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Jing Huo

Publications and source records attributed to Jing Huo.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Robust Dataset Distillation by Matching Adversarial Trajectories

Dataset distillation synthesizes compact datasets that enable models to achieve performance comparable to training on the original large-scale datasets. However, existing distillation methods overlook the robustness of the model, resulting in models that are vulnerable to adversarial attacks when trained on distilled data. To address this limitation, we introduce the task of ``robust dataset distillation", a novel paradigm that embeds adversarial robustness into the synthetic datasets during the distillation process. We propose Matching Adversarial Trajectories (MAT), a method that integrates adversarial training into trajectory-based dataset distillation. MAT incorporates adversarial samples during trajectory generation to obtain robust training trajectories, which are then used to guide the distillation process. As experimentally demonstrated, even through natural training on our distilled dataset, models can achieve enhanced adversarial robustness while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to existing distillation methods. Our work highlights robust dataset distillation as a new and important research direction and provides a strong baseline for future research to bridge the gap between efficient training and adversarial robustness.

cs.CV↗

Towards Empowerment Gain through Causal Structure Learning in Model-Based RL

In Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), incorporating causal structures into dynamics models provides agents with a structured understanding of the environments, enabling efficient decision. Empowerment as an intrinsic motivation enhances the ability of agents to actively control their environments by maximizing the mutual information between future states and actions. We posit that empowerment coupled with causal understanding can improve controllability, while enhanced empowerment gain can further facilitate causal reasoning in MBRL. To improve learning efficiency and controllability, we propose a novel framework, Empowerment through Causal Learning (ECL), where an agent with the awareness of causal dynamics models achieves empowerment-driven exploration and optimizes its causal structure for task learning. Specifically, ECL operates by first training a causal dynamics model of the environment based on collected data. We then maximize empowerment under the causal structure for exploration, simultaneously using data gathered through exploration to update causal dynamics model to be more controllable than dense dynamics model without causal structure. In downstream task learning, an intrinsic curiosity reward is included to balance the causality, mitigating overfitting. Importantly, ECL is method-agnostic and is capable of integrating various causal discovery methods. We evaluate ECL combined with 3 causal discovery methods across 6 environments including pixel-based tasks, demonstrating its superior performance compared to other causal MBRL methods, in terms of causal discovery, sample efficiency, and asymptotic performance.

cs.AI↗

Causal Information Prioritization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods often suffer from sample-inefficiency, resulting from blind exploration strategies that neglect causal relationships among states, actions, and rewards. Although recent causal approaches aim to address this problem, they lack grounded modeling of reward-guided causal understanding of states and actions for goal-orientation, thus impairing learning efficiency. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel method named Causal Information Prioritization (CIP) that improves sample efficiency by leveraging factored MDPs to infer causal relationships between different dimensions of states and actions with respect to rewards, enabling the prioritization of causal information. Specifically, CIP identifies and leverages causal relationships between states and rewards to execute counterfactual data augmentation to prioritize high-impact state features under the causal understanding of the environments. Moreover, CIP integrates a causality-aware empowerment learning objective, which significantly enhances the agent's execution of reward-guided actions for more efficient exploration in complex environments. To fully assess the effectiveness of CIP, we conduct extensive experiments across 39 tasks in 5 diverse continuous control environments, encompassing both locomotion and manipulation skills learning with pixel-based and sparse reward settings. Experimental results demonstrate that CIP consistently outperforms existing RL methods across a wide range of scenarios.

cs.AI↗

RoboHorizon: An LLM-Assisted Multi-View World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Efficient control in long-horizon robotic manipulation is challenging due to complex representation and policy learning requirements. Model-based visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in addressing these challenges but still faces notable limitations, particularly in handling sparse rewards and complex visual features in long-horizon environments. To address these limitations, we propose the Recognize-Sense-Plan-Act (RSPA) pipeline for long-horizon tasks and further introduce RoboHorizon, an LLM-assisted multi-view world model tailored for long-horizon robotic manipulation. In RoboHorizon, pre-trained LLMs generate dense reward structures for multi-stage sub-tasks based on task language instructions, enabling robots to better recognize long-horizon tasks. Keyframe discovery is then integrated into the multi-view masked autoencoder (MAE) architecture to enhance the robot's ability to sense critical task sequences, strengthening its multi-stage perception of long-horizon processes. Leveraging these dense rewards and multi-view representations, a robotic world model is constructed to efficiently plan long-horizon tasks, enabling the robot to reliably act through RL algorithms. Experiments on two representative benchmarks, RLBench and FurnitureBench, show that RoboHorizon outperforms state-of-the-art visual model-based RL methods, achieving a 23.35% improvement in task success rates on RLBench's 4 short-horizon tasks and a 29.23% improvement on 6 long-horizon tasks from RLBench and 3 furniture assembly tasks from FurnitureBench.

