arXiv subjects

Xiangyu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangyu Zhang.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Weight-dependent Gates for Network Pruning

In this paper, a simple yet effective network pruning framework is proposed to simultaneously address the problems of pruning indicator, pruning ratio, and efficiency constraint. This paper argues that the pruning decision should depend on the convolutional weights, and thus proposes novel weight-dependent gates (W-Gates) to learn the information from filter weights and obtain binary gates to prune or keep the filters automatically. To prune the network under efficiency constraints, a switchable Efficiency Module is constructed to predict the hardware latency or FLOPs of candidate pruned networks. Combined with the proposed Efficiency Module, W-Gates can perform filter pruning in an efficiency-aware manner and achieve a compact network with a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on ResNet34, ResNet50, and MobileNet V2, respectively achieving up to 1.33/1.28/1.1 higher Top-1 accuracy with lower hardware latency on ImageNet. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, W-Gates also achieves superior performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Progressive End-to-End Object Detection in Crowded Scenes

In this paper, we propose a new query-based detection framework for crowd detection. Previous query-based detectors suffer from two drawbacks: first, multiple predictions will be inferred for a single object, typically in crowded scenes; second, the performance saturates as the depth of the decoding stage increases. Benefiting from the nature of the one-to-one label assignment rule, we propose a progressive predicting method to address the above issues. Specifically, we first select accepted queries prone to generate true positive predictions, then refine the rest noisy queries according to the previously accepted predictions. Experiments show that our method can significantly boost the performance of query-based detectors in crowded scenes. Equipped with our approach, Sparse RCNN achieves 92.0\% $\text{AP}$, 41.4\% $\text{MR}^{-2}$ and 83.2\% $\text{JI}$ on the challenging CrowdHuman \cite{shao2018crowdhuman} dataset, outperforming the box-based method MIP \cite{chu2020detection} that specifies in handling crowded scenarios. Moreover, the proposed method, robust to crowdedness, can still obtain consistent improvements on moderately and slightly crowded datasets like CityPersons \cite{zhang2017citypersons} and COCO \cite{lin2014microsoft}. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/megvii-model/Iter-E2EDET.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Focal Sparse Convolutional Networks for 3D Object Detection

Non-uniformed 3D sparse data, e.g., point clouds or voxels in different spatial positions, make contribution to the task of 3D object detection in different ways. Existing basic components in sparse convolutional networks (Sparse CNNs) process all sparse data, regardless of regular or submanifold sparse convolution. In this paper, we introduce two new modules to enhance the capability of Sparse CNNs, both are based on making feature sparsity learnable with position-wise importance prediction. They are focal sparse convolution (Focals Conv) and its multi-modal variant of focal sparse convolution with fusion, or Focals Conv-F for short. The new modules can readily substitute their plain counterparts in existing Sparse CNNs and be jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion. For the first time, we show that spatially learnable sparsity in sparse convolution is essential for sophisticated 3D object detection. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, nuScenes and Waymo benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Without bells and whistles, our results outperform all existing single-model entries on the nuScenes test benchmark at the paper submission time. Code and models are at https://github.com/dvlab-research/FocalsConv.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

LGD: Label-guided Self-distillation for Object Detection

In this paper, we propose the first self-distillation framework for general object detection, termed LGD (Label-Guided self-Distillation). Previous studies rely on a strong pretrained teacher to provide instructive knowledge that could be unavailable in real-world scenarios. Instead, we generate an instructive knowledge based only on student representations and regular labels. Our framework includes sparse label-appearance encoder, inter-object relation adapter and intra-object knowledge mapper that jointly form an implicit teacher at training phase, dynamically dependent on labels and evolving student representations. They are trained end-to-end with detector and discarded in inference. Experimentally, LGD obtains decent results on various detectors, datasets, and extensive tasks like instance segmentation. For example in MS-COCO dataset, LGD improves RetinaNet with ResNet-50 under 2x single-scale training from 36.2% to 39.0% mAP (+ 2.8%). It boosts much stronger detectors like FCOS with ResNeXt-101 DCN v2 under 2x multi-scale training from 46.1% to 47.9% (+ 1.8%). Compared with a classical teacher-based method FGFI, LGD not only performs better without requiring pretrained teacher but also reduces 51% training cost beyond inherent student learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/megvii-research/LGD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

When NAS Meets Trees: An Efficient Algorithm for Neural Architecture Search

The key challenge in neural architecture search (NAS) is designing how to explore wisely in the huge search space. We propose a new NAS method called TNAS (NAS with trees), which improves search efficiency by exploring only a small number of architectures while also achieving a higher search accuracy. TNAS introduces an architecture tree and a binary operation tree, to factorize the search space and substantially reduce the exploration size. TNAS performs a modified bi-level Breadth-First Search in the proposed trees to discover a high-performance architecture. Impressively, TNAS finds the global optimal architecture on CIFAR-10 with test accuracy of 94.37\% in four GPU hours in NAS-Bench-201. The average test accuracy is 94.35\%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/guochengqian/TNAS}.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Relieving Long-tailed Instance Segmentation via Pairwise Class Balance

