arXiv subjects

Yi Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Xu.

At least 361 records · Page 20Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

DP-SSL: Towards Robust Semi-supervised Learning with A Few Labeled Samples

The scarcity of labeled data is a critical obstacle to deep learning. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a promising way to leverage unlabeled data by pseudo labels. However, when the size of labeled data is very small (say a few labeled samples per class), SSL performs poorly and unstably, possibly due to the low quality of learned pseudo labels. In this paper, we propose a new SSL method called DP-SSL that adopts an innovative data programming (DP) scheme to generate probabilistic labels for unlabeled data. Different from existing DP methods that rely on human experts to provide initial labeling functions (LFs), we develop a multiple-choice learning~(MCL) based approach to automatically generate LFs from scratch in SSL style. With the noisy labels produced by the LFs, we design a label model to resolve the conflict and overlap among the noisy labels, and finally infer probabilistic labels for unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments on four standard SSL benchmarks show that DP-SSL can provide reliable labels for unlabeled data and achieve better classification performance on test sets than existing SSL methods, especially when only a small number of labeled samples are available. Concretely, for CIFAR-10 with only 40 labeled samples, DP-SSL achieves 93.82% annotation accuracy on unlabeled data and 93.46% classification accuracy on test data, which are higher than the SOTA results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Weakly-supervised Text Classification Based on Keyword Graph

Weakly-supervised text classification has received much attention in recent years for it can alleviate the heavy burden of annotating massive data. Among them, keyword-driven methods are the mainstream where user-provided keywords are exploited to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled texts. However, existing methods treat keywords independently, thus ignore the correlation among them, which should be useful if properly exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called ClassKG to explore keyword-keyword correlation on keyword graph by GNN. Our framework is an iterative process. In each iteration, we first construct a keyword graph, so the task of assigning pseudo labels is transformed to annotating keyword subgraphs. To improve the annotation quality, we introduce a self-supervised task to pretrain a subgraph annotator, and then finetune it. With the pseudo labels generated by the subgraph annotator, we then train a text classifier to classify the unlabeled texts. Finally, we re-extract keywords from the classified texts. Extensive experiments on both long-text and short-text datasets show that our method substantially outperforms the existing ones

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

MLIM: Vision-and-Language Model Pre-training with Masked Language and Image Modeling

Vision-and-Language Pre-training (VLP) improves model performance for downstream tasks that require image and text inputs. Current VLP approaches differ on (i) model architecture (especially image embedders), (ii) loss functions, and (iii) masking policies. Image embedders are either deep models like ResNet or linear projections that directly feed image-pixels into the transformer. Typically, in addition to the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) loss, alignment-based objectives are used for cross-modality interaction, and RoI feature regression and classification tasks for Masked Image-Region Modeling (MIRM). Both alignment and MIRM objectives mostly do not have ground truth. Alignment-based objectives require pairings of image and text and heuristic objective functions. MIRM relies on object detectors. Masking policies either do not take advantage of multi-modality or are strictly coupled with alignments generated by other models. In this paper, we present Masked Language and Image Modeling (MLIM) for VLP. MLIM uses two loss functions: Masked Language Modeling (MLM) loss and image reconstruction (RECON) loss. We propose Modality Aware Masking (MAM) to boost cross-modality interaction and take advantage of MLM and RECON losses that separately capture text and image reconstruction quality. Using MLM + RECON tasks coupled with MAM, we present a simplified VLP methodology and show that it has better downstream task performance on a proprietary e-commerce multi-modal dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Federated Deep AUC Maximization for Heterogeneous Data with a Constant Communication Complexity

Deep AUC (area under the ROC curve) Maximization (DAM) has attracted much attention recently due to its great potential for imbalanced data classification. However, the research on Federated Deep AUC Maximization (FDAM) is still limited. Compared with standard federated learning (FL) approaches that focus on decomposable minimization objectives, FDAM is more complicated due to its minimization objective is non-decomposable over individual examples. In this paper, we propose improved FDAM algorithms for heterogeneous data by solving the popular non-convex strongly-concave min-max formulation of DAM in a distributed fashion, which can also be applied to a class of non-convex strongly-concave min-max problems. A striking result of this paper is that the communication complexity of the proposed algorithm is a constant independent of the number of machines and also independent of the accuracy level, which improves an existing result by orders of magnitude. The experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our FDAM algorithm on benchmark datasets, and on medical chest X-ray images from different organizations. Our experiment shows that the performance of FDAM using data from multiple hospitals can improve the AUC score on testing data from a single hospital for detecting life-threatening diseases based on chest radiographs. The proposed method is implemented in our open-sourced library LibAUC (www.libauc.org) whose github address is https://github.com/Optimization-AI/ICML2021_FedDeepAUC_CODASCA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Dash: Semi-Supervised Learning with Dynamic Thresholding

