arXiv subjects

Tiejun Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Tiejun Huang.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

HUB: Guiding Learned Optimizers with Continuous Prompt Tuning

Learned optimizers are a crucial component of meta-learning. Recent advancements in scalable learned optimizers have demonstrated their superior performance over hand-designed optimizers in various tasks. However, certain characteristics of these models, such as an unstable learning curve, limited ability to handle unseen tasks and network architectures, difficult-to-control behaviours, and poor performance in fine-tuning tasks impede their widespread adoption. To tackle the issue of generalization in scalable learned optimizers, we propose a hybrid-update-based (HUB) optimization strategy inspired by recent advancements in hard prompt tuning and result selection techniques used in large language and vision models. This approach can be easily applied to any task that involves hand-designed or learned optimizer. By incorporating hand-designed optimizers as the second component in our hybrid approach, we are able to retain the benefits of learned optimizers while stabilizing the training process and, more importantly, improving testing performance. We validate our design through a total of 17 tasks, consisting of thirteen training from scratch and four fine-tuning settings. These tasks vary in model sizes, architectures, or dataset sizes, and the competing optimizers are hyperparameter-tuned. We outperform all competitors in 94% of the tasks with better testing performance. Furthermore, we conduct a theoretical analysis to examine the potential impact of our hybrid strategy on the behaviours and inherited traits of learned optimizers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context

We present SegGPT, a generalist model for segmenting everything in context. We unify various segmentation tasks into a generalist in-context learning framework that accommodates different kinds of segmentation data by transforming them into the same format of images. The training of SegGPT is formulated as an in-context coloring problem with random color mapping for each data sample. The objective is to accomplish diverse tasks according to the context, rather than relying on specific colors. After training, SegGPT can perform arbitrary segmentation tasks in images or videos via in-context inference, such as object instance, stuff, part, contour, and text. SegGPT is evaluated on a broad range of tasks, including few-shot semantic segmentation, video object segmentation, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation. Our results show strong capabilities in segmenting in-domain and out-of-domain targets, either qualitatively or quantitatively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning

In-context learning, as a new paradigm in NLP, allows the model to rapidly adapt to various tasks with only a handful of prompts and examples. But in computer vision, the difficulties for in-context learning lie in that tasks vary significantly in the output representations, thus it is unclear how to define the general-purpose task prompts that the vision model can understand and transfer to out-of-domain tasks. In this work, we present Painter, a generalist model which addresses these obstacles with an "image"-centric solution, that is, to redefine the output of core vision tasks as images, and specify task prompts as also images. With this idea, our training process is extremely simple, which performs standard masked image modeling on the stitch of input and output image pairs. This makes the model capable of performing tasks conditioned on visible image patches. Thus, during inference, we can adopt a pair of input and output images from the same task as the input condition, to indicate which task to perform. Without bells and whistles, our generalist Painter can achieve competitive performance compared to well-established task-specific models, on seven representative vision tasks ranging from high-level visual understanding to low-level image processing. In addition, Painter significantly outperforms recent generalist models on several challenging tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis

We launch EVA-02, a next-generation Transformer-based visual representation pre-trained to reconstruct strong and robust language-aligned vision features via masked image modeling. With an updated plain Transformer architecture as well as extensive pre-training from an open & accessible giant CLIP vision encoder, EVA-02 demonstrates superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-art approaches across various representative vision tasks, while utilizing significantly fewer parameters and compute budgets. Notably, using exclusively publicly accessible training data, EVA-02 with only 304M parameters achieves a phenomenal 90.0 fine-tuning top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K val set. Additionally, our EVA-02-CLIP can reach up to 80.4 zero-shot top-1 on ImageNet-1K, outperforming the previous largest & best open-sourced CLIP with only ~1/6 parameters and ~1/6 image-text training data. We offer four EVA-02 variants in various model sizes, ranging from 6M to 304M parameters, all with impressive performance. To facilitate open access and open research, we release the complete suite of EVA-02 to the community at https://github.com/baaivision/EVA/tree/master/EVA-02.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Optimal ANN-SNN Conversion for High-accuracy and Ultra-low-latency Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained great attraction due to their distinctive properties of low power consumption and fast inference on neuromorphic hardware. As the most effective method to get deep SNNs, ANN-SNN conversion has achieved comparable performance as ANNs on large-scale datasets. Despite this, it requires long time-steps to match the firing rates of SNNs to the activation of ANNs. As a result, the converted SNN suffers severe performance degradation problems with short time-steps, which hamper the practical application of SNNs. In this paper, we theoretically analyze ANN-SNN conversion error and derive the estimated activation function of SNNs. Then we propose the quantization clip-floor-shift activation function to replace the ReLU activation function in source ANNs, which can better approximate the activation function of SNNs. We prove that the expected conversion error between SNNs and ANNs is zero, enabling us to achieve high-accuracy and ultra-low-latency SNNs. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art ANN-SNN and directly trained SNNs in both accuracy and time-steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to explore high-performance ANN-SNN conversion with ultra-low latency (4 time-steps). Code is available at https://github.com/putshua/SNN\_conversion\_QCFS

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Bridging the Gap between ANNs and SNNs by Calibrating Offset Spikes

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted great attention due to their distinctive characteristics of low power consumption and temporal information processing. ANN-SNN conversion, as the most commonly used training method for applying SNNs, can ensure that converted SNNs achieve comparable performance to ANNs on large-scale datasets. However, the performance degrades severely under low quantities of time-steps, which hampers the practical applications of SNNs to neuromorphic chips. In this paper, instead of evaluating different conversion errors and then eliminating these errors, we define an offset spike to measure the degree of deviation between actual and desired SNN firing rates. We perform a detailed analysis of offset spike and note that the firing of one additional (or one less) spike is the main cause of conversion errors. Based on this, we propose an optimization strategy based on shifting the initial membrane potential and we theoretically prove the corresponding optimal shifting distance for calibrating the spike. In addition, we also note that our method has a unique iterative property that enables further reduction of conversion errors. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets. For example, we reach a top-1 accuracy of 67.12% on ImageNet when using 6 time-steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an ANN-SNN conversion has been shown to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and ultralow latency on complex datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/ANN2SNN_COS.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Reducing ANN-SNN Conversion Error through Residual Membrane Potential

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have received extensive academic attention due to the unique properties of low power consumption and high-speed computing on neuromorphic chips. Among various training methods of SNNs, ANN-SNN conversion has shown the equivalent level of performance as ANNs on large-scale datasets. However, unevenness error, which refers to the deviation caused by different temporal sequences of spike arrival on activation layers, has not been effectively resolved and seriously suffers the performance of SNNs under the condition of short time-steps. In this paper, we make a detailed analysis of unevenness error and divide it into four categories. We point out that the case of the ANN output being zero while the SNN output being larger than zero accounts for the largest percentage. Based on this, we theoretically prove the sufficient and necessary conditions of this case and propose an optimization strategy based on residual membrane potential to reduce unevenness error. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 64.32\% on ImageNet with 10-steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time ANN-SNN conversion can simultaneously achieve high accuracy and ultra-low-latency on the complex dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/ANN2SNN\_SRP.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2022

EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale

We launch EVA, a vision-centric foundation model to explore the limits of visual representation at scale using only publicly accessible data. EVA is a vanilla ViT pre-trained to reconstruct the masked out image-text aligned vision features conditioned on visible image patches. Via this pretext task, we can efficiently scale up EVA to one billion parameters, and sets new records on a broad range of representative vision downstream tasks, such as image recognition, video action recognition, object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation without heavy supervised training. Moreover, we observe quantitative changes in scaling EVA result in qualitative changes in transfer learning performance that are not present in other models. For instance, EVA takes a great leap in the challenging large vocabulary instance segmentation task: our model achieves almost the same state-of-the-art performance on LVISv1.0 dataset with over a thousand categories and COCO dataset with only eighty categories. Beyond a pure vision encoder, EVA can also serve as a vision-centric, multi-modal pivot to connect images and text. We find initializing the vision tower of a giant CLIP from EVA can greatly stabilize the training and outperform the training from scratch counterpart with much fewer samples and less compute, providing a new direction for scaling up and accelerating the costly training of multi-modal foundation models. To facilitate future research, we release all the code and models at https://github.com/baaivision/EVA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Entity Divider with Language Grounding in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We investigate the use of natural language to drive the generalization of policies in multi-agent settings. Unlike single-agent settings, the generalization of policies should also consider the influence of other agents. Besides, with the increasing number of entities in multi-agent settings, more agent-entity interactions are needed for language grounding, and the enormous search space could impede the learning process. Moreover, given a simple general instruction,e.g., beating all enemies, agents are required to decompose it into multiple subgoals and figure out the right one to focus on. Inspired by previous work, we try to address these issues at the entity level and propose a novel framework for language grounding in multi-agent reinforcement learning, entity divider (EnDi). EnDi enables agents to independently learn subgoal division at the entity level and act in the environment based on the associated entities. The subgoal division is regularized by opponent modeling to avoid subgoal conflicts and promote coordinated strategies. Empirically, EnDi demonstrates the strong generalization ability to unseen games with new dynamics and expresses the superiority over existing methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Uncertainty Guided Depth Fusion for Spike Camera

Depth estimation is essential for various important real-world applications such as autonomous driving. However, it suffers from severe performance degradation in high-velocity scenario since traditional cameras can only capture blurred images. To deal with this problem, the spike camera is designed to capture the pixel-wise luminance intensity at high frame rate. However, depth estimation with spike camera remains very challenging using traditional monocular or stereo depth estimation algorithms, which are based on the photometric consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Guided Depth Fusion (UGDF) framework to fuse the predictions of monocular and stereo depth estimation networks for spike camera. Our framework is motivated by the fact that stereo spike depth estimation achieves better results at close range while monocular spike depth estimation obtains better results at long range. Therefore, we introduce a dual-task depth estimation architecture with a joint training strategy and estimate the distributed uncertainty to fuse the monocular and stereo results. In order to demonstrate the advantage of spike depth estimation over traditional camera depth estimation, we contribute a spike-depth dataset named CitySpike20K, which contains 20K paired samples, for spike depth estimation. UGDF achieves state-of-the-art results on CitySpike20K, surpassing all monocular or stereo spike depth estimation baselines. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of our method on CitySpike20K. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first dual-task fusion framework for spike camera depth estimation. Code and dataset will be released.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Temporal Up-Sampling for Asynchronous Events

The event camera is a novel bio-inspired vision sensor. When the brightness change exceeds the preset threshold, the sensor generates events asynchronously. The number of valid events directly affects the performance of event-based tasks, such as reconstruction, detection, and recognition. However, when in low-brightness or slow-moving scenes, events are often sparse and accompanied by noise, which poses challenges for event-based tasks. To solve these challenges, we propose an event temporal up-sampling algorithm1 to generate more effective and reliable events. The main idea of our algorithm is to generate up-sampling events on the event motion trajectory. First, we estimate the event motion trajectory by contrast maximization algorithm and then up-sampling the events by temporal point processes. Experimental results show that up-sampling events can provide more effective information and improve the performance of downstream tasks, such as improving the quality of reconstructed images and increasing the accuracy of object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling

We present Point-BERT, a new paradigm for learning Transformers to generalize the concept of BERT to 3D point cloud. Inspired by BERT, we devise a Masked Point Modeling (MPM) task to pre-train point cloud Transformers. Specifically, we first divide a point cloud into several local point patches, and a point cloud Tokenizer with a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) is designed to generate discrete point tokens containing meaningful local information. Then, we randomly mask out some patches of input point clouds and feed them into the backbone Transformers. The pre-training objective is to recover the original point tokens at the masked locations under the supervision of point tokens obtained by the Tokenizer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed BERT-style pre-training strategy significantly improves the performance of standard point cloud Transformers. Equipped with our pre-training strategy, we show that a pure Transformer architecture attains 93.8% accuracy on ModelNet40 and 83.1% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing carefully designed point cloud models with much fewer hand-made designs. We also demonstrate that the representations learned by Point-BERT transfer well to new tasks and domains, where our models largely advance the state-of-the-art of few-shot point cloud classification task. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lulutang0608/Point-BERT

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Annotation Efficient Person Re-Identification with Diverse Cluster-Based Pair Selection

Person Re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted great attention due to its promising real-world applications. However, in practice, it is always costly to annotate the training data to train a Re-ID model, and it still remains challenging to reduce the annotation cost while maintaining the performance for the Re-ID task. To solve this problem, we propose the Annotation Efficient Person Re-Identification method to select image pairs from an alternative pair set according to the fallibility and diversity of pairs, and train the Re-ID model based on the annotation. Specifically, we design an annotation and training framework to firstly reduce the size of the alternative pair set by clustering all images considering the locality of features, secondly select images pairs from intra-/inter-cluster samples for human to annotate, thirdly re-assign clusters according to the annotation, and finally train the model with the re-assigned clusters. During the pair selection, we seek for valuable pairs according to pairs' fallibility and diversity, which includes an intra-cluster criterion to construct image pairs with the most chaotic samples and the representative samples within clusters, an inter-cluster criterion to construct image pairs between clusters based on the second-order Wasserstein distance, and a diversity criterion for clusterbased pair selection. Combining all criteria above, a greedy strategy is developed to solve the pair selection problem. Finally, the above clustering-selecting-annotating-reassigning-training procedure will be repeated until the annotation budget is reached. Extensive experiments on three widely adopted Re-ID datasets show that we can greatly reduce the annotation cost while achieving better performance compared with state-of-the-art works.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Spatio-Temporal Recurrent Networks for Event-Based Optical Flow Estimation

Event camera has offered promising alternative for visual perception, especially in high speed and high dynamic range scenes. Recently, many deep learning methods have shown great success in providing promising solutions to many event-based problems, such as optical flow estimation. However, existing deep learning methods did not address the importance of temporal information well from the perspective of architecture design and cannot effectively extract spatio-temporal features. Another line of research that utilizes Spiking Neural Network suffers from training issues for deeper architecture.To address these points, a novel input representation is proposed that captures the events' temporal distribution for signal enhancement. Moreover, we introduce a spatio-temporal recurrent encoding-decoding neural network architecture for event-based optical flow estimation, which utilizes Convolutional Gated Recurrent Units to extract feature maps from a series of event images. Besides, our architecture allows some traditional frame-based core modules, such as correlation layer and iterative residual refine scheme, to be incorporated. The network is end-to-end trained with self-supervised learning on the Multi-Vehicle Stereo Event Camera dataset. We have shown that it outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. The code link is https://github.com/ruizhao26/STE-FlowNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Optical Flow Estimation for Spiking Camera

As a bio-inspired sensor with high temporal resolution, the spiking camera has an enormous potential in real applications, especially for motion estimation in high-speed scenes. However, frame-based and event-based methods are not well suited to spike streams from the spiking camera due to the different data modalities. To this end, we present, SCFlow, a tailored deep learning pipeline to estimate optical flow in high-speed scenes from spike streams. Importantly, a novel input representation is introduced which can adaptively remove the motion blur in spike streams according to the prior motion. Further, for training SCFlow, we synthesize two sets of optical flow data for the spiking camera, SPIkingly Flying Things and Photo-realistic High-speed Motion, denoted as SPIFT and PHM respectively, corresponding to random high-speed and well-designed scenes. Experimental results show that the SCFlow can predict optical flow from spike streams in different high-speed scenes. Moreover, SCFlow shows promising generalization on \textbf{real spike streams}. Codes and datasets refer to https://github.com/Acnext/Optical-Flow-For-Spiking-Camera.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Event-based Video Reconstruction via Potential-assisted Spiking Neural Network

