arXiv subjects

Dacheng Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Dacheng Tao.

At least 793 records · Page 44Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Open-Set Hypothesis Transfer with Semantic Consistency

Unsupervised open-set domain adaptation (UODA) is a realistic problem where unlabeled target data contain unknown classes. Prior methods rely on the coexistence of both source and target domain data to perform domain alignment, which greatly limits their applications when source domain data are restricted due to privacy concerns. This paper addresses the challenging hypothesis transfer setting for UODA, where data from source domain are no longer available during adaptation on target domain. We introduce a method that focuses on the semantic consistency under transformation of target data, which is rarely appreciated by previous domain adaptation methods. Specifically, our model first discovers confident predictions and performs classification with pseudo-labels. Then we enforce the model to output consistent and definite predictions on semantically similar inputs. As a result, unlabeled data can be classified into discriminative classes coincided with either source classes or unknown classes. Experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on UODA benchmarks.

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arXiv2020

3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE

The 3D CAD shapes in current 3D benchmarks are mostly collected from online model repositories. Thus, they typically have insufficient geometric details and less informative textures, making them less attractive for comprehensive and subtle research in areas such as high-quality 3D mesh and texture recovery. This paper presents 3D Furniture shape with TextURE (3D-FUTURE): a richly-annotated and large-scale repository of 3D furniture shapes in the household scenario. At the time of this technical report, 3D-FUTURE contains 20,240 clean and realistic synthetic images of 5,000 different rooms. There are 9,992 unique detailed 3D instances of furniture with high-resolution textures. Experienced designers developed the room scenes, and the 3D CAD shapes in the scene are used for industrial production. Given the well-organized 3D-FUTURE, we provide baseline experiments on several widely studied tasks, such as joint 2D instance segmentation and 3D object pose estimation, image-based 3D shape retrieval, 3D object reconstruction from a single image, and texture recovery for 3D shapes, to facilitate related future researches on our database.

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arXiv2020

Searching for Low-Bit Weights in Quantized Neural Networks

Quantized neural networks with low-bit weights and activations are attractive for developing AI accelerators. However, the quantization functions used in most conventional quantization methods are non-differentiable, which increases the optimization difficulty of quantized networks. Compared with full-precision parameters (i.e., 32-bit floating numbers), low-bit values are selected from a much smaller set. For example, there are only 16 possibilities in 4-bit space. Thus, we present to regard the discrete weights in an arbitrary quantized neural network as searchable variables, and utilize a differential method to search them accurately. In particular, each weight is represented as a probability distribution over the discrete value set. The probabilities are optimized during training and the values with the highest probability are selected to establish the desired quantized network. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method is able to produce quantized neural networks with higher performance over the state-of-the-art methods on both image classification and super-resolution tasks.

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arXiv2020

Short-Term and Long-Term Context Aggregation Network for Video Inpainting

Video inpainting aims to restore missing regions of a video and has many applications such as video editing and object removal. However, existing methods either suffer from inaccurate short-term context aggregation or rarely explore long-term frame information. In this work, we present a novel context aggregation network to effectively exploit both short-term and long-term frame information for video inpainting. In the encoding stage, we propose boundary-aware short-term context aggregation, which aligns and aggregates, from neighbor frames, local regions that are closely related to the boundary context of missing regions into the target frame. Furthermore, we propose dynamic long-term context aggregation to globally refine the feature map generated in the encoding stage using long-term frame features, which are dynamically updated throughout the inpainting process. Experiments show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods with better inpainting results and fast inpainting speed.

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arXiv2020

Adaptive Context-Aware Multi-Modal Network for Depth Completion

Depth completion aims to recover a dense depth map from the sparse depth data and the corresponding single RGB image. The observed pixels provide the significant guidance for the recovery of the unobserved pixels' depth. However, due to the sparsity of the depth data, the standard convolution operation, exploited by most of existing methods, is not effective to model the observed contexts with depth values. To address this issue, we propose to adopt the graph propagation to capture the observed spatial contexts. Specifically, we first construct multiple graphs at different scales from observed pixels. Since the graph structure varies from sample to sample, we then apply the attention mechanism on the propagation, which encourages the network to model the contextual information adaptively. Furthermore, considering the mutli-modality of input data, we exploit the graph propagation on the two modalities respectively to extract multi-modal representations. Finally, we introduce the symmetric gated fusion strategy to exploit the extracted multi-modal features effectively. The proposed strategy preserves the original information for one modality and also absorbs complementary information from the other through learning the adaptive gating weights. Our model, named Adaptive Context-Aware Multi-Modal Network (ACMNet), achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks, {\it i.e.}, KITTI and NYU-v2, and at the same time has fewer parameters than latest models. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/sshan-zhao/ACMNet}.