Long-tailed instance segmentation is a challenging task due to the extreme imbalance of training samples among classes. It causes severe biases of the head classes (with majority samples) against the tailed ones. This renders "how to appropriately define and alleviate the bias" one of the most important issues. Prior works mainly use label distribution or mean score information to indicate a coarse-grained bias. In this paper, we explore to excavate the confusion matrix, which carries the fine-grained misclassification details, to relieve the pairwise biases, generalizing the coarse one. To this end, we propose a novel Pairwise Class Balance (PCB) method, built upon a confusion matrix which is updated during training to accumulate the ongoing prediction preferences. PCB generates fightback soft labels for regularization during training. Besides, an iterative learning paradigm is developed to support a progressive and smooth regularization in such debiasing. PCB can be plugged and played to any existing method as a complement. Experimental results on LVIS demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles. Superior results across various architectures show the generalization ability. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/megvii-research/PCB.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Scaling Up Your Kernels to 31x31: Revisiting Large Kernel Design in CNNs

We revisit large kernel design in modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Inspired by recent advances in vision transformers (ViTs), in this paper, we demonstrate that using a few large convolutional kernels instead of a stack of small kernels could be a more powerful paradigm. We suggested five guidelines, e.g., applying re-parameterized large depth-wise convolutions, to design efficient high-performance large-kernel CNNs. Following the guidelines, we propose RepLKNet, a pure CNN architecture whose kernel size is as large as 31x31, in contrast to commonly used 3x3. RepLKNet greatly closes the performance gap between CNNs and ViTs, e.g., achieving comparable or superior results than Swin Transformer on ImageNet and a few typical downstream tasks, with lower latency. RepLKNet also shows nice scalability to big data and large models, obtaining 87.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and 56.0% mIoU on ADE20K, which is very competitive among the state-of-the-arts with similar model sizes. Our study further reveals that, in contrast to small-kernel CNNs, large-kernel CNNs have much larger effective receptive fields and higher shape bias rather than texture bias. Code & models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RepLKNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

RepMLP: Re-parameterizing Convolutions into Fully-connected Layers for Image Recognition

We propose RepMLP, a multi-layer-perceptron-style neural network building block for image recognition, which is composed of a series of fully-connected (FC) layers. Compared to convolutional layers, FC layers are more efficient, better at modeling the long-range dependencies and positional patterns, but worse at capturing the local structures, hence usually less favored for image recognition. We propose a structural re-parameterization technique that adds local prior into an FC to make it powerful for image recognition. Specifically, we construct convolutional layers inside a RepMLP during training and merge them into the FC for inference. On CIFAR, a simple pure-MLP model shows performance very close to CNN. By inserting RepMLP in traditional CNN, we improve ResNets by 1.8% accuracy on ImageNet, 2.9% for face recognition, and 2.3% mIoU on Cityscapes with lower FLOPs. Our intriguing findings highlight that combining the global representational capacity and positional perception of FC with the local prior of convolution can improve the performance of neural network with faster speed on both the tasks with translation invariance (e.g., semantic segmentation) and those with aligned images and positional patterns (e.g., face recognition). The code and models are available at https://github.com/DingXiaoH/RepMLP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

RepMLPNet: Hierarchical Vision MLP with Re-parameterized Locality

Compared to convolutional layers, fully-connected (FC) layers are better at modeling the long-range dependencies but worse at capturing the local patterns, hence usually less favored for image recognition. In this paper, we propose a methodology, Locality Injection, to incorporate local priors into an FC layer via merging the trained parameters of a parallel conv kernel into the FC kernel. Locality Injection can be viewed as a novel Structural Re-parameterization method since it equivalently converts the structures via transforming the parameters. Based on that, we propose a multi-layer-perceptron (MLP) block named RepMLP Block, which uses three FC layers to extract features, and a novel architecture named RepMLPNet. The hierarchical design distinguishes RepMLPNet from the other concurrently proposed vision MLPs. As it produces feature maps of different levels, it qualifies as a backbone model for downstream tasks like semantic segmentation. Our results reveal that 1) Locality Injection is a general methodology for MLP models; 2) RepMLPNet has favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to the other MLPs; 3) RepMLPNet is the first MLP that seamlessly transfer to Cityscapes semantic segmentation. The code and models are available at https://github.com/DingXiaoH/RepMLP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Near-optimality for infinite-horizon restless bandits with many arms

