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Mingli Song

Publications and source records attributed to Mingli Song.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Evaluation and Improvement of Interpretability for Self-Explainable Part-Prototype Networks

Part-prototype networks (e.g., ProtoPNet, ProtoTree, and ProtoPool) have attracted broad research interest for their intrinsic interpretability and comparable accuracy to non-interpretable counterparts. However, recent works find that the interpretability from prototypes is fragile, due to the semantic gap between the similarities in the feature space and that in the input space. In this work, we strive to address this challenge by making the first attempt to quantitatively and objectively evaluate the interpretability of the part-prototype networks. Specifically, we propose two evaluation metrics, termed as consistency score and stability score, to evaluate the explanation consistency across images and the explanation robustness against perturbations, respectively, both of which are essential for explanations taken into practice. Furthermore, we propose an elaborated part-prototype network with a shallow-deep feature alignment (SDFA) module and a score aggregation (SA) module to improve the interpretability of prototypes. We conduct systematical evaluation experiments and provide substantial discussions to uncover the interpretability of existing part-prototype networks. Experiments on three benchmarks across nine architectures demonstrate that our model achieves significantly superior performance to the state of the art, in both the accuracy and interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/EvalProtoPNet.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

DIVOTrack: A Novel Dataset and Baseline Method for Cross-View Multi-Object Tracking in DIVerse Open Scenes

Cross-view multi-object tracking aims to link objects between frames and camera views with substantial overlaps. Although cross-view multi-object tracking has received increased attention in recent years, existing datasets still have several issues, including 1) missing real-world scenarios, 2) lacking diverse scenes, 3) owning a limited number of tracks, 4) comprising only static cameras, and 5) lacking standard benchmarks, which hinder the investigation and comparison of cross-view tracking methods. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce DIVOTrack: a new cross-view multi-object tracking dataset for DIVerse Open scenes with dense tracking pedestrians in realistic and non-experimental environments. Our DIVOTrack has fifteen distinct scenarios and 953 cross-view tracks, surpassing all cross-view multi-object tracking datasets currently available. Furthermore, we provide a novel baseline cross-view tracking method with a unified joint detection and cross-view tracking framework named CrossMOT, which learns object detection, single-view association, and cross-view matching with an all-in-one embedding model. Finally, we present a summary of current methodologies and a set of standard benchmarks with our DIVOTrack to provide a fair comparison and conduct a comprehensive analysis of current approaches and our proposed CrossMOT. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/shengyuhao/DIVOTrack.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Propheter: Prophetic Teacher Guided Long-Tailed Distribution Learning

The problem of deep long-tailed learning, a prevalent challenge in the realm of generic visual recognition, persists in a multitude of real-world applications. To tackle the heavily-skewed dataset issue in long-tailed classification, prior efforts have sought to augment existing deep models with the elaborate class-balancing strategies, such as class rebalancing, data augmentation, and module improvement. Despite the encouraging performance, the limited class knowledge of the tailed classes in the training dataset still bottlenecks the performance of the existing deep models. In this paper, we propose an innovative long-tailed learning paradigm that breaks the bottleneck by guiding the learning of deep networks with external prior knowledge. This is specifically achieved by devising an elaborated ``prophetic'' teacher, termed as ``Propheter'', that aims to learn the potential class distributions. The target long-tailed prediction model is then optimized under the instruction of the well-trained ``Propheter'', such that the distributions of different classes are as distinguishable as possible from each other. Experiments on eight long-tailed benchmarks across three architectures demonstrate that the proposed prophetic paradigm acts as a promising solution to the challenge of limited class knowledge in long-tailed datasets. The developed code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/tcmyxc/propheter}.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Triple-View Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

To alleviate the expensive human labeling, semi-supervised semantic segmentation employs a few labeled images and an abundant of unlabeled images to predict the pixel-level label map with the same size. Previous methods often adopt co-training using two convolutional networks with the same architecture but different initialization, which fails to capture the sufficiently diverse features. This motivates us to use tri-training and develop the triple-view encoder to utilize the encoders with different architectures to derive diverse features, and exploit the knowledge distillation skill to learn the complementary semantics among these encoders. Moreover, existing methods simply concatenate the features from both encoder and decoder, resulting in redundant features that require large memory cost. This inspires us to devise a dual-frequency decoder that selects those important features by projecting the features from the spatial domain to the frequency domain, where the dual-frequency channel attention mechanism is introduced to model the feature importance. Therefore, we propose a Triple-view Knowledge Distillation framework, termed TriKD, for semi-supervised semantic segmentation, including the triple-view encoder and the dual-frequency decoder. Extensive experiments were conducted on two benchmarks, \ie, Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, whose results verify the superiority of the proposed method with a good tradeoff between precision and inference speed.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