cs.RO↗

Stitching, Fine-tuning, Re-training: A SAM-enabled Framework for Semi-supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) fine-tuning has shown remarkable performance in medical image segmentation in a fully supervised manner, but requires precise annotations. To reduce the annotation cost and maintain satisfactory performance, in this work, we leverage the capabilities of SAM for establishing semi-supervised medical image segmentation models. Rethinking the requirements of effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility, we propose a three-stage framework, i.e., Stitching, Fine-tuning, and Re-training (SFR). The current fine-tuning approaches mostly involve 2D slice-wise fine-tuning that disregards the contextual information between adjacent slices. Our stitching strategy mitigates the mismatch between natural and 3D medical images. The stitched images are then used for fine-tuning SAM, providing robust initialization of pseudo-labels. Afterwards, we train a 3D semi-supervised segmentation model while maintaining the same parameter size as the conventional segmenter such as V-Net. Our SFR framework is plug-and-play, and easily compatible with various popular semi-supervised methods. We also develop an extended framework SFR$^+$ with selective fine-tuning and re-training through confidence estimation. Extensive experiments validate that our SFR and SFR$^+$ achieve significant improvements in both moderate annotation and scarce annotation across five datasets. In particular, SFR framework improves the Dice score of Mean Teacher from 29.68% to 74.40% with only one labeled data of LA dataset.

cs.CV↗

3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent technique with the potential to become a mainstream method for 3D representations. It can effectively transform multi-view images into explicit 3D Gaussian through efficient training, and achieve real-time rendering of novel views. This survey aims to analyze existing 3DGS-related works from multiple intersecting perspectives, including related tasks, technologies, challenges, and opportunities. The primary objective is to provide newcomers with a rapid understanding of the field and to assist researchers in methodically organizing existing technologies and challenges. Specifically, we delve into the optimization, application, and extension of 3DGS, categorizing them based on their focuses or motivations. Additionally, we summarize and classify nine types of technical modules and corresponding improvements identified in existing works. Based on these analyses, we further examine the common challenges and technologies across various tasks, proposing potential research opportunities.

cs.CV↗

Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model

Visual In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a promising research area due to its capability to accomplish various tasks with limited example pairs through analogical reasoning. However, training-based visual ICL has limitations in its ability to generalize to unseen tasks and requires the collection of a diverse task dataset. On the other hand, existing methods in the inference-based visual ICL category solely rely on textual prompts, which fail to capture fine-grained contextual information from given examples and can be time-consuming when converting from images to text prompts. To address these challenges, we propose Analogist, a novel inference-based visual ICL approach that exploits both visual and textual prompting techniques using a text-to-image diffusion model pretrained for image inpainting. For visual prompting, we propose a self-attention cloning (SAC) method to guide the fine-grained structural-level analogy between image examples. For textual prompting, we leverage GPT-4V's visual reasoning capability to efficiently generate text prompts and introduce a cross-attention masking (CAM) operation to enhance the accuracy of semantic-level analogy guided by text prompts. Our method is out-of-the-box and does not require fine-tuning or optimization. It is also generic and flexible, enabling a wide range of visual tasks to be performed in an in-context manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

cs.CV↗

ONNXPruner: ONNX-Based General Model Pruning Adapter

Recent advancements in model pruning have focused on developing new algorithms and improving upon benchmarks. However, the practical application of these algorithms across various models and platforms remains a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we propose ONNXPruner, a versatile pruning adapter designed for the ONNX format models. ONNXPruner streamlines the adaptation process across diverse deep learning frameworks and hardware platforms. A novel aspect of ONNXPruner is its use of node association trees, which automatically adapt to various model architectures. These trees clarify the structural relationships between nodes, guiding the pruning process, particularly highlighting the impact on interconnected nodes. Furthermore, we introduce a tree-level evaluation method. By leveraging node association trees, this method allows for a comprehensive analysis beyond traditional single-node evaluations, enhancing pruning performance without the need for extra operations. Experiments across multiple models and datasets confirm ONNXPruner's strong adaptability and increased efficacy. Our work aims to advance the practical application of model pruning.

