arXiv subjects

Lu Yuan

Publications and source records attributed to Lu Yuan.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions

The complex nature of combining localization and classification in object detection has resulted in the flourished development of methods. Previous works tried to improve the performance in various object detection heads but failed to present a unified view. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic head framework to unify object detection heads with attentions. By coherently combining multiple self-attention mechanisms between feature levels for scale-awareness, among spatial locations for spatial-awareness, and within output channels for task-awareness, the proposed approach significantly improves the representation ability of object detection heads without any computational overhead. Further experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed dynamic head on the COCO benchmark. With a standard ResNeXt-101-DCN backbone, we largely improve the performance over popular object detectors and achieve a new state-of-the-art at 54.0 AP. Furthermore, with latest transformer backbone and extra data, we can push current best COCO result to a new record at 60.6 AP. The code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/DynamicHead.

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arXiv2021

Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding

This paper presents a new Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture Multi-Scale Vision Longformer, which significantly enhances the ViT of \cite{dosovitskiy2020image} for encoding high-resolution images using two techniques. The first is the multi-scale model structure, which provides image encodings at multiple scales with manageable computational cost. The second is the attention mechanism of vision Longformer, which is a variant of Longformer \cite{beltagy2020longformer}, originally developed for natural language processing, and achieves a linear complexity w.r.t. the number of input tokens. A comprehensive empirical study shows that the new ViT significantly outperforms several strong baselines, including the existing ViT models and their ResNet counterparts, and the Pyramid Vision Transformer from a concurrent work \cite{wang2021pyramid}, on a range of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation. The models and source code are released at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/vision-longformer}.

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arXiv2021

Efficient Semantic Image Synthesis via Class-Adaptive Normalization

Spatially-adaptive normalization (SPADE) is remarkably successful recently in conditional semantic image synthesis \cite{park2019semantic}, which modulates the normalized activation with spatially-varying transformations learned from semantic layouts, to prevent the semantic information from being washed away. Despite its impressive performance, a more thorough understanding of the advantages inside the box is still highly demanded to help reduce the significant computation and parameter overhead introduced by this novel structure. In this paper, from a return-on-investment point of view, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of this spatially-adaptive normalization and observe that its modulation parameters benefit more from semantic-awareness rather than spatial-adaptiveness, especially for high-resolution input masks. Inspired by this observation, we propose class-adaptive normalization (CLADE), a lightweight but equally-effective variant that is only adaptive to semantic class. In order to further improve spatial-adaptiveness, we introduce intra-class positional map encoding calculated from semantic layouts to modulate the normalization parameters of CLADE and propose a truly spatially-adaptive variant of CLADE, namely CLADE-ICPE.Through extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed CLADE can be generalized to different SPADE-based methods while achieving comparable generation quality compared to SPADE, but it is much more efficient with fewer extra parameters and lower computational cost. The code and pretrained models are available at \url{https://github.com/tzt101/CLADE.git}.

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arXiv2021

Unsupervised Pre-training for Person Re-identification

In this paper, we present a large scale unlabeled person re-identification (Re-ID) dataset "LUPerson" and make the first attempt of performing unsupervised pre-training for improving the generalization ability of the learned person Re-ID feature representation. This is to address the problem that all existing person Re-ID datasets are all of limited scale due to the costly effort required for data annotation. Previous research tries to leverage models pre-trained on ImageNet to mitigate the shortage of person Re-ID data but suffers from the large domain gap between ImageNet and person Re-ID data. LUPerson is an unlabeled dataset of 4M images of over 200K identities, which is 30X larger than the largest existing Re-ID dataset. It also covers a much diverse range of capturing environments (eg, camera settings, scenes, etc.). Based on this dataset, we systematically study the key factors for learning Re-ID features from two perspectives: data augmentation and contrastive loss. Unsupervised pre-training performed on this large-scale dataset effectively leads to a generic Re-ID feature that can benefit all existing person Re-ID methods. Using our pre-trained model in some basic frameworks, our methods achieve state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles on four widely used Re-ID datasets: CUHK03, Market1501, DukeMTMC, and MSMT17. Our results also show that the performance improvement is more significant on small-scale target datasets or under few-shot setting.

