arXiv subjects

Kowshik Thopalli

Publications and source records attributed to Kowshik Thopalli.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Domain Alignment Meets Fully Test-Time Adaptation

A foundational requirement of a deployed ML model is to generalize to data drawn from a testing distribution that is different from training. A popular solution to this problem is to adapt a pre-trained model to novel domains using only unlabeled data. In this paper, we focus on a challenging variant of this problem, where access to the original source data is restricted. While fully test-time adaptation (FTTA) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) are closely related, the advances in UDA are not readily applicable to TTA, since most UDA methods require access to the source data. Hence, we propose a new approach, CATTAn, that bridges UDA and FTTA, by relaxing the need to access entire source data, through a novel deep subspace alignment strategy. With a minimal overhead of storing the subspace basis set for the source data, CATTAn enables unsupervised alignment between source and target data during adaptation. Through extensive experimental evaluation on multiple 2D and 3D vision benchmarks (ImageNet-C, Office-31, OfficeHome, DomainNet, PointDA-10) and model architectures, we demonstrate significant gains in FTTA performance. Furthermore, we make a number of crucial findings on the utility of the alignment objective even with inherently robust models, pre-trained ViT representations and under low sample availability in the target domain.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Revisiting Deep Subspace Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer and adapt knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Traditionally, subspace-based methods form an important class of solutions to this problem. Despite their mathematical elegance and tractability, these methods are often found to be ineffective at producing domain-invariant features with complex, real-world datasets. Motivated by the recent advances in representation learning with deep networks, this paper revisits the use of subspace alignment for UDA and proposes a novel adaptation algorithm that consistently leads to improved generalization. In contrast to existing adversarial training-based DA methods, our approach isolates feature learning and distribution alignment steps, and utilizes a primary-auxiliary optimization strategy to effectively balance the objectives of domain invariance and model fidelity. While providing a significant reduction in target data and computational requirements, our subspace-based DA performs competitively and sometimes even outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several standard UDA benchmarks. Furthermore, subspace alignment leads to intrinsically well-regularized models that demonstrate strong generalization even in the challenging partial DA setting. Finally, the design of our UDA framework inherently supports progressive adaptation to new target domains at test-time, without requiring retraining of the model from scratch. In summary, powered by powerful feature learners and an effective optimization strategy, we establish subspace-based DA as a highly effective approach for visual recognition.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

MaAST: Map Attention with Semantic Transformersfor Efficient Visual Navigation

Visual navigation for autonomous agents is a core task in the fields of computer vision and robotics. Learning-based methods, such as deep reinforcement learning, have the potential to outperform the classical solutions developed for this task; however, they come at a significantly increased computational load. Through this work, we design a novel approach that focuses on performing better or comparable to the existing learning-based solutions but under a clear time/computational budget. To this end, we propose a method to encode vital scene semantics such as traversable paths, unexplored areas, and observed scene objects -- alongside raw visual streams such as RGB, depth, and semantic segmentation masks -- into a semantically informed, top-down egocentric map representation. Further, to enable the effective use of this information, we introduce a novel 2-D map attention mechanism, based on the successful multi-layer Transformer networks. We conduct experiments on 3-D reconstructed indoor PointGoal visual navigation and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We show that by using our novel attention schema and auxiliary rewards to better utilize scene semantics, we outperform multiple baselines trained with only raw inputs or implicit semantic information while operating with an 80% decrease in the agent's experience.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Calibrate and Prune: Improving Reliability of Lottery Tickets Through Prediction Calibration

The hypothesis that sub-network initializations (lottery) exist within the initializations of over-parameterized networks, which when trained in isolation produce highly generalizable models, has led to crucial insights into network initialization and has enabled efficient inferencing. Supervised models with uncalibrated confidences tend to be overconfident even when making wrong prediction. In this paper, for the first time, we study how explicit confidence calibration in the over-parameterized network impacts the quality of the resulting lottery tickets. More specifically, we incorporate a suite of calibration strategies, ranging from mixup regularization, variance-weighted confidence calibration to the newly proposed likelihood-based calibration and normalized bin assignment strategies. Furthermore, we explore different combinations of architectures and datasets, and make a number of key findings about the role of confidence calibration. Our empirical studies reveal that including calibration mechanisms consistently lead to more effective lottery tickets, in terms of accuracy as well as empirical calibration metrics, even when retrained using data with challenging distribution shifts with respect to the source dataset.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2020