cs.LG↗

Exploiting Inter-sample and Inter-feature Relations in Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation has emerged as a promising approach in deep learning, enabling efficient training with small synthetic datasets derived from larger real ones. Particularly, distribution matching-based distillation methods attract attention thanks to its effectiveness and low computational cost. However, these methods face two primary limitations: the dispersed feature distribution within the same class in synthetic datasets, reducing class discrimination, and an exclusive focus on mean feature consistency, lacking precision and comprehensiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce two novel constraints: a class centralization constraint and a covariance matching constraint. The class centralization constraint aims to enhance class discrimination by more closely clustering samples within classes. The covariance matching constraint seeks to achieve more accurate feature distribution matching between real and synthetic datasets through local feature covariance matrices, particularly beneficial when sample sizes are much smaller than the number of features. Experiments demonstrate notable improvements with these constraints, yielding performance boosts of up to 6.6% on CIFAR10, 2.9% on SVHN, 2.5% on CIFAR100, and 2.5% on TinyImageNet, compared to the state-of-the-art relevant methods. In addition, our method maintains robust performance in cross-architecture settings, with a maximum performance drop of 1.7% on four architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/VincenDen/IID.

cs.CV↗

InsertNeRF: Instilling Generalizability into NeRF with HyperNet Modules

Generalizing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to new scenes is a significant challenge that existing approaches struggle to address without extensive modifications to vanilla NeRF framework. We introduce InsertNeRF, a method for INStilling gEneRalizabiliTy into NeRF. By utilizing multiple plug-and-play HyperNet modules, InsertNeRF dynamically tailors NeRF's weights to specific reference scenes, transforming multi-scale sampling-aware features into scene-specific representations. This novel design allows for more accurate and efficient representations of complex appearances and geometries. Experiments show that this method not only achieves superior generalization performance but also provides a flexible pathway for integration with other NeRF-like systems, even in sparse input settings. Code will be available https://github.com/bbbbby-99/InsertNeRF.

cs.CV↗

CasIL: Cognizing and Imitating Skills via a Dual Cognition-Action Architecture

Enabling robots to effectively imitate expert skills in longhorizon tasks such as locomotion, manipulation, and more, poses a long-standing challenge. Existing imitation learning (IL) approaches for robots still grapple with sub-optimal performance in complex tasks. In this paper, we consider how this challenge can be addressed within the human cognitive priors. Heuristically, we extend the usual notion of action to a dual Cognition (high-level)-Action (low-level) architecture by introducing intuitive human cognitive priors, and propose a novel skill IL framework through human-robot interaction, called Cognition-Action-based Skill Imitation Learning (CasIL), for the robotic agent to effectively cognize and imitate the critical skills from raw visual demonstrations. CasIL enables both cognition and action imitation, while high-level skill cognition explicitly guides low-level primitive actions, providing robustness and reliability to the entire skill IL process. We evaluated our method on MuJoCo and RLBench benchmarks, as well as on the obstacle avoidance and point-goal navigation tasks for quadrupedal robot locomotion. Experimental results show that our CasIL consistently achieves competitive and robust skill imitation capability compared to other counterparts in a variety of long-horizon robotic tasks.