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arXiv2020

Symbiotic Adversarial Learning for Attribute-based Person Search

Attribute-based person search is in significant demand for applications where no detected query images are available, such as identifying a criminal from witness. However, the task itself is quite challenging because there is a huge modality gap between images and physical descriptions of attributes. Often, there may also be a large number of unseen categories (attribute combinations). The current state-of-the-art methods either focus on learning better cross-modal embeddings by mining only seen data, or they explicitly use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize unseen features. The former tends to produce poor embeddings due to insufficient data, while the latter does not preserve intra-class compactness during generation. In this paper, we present a symbiotic adversarial learning framework, called SAL.Two GANs sit at the base of the framework in a symbiotic learning scheme: one synthesizes features of unseen classes/categories, while the other optimizes the embedding and performs the cross-modal alignment on the common embedding space .Specifically, two different types of generative adversarial networks learn collaboratively throughout the training process and the interactions between the two mutually benefit each other. Extensive evaluations show SAL's superiority over nine state-of-the-art methods with two challenging pedestrian benchmarks, PETA and Market-1501. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ycao5602/SAL .

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arXiv2020

Condensing Two-stage Detection with Automatic Object Key Part Discovery

Modern two-stage object detectors generally require excessively large models for their detection heads to achieve high accuracy. To address this problem, we propose that the model parameters of two-stage detection heads can be condensed and reduced by concentrating on object key parts. To this end, we first introduce an automatic object key part discovery task to make neural networks discover representative sub-parts in each foreground object. With these discovered key parts, we then decompose the object appearance modeling into a key part modeling process and a global modeling process for detection. Key part modeling encodes fine and detailed features from the discovered key parts, and global modeling encodes rough and holistic object characteristics. In practice, such decomposition allows us to significantly abridge model parameters without sacrificing much detection accuracy. Experiments on popular datasets illustrate that our proposed technique consistently maintains original performance while waiving around 50% of the model parameters of common two-stage detection heads, with the performance only deteriorating by 1.5% when waiving around 96% of the original model parameters. Codes are released on: https://github.com/zhechen/Condensing2stageDetection.

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arXiv2020

Recurrent Feature Reasoning for Image Inpainting

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance for recovering regular or small image defects. However, filling in large continuous holes remains difficult due to the lack of constraints for the hole center. In this paper, we devise a Recurrent Feature Reasoning (RFR) network which is mainly constructed by a plug-and-play Recurrent Feature Reasoning module and a Knowledge Consistent Attention (KCA) module. Analogous to how humans solve puzzles (i.e., first solve the easier parts and then use the results as additional information to solve difficult parts), the RFR module recurrently infers the hole boundaries of the convolutional feature maps and then uses them as clues for further inference. The module progressively strengthens the constraints for the hole center and the results become explicit. To capture information from distant places in the feature map for RFR, we further develop KCA and incorporate it in RFR. Empirically, we first compare the proposed RFR-Net with existing backbones, demonstrating that RFR-Net is more efficient (e.g., a 4\% SSIM improvement for the same model size). We then place the network in the context of the current state-of-the-art, where it exhibits improved performance. The corresponding source code is available at: https://github.com/jingyuanli001/RFR-Inpainting

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arXiv2020

Tighter Generalization Bounds for Iterative Differentially Private Learning Algorithms

This paper studies the relationship between generalization and privacy preservation in iterative learning algorithms by two sequential steps. We first establish an alignment between generalization and privacy preservation for any learning algorithm. We prove that $(\varepsilon, δ)$-differential privacy implies an on-average generalization bound for multi-database learning algorithms which further leads to a high-probability bound for any learning algorithm. This high-probability bound also implies a PAC-learnable guarantee for differentially private learning algorithms. We then investigate how the iterative nature shared by most learning algorithms influence privacy preservation and further generalization. Three composition theorems are proposed to approximate the differential privacy of any iterative algorithm through the differential privacy of its every iteration. By integrating the above two steps, we eventually deliver generalization bounds for iterative learning algorithms, which suggest one can simultaneously enhance privacy preservation and generalization. Our results are strictly tighter than the existing works. Particularly, our generalization bounds do not rely on the model size which is prohibitively large in deep learning. This sheds light to understanding the generalizability of deep learning. These results apply to a wide spectrum of learning algorithms. In this paper, we apply them to stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics and agnostic federated learning as examples.