While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has received tremendous attentions in many machine learning tasks due to its successful use of unlabeled data, existing SSL algorithms use either all unlabeled examples or the unlabeled examples with a fixed high-confidence prediction during the training progress. However, it is possible that too many correct/wrong pseudo labeled examples are eliminated/selected. In this work we develop a simple yet powerful framework, whose key idea is to select a subset of training examples from the unlabeled data when performing existing SSL methods so that only the unlabeled examples with pseudo labels related to the labeled data will be used to train models. The selection is performed at each updating iteration by only keeping the examples whose losses are smaller than a given threshold that is dynamically adjusted through the iteration. Our proposed approach, Dash, enjoys its adaptivity in terms of unlabeled data selection and its theoretical guarantee. Specifically, we theoretically establish the convergence rate of Dash from the view of non-convex optimization. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art over benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Recursive Fusion and Deformable Spatiotemporal Attention for Video Compression Artifact Reduction

A number of deep learning based algorithms have been proposed to recover high-quality videos from low-quality compressed ones. Among them, some restore the missing details of each frame via exploring the spatiotemporal information of neighboring frames. However, these methods usually suffer from a narrow temporal scope, thus may miss some useful details from some frames outside the neighboring ones. In this paper, to boost artifact removal, on the one hand, we propose a Recursive Fusion (RF) module to model the temporal dependency within a long temporal range. Specifically, RF utilizes both the current reference frames and the preceding hidden state to conduct better spatiotemporal compensation. On the other hand, we design an efficient and effective Deformable Spatiotemporal Attention (DSTA) module such that the model can pay more effort on restoring the artifact-rich areas like the boundary area of a moving object. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the existing ones on the MFQE 2.0 dataset in terms of both fidelity and perceptual effect. Code is available at https://github.com/zhaominyiz/RFDA-PyTorch.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Dialogue-oriented Pre-training

Pre-trained language models (PrLM) has been shown powerful in enhancing a broad range of downstream tasks including various dialogue related ones. However, PrLMs are usually trained on general plain text with common language model (LM) training objectives, which cannot sufficiently capture dialogue exclusive features due to the limitation of such training setting, so that there is an immediate need to fill the gap between a specific dialogue task and the LM task. As it is unlikely to collect huge dialogue data for dialogue-oriented pre-training, in this paper, we propose three strategies to simulate the conversation features on general plain text. Our proposed method differs from existing post-training methods that it may yield a general-purpose PrLM and does not individualize to any detailed task while keeping the capability of learning dialogue related features including speaker awareness, continuity and consistency. The resulted Dialog-PrLM is fine-tuned on three public multi-turn dialogue datasets and helps achieve significant and consistent improvement over the plain PrLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

MonoIndoor: Towards Good Practice of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Environments

Self-supervised depth estimation for indoor environments is more challenging than its outdoor counterpart in at least the following two aspects: (i) the depth range of indoor sequences varies a lot across different frames, making it difficult for the depth network to induce consistent depth cues, whereas the maximum distance in outdoor scenes mostly stays the same as the camera usually sees the sky; (ii) the indoor sequences contain much more rotational motions, which cause difficulties for the pose network, while the motions of outdoor sequences are pre-dominantly translational, especially for driving datasets such as KITTI. In this paper, special considerations are given to those challenges and a set of good practices are consolidated for improving the performance of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor environments. The proposed method mainly consists of two novel modules, \ie, a depth factorization module and a residual pose estimation module, each of which is designed to respectively tackle the aforementioned challenges. The effectiveness of each module is shown through a carefully conducted ablation study and the demonstration of the state-of-the-art performance on three indoor datasets, \ie, EuRoC, NYUv2, and 7-scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Simpler, Faster, Stronger: Breaking The log-K Curse On Contrastive Learners With FlatNCE