cs.RO↗

Defensive Few-shot Learning

This paper investigates a new challenging problem called defensive few-shot learning in order to learn a robust few-shot model against adversarial attacks. Simply applying the existing adversarial defense methods to few-shot learning cannot effectively solve this problem. This is because the commonly assumed sample-level distribution consistency between the training and test sets can no longer be met in the few-shot setting. To address this situation, we develop a general defensive few-shot learning (DFSL) framework to answer the following two key questions: (1) how to transfer adversarial defense knowledge from one sample distribution to another? (2) how to narrow the distribution gap between clean and adversarial examples under the few-shot setting? To answer the first question, we propose an episode-based adversarial training mechanism by assuming a task-level distribution consistency to better transfer the adversarial defense knowledge. As for the second question, within each few-shot task, we design two kinds of distribution consistency criteria to narrow the distribution gap between clean and adversarial examples from the feature-wise and prediction-wise perspectives, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively make the existing few-shot models robust against adversarial attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/WenbinLee/DefensiveFSL.git.

cs.CV↗

A Multilayer Framework for Online Metric Learning

Online metric learning has been widely applied in classification and retrieval. It can automatically learn a suitable metric from data by restricting similar instances to be separated from dissimilar instances with a given margin. However, the existing online metric learning algorithms have limited performance in real-world classifications, especially when data distributions are complex. To this end, this paper proposes a multilayer framework for online metric learning to capture the nonlinear similarities among instances. Different from the traditional online metric learning, which can only learn one metric space, the proposed Multi-Layer Online Metric Learning (MLOML) takes an online metric learning algorithm as a metric layer and learns multiple hierarchical metric spaces, where each metric layer follows a nonlinear layers for the complicated data distribution. Moreover, the forward propagation (FP) strategy and backward propagation (BP) strategy are employed to train the hierarchical metric layers. To build a metric layer of the proposed MLOML, a new Mahalanobis-based Online Metric Learning (MOML) algorithm is presented based on the passive-aggressive strategy and one-pass triplet construction strategy. Furthermore, in a progressively and nonlinearly learning way, MLOML has a stronger learning ability than traditional online metric learning in the case of limited available training data. To make the learning process more explainable and theoretically guaranteed, theoretical analysis is provided. The proposed MLOML enjoys several nice properties, indeed learns a metric progressively, and performs better on the benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments with different settings have been conducted to verify these properties of the proposed MLOML.

cs.CV↗

Trip-ROMA: Self-Supervised Learning with Triplets and Random Mappings

Contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, such as MoCo and SimCLR, have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning. They rely on a large number of negative pairs and thus require either large memory banks or large batches. Some recent non-contrastive SSL methods, such as BYOL and SimSiam, attempt to discard negative pairs and have also shown remarkable performance. To avoid collapsed solutions caused by not using negative pairs, these methods require non-trivial asymmetry designs. However, in small data regimes, we can not obtain a sufficient number of negative pairs or effectively avoid the over-fitting problem when negatives are not used at all. To address this situation, we argue that negative pairs are still important but one is generally sufficient for each positive pair. We show that a simple Triplet-based loss (Trip) can achieve surprisingly good performance without requiring large batches or asymmetry designs. Moreover, to alleviate the over-fitting problem in small data regimes and further enhance the effect of Trip, we propose a simple plug-and-play RandOm MApping (ROMA) strategy by randomly mapping samples into other spaces and requiring these randomly projected samples to satisfy the same relationship indicated by the triplets. Integrating the triplet-based loss with random mapping, we obtain the proposed method Trip-ROMA. Extensive experiments, including unsupervised representation learning and unsupervised few-shot learning, have been conducted on ImageNet-1K and seven small datasets. They successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of Trip-ROMA and consistently show that ROMA can further effectively boost other SSL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/WenbinLee/Trip-ROMA.

cs.CV↗

Where and How: Mitigating Confusion in Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Inputs

Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse input} (NeRF-S) have shown great potential in synthesizing novel views with a limited number of observed viewpoints. However, due to the inherent limitations of sparse inputs and the gap between non-adjacent views, rendering results often suffer from over-fitting and foggy surfaces, a phenomenon we refer to as "CONFUSION" during volume rendering. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of this confusion and attribute it to two fundamental questions: "WHERE" and "HOW". To this end, we present a novel learning framework, WaH-NeRF, which effectively mitigates confusion by tackling the following challenges: (i)"WHERE" to Sample? in NeRF-S -- we introduce a Deformable Sampling strategy and a Weight-based Mutual Information Loss to address sample-position confusion arising from the limited number of viewpoints; and (ii) "HOW" to Predict? in NeRF-S -- we propose a Semi-Supervised NeRF learning Paradigm based on pose perturbation and a Pixel-Patch Correspondence Loss to alleviate prediction confusion caused by the disparity between training and testing viewpoints. By integrating our proposed modules and loss functions, WaH-NeRF outperforms previous methods under the NeRF-S setting. Code is available https://github.com/bbbbby-99/WaH-NeRF.