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arXiv2020

Learning Disentangled Representations with Latent Variation Predictability

Latent traversal is a popular approach to visualize the disentangled latent representations. Given a bunch of variations in a single unit of the latent representation, it is expected that there is a change in a single factor of variation of the data while others are fixed. However, this impressive experimental observation is rarely explicitly encoded in the objective function of learning disentangled representations. This paper defines the variation predictability of latent disentangled representations. Given image pairs generated by latent codes varying in a single dimension, this varied dimension could be closely correlated with these image pairs if the representation is well disentangled. Within an adversarial generation process, we encourage variation predictability by maximizing the mutual information between latent variations and corresponding image pairs. We further develop an evaluation metric that does not rely on the ground-truth generative factors to measure the disentanglement of latent representations. The proposed variation predictability is a general constraint that is applicable to the VAE and GAN frameworks for boosting disentanglement of latent representations. Experiments show that the proposed variation predictability correlates well with existing ground-truth-required metrics and the proposed algorithm is effective for disentanglement learning.

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arXiv2020

Approximated Bilinear Modules for Temporal Modeling

We consider two less-emphasized temporal properties of video: 1. Temporal cues are fine-grained; 2. Temporal modeling needs reasoning. To tackle both problems at once, we exploit approximated bilinear modules (ABMs) for temporal modeling. There are two main points making the modules effective: two-layer MLPs can be seen as a constraint approximation of bilinear operations, thus can be used to construct deep ABMs in existing CNNs while reusing pretrained parameters; frame features can be divided into static and dynamic parts because of visual repetition in adjacent frames, which enables temporal modeling to be more efficient. Multiple ABM variants and implementations are investigated, from high performance to high efficiency. Specifically, we show how two-layer subnets in CNNs can be converted to temporal bilinear modules by adding an auxiliary-branch. Besides, we introduce snippet sampling and shifting inference to boost sparse-frame video classification performance. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of proposed techniques. Our models can outperform most state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something v1 and v2 datasets without Kinetics pretraining, and are also competitive on other YouTube-like action recognition datasets. Our code is available on https://github.com/zhuxinqimac/abm-pytorch.

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arXiv2020

On the learnability of quantum neural networks

We consider the learnability of the quantum neural network (QNN) built on the variational hybrid quantum-classical scheme, which remains largely unknown due to the non-convex optimization landscape, the measurement error, and the unavoidable gate errors introduced by noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines. Our contributions in this paper are multi-fold. First, we derive the utility bounds of QNN towards empirical risk minimization, and show that large gate noise, few quantum measurements, and deep circuit depth will lead to the poor utility bounds. This result also applies to the variational quantum circuits with gradient-based classical optimization, and can be of independent interest. We then prove that QNN can be treated as a differentially private (DP) model. Thirdly, we show that if a concept class can be efficiently learned by QNN, then it can also be effectively learned by QNN even with gate noise. This result implies the same learnability of QNN whether it is implemented on noiseless or noisy quantum machines. We last exhibit that the quantum statistical query (QSQ) model can be effectively simulated by noisy QNN. Since the QSQ model can tackle certain tasks with runtime speedup, our result suggests that the modified QNN implemented on NISQ devices will retain the quantum advantage. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results.

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arXiv2020

Quantum Geometric Machine Learning for Quantum Circuits and Control

The application of machine learning techniques to solve problems in quantum control together with established geometric methods for solving optimisation problems leads naturally to an exploration of how machine learning approaches can be used to enhance geometric approaches to solving problems in quantum information processing. In this work, we review and extend the application of deep learning to quantum geometric control problems. Specifically, we demonstrate enhancements in time-optimal control in the context of quantum circuit synthesis problems by applying novel deep learning algorithms in order to approximate geodesics (and thus minimal circuits) along Lie group manifolds relevant to low-dimensional multi-qubit systems, such as SU(2), SU(4) and SU(8). We demonstrate the superior performance of greybox models, which combine traditional blackbox algorithms with prior domain knowledge of quantum mechanics, as means of learning underlying quantum circuit distributions of interest. Our results demonstrate how geometric control techniques can be used to both (a) verify the extent to which geometrically synthesised quantum circuits lie along geodesic, and thus time-optimal, routes and (b) synthesise those circuits. Our results are of interest to researchers in quantum control and quantum information theory seeking to combine machine learning and geometric techniques for time-optimal control problems.

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arXiv2020

Boundary-assisted Region Proposal Networks for Nucleus Segmentation

Nucleus segmentation is an important task in medical image analysis. However, machine learning models cannot perform well because there are large amount of clusters of crowded nuclei. To handle this problem, existing approaches typically resort to sophisticated hand-crafted post-processing strategies; therefore, they are vulnerable to the variation of post-processing hyper-parameters. Accordingly, in this paper, we devise a Boundary-assisted Region Proposal Network (BRP-Net) that achieves robust instance-level nucleus segmentation. First, we propose a novel Task-aware Feature Encoding (TAFE) network that efficiently extracts respective high-quality features for semantic segmentation and instance boundary detection tasks. This is achieved by carefully considering the correlation and differences between the two tasks. Second, coarse nucleus proposals are generated based on the predictions of the above two tasks. Third, these proposals are fed into instance segmentation networks for more accurate prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of BRP-Net is robust to the variation of post-processing hyper-parameters. Furthermore, BRP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performances on both the Kumar and CPM17 datasets. The code of BRP-Net will be released at https://github.com/csccsccsccsc/brpnet.