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arXiv2021

Lite-HRNet: A Lightweight High-Resolution Network

We present an efficient high-resolution network, Lite-HRNet, for human pose estimation. We start by simply applying the efficient shuffle block in ShuffleNet to HRNet (high-resolution network), yielding stronger performance over popular lightweight networks, such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and Small HRNet. We find that the heavily-used pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks become the computational bottleneck. We introduce a lightweight unit, conditional channel weighting, to replace costly pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks. The complexity of channel weighting is linear w.r.t the number of channels and lower than the quadratic time complexity for pointwise convolutions. Our solution learns the weights from all the channels and over multiple resolutions that are readily available in the parallel branches in HRNet. It uses the weights as the bridge to exchange information across channels and resolutions, compensating the role played by the pointwise (1x1) convolution. Lite-HRNet demonstrates superior results on human pose estimation over popular lightweight networks. Moreover, Lite-HRNet can be easily applied to semantic segmentation task in the same lightweight manner. The code and models have been publicly available at https://github.com/HRNet/Lite-HRNet.

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arXiv2021

CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers

We present in this paper a new architecture, named Convolutional vision Transformer (CvT), that improves Vision Transformer (ViT) in performance and efficiency by introducing convolutions into ViT to yield the best of both designs. This is accomplished through two primary modifications: a hierarchy of Transformers containing a new convolutional token embedding, and a convolutional Transformer block leveraging a convolutional projection. These changes introduce desirable properties of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the ViT architecture (\ie shift, scale, and distortion invariance) while maintaining the merits of Transformers (\ie dynamic attention, global context, and better generalization). We validate CvT by conducting extensive experiments, showing that this approach achieves state-of-the-art performance over other Vision Transformers and ResNets on ImageNet-1k, with fewer parameters and lower FLOPs. In addition, performance gains are maintained when pretrained on larger datasets (\eg ImageNet-22k) and fine-tuned to downstream tasks. Pre-trained on ImageNet-22k, our CvT-W24 obtains a top-1 accuracy of 87.7\% on the ImageNet-1k val set. Finally, our results show that the positional encoding, a crucial component in existing Vision Transformers, can be safely removed in our model, simplifying the design for higher resolution vision tasks. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/leoxiaobin/CvT}.

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arXiv2021

Dynamic Transfer for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

Recent works of multi-source domain adaptation focus on learning a domain-agnostic model, of which the parameters are static. However, such a static model is difficult to handle conflicts across multiple domains, and suffers from a performance degradation in both source domains and target domain. In this paper, we present dynamic transfer to address domain conflicts, where the model parameters are adapted to samples. The key insight is that adapting model across domains is achieved via adapting model across samples. Thus, it breaks down source domain barriers and turns multi-source domains into a single-source domain. This also simplifies the alignment between source and target domains, as it only requires the target domain to be aligned with any part of the union of source domains. Furthermore, we find dynamic transfer can be simply modeled by aggregating residual matrices and a static convolution matrix. Experimental results show that, without using domain labels, our dynamic transfer outperforms the state-of-the-art method by more than 3% on the large multi-source domain adaptation datasets -- DomainNet. Source code is at https://github.com/liyunsheng13/DRT.

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arXiv2021

Revisiting Dynamic Convolution via Matrix Decomposition

Recent research in dynamic convolution shows substantial performance boost for efficient CNNs, due to the adaptive aggregation of K static convolution kernels. It has two limitations: (a) it increases the number of convolutional weights by K-times, and (b) the joint optimization of dynamic attention and static convolution kernels is challenging. In this paper, we revisit it from a new perspective of matrix decomposition and reveal the key issue is that dynamic convolution applies dynamic attention over channel groups after projecting into a higher dimensional latent space. To address this issue, we propose dynamic channel fusion to replace dynamic attention over channel groups. Dynamic channel fusion not only enables significant dimension reduction of the latent space, but also mitigates the joint optimization difficulty. As a result, our method is easier to train and requires significantly fewer parameters without sacrificing accuracy. Source code is at https://github.com/liyunsheng13/dcd.

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arXiv2020

Are Fewer Labels Possible for Few-shot Learning?

Few-shot learning is challenging due to its very limited data and labels. Recent studies in big transfer (BiT) show that few-shot learning can greatly benefit from pretraining on large scale labeled dataset in a different domain. This paper asks a more challenging question: "can we use as few as possible labels for few-shot learning in both pretraining (with no labels) and fine-tuning (with fewer labels)?". Our key insight is that the clustering of target samples in the feature space is all we need for few-shot finetuning. It explains why the vanilla unsupervised pretraining (poor clustering) is worse than the supervised one. In this paper, we propose transductive unsupervised pretraining that achieves a better clustering by involving target data even though its amount is very limited. The improved clustering result is of great value for identifying the most representative samples ("eigen-samples") for users to label, and in return, continued finetuning with the labeled eigen-samples further improves the clustering. Thus, we propose eigen-finetuning to enable fewer shot learning by leveraging the co-evolution of clustering and eigen-samples in the finetuning. We conduct experiments on 10 different few-shot target datasets, and our average few-shot performance outperforms both vanilla inductive unsupervised transfer and supervised transfer by a large margin. For instance, when each target category only has 10 labeled samples, the mean accuracy gain over the above two baselines is 9.2% and 3.42 respectively.