Restless bandits are an important class of problems with applications in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management and other areas. We consider infinite-horizon discounted restless bandits with many arms where a fixed proportion of arms may be pulled in each period and where arms share a finite state space. Although an average-case-optimal policy can be computed via stochastic dynamic programming, the computation required grows exponentially with the number of arms $N$. Thus, it is important to find scalable policies that can be computed efficiently for large $N$ and that are near optimal in this regime, in the sense that the optimality gap (i.e. the loss of expected performance against an optimal policy) per arm vanishes for large $N$. However, the most popular approach, the Whittle index, requires a hard-to-verify indexability condition to be well-defined and another hard-to-verify condition to guarantee a $o(N)$ optimality gap. We present a method resolving these difficulties. By replacing a global Lagrange multiplier used by the Whittle index with a sequence of Lagrangian multipliers, one per time period up to a finite truncation point, we derive a class of policies, called fluid-balance policies, that have a $O(\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. Unlike the Whittle index, fluid-balance policies do not require indexability to be well-defined and their $O(\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap bound holds universally without sufficient conditions. We also demonstrate empirically that fluid-balance policies provide state-of-the-art performance on specific problems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Tree Energy Loss: Towards Sparsely Annotated Semantic Segmentation

Sparsely annotated semantic segmentation (SASS) aims to train a segmentation network with coarse-grained (i.e., point-, scribble-, and block-wise) supervisions, where only a small proportion of pixels are labeled in each image. In this paper, we propose a novel tree energy loss for SASS by providing semantic guidance for unlabeled pixels. The tree energy loss represents images as minimum spanning trees to model both low-level and high-level pair-wise affinities. By sequentially applying these affinities to the network prediction, soft pseudo labels for unlabeled pixels are generated in a coarse-to-fine manner, achieving dynamic online self-training. The tree energy loss is effective and easy to be incorporated into existing frameworks by combining it with a traditional segmentation loss. Compared with previous SASS methods, our method requires no multistage training strategies, alternating optimization procedures, additional supervised data, or time-consuming post-processing while outperforming them in all SASS settings. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/TreeEnergyLoss.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

On Efficient Transformer-Based Image Pre-training for Low-Level Vision

Pre-training has marked numerous state of the arts in high-level computer vision, while few attempts have ever been made to investigate how pre-training acts in image processing systems. In this paper, we tailor transformer-based pre-training regimes that boost various low-level tasks. To comprehensively diagnose the influence of pre-training, we design a whole set of principled evaluation tools that uncover its effects on internal representations. The observations demonstrate that pre-training plays strikingly different roles in low-level tasks. For example, pre-training introduces more local information to higher layers in super-resolution (SR), yielding significant performance gains, while pre-training hardly affects internal feature representations in denoising, resulting in limited gains. Further, we explore different methods of pre-training, revealing that multi-related-task pre-training is more effective and data-efficient than other alternatives. Finally, we extend our study to varying data scales and model sizes, as well as comparisons between transformers and CNNs-based architectures. Based on the study, we successfully develop state-of-the-art models for multiple low-level tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/fenglinglwb/EDT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Constrained Optimization with Dynamic Bound-scaling for Effective NLPBackdoor Defense

We develop a novel optimization method for NLPbackdoor inversion. We leverage a dynamically reducing temperature coefficient in the softmax function to provide changing loss landscapes to the optimizer such that the process gradually focuses on the ground truth trigger, which is denoted as a one-hot value in a convex hull. Our method also features a temperature rollback mechanism to step away from local optimals, exploiting the observation that local optimals can be easily deter-mined in NLP trigger inversion (while not in general optimization). We evaluate the technique on over 1600 models (with roughly half of them having injected backdoors) on 3 prevailing NLP tasks, with 4 different backdoor attacks and 7 architectures. Our results show that the technique is able to effectively and efficiently detect and remove backdoors, outperforming 4 baseline methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Instance-Conditional Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection

Knowledge distillation has shown great success in classification, however, it is still challenging for detection. In a typical image for detection, representations from different locations may have different contributions to detection targets, making the distillation hard to balance. In this paper, we propose a conditional distillation framework to distill the desired knowledge, namely knowledge that is beneficial in terms of both classification and localization for every instance. The framework introduces a learnable conditional decoding module, which retrieves information given each target instance as query. Specifically, we encode the condition information as query and use the teacher's representations as key. The attention between query and key is used to measure the contribution of different features, guided by a localization-recognition-sensitive auxiliary task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method: we observe impressive improvements under various settings. Notably, we boost RetinaNet with ResNet-50 backbone from 37.4 to 40.7 mAP (+3.3) under 1x schedule, that even surpasses the teacher (40.4 mAP) with ResNet-101 backbone under 3x schedule. Code has been released on https://github.com/megvii-research/ICD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Communication-Efficient TeraByte-Scale Model Training Framework for Online Advertising