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arXiv2020

DC-NAS: Divide-and-Conquer Neural Architecture Search

Most applications demand high-performance deep neural architectures costing limited resources. Neural architecture searching is a way of automatically exploring optimal deep neural networks in a given huge search space. However, all sub-networks are usually evaluated using the same criterion; that is, early stopping on a small proportion of the training dataset, which is an inaccurate and highly complex approach. In contrast to conventional methods, here we present a divide-and-conquer (DC) approach to effectively and efficiently search deep neural architectures. Given an arbitrary search space, we first extract feature representations of all sub-networks according to changes in parameters or output features of each layer, and then calculate the similarity between two different sampled networks based on the representations. Then, a k-means clustering is conducted to aggregate similar architectures into the same cluster, separately executing sub-network evaluation in each cluster. The best architecture in each cluster is later merged to obtain the optimal neural architecture. Experimental results conducted on several benchmarks illustrate that DC-NAS can overcome the inaccurate evaluation problem, achieving a $75.1\%$ top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset, which is higher than that of state-of-the-art methods using the same search space.

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arXiv2020

Repulsive Mixture Models of Exponential Family PCA for Clustering

The mixture extension of exponential family principal component analysis (EPCA) was designed to encode much more structural information about data distribution than the traditional EPCA does. For example, due to the linearity of EPCA's essential form, nonlinear cluster structures cannot be easily handled, but they are explicitly modeled by the mixing extensions. However, the traditional mixture of local EPCAs has the problem of model redundancy, i.e., overlaps among mixing components, which may cause ambiguity for data clustering. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, a repulsiveness-encouraging prior is introduced among mixing components and a diversified EPCA mixture (DEPCAM) model is developed in the Bayesian framework. Specifically, a determinantal point process (DPP) is exploited as a diversity-encouraging prior distribution over the joint local EPCAs. As required, a matrix-valued measure for L-ensemble kernel is designed, within which, $\ell_1$ constraints are imposed to facilitate selecting effective PCs of local EPCAs, and angular based similarity measure are proposed. An efficient variational EM algorithm is derived to perform parameter learning and hidden variable inference. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of model parsimony and generalization ability on unseen test data.

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arXiv2020

Detecting Communities in Heterogeneous Multi-Relational Networks:A Message Passing based Approach

Community is a common characteristic of networks including social networks, biological networks, computer and information networks, to name a few. Community detection is a basic step for exploring and analysing these network data. Typically, homogenous network is a type of networks which consists of only one type of objects with one type of links connecting them. There has been a large body of developments in models and algorithms to detect communities over it. However, real-world networks naturally exhibit heterogeneous qualities appearing as multiple types of objects with multi-relational links connecting them. Those heterogeneous information could facilitate the community detection for its constituent homogeneous networks, but has not been fully explored. In this paper, we exploit heterogeneous multi-relational networks (HMRNet) and propose an efficient message passing based algorithm to simultaneously detect communities for all homogeneous networks. Specifically, an HMRNet is reorganized into a hierarchical structure with homogeneous networks as its layers and heterogeneous links connecting them. To detect communities in such an HMRNet, the problem is formulated as a maximum a posterior (MAP) over a factor graph. Finally a message passing based algorithm is derived to find a best solution of the MAP problem. Evaluation on both synthetic and real-world networks confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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arXiv2020

Learning Oracle Attention for High-fidelity Face Completion

High-fidelity face completion is a challenging task due to the rich and subtle facial textures involved. What makes it more complicated is the correlations between different facial components, for example, the symmetry in texture and structure between both eyes. While recent works adopted the attention mechanism to learn the contextual relations among elements of the face, they have largely overlooked the disastrous impacts of inaccurate attention scores; in addition, they fail to pay sufficient attention to key facial components, the completion results of which largely determine the authenticity of a face image. Accordingly, in this paper, we design a comprehensive framework for face completion based on the U-Net structure. Specifically, we propose a dual spatial attention module to efficiently learn the correlations between facial textures at multiple scales; moreover, we provide an oracle supervision signal to the attention module to ensure that the obtained attention scores are reasonable. Furthermore, we take the location of the facial components as prior knowledge and impose a multi-discriminator on these regions, with which the fidelity of facial components is significantly promoted. Extensive experiments on two high-resolution face datasets including CelebA-HQ and Flickr-Faces-HQ demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

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