Invenio: Discovering Hidden Relationships Between Tasks/Domains Using Structured Meta Learning

Exploiting known semantic relationships between fine-grained tasks is critical to the success of recent model agnostic approaches. These approaches often rely on meta-optimization to make a model robust to systematic task or domain shifts. However, in practice, the performance of these methods can suffer, when there are no coherent semantic relationships between the tasks (or domains). We present Invenio, a structured meta-learning algorithm to infer semantic similarities between a given set of tasks and to provide insights into the complexity of transferring knowledge between different tasks. In contrast to existing techniques such as Task2Vec and Taskonomy, which measure similarities between pre-trained models, our approach employs a novel self-supervised learning strategy to discover these relationships in the training loop and at the same time utilizes them to update task-specific models in the meta-update step. Using challenging task and domain databases, under few-shot learning settings, we show that Invenio can discover intricate dependencies between tasks or domains, and can provide significant gains over existing approaches in terms of generalization performance. The learned semantic structure between tasks/domains from Invenio is interpretable and can be used to construct meaningful priors for tasks or domains.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

SALT: Subspace Alignment as an Auxiliary Learning Task for Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer and adapt knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Key components of unsupervised domain adaptation include: (a) maximizing performance on the target, and (b) aligning the source and target domains. Traditionally, these tasks have either been considered as separate, or assumed to be implicitly addressed together with high-capacity feature extractors. When considered separately, alignment is usually viewed as a problem of aligning data distributions, either through geometric approaches such as subspace alignment or through distributional alignment such as optimal transport. This paper represents a hybrid approach, where we assume simplified data geometry in the form of subspaces, and consider alignment as an auxiliary task to the primary task of maximizing performance on the source. The alignment is made rather simple by leveraging tractable data geometry in the form of subspaces. We synergistically allow certain parameters derived from the closed-form auxiliary solution, to be affected by gradients from the primary task. The proposed approach represents a unique fusion of geometric and model-based alignment with gradients from a data-driven primary task. Our approach termed SALT, is a simple framework that achieves comparable or sometimes outperforms state-of-the-art on multiple standard benchmarks.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

Multiple Subspace Alignment Improves Domain Adaptation

We present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) method for cross-domain visual recognition. Though subspace methods have found success in DA, their performance is often limited due to the assumption of approximating an entire dataset using a single low-dimensional subspace. Instead, we develop a method to effectively represent the source and target datasets via a collection of low-dimensional subspaces, and subsequently align them by exploiting the natural geometry of the space of subspaces, on the Grassmann manifold. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, using empirical studies on two widely used benchmarks, with state of the art domain adaptation performance

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Perturbation Robust Representations of Topological Persistence Diagrams

Topological methods for data analysis present opportunities for enforcing certain invariances of broad interest in computer vision, including view-point in activity analysis, articulation in shape analysis, and measurement invariance in non-linear dynamical modeling. The increasing success of these methods is attributed to the complementary information that topology provides, as well as availability of tools for computing topological summaries such as persistence diagrams. However, persistence diagrams are multi-sets of points and hence it is not straightforward to fuse them with features used for contemporary machine learning tools like deep-nets. In this paper we present theoretically well-grounded approaches to develop novel perturbation robust topological representations, with the long-term view of making them amenable to fusion with contemporary learning architectures. We term the proposed representation as Perturbed Topological Signatures, which live on a Grassmann manifold and hence can be efficiently used in machine learning pipelines. We explore the use of the proposed descriptor on three applications: 3D shape analysis, view-invariant activity analysis, and non-linear dynamical modeling. We show favorable results in both high-level recognition performance and time-complexity when compared to other baseline methods.

cs.CV↗