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Quantization has emerged as a promising direction for model compression. Recently, data-free quantization has been widely studied as a promising method to avoid privacy concerns, which synthesizes images as an alternative to real training data. Existing methods use classification loss to ensure the reliability of the synthesized images. Unfortunately, even if these images are well-classified by the pre-trained model, they still suffer from low semantics and homogenization issues. Intuitively, these low-semantic images are sensitive to perturbations, and the pre-trained model tends to have inconsistent output when the generator synthesizes an image with low semantics. To this end, we propose Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis (RIS), a simple but effective method to enrich the semantics of synthetic images and improve image diversity, further boosting the performance of data-free compression tasks. Concretely, we first introduce perturbations on input and model weight, then define the inconsistency metrics at feature and prediction levels before and after perturbations. On the basis of inconsistency on two levels, we design a robustness optimization objective to eliminate low-semantic images. Moreover, we also make our approach diversity-aware by forcing the generator to synthesize images with small correlations. With RIS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for various settings on data-free quantization and can be extended to other data-free compression tasks.

AAAI 2024

Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis for Data-Free Quantization

data-free quantization

image synthesis

model compression

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

GroundVLP: Harnessing Zero-Shot Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Pre-training and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) system is an effective manner for hyperspectral snapshot compressive imaging. The core issue of CASSI is to solve the inverse problem for the reconstruction of hyperspectral image (HSI). In recent years, Transformer-based methods achieve promising performance in HSI reconstruction. However, capturing both long-range dependencies and local information while ensuring reasonable computational costs remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based HSI reconstruction method called dual-window multiscale Transformer (DWMT), which is a coarse-to-fine process, reconstructing the global properties of HSI with the long-range dependencies. In our method, we propose a novel U-Net architecture using a dual-branch encoder to refine pixel information and full-scale skip connections to fuse different features, enhancing the extraction of fine-grained features. Meanwhile, we design a novel self-attention mechanism called dual-window multiscale multi-head self-attention (DWM-MSA), which utilizes two different-sized windows to compute self-attention, which can capture the long-term dependencies in a local region at different scales to improve the reconstruction performance. We also propose a novel position embedding method for Transformer, named con-abs position embedding (CAPE), which effectively enhance positional information of the HSIs. Extensive experiments on both the simulated and the real data are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance, stability, and generalization ability of our DWMT. Code of this project is at https://github.com/chenx2000/DWMT.

Dual-Window Multiscale Transformer for Hyperspectral Snapshot Compressive Imaging

We observe two phenomenons with respect to quantity and capacity: 1) more teacher is not always better for multi-teacher knowledge distillation, and 2) stronger teacher is not always better for single-teacher knowledge distillation. To trade off the quantity and capacity of teacher ensemble, in this paper, we propose a new distillation paradigm named Dynamic Knowledge Distillation (DynaKD) that learn an adaptive categorical distribution to stochastically employ a teacher from a teacher ensemble in each step, to transfer knowledge from teacher ensemble into student. DynaKD has three advantages: 1) it can preserve diversity of each teacher via one-to-one distillation manner instead of several-for-one, 2) it can make the best of powerful teacher via those multi-level assistant teachers in ensemble, and 3) it can also dynamically determine the importance of each teacher for various tasks. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments for BERT compression on GLUE benchmark. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art score compared to previous compression approaches on five out of seven downstream tasks, including pushing MRPC F1 and accuracy to 92.2 (1.4 point absolute improvement), RTE accuracy to 76.2 (2.8 point absolute improvement). Moreover, we conduct also extensive experiments for image classification on CIFAR-100. Similarly, DynaKD achieves also state-of-the-art performance.

How to Trade Off the Quantity and Capacity of Teacher Ensemble: Learning Categorical Distribution to Stochastically Employ a Teacher for Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important for machine learning applications. However, it can be challenging to align LLMs with our intent, particularly when we want to generate content that is preferable over others or when we want the LLM to respond in a certain style or tone that is hard to describe. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that uses contrastive examples to better describe our intent. This involves providing positive examples that illustrate the true intent, along with negative examples that show what characteristics we want LLMs to avoid. The negative examples can be retrieved from labeled data, written by a human, or generated by the LLM itself.
Before generating an answer, we ask the model to analyze the examples to teach itself what to avoid. This reasoning step provides the model with the appropriate articulation of the user's need and guides it towards generting a better answer. We tested our approach on both synthesized and real-world datasets, including StackExchange and Reddit, and found that it significantly improves performance compared to standard few-shot prompting.

Customizing Language Model Responses with Contrastive In-Context Learning

Efficiently utilizing rich knowledge in pretrained models has become a critical topic in the era of large models. This work focuses on adaptively utilize knowledge from multiple source-pretrained models to an unlabeled target domain without accessing the source data. Despite being a practically useful setting, existing methods require extensive parameter tuning over each source model, which is computationally expensive when facing abundant source domains or larger source models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach which is free of the parameter tuning over source backbones. Our technical contribution lies in the Bi-level ATtention ENsemble (Bi-ATEN) module, which learns both intra-domain weights and inter-domain ensemble weights to achieve a fine balance between instance specificity and domain consistency. By slightly tuning source bottlenecks, we achieve comparable or even superior performance on a challenging benchmark DomainNet with less than 3% trained parameters and 8 times of throughput compared with SOTA method. Furthermore, with minor modifications, the proposed module can be easily equipped to existing methods and gain more than 4% performance boost. Code is available at https://github.com/TL-UESTC/Bi-ATEN.