InfoNCE-based contrastive representation learners, such as SimCLR, have been tremendously successful in recent years. However, these contrastive schemes are notoriously resource demanding, as their effectiveness breaks down with small-batch training (i.e., the log-K curse, whereas K is the batch-size). In this work, we reveal mathematically why contrastive learners fail in the small-batch-size regime, and present a novel simple, non-trivial contrastive objective named FlatNCE, which fixes this issue. Unlike InfoNCE, our FlatNCE no longer explicitly appeals to a discriminative classification goal for contrastive learning. Theoretically, we show FlatNCE is the mathematical dual formulation of InfoNCE, thus bridging the classical literature on energy modeling; and empirically, we demonstrate that, with minimal modification of code, FlatNCE enables immediate performance boost independent of the subject-matter engineering efforts. The significance of this work is furthered by the powerful generalization of contrastive learning techniques, and the introduction of new tools to monitor and diagnose contrastive training. We substantiate our claims with empirical evidence on CIFAR10, ImageNet, and other datasets, where FlatNCE consistently outperforms InfoNCE.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Transverse Kerker effect of localized electromagnetic sources

Transverse Kerker effect is known by the directional scattering of an electromagnetic plane wave perpendicular to the propagation direction with nearly suppression of both forward and backward scattering. Compared with plane waves, localized electromagnetic emitters are more general sources in modern nanophotonics. As a typical example, manipulating the emission direction of a quantum dot is of virtue importance for the investigation of on-chip quantum optics and quantum information processing. Herein, we introduce the concept of transverse Kerker effect of localized electromagnetic sources utilizing a subwavelength dielectric antenna, where the radiative power of magnetic, electric and more general chiral dipole emitters can be dominantly directed along its dipole moment with nearly suppression of radiation perpendicular to the dipole moments. Such transverse Kerker effect is also associated with Purcell enhancement mediated by electromagnetic multipolar resonances induced in the dielectric antenna. Analytical conditions of transverse Kerker effect are derived for the magnetic dipole, electric dipole and chiral dipole emitters. We further provide microwave experiment validation for the magnetic dipole emitter. Our results provide new physical mechanisms to manipulate the emission properties of localized electromagnetic source which might facilitate the on-chip quantum optics and beyond.

physics.class-ph↗

arXiv2021

Boosting the Performance of Video Compression Artifact Reduction with Reference Frame Proposals and Frequency Domain Information

Many deep learning based video compression artifact removal algorithms have been proposed to recover high-quality videos from low-quality compressed videos. Recently, methods were proposed to mine spatiotemporal information via utilizing multiple neighboring frames as reference frames. However, these post-processing methods take advantage of adjacent frames directly, but neglect the information of the video itself, which can be exploited. In this paper, we propose an effective reference frame proposal strategy to boost the performance of the existing multi-frame approaches. Besides, we introduce a loss based on fast Fourier transformation~(FFT) to further improve the effectiveness of restoration. Experimental results show that our method achieves better fidelity and perceptual performance on MFQE 2.0 dataset than the state-of-the-art methods. And our method won Track 1 and Track 2, and was ranked the 2nd in Track 3 of NTIRE 2021 Quality enhancement of heavily compressed videos Challenge.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Dynamic Dual Sampling Module for Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation

Representation of semantic context and local details is the essential issue for building modern semantic segmentation models. However, the interrelationship between semantic context and local details is not well explored in previous works. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Dual Sampling Module (DDSM) to conduct dynamic affinity modeling and propagate semantic context to local details, which yields a more discriminative representation. Specifically, a dynamic sampling strategy is used to sparsely sample representative pixels and channels in the higher layer, forming adaptive compact support for each pixel and channel in the lower layer. The sampled features with high semantics are aggregated according to the affinities and then propagated to detailed lower-layer features, leading to a fine-grained segmentation result with well-preserved boundaries. Experiment results on both Cityscapes and Camvid datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Code and models will be available at \url{x3https://github.com/Fantasticarl/DDSM}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Why Does Multi-Epoch Training Help?

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has become the most attractive optimization method in training large-scale deep neural networks due to its simplicity, low computational cost in each updating step, and good performance. Standard excess risk bounds show that SGD only needs to take one pass over the training data and more passes could not help to improve the performance. Empirically, it has been observed that SGD taking more than one pass over the training data (multi-pass SGD) has much better excess risk bound performance than the SGD only taking one pass over the training data (one-pass SGD). However, it is not very clear that how to explain this phenomenon in theory. In this paper, we provide some theoretical evidences for explaining why multiple passes over the training data can help improve performance under certain circumstance. Specifically, we consider smooth risk minimization problems whose objective function is non-convex least squared loss. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) condition, we establish faster convergence rate of excess risk bound for multi-pass SGD than that for one-pass SGD.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Dance Generation with Style Embedding: Learning and Transferring Latent Representations of Dance Styles

