointly in each iteration. Based on the group-based sparse representation model, we further provide a theoretical analysis on the feasibility of the proposed RRC model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RRC model outperforms many state-of-the-art schemes in both the objective and perceptual quality.

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arXiv2019

Transform Learning for Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction: From Model-based Learning to Building Neural Networks

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used in clinical practice, but it has been traditionally limited by its slow data acquisition. Recent advances in compressed sensing (CS) techniques for MRI reduce acquisition time while maintaining high image quality. Whereas classical CS assumes the images are sparse in known analytical dictionaries or transform domains, methods using learned image models for reconstruction have become popular. The model could be pre-learned from datasets, or learned simultaneously with the reconstruction, i.e., blind CS (BCS). Besides the well-known synthesis dictionary model, recent advances in transform learning (TL) provide an efficient alternative framework for sparse modeling in MRI. TL-based methods enjoy numerous advantages including exact sparse coding, transform update, and clustering solutions, cheap computation, and convergence guarantees, and provide high-quality results in MRI compared to popular competing methods. This paper provides a review of some recent works in MRI reconstruction from limited data, with focus on the recent TL-based methods. A unified framework for incorporating various TL-based models is presented. We discuss the connections between transform learning and convolutional or filter bank models and corresponding multi-layer extensions, with connections to deep learning. Finally, we discuss recent trends in MRI, open problems, and future directions for the field.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability Across Heterogeneous Blockchains

Blockchain interoperability, which allows state transitions across different blockchain networks, is critical functionality to facilitate major blockchain adoption. Existing interoperability protocols mostly focus on atomic token exchange between blockchains. However, as blockchains have been upgraded from passive distributed ledgers into programmable state machines (thanks to smart contracts), the scope of blockchain interoperability goes beyond just token exchange. In this paper, we present HyperService, the first platform that delivers interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains. HyperService is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a developer-facing programming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications in a unified programming model; and (ii) a secure blockchain-facing cryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains. We implement a prototype of HyperService in about 35,000 lines of code to demonstrate its practicality. Our experiment results show that HyperService imposes reasonable latency, in order of seconds, on the end-to-end execution of cross-chain applications

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Segmentation-Aware Image Denoising without Knowing True Segmentation

Several recent works discussed application-driven image restoration neural networks, which are capable of not only removing noise in images but also preserving their semantic-aware details, making them suitable for various high-level computer vision tasks as the pre-processing step. However, such approaches require extra annotations for their high-level vision tasks, in order to train the joint pipeline using hybrid losses. The availability of those annotations is yet often limited to a few image sets, potentially restricting the general applicability of these methods to denoising more unseen and unannotated images. Motivated by that, we propose a segmentation-aware image denoising model dubbed U-SAID, based on a novel unsupervised approach with a pixel-wise uncertainty loss. U-SAID does not need any ground-truth segmentation map, and thus can be applied to any image dataset. It generates denoised images with comparable or even better quality, and the denoised results show stronger robustness for subsequent semantic segmentation tasks, when compared to either its supervised counterpart or classical "application-agnostic" denoisers. Moreover, we demonstrate the superior generalizability of U-SAID in three-folds, by plugging its "universal" denoiser without fine-tuning: (1) denoising unseen types of images; (2) denoising as pre-processing for segmenting unseen noisy images; and (3) denoising for unseen high-level tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and generalizability of the proposed U-SAID over various popular image sets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

A Comparative Study for the Nuclear Norms Minimization Methods

The nuclear norm minimization (NNM) is commonly used to approximate the matrix rank by shrinking all singular values equally. However, the singular values have clear physical meanings in many practical problems, and NNM may not be able to faithfully approximate the matrix rank. To alleviate the above-mentioned limitation of NNM, recent studies have suggested that the weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM) can achieve a better rank estimation than NNM, which heuristically set the weight being inverse to the singular values. However, it still lacks a rigorous explanation why WNNM is more effective than NMM in various applications. In this paper, we analyze NNM and WNNM from the perspective of group sparse representation (GSR). Concretely, an adaptive dictionary learning method is devised to connect the rank minimization and GSR models. Based on the proposed dictionary, we prove that NNM and WNNM are equivalent to L1-norm minimization and the weighted L1-norm minimization in GSR, respectively. Inspired by enhancing sparsity of the weighted L1-norm minimization in comparison with L1-norm minimization in sparse representation, we thus explain that WNNM is more effective than NMM. By integrating the image nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior with the WNNM model, we then apply it to solve the image denoising problem. Experimental results demonstrate that WNNM is more effective than NNM and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in both objective and perceptual quality.

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arXiv2018

Non-Local Recurrent Network for Image Restoration

Many classic methods have shown non-local self-similarity in natural images to be an effective prior for image restoration. However, it remains unclear and challenging to make use of this intrinsic property via deep networks. In this paper, we propose a non-local recurrent network (NLRN) as the first attempt to incorporate non-local operations into a recurrent neural network (RNN) for image restoration. The main contributions of this work are: (1) Unlike existing methods that measure self-similarity in an isolated manner, the proposed non-local module can be flexibly integrated into existing deep networks for end-to-end training to capture deep feature correlation between each location and its neighborhood. (2) We fully employ the RNN structure for its parameter efficiency and allow deep feature correlation to be propagated along adjacent recurrent states. This new design boosts robustness against inaccurate correlation estimation due to severely degraded images. (3) We show that it is essential to maintain a confined neighborhood for computing deep feature correlation given degraded images. This is in contrast to existing practice that deploys the whole image. Extensive experiments on both image denoising and super-resolution tasks are conducted. Thanks to the recurrent non-local operations and correlation propagation, the proposed NLRN achieves superior results to state-of-the-art methods with much fewer parameters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Connecting Image Denoising and High-Level Vision Tasks via Deep Learning

Image denoising and high-level vision tasks are usually handled independently in the conventional practice of computer vision, and their connection is fragile. In this paper, we cope with the two jointly and explore the mutual influence between them with the focus on two questions, namely (1) how image denoising can help improving high-level vision tasks, and (2) how the semantic information from high-level vision tasks can be used to guide image denoising. First for image denoising we propose a convolutional neural network in which convolutions are conducted in various spatial resolutions via downsampling and upsampling operations in order to fuse and exploit contextual information on different scales. Second we propose a deep neural network solution that cascades two modules for image denoising and various high-level tasks, respectively, and use the joint loss for updating only the denoising network via back-propagation. We experimentally show that on one hand, the proposed denoiser has the generality to overcome the performance degradation of different high-level vision tasks. On the other hand, with the guidance of high-level vision information, the denoising network produces more visually appealing results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the benefit of exploiting image semantics simultaneously for image denoising and high-level vision tasks via deep learning. The code is available online: https://github.com/Ding-Liu/DeepDenoising

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