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial component in the online advertising industry. In order to produce a personalized CTR prediction, an industry-level CTR prediction model commonly takes a high-dimensional (e.g., 100 or 1000 billions of features) sparse vector (that is encoded from query keywords, user portraits, etc.) as input. As a result, the model requires Terabyte scale parameters to embed the high-dimensional input. Hierarchical distributed GPU parameter server has been proposed to enable GPU with limited memory to train the massive network by leveraging CPU main memory and SSDs as secondary storage. We identify two major challenges in the existing GPU training framework for massive-scale ad models and propose a collection of optimizations to tackle these challenges: (a) the GPU, CPU, SSD rapidly communicate with each other during the training. The connections between GPUs and CPUs are non-uniform due to the hardware topology. The data communication route should be optimized according to the hardware topology; (b) GPUs in different computing nodes frequently communicates to synchronize parameters. We are required to optimize the communications so that the distributed system can become scalable. In this paper, we propose a hardware-aware training workflow that couples the hardware topology into the algorithm design. To reduce the extensive communication between computing nodes, we introduce a $k$-step model merging algorithm for the popular Adam optimizer and provide its convergence rate in non-convex optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of $k$-step adaptive optimization method in industrial-level CTR model training. The numerical results on real-world data confirm that the optimized system design considerably reduces the training time of the massive model, with essentially no loss in accuracy.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Anchor DETR: Query Design for Transformer-Based Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel query design for the transformer-based object detection. In previous transformer-based detectors, the object queries are a set of learned embeddings. However, each learned embedding does not have an explicit physical meaning and we cannot explain where it will focus on. It is difficult to optimize as the prediction slot of each object query does not have a specific mode. In other words, each object query will not focus on a specific region. To solved these problems, in our query design, object queries are based on anchor points, which are widely used in CNN-based detectors. So each object query focuses on the objects near the anchor point. Moreover, our query design can predict multiple objects at one position to solve the difficulty: "one region, multiple objects". In addition, we design an attention variant, which can reduce the memory cost while achieving similar or better performance than the standard attention in DETR. Thanks to the query design and the attention variant, the proposed detector that we called Anchor DETR, can achieve better performance and run faster than the DETR with 10$\times$ fewer training epochs. For example, it achieves 44.2 AP with 19 FPS on the MSCOCO dataset when using the ResNet50-DC5 feature for training 50 epochs. Extensive experiments on the MSCOCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/megvii-research/AnchorDETR}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Exhaustive goodness-of-fit via smoothed inference and graphics

Classical tests of goodness-of-fit aim to validate the conformity of a postulated model to the data under study. Given their inferential nature, they can be considered a crucial step in confirmatory data analysis. In their standard formulation, however, they do not allow exploring how the hypothesized model deviates from the truth nor do they provide any insight into how the rejected model could be improved to better fit the data. The main goal of this work is to establish a comprehensive framework for goodness-of-fit which naturally integrates modeling, estimation, inference, and graphics. Modeling and estimation focus on a novel formulation of smooth tests that easily extends to arbitrary distributions, either continuous or discrete. Inference and adequate post-selection adjustments are performed via a specially designed smoothed bootstrap and the results are summarized via an exhaustive graphical tool called CD-plot.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2021

Raw Bayer Pattern Image Synthesis for Computer Vision-oriented Image Signal Processing Pipeline Design

In this paper, we propose a method to add constraints that are un-formulatable in generative adversarial networks (GAN)-based arbitrary size RAW Bayer image generation. It is shown theoretically that by using the transformed data in GAN training, it is able to improve the learning of the original data distribution, owing to the invariant of Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between two distributions under invertible and differentiable transformation. Benefiting from the proposed method, RAW Bayer pattern images can be generated by configuring the transformation as demosaicing. It is shown that by adding another transformation, the proposed method is able to synthesize high-quality RAW Bayer images with arbitrary size. Experimental results show that images generated by the proposed method outperform the existing methods in the Fréchet inception distance (FID) score, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and mean structural similarity (MSSIM), and the training process is more stable. To the best knowledge of the authors, there is no open-source, large-scale image dataset in the RAW Bayer domain, which is crucial for research works aiming to explore the image signal processing (ISP) pipeline design for computer vision tasks. Converting the existing commonly used color image datasets to their corresponding RAW Bayer versions, the proposed method can be a promising solution to the RAW image dataset problem. We also show in the experiments that, by training object detection frameworks using the synthesized RAW Bayer images, they can be used in an end-to-end manner (from RAW images to vision tasks) with negligible performance degradation.

eess.IV↗