Neuromorphic vision sensor is a new bio-inspired imaging paradigm that reports asynchronous, continuously per-pixel brightness changes called `events' with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. So far, the event-based image reconstruction methods are based on artificial neural networks (ANN) or hand-crafted spatiotemporal smoothing techniques. In this paper, we first implement the image reconstruction work via fully spiking neural network (SNN) architecture. As the bio-inspired neural networks, SNNs operating with asynchronous binary spikes distributed over time, can potentially lead to greater computational efficiency on event-driven hardware. We propose a novel Event-based Video reconstruction framework based on a fully Spiking Neural Network (EVSNN), which utilizes Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron and Membrane Potential (MP) neuron. We find that the spiking neurons have the potential to store useful temporal information (memory) to complete such time-dependent tasks. Furthermore, to better utilize the temporal information, we propose a hybrid potential-assisted framework (PA-EVSNN) using the membrane potential of spiking neuron. The proposed neuron is referred as Adaptive Membrane Potential (AMP) neuron, which adaptively updates the membrane potential according to the input spikes. The experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve comparable performance to ANN-based models on IJRR, MVSEC, and HQF datasets. The energy consumptions of EVSNN and PA-EVSNN are 19.36$\times$ and 7.75$\times$ more computationally efficient than their ANN architectures, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Optimized Potential Initialization for Low-latency Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been attached great importance due to the distinctive properties of low power consumption, biological plausibility, and adversarial robustness. The most effective way to train deep SNNs is through ANN-to-SNN conversion, which have yielded the best performance in deep network structure and large-scale datasets. However, there is a trade-off between accuracy and latency. In order to achieve high precision as original ANNs, a long simulation time is needed to match the firing rate of a spiking neuron with the activation value of an analog neuron, which impedes the practical application of SNN. In this paper, we aim to achieve high-performance converted SNNs with extremely low latency (fewer than 32 time-steps). We start by theoretically analyzing ANN-to-SNN conversion and show that scaling the thresholds does play a similar role as weight normalization. Instead of introducing constraints that facilitate ANN-to-SNN conversion at the cost of model capacity, we applied a more direct way by optimizing the initial membrane potential to reduce the conversion loss in each layer. Besides, we demonstrate that optimal initialization of membrane potentials can implement expected error-free ANN-to-SNN conversion. We evaluate our algorithm on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, using fewer time-steps. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 93.38\% on CIFAR-10 with 16 time-steps. Moreover, our method can be applied to other ANN-SNN conversion methodologies and remarkably promote performance when the time-steps is small.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2022

Sample Prior Guided Robust Model Learning to Suppress Noisy Labels

Imperfect labels are ubiquitous in real-world datasets and seriously harm the model performance. Several recent effective methods for handling noisy labels have two key steps: 1) dividing samples into cleanly labeled and wrongly labeled sets by training loss, 2) using semi-supervised methods to generate pseudo-labels for samples in the wrongly labeled set. However, current methods always hurt the informative hard samples due to the similar loss distribution between the hard samples and the noisy ones. In this paper, we proposed PGDF (Prior Guided Denoising Framework), a novel framework to learn a deep model to suppress noise by generating the samples' prior knowledge, which is integrated into both dividing samples step and semi-supervised step. Our framework can save more informative hard clean samples into the cleanly labeled set. Besides, our framework also promotes the quality of pseudo-labels during the semi-supervised step by suppressing the noise in the current pseudo-labels generating scheme. To further enhance the hard samples, we reweight the samples in the cleanly labeled set during training. We evaluated our method using synthetic datasets based on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, as well as on the real-world datasets WebVision and Clothing1M. The results demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