Choreography refers to creation of dance steps and motions for dances according to the latent knowledge in human mind, where the created dance motions are in general style-specific and consistent. So far, such latent style-specific knowledge about dance styles cannot be represented explicitly in human language and has not yet been learned in previous works on music-to-dance generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel music-to-dance synthesis framework with controllable style embeddings. These embeddings are learned representations of style-consistent kinematic abstraction of reference dance clips, which act as controllable factors to impose style constraints on dance generation in a latent manner. Thus, the dance styles can be transferred to dance motions by merely modifying the style embeddings. To support this study, we build a large music-to-dance dataset. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the advantage of our proposed framework, as well as the ability of synthesizing diverse styles of dances from identical music via style embeddings.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2021

Cylindrical vector beams reveal radiationless anapole condition in a resonant state

Nonscattering optical anapole condition is corresponding to the excitation of radiationless field distributions in open resonators, which offers new degrees of freedom for tailoring light-matter interaction. Conventional mechanisms for achieving such a condition relies on sophisticated manipulation of electromagnetic multipolar moments of all orders to guarantee superpositions of vanished moment strengths at the same wavelength. In contrast, here we report on the excitation of optical radiationless anapole hidden in a resonant state of a Si nanoparticle utilizing tightly focused radially polarized (RP) beam. The coexistence of magnetic resonant state and anapole condition at the same wavelength further enables the triggering of resonant state by tightly focused azimuthally polarized (AP) beam whose corresponding electric multipole coefficient could be zero. As a result, high contrast inter-transition between radiationless anapole condition and ideal magnetic resonant scattering can be achieved experimentally in visible spectrum. The proposed mechanism is general which can be realized in different types of nanostructures. Our results showcase that the unique combination of structured light and structured Mie resonances could provide new degrees of freedom for tailoring light-matter interaction, which might shed new light on functional meta-optics.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

Near-perfect fidelity polarization-encoded multilayer optical data storage based on aligned gold nanorods

Encoding information in light polarization is of great importance in facilitating optical data storage (ODS) for information security and data storage capacity escalation. However, despite recent advances in nanophotonic techniques vastly enhancing the feasibility of applying polarization channels, the data fidelity in reconstructed bits has been constrained by severe crosstalks occurring between varied polarization angles during data recording and reading process, which gravely hindered the utilization of this technique in practice. In this paper, we demonstrate an ultra-low crosstalk polarization-encoding multilayer optical data storage technique for high-fidelity data recording and retrieving by utilizing a nanofibre-based nanocomposite film involving highly aligned gold nanorods (GNRs). With parallelizing the gold nanorods in the recording medium, the information carrier configuration minimizes miswriting and misreading possibilities for information input and output, respectively, compared with its randomly self-assembled counterparts. The enhanced data accuracy has significantly improved the bit recall fidelity that is quantified by a correlation coefficient higher than 0.99. It is anticipated that the demonstrated technique can facilitate the development of multiplexing ODS for a greener future.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

A Theoretical Analysis of Learning with Noisily Labeled Data

Noisy labels are very common in deep supervised learning. Although many studies tend to improve the robustness of deep training for noisy labels, rare works focus on theoretically explaining the training behaviors of learning with noisily labeled data, which is a fundamental principle in understanding its generalization. In this draft, we study its two phenomena, clean data first and phase transition, by explaining them from a theoretical viewpoint. Specifically, we first show that in the first epoch training, the examples with clean labels will be learned first. We then show that after the learning from clean data stage, continuously training model can achieve further improvement in testing error when the rate of corrupted class labels is smaller than a certain threshold; otherwise, extensively training could lead to an increasing testing error.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Evaluating Features and Metrics for High-Quality Simulation of Early Vocal Learning of Vowels

The way infants use auditory cues to learn to speak despite the acoustic mismatch of their vocal apparatus is a hot topic of scientific debate. The simulation of early vocal learning using articulatory speech synthesis offers a way towards gaining a deeper understanding of this process. One of the crucial parameters in these simulations is the choice of features and a metric to evaluate the acoustic error between the synthesised sound and the reference target. We contribute with evaluating the performance of a set of 40 feature-metric combinations for the task of optimising the production of static vowels with a high-quality articulatory synthesiser. Towards this end we assess the usability of formant error and the projection of the feature-metric error surface in the normalised F1-F2 formant space. We show that this approach can be used to evaluate the impact of features and metrics and also to offer insight to perceptual results.

eess.AS↗