Agile Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation | VIDEO

Recent deep-learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods have shown impressive performance whereas typical methods train their networks by minimizing the pixel-wise distance with respect to a given high-resolution (HR) image. However, despite the basic training scheme being the predominant choice, its use in the context of ill-posed inverse problems has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we aim to provide a better comprehension of the underlying constituent by decomposing target HR images into two subcomponents: (1) the optimal centroid which is the expectation over multiple potential HR images, and (2) the residual between the HR image and the centroid as the inherent noise. Our findings show that the current training scheme cannot capture the ill-posed nature of SISR and becomes vulnerable to the inherent noise term, especially during early training steps. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel optimization method that can effectively remove the inherent noise term in the early steps of vanilla training by estimating the optimal centroid and directly optimizing toward the estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance the stability of vanilla training, leading to overall performance gain.

Noise-Free Optimization in Early Training Steps for Image Super-resolution | VIDEO

Determining the types of neurons within a nervous system plays a significant role in the analysis of brain connectomics and the investigation of neurological diseases. However, the efficiency of utilizing anatomical, physiological, or molecular characteristics of neurons is relatively low and costly. With the advancements in electron microscopy imaging and analysis techniques for brain tissue, we are able to obtain whole-brain connectome consisting neuronal high-resolution morphology and connectivity information. However, few models are built based on such data for automated neuron classification. In this paper, we propose NeuNet, a framework that combines morphological information of neurons obtained from skeleton and topological information between neurons obtained from neural circuit. Specifically, NeuNet consists of three components, namely Skeleton Encoder, Connectome Encoder, and Readout Layer. Skeleton Encoder integrates the local information of neurons in a bottom-up manner, with a one-dimensional convolution in neural skeleton's point data; Connectome Encoder uses a graph neural network to capture the topological information of neural circuit; finally, Readout Layer fuses the above two information and outputs classification results. We reprocess and release two new datasets for neuron classification task from volume electron microscopy(VEM) images of human brain cortex and Drosophila brain. Experiments on these two datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our model with accuracies of 0.9169 and 0.9363, respectively. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/WHUminghui/NeuNet.

Joint Learning Neuronal Skeleton and Brain Circuit Topology with Permutation Invariant Encoders for Neuron Classification

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated impressive potential in synthesizing novel views from dense input, however, their effectiveness is challenged when dealing with sparse input. Existing approaches that incorporate additional depth or semantic supervision can alleviate this issue to an extent. However, the process of supervision collection is not only costly but also potentially inaccurate. In our work, we introduce a novel model: the Collaborative Neural Radiance Fields (ColNeRF) designed to work with sparse input. The collaboration in ColNeRF includes the cooperation among sparse input source images and the cooperation among the output of the NeRF. Through this, we construct a novel collaborative module that aligns information from various views and meanwhile imposes self-supervised constraints to ensure multi-view consistency in both geometry and appearance. A Collaborative Cross-View Volume Integration module (CCVI) is proposed to capture complex occlusions and implicitly infer the spatial location of objects. Moreover, we introduce self-supervision of target rays projected in multiple directions to ensure geometric and color consistency in adjacent regions. Benefiting from the collaboration at the input and output ends, ColNeRF is capable of capturing richer and more generalized scene representation, thereby facilitating higher-quality results of the novel view synthesis. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that ColNeRF outperforms state-of-the-art sparse input generalizable NeRF methods. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superiority in fine-tuning towards adapting to new scenes, achieving competitive performance compared to per-scene optimized NeRF-based methods while significantly reducing computational costs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/eezkni/ColNeRF.

ColNeRF: Collaboration for Generalizable Sparse Input Neural Radiance Field

One-shot object detection (OSOD) aims to detect all object instances towards the given category specified by a query image. Most existing studies in OSOD endeavor to establish effective cross-image correlation with limited query information, however, ignoring the problems of the model bias towards the base classes and the generalization degradation on the novel classes. Observing this, we propose a novel algorithm, namely Base-class Suppression with Prior Guidance (BSPG) network to achieve bias-free OSOD. Specifically, the objects of base categories can be detected by a base-class predictor and eliminated by a base-class suppression module (BcS). Moreover, a prior guidance module (PG) is designed to calculate the correlation of high-level features in a non-parametric manner, producing a class-agnostic prior map with unbiased semantic information to guide the subsequent detection process. Equipped with the proposed two modules, we endow the model with a strong discriminative ability to distinguish the target objects from distractors belonging to the base classes. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous techniques by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art performance under various evaluation settings.

Exploring Base-Class Suppression with Prior Guidance for Bias-Free One-Shot Object Detection

Knowledge distillation aims at transferring knowledge from the teacher model to the student one by aligning their distributions. 
Feature-level distillation often uses $\mathcal{L}_{2}$ distance or its variants as the loss function, based on the assumption that outputs follow normal distributions. 
This poses a significant challenge when distribution gaps are substantial since this loss function ignores the variance term. 
To address the problem, we propose to decompose the transfer objective into small parts and optimize it progressively. 
This process is inspired by diffusion models from which the noise distribution is mapped to the target distribution step by step.
However, directly employing diffusion models is impractical in the distillation scenario due to its heavy reverse process.
To overcome this challenge, we adopt the structural re-parameterization technique to generate multiple student features to approximate the teacher features sequentially. 
The multiple student features are combined linearly in inference time without extra cost.
We present extensive experiments performed on various transfer scenarios, such as CNN-to-CNN and Transformer-to-CNN, that validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yaoxufeng/KDiffusion}.

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