ModelGiF: Gradient Fields for Model Functional Distance

The last decade has witnessed the success of deep learning and the surge of publicly released trained models, which necessitates the quantification of the model functional distance for various purposes. However, quantifying the model functional distance is always challenging due to the opacity in inner workings and the heterogeneity in architectures or tasks. Inspired by the concept of "field" in physics, in this work we introduce Model Gradient Field (abbr. ModelGiF) to extract homogeneous representations from the heterogeneous pre-trained models. Our main assumption underlying ModelGiF is that each pre-trained deep model uniquely determines a ModelGiF over the input space. The distance between models can thus be measured by the similarity between their ModelGiFs. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed ModelGiF with a suite of testbeds, including task relatedness estimation, intellectual property protection, and model unlearning verification. Experimental results demonstrate the versatility of the proposed ModelGiF on these tasks, with significantly superiority performance to state-of-the-art competitors. Codes are available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/modelgif.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Adversarial Erasing with Pruned Elements: Towards Better Graph Lottery Ticket

Graph Lottery Ticket (GLT), a combination of core subgraph and sparse subnetwork, has been proposed to mitigate the computational cost of deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large input graphs while preserving original performance. However, the winning GLTs in exisiting studies are obtained by applying iterative magnitude-based pruning (IMP) without re-evaluating and re-considering the pruned information, which disregards the dynamic changes in the significance of edges/weights during graph/model structure pruning, and thus limits the appeal of the winning tickets. In this paper, we formulate a conjecture, i.e., existing overlooked valuable information in the pruned graph connections and model parameters which can be re-grouped into GLT to enhance the final performance. Specifically, we propose an adversarial complementary erasing (ACE) framework to explore the valuable information from the pruned components, thereby developing a more powerful GLT, referred to as the ACE-GLT. The main idea is to mine valuable information from pruned edges/weights after each round of IMP, and employ the ACE technique to refine the GLT processing. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our ACE-GLT outperforms existing methods for searching GLT in diverse tasks. Our code will be made publicly available.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

An Integrated Visual Analytics System for Studying Clinical Carotid Artery Plaques

Carotid artery plaques can cause arterial vascular diseases such as stroke and myocardial infarction, posing a severe threat to human life. However, the current clinical examination mainly relies on a direct assessment by physicians of patients' clinical indicators and medical images, lacking an integrated visualization tool for analyzing the influencing factors and composition of carotid artery plaques. We have designed an intelligent carotid artery plaque visual analysis system for vascular surgery experts to comprehensively analyze the clinical physiological and imaging indicators of carotid artery diseases. The system mainly includes two functions: First, it displays the correlation between carotid artery plaque and various factors through a series of information visualization methods and integrates the analysis of patient physiological indicator data. Second, it enhances the interface guidance analysis of the inherent correlation between the components of carotid artery plaque through machine learning and displays the spatial distribution of the plaque on medical images. Additionally, we conducted two case studies on carotid artery plaques using real data obtained from a hospital, and the results indicate that our designed carotid analysis system can effectively provide clinical diagnosis and treatment guidance for vascular surgeons.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Graph Neural Networks-based Hybrid Framework For Predicting Particle Crushing Strength

Graph Neural Networks have emerged as an effective machine learning tool for multi-disciplinary tasks such as pharmaceutical molecule classification and chemical reaction prediction, because they can model non-euclidean relationships between different entities. Particle crushing, as a significant field of civil engineering, describes the breakage of granular materials caused by the breakage of particle fragment bonds under the modeling of numerical simulations, which motivates us to characterize the mechanical behaviors of particle crushing through the connectivity of particle fragments with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, there lacks an open-source large-scale particle crushing dataset for research due to the expensive costs of laboratory tests or numerical simulations. Therefore, we firstly generate a dataset with 45,000 numerical simulations and 900 particle types to facilitate the research progress of machine learning for particle crushing. Secondly, we devise a hybrid framework based on GNNs to predict particle crushing strength in a particle fragment view with the advances of state of the art GNNs. Finally, we compare our hybrid framework against traditional machine learning methods and the plain MLP to verify its effectiveness. The usefulness of different features is further discussed through the gradient attribution explanation w.r.t the predictions. Our data and code are released at https://github.com/doujiang-zheng/GNN-For-Particle-Crushing.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Schema Inference for Interpretable Image Classification