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arXiv2020

MicroNet: Towards Image Recognition with Extremely Low FLOPs

In this paper, we present MicroNet, which is an efficient convolutional neural network using extremely low computational cost (e.g. 6 MFLOPs on ImageNet classification). Such a low cost network is highly desired on edge devices, yet usually suffers from a significant performance degradation. We handle the extremely low FLOPs based upon two design principles: (a) avoiding the reduction of network width by lowering the node connectivity, and (b) compensating for the reduction of network depth by introducing more complex non-linearity per layer. Firstly, we propose Micro-Factorized convolution to factorize both pointwise and depthwise convolutions into low rank matrices for a good tradeoff between the number of channels and input/output connectivity. Secondly, we propose a new activation function, named Dynamic Shift-Max, to improve the non-linearity via maxing out multiple dynamic fusions between an input feature map and its circular channel shift. The fusions are dynamic as their parameters are adapted to the input. Building upon Micro-Factorized convolution and dynamic Shift-Max, a family of MicroNets achieve a significant performance gain over the state-of-the-art in the low FLOP regime. For instance, MicroNet-M1 achieves 61.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification with 12 MFLOPs, outperforming MobileNetV3 by 11.3%.

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arXiv2020

MichiGAN: Multi-Input-Conditioned Hair Image Generation for Portrait Editing

Despite the recent success of face image generation with GANs, conditional hair editing remains challenging due to the under-explored complexity of its geometry and appearance. In this paper, we present MichiGAN (Multi-Input-Conditioned Hair Image GAN), a novel conditional image generation method for interactive portrait hair manipulation. To provide user control over every major hair visual factor, we explicitly disentangle hair into four orthogonal attributes, including shape, structure, appearance, and background. For each of them, we design a corresponding condition module to represent, process, and convert user inputs, and modulate the image generation pipeline in ways that respect the natures of different visual attributes. All these condition modules are integrated with the backbone generator to form the final end-to-end network, which allows fully-conditioned hair generation from multiple user inputs. Upon it, we also build an interactive portrait hair editing system that enables straightforward manipulation of hair by projecting intuitive and high-level user inputs such as painted masks, guiding strokes, or reference photos to well-defined condition representations. Through extensive experiments and evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of our method regarding both result quality and user controllability. The code is available at https://github.com/tzt101/MichiGAN.

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arXiv2020

GreedyFool: Distortion-Aware Sparse Adversarial Attack

Modern deep neural networks(DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial samples. Sparse adversarial samples are a special branch of adversarial samples that can fool the target model by only perturbing a few pixels. The existence of the sparse adversarial attack points out that DNNs are much more vulnerable than people believed, which is also a new aspect for analyzing DNNs. However, current sparse adversarial attack methods still have some shortcomings on both sparsity and invisibility. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage distortion-aware greedy-based method dubbed as "GreedyFool". Specifically, it first selects the most effective candidate positions to modify by considering both the gradient(for adversary) and the distortion map(for invisibility), then drops some less important points in the reduce stage. Experiments demonstrate that compared with the start-of-the-art method, we only need to modify $3\times$ fewer pixels under the same sparse perturbation setting. For target attack, the success rate of our method is 9.96\% higher than the start-of-the-art method under the same pixel budget. Code can be found at https://github.com/LightDXY/GreedyFool.

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arXiv2020

Dynamic ReLU

Rectified linear units (ReLU) are commonly used in deep neural networks. So far ReLU and its generalizations (non-parametric or parametric) are static, performing identically for all input samples. In this paper, we propose dynamic ReLU (DY-ReLU), a dynamic rectifier of which parameters are generated by a hyper function over all in-put elements. The key insight is that DY-ReLU encodes the global context into the hyper function, and adapts the piecewise linear activation function accordingly. Compared to its static counterpart, DY-ReLU has negligible extra computational cost, but significantly more representation capability, especially for light-weight neural networks. By simply using DY-ReLU for MobileNetV2, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification is boosted from 72.0% to 76.2% with only 5% additional FLOPs.