cs.CV↗

Modeling Inter-Class and Intra-Class Constraints in Novel Class Discovery

Novel class discovery (NCD) aims at learning a model that transfers the common knowledge from a class-disjoint labelled dataset to another unlabelled dataset and discovers new classes (clusters) within it. Many methods, as well as elaborate training pipelines and appropriate objectives, have been proposed and considerably boosted performance on NCD tasks. Despite all this, we find that the existing methods do not sufficiently take advantage of the essence of the NCD setting. To this end, in this paper, we propose to model both inter-class and intra-class constraints in NCD based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence (sKLD). Specifically, we propose an inter-class sKLD constraint to effectively exploit the disjoint relationship between labelled and unlabelled classes, enforcing the separability for different classes in the embedding space. In addition, we present an intra-class sKLD constraint to explicitly constrain the intra-relationship between a sample and its augmentations and ensure the stability of the training process at the same time. We conduct extensive experiments on the popular CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks and successfully demonstrate that our method can establish a new state of the art and can achieve significant performance improvements, e.g., 3.5%/3.7% clustering accuracy improvements on CIFAR100-50 dataset split under the task-aware/-agnostic evaluation protocol, over previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/FanZhichen/NCD-IIC.

cs.CV↗

A Unified Framework for Contrastive Learning from a Perspective of Affinity Matrix

In recent years, a variety of contrastive learning based unsupervised visual representation learning methods have been designed and achieved great success in many visual tasks. Generally, these methods can be roughly classified into four categories: (1) standard contrastive methods with an InfoNCE like loss, such as MoCo and SimCLR; (2) non-contrastive methods with only positive pairs, such as BYOL and SimSiam; (3) whitening regularization based methods, such as W-MSE and VICReg; and (4) consistency regularization based methods, such as CO2. In this study, we present a new unified contrastive learning representation framework (named UniCLR) suitable for all the above four kinds of methods from a novel perspective of basic affinity matrix. Moreover, three variants, i.e., SimAffinity, SimWhitening and SimTrace, are presented based on UniCLR. In addition, a simple symmetric loss, as a new consistency regularization term, is proposed based on this framework. By symmetrizing the affinity matrix, we can effectively accelerate the convergence of the training process. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show that (1) the proposed UniCLR framework can achieve superior results on par with and even be better than the state of the art, (2) the proposed symmetric loss can significantly accelerate the convergence of models, and (3) SimTrace can avoid the mode collapse problem by maximizing the trace of a whitened affinity matrix without relying on asymmetry designs or stop-gradients.

cs.CV↗

LibFewShot: A Comprehensive Library for Few-shot Learning

Few-shot learning, especially few-shot image classification, has received increasing attention and witnessed significant advances in recent years. Some recent studies implicitly show that many generic techniques or ``tricks'', such as data augmentation, pre-training, knowledge distillation, and self-supervision, may greatly boost the performance of a few-shot learning method. Moreover, different works may employ different software platforms, backbone architectures and input image sizes, making fair comparisons difficult and practitioners struggle with reproducibility. To address these situations, we propose a comprehensive library for few-shot learning (LibFewShot) by re-implementing eighteen state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods in a unified framework with the same single codebase in PyTorch. Furthermore, based on LibFewShot, we provide comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks with various backbone architectures to evaluate common pitfalls and effects of different training tricks. In addition, with respect to the recent doubts on the necessity of meta- or episodic-training mechanism, our evaluation results confirm that such a mechanism is still necessary especially when combined with pre-training. We hope our work can not only lower the barriers for beginners to enter the area of few-shot learning but also elucidate the effects of nontrivial tricks to facilitate intrinsic research on few-shot learning. The source code is available from https://github.com/RL-VIG/LibFewShot.

cs.CV↗