In this paper, we study a novel inference paradigm, termed as schema inference, that learns to deductively infer the explainable predictions by rebuilding the prior deep neural network (DNN) forwarding scheme, guided by the prevalent philosophical cognitive concept of schema. We strive to reformulate the conventional model inference pipeline into a graph matching policy that associates the extracted visual concepts of an image with the pre-computed scene impression, by analogy with human reasoning mechanism via impression matching. To this end, we devise an elaborated architecture, termed as SchemaNet, as a dedicated instantiation of the proposed schema inference concept, that models both the visual semantics of input instances and the learned abstract imaginations of target categories as topological relational graphs. Meanwhile, to capture and leverage the compositional contributions of visual semantics in a global view, we also introduce a universal Feat2Graph scheme in SchemaNet to establish the relational graphs that contain abundant interaction information. Both the theoretical analysis and the experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed schema inference achieves encouraging performance and meanwhile yields a clear picture of the deductive process leading to the predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhfeing/SchemaNet-PyTorch.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision

Deep learning has the potential to revolutionize sports performance, with applications ranging from perception and comprehension to decision. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning in sports performance, focusing on three main aspects: algorithms, datasets and virtual environments, and challenges. Firstly, we discuss the hierarchical structure of deep learning algorithms in sports performance which includes perception, comprehension and decision while comparing their strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, we list widely used existing datasets in sports and highlight their characteristics and limitations. Finally, we summarize current challenges and point out future trends of deep learning in sports. Our survey provides valuable reference material for researchers interested in deep learning in sports applications.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Curricular Subgoals for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior, existing IRL methods mainly focus on learning global reward functions to minimize the trajectory difference between the imitator and the expert. However, these global designs are still limited by the redundant noise and error propagation problems, leading to the unsuitable reward assignment and thus downgrading the agent capability in complex multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Curricular Subgoal-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CSIRL) framework, that explicitly disentangles one task with several local subgoals to guide agent imitation. Specifically, CSIRL firstly introduces decision uncertainty of the trained agent over expert trajectories to dynamically select subgoals, which directly determines the exploration boundary of different task stages. To further acquire local reward functions for each stage, we customize a meta-imitation objective based on these curricular subgoals to train an intrinsic reward generator. Experiments on the D4RL and autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed methods yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts, as well as better interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/Plankson/CSIRL.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Improving Expressivity of GNNs with Subgraph-specific Factor Embedded Normalization

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful category of learning architecture for handling graph-structured data. However, existing GNNs typically ignore crucial structural characteristics in node-induced subgraphs, which thus limits their expressiveness for various downstream tasks. In this paper, we strive to strengthen the representative capabilities of GNNs by devising a dedicated plug-and-play normalization scheme, termed as SUbgraph-sPEcific FactoR Embedded Normalization (SuperNorm), that explicitly considers the intra-connection information within each node-induced subgraph. To this end, we embed the subgraph-specific factor at the beginning and the end of the standard BatchNorm, as well as incorporate graph instance-specific statistics for improved distinguishable capabilities. In the meantime, we provide theoretical analysis to support that, with the elaborated SuperNorm, an arbitrary GNN is at least as powerful as the 1-WL test in distinguishing non-isomorphism graphs. Furthermore, the proposed SuperNorm scheme is also demonstrated to alleviate the over-smoothing phenomenon. Experimental results related to predictions of graph, node, and link properties on the eight popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchkx/SuperNorm.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Message-passing selection: Towards interpretable GNNs for graph classification

In this paper, we strive to develop an interpretable GNNs' inference paradigm, termed MSInterpreter, which can serve as a plug-and-play scheme readily applicable to various GNNs' baselines. Unlike the most existing explanation methods, MSInterpreter provides a Message-passing Selection scheme(MSScheme) to select the critical paths for GNNs' message aggregations, which aims at reaching the self-explaination instead of post-hoc explanations. In detail, the elaborate MSScheme is designed to calculate weight factors of message aggregation paths by considering the vanilla structure and node embedding components, where the structure base aims at weight factors among node-induced substructures; on the other hand, the node embedding base focuses on weight factors via node embeddings obtained by one-layer GNN.Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on graph classification benchmarks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Improved Projection-free Online Continuous Submodular Maximization

We investigate the problem of online learning with monotone and continuous DR-submodular reward functions, which has received great attention recently. To efficiently handle this problem, especially in the case with complicated decision sets, previous studies have proposed an efficient projection-free algorithm called Mono-Frank-Wolfe (Mono-FW) using $O(T)$ gradient evaluations and linear optimization steps in total. However, it only attains a $(1-1/e)$-regret bound of $O(T^{4/5})$. In this paper, we propose an improved projection-free algorithm, namely POBGA, which reduces the regret bound to $O(T^{3/4})$ while keeping the same computational complexity as Mono-FW. Instead of modifying Mono-FW, our key idea is to make a novel combination of a projection-based algorithm called online boosting gradient ascent, an infeasible projection technique, and a blocking technique. Furthermore, we consider the decentralized setting and develop a variant of POBGA, which not only reduces the current best regret bound of efficient projection-free algorithms for this setting from $O(T^{4/5})$ to $O(T^{3/4})$, but also reduces the total communication complexity from $O(T)$ to $O(\sqrt{T})$.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