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arXiv2020

Smart, Adaptive Energy Optimization for Mobile Web Interactions

Web technology underpins many interactive mobile applications. However, energy-efficient mobile web interactions is an outstanding challenge. Given the increasing diversity and complexity of mobile hardware, any practical optimization scheme must work for a wide range of users, mobile platforms and web workloads. This paper presents CAMEL , a novel energy optimization system for mobile web interactions. CAMEL leverages machine learning techniques to develop a smart, adaptive scheme to judiciously trade performance for reduced power consumption. Unlike prior work, C AMEL directly models how a given web content affects the user expectation and uses this to guide energy optimization. It goes further by employing transfer learning and conformal predictions to tune a previously learned model in the end-user environment and improve it over time. We apply CAMEL to Chromium and evaluate it on four distinct mobile systems involving 1,000 testing webpages and 30 users. Compared to four state-of-the-art web-event optimizers, CAMEL delivers 22% more energy savings, but with 49% fewer violations on the quality of user experience, and exhibits orders of magnitudes less overhead when targeting a new computing environment.

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arXiv2020

LSM: Learning Subspace Minimization for Low-level Vision

We study the energy minimization problem in low-level vision tasks from a novel perspective. We replace the heuristic regularization term with a learnable subspace constraint, and preserve the data term to exploit domain knowledge derived from the first principle of a task. This learning subspace minimization (LSM) framework unifies the network structures and the parameters for many low-level vision tasks, which allows us to train a single network for multiple tasks simultaneously with completely shared parameters, and even generalizes the trained network to an unseen task as long as its data term can be formulated. We demonstrate our LSM framework on four low-level tasks including interactive image segmentation, video segmentation, stereo matching, and optical flow, and validate the network on various datasets. The experiments show that the proposed LSM generates state-of-the-art results with smaller model size, faster training convergence, and real-time inference.

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arXiv2020

Cross-domain Correspondence Learning for Exemplar-based Image Translation

We present a general framework for exemplar-based image translation, which synthesizes a photo-realistic image from the input in a distinct domain (e.g., semantic segmentation mask, or edge map, or pose keypoints), given an exemplar image. The output has the style (e.g., color, texture) in consistency with the semantically corresponding objects in the exemplar. We propose to jointly learn the crossdomain correspondence and the image translation, where both tasks facilitate each other and thus can be learned with weak supervision. The images from distinct domains are first aligned to an intermediate domain where dense correspondence is established. Then, the network synthesizes images based on the appearance of semantically corresponding patches in the exemplar. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in several image translation tasks. Our method is superior to state-of-the-art methods in terms of image quality significantly, with the image style faithful to the exemplar with semantic consistency. Moreover, we show the utility of our method for several applications

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arXiv2020

Rethinking Spatially-Adaptive Normalization

Spatially-adaptive normalization is remarkably successful recently in conditional semantic image synthesis, which modulates the normalized activation with spatially-varying transformations learned from semantic layouts, to preserve the semantic information from being washed away. Despite its impressive performance, a more thorough understanding of the true advantages inside the box is still highly demanded, to help reduce the significant computation and parameter overheads introduced by these new structures. In this paper, from a return-on-investment point of view, we present a deep analysis of the effectiveness of SPADE and observe that its advantages actually come mainly from its semantic-awareness rather than the spatial-adaptiveness. Inspired by this point, we propose class-adaptive normalization (CLADE), a lightweight variant that is not adaptive to spatial positions or layouts. Benefited from this design, CLADE greatly reduces the computation cost while still being able to preserve the semantic information during the generation. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets demonstrate that while the resulting fidelity is on par with SPADE, its overhead is much cheaper than SPADE. Take the generator for ADE20k dataset as an example, the extra parameter and computation cost introduced by CLADE are only 4.57% and 0.07% while that of SPADE are 39.21% and 234.73% respectively.

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arXiv2020

Rethinking Classification and Localization for Object Detection

Two head structures (i.e. fully connected head and convolution head) have been widely used in R-CNN based detectors for classification and localization tasks. However, there is a lack of understanding of how does these two head structures work for these two tasks. To address this issue, we perform a thorough analysis and find an interesting fact that the two head structures have opposite preferences towards the two tasks. Specifically, the fully connected head (fc-head) is more suitable for the classification task, while the convolution head (conv-head) is more suitable for the localization task. Furthermore, we examine the output feature maps of both heads and find that fc-head has more spatial sensitivity than conv-head. Thus, fc-head has more capability to distinguish a complete object from part of an object, but is not robust to regress the whole object. Based upon these findings, we propose a Double-Head method, which has a fully connected head focusing on classification and a convolution head for bounding box regression. Without bells and whistles, our method gains +3.5 and +2.8 AP on MS COCO dataset from Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) baselines with ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 backbones, respectively.

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