ViT-Calibrator: Decision Stream Calibration for Vision Transformer

A surge of interest has emerged in utilizing Transformers in diverse vision tasks owing to its formidable performance. However, existing approaches primarily focus on optimizing internal model architecture designs that often entail significant trial and error with high burdens. In this work, we propose a new paradigm dubbed Decision Stream Calibration that boosts the performance of general Vision Transformers. To achieve this, we shed light on the information propagation mechanism in the learning procedure by exploring the correlation between different tokens and the relevance coefficient of multiple dimensions. Upon further analysis, it was discovered that 1) the final decision is associated with tokens of foreground targets, while token features of foreground target will be transmitted into the next layer as much as possible, and the useless token features of background area will be eliminated gradually in the forward propagation. 2) Each category is solely associated with specific sparse dimensions in the tokens. Based on the discoveries mentioned above, we designed a two-stage calibration scheme, namely ViT-Calibrator, including token propagation calibration stage and dimension propagation calibration stage. Extensive experiments on commonly used datasets show that the proposed approach can achieve promising results. The source codes are given in the supplements.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Temporal Aggregation and Propagation Graph Neural Networks for Dynamic Representation

Temporal graphs exhibit dynamic interactions between nodes over continuous time, whose topologies evolve with time elapsing. The whole temporal neighborhood of nodes reveals the varying preferences of nodes. However, previous works usually generate dynamic representation with limited neighbors for simplicity, which results in both inferior performance and high latency of online inference. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel method of temporal graph convolution with the whole neighborhood, namely Temporal Aggregation and Propagation Graph Neural Networks (TAP-GNN). Specifically, we firstly analyze the computational complexity of the dynamic representation problem by unfolding the temporal graph in a message-passing paradigm. The expensive complexity motivates us to design the AP (aggregation and propagation) block, which significantly reduces the repeated computation of historical neighbors. The final TAP-GNN supports online inference in the graph stream scenario, which incorporates the temporal information into node embeddings with a temporal activation function and a projection layer besides several AP blocks. Experimental results on various real-life temporal networks show that our proposed TAP-GNN outperforms existing temporal graph methods by a large margin in terms of both predictive performance and online inference latency. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/doujiang-zheng/TAP-GNN}.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Transition Propagation Graph Neural Networks for Temporal Networks

Researchers of temporal networks (e.g., social networks and transaction networks) have been interested in mining dynamic patterns of nodes from their diverse interactions. Inspired by recently powerful graph mining methods like skip-gram models and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), existing approaches focus on generating temporal node embeddings sequentially with nodes' sequential interactions. However, the sequential modeling of previous approaches cannot handle the transition structure between nodes' neighbors with limited memorization capacity. Detailedly, an effective method for the transition structures is required to both model nodes' personalized patterns adaptively and capture node dynamics accordingly. In this paper, we propose a method, namely Transition Propagation Graph Neural Networks (TIP-GNN), to tackle the challenges of encoding nodes' transition structures. The proposed TIP-GNN focuses on the bilevel graph structure in temporal networks: besides the explicit interaction graph, a node's sequential interactions can also be constructed as a transition graph. Based on the bilevel graph, TIP-GNN further encodes transition structures by multi-step transition propagation and distills information from neighborhoods by a bilevel graph convolution. Experimental results over various temporal networks reveal the efficiency of our TIP-GNN, with at most 7.2\% improvements of accuracy on temporal link prediction. Extensive ablation studies further verify the effectiveness and limitations of the transition propagation module. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/doujiang-zheng/TIP-GNN}.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Life Regression based Patch Slimming for Vision Transformers

Vision transformers have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks by using multi-head self-attention modules to capture long-range dependencies within images. However, the high inference computation cost poses a new challenge. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, mainly by slimming patches. In the inference stage, these methods classify patches into two classes, one to keep and the other to discard in multiple layers. This approach results in additional computation at every layer where patches are discarded, which hinders inference acceleration. In this study, we tackle the patch slimming problem from a different perspective by proposing a life regression module that determines the lifespan of each image patch in one go. During inference, the patch is discarded once the current layer index exceeds its life. Our proposed method avoids additional computation and parameters in multiple layers to enhance inference speed while maintaining competitive performance. Additionally, our approach requires fewer training epochs than other patch slimming methods.

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