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The scale and diversity of demonstration data required for imitation learning is a significant challenge. We present EgoMimic, a full-stack framework which scales manipulation via human embodiment data, specifically egocentric human videos paired with 3D hand tracking. EgoMimic achieves this through: (1) a system to capture human embodiment data using the ergonomic Project Aria glasses, (2) a low-cost bimanual manipulator that minimizes the kinematic gap to human data, (3) cross-domain data alignment techniques, and (4) an imitation learning architecture that co-trains on human and robot data. Compared to prior works that only extract high-level intent from human videos, our approach treats human and robot data equally as embodied demonstration data and learns a unified policy from both data sources. EgoMimic achieves significant improvement on a diverse set of long-horizon, single-arm and bimanual manipulation tasks over state-of-the-art imitation learning methods and enables generalization to entirely new scenes. Finally, we show a favorable scaling trend for EgoMimic, where adding 1 hour of additional hand data is significantly more valuable than 1 hour of additional robot data. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egomimic.github.io/

Recent model merging methods demonstrate that the parameters of fully-finetuned models specializing in distinct tasks can be combined into one model capable of solving all tasks without retraining. Yet, this success does not transfer well when merging LoRA finetuned models. We study this phenomenon and observe that the weights of LoRA finetuned models showcase a lower degree of alignment compared to their fully-finetuned counterparts. We hypothesize that improving this alignment is key to obtaining better LoRA model merges, and propose KnOTS to address this problem. KnOTS uses the SVD to jointly transform the weights of different LoRA models into an aligned space, where existing merging methods can be applied. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark that explicitly evaluates whether merged models are general models. Notably, KnOTS consistently improves LoRA merging by up to 4.3% across several vision and language benchmarks, including our new setting. We release our code at: https://github.com/gstoica27/KnOTS.

There has been abundant work in unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation (DAS) seeking to adapt a model trained on images from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. While the vast majority of prior work has studied this as a frame-level Image-DAS problem, a few Video-DAS works have sought to additionally leverage the temporal signal present in adjacent frames. However, Video-DAS works have historically studied a distinct set of benchmarks from Image-DAS, with minimal cross-benchmarking. In this work, we address this gap. Surprisingly, we find that (1) even after carefully controlling for data and model architecture, state-of-the-art Image-DAS methods (HRDA and HRDA+MIC) outperform Video-DAS methods on established Video-DAS benchmarks (+14.5 mIoU on Viper$\rightarrow$CityscapesSeq, +19.0 mIoU on Synthia$\rightarrow$CityscapesSeq), and (2) naive combinations of Image-DAS and Video-DAS techniques only lead to marginal improvements across datasets. To avoid siloed progress between Image-DAS and Video-DAS, we open-source our codebase with support for a comprehensive set of Video-DAS and Image-DAS methods on a common benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/SimarKareer/UnifiedVideoDA, Comment: TMLR 2024

Real-world aerial scene understanding is limited by a lack of datasets that contain densely annotated images curated under a diverse set of conditions. Due to inherent challenges in obtaining such images in controlled real-world settings, we present SkyScenes, a synthetic dataset of densely annotated aerial images captured from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspectives. We carefully curate SkyScenes images from CARLA to comprehensively capture diversity across layouts (urban and rural maps), weather conditions, times of day, pitch angles and altitudes with corresponding semantic, instance and depth annotations. Through our experiments using SkyScenes, we show that (1) models trained on SkyScenes generalize well to different real-world scenarios, (2) augmenting training on real images with SkyScenes data can improve real-world performance, (3) controlled variations in SkyScenes can offer insights into how models respond to changes in viewpoint conditions (height and pitch), weather and time of day, and (4) incorporating additional sensor modalities (depth) can improve aerial scene understanding. Our dataset and associated generation code are publicly available at: https://hoffman-group.github.io/SkyScenes/, Comment: Accepted at The 18th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2024

Synthetic data (SIM) drawn from simulators have emerged as a popular alternative for training models where acquiring annotated real-world images is difficult. However, transferring models trained on synthetic images to real-world applications can be challenging due to appearance disparities. A commonly employed solution to counter this SIM2REAL gap is unsupervised domain adaptation, where models are trained using labeled SIM data and unlabeled REAL data. Mispredictions made by such SIM2REAL adapted models are often associated with miscalibration - stemming from overconfident predictions on real data. In this paper, we introduce AUGCAL, a simple training-time patch for unsupervised adaptation that improves SIM2REAL adapted models by - (1) reducing overall miscalibration, (2) reducing overconfidence in incorrect predictions and (3) improving confidence score reliability by better guiding misclassification detection - all while retaining or improving SIM2REAL performance. Given a base SIM2REAL adaptation algorithm, at training time, AUGCAL involves replacing vanilla SIM images with strongly augmented views (AUG intervention) and additionally optimizing for a training time calibration loss on augmented SIM predictions (CAL intervention). We motivate AUGCAL using a brief analytical justification of how to reduce miscalibration on unlabeled REAL data. Through our experiments, we empirically show the efficacy of AUGCAL across multiple adaptation methods, backbones, tasks and shifts., Comment: Published at ICLR 2024

We present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multimodal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured egocentric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). 740 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 123 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,286 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is unprecedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions -- including a novel "expert commentary" done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources are open sourced to fuel new research in the community. Project page: http://ego-exo4d-data.org/, Comment: Expanded manuscript (compared to arxiv v1 from Nov 2023 and CVPR 2024 paper from June 2024) for more comprehensive dataset and benchmark presentation, plus new results on v2 data release

Window attention, position embeddings, and high resolution finetuning are core concepts in the modern transformer era of computer vision. However, we find that naively combining these near ubiquitous components can have a detrimental effect on performance. The issue is simple: interpolating position embeddings while using window attention is wrong. We study two state-of-the-art methods that have these three components, namely Hiera and ViTDet, and find that both do indeed suffer from this bug. To fix it, we introduce a simple absolute window position embedding strategy, which solves the bug outright in Hiera and allows us to increase both speed and performance of the model in ViTDet. We finally combine the two to obtain HieraDet, which achieves 61.7 box mAP on COCO, making it state-of-the-art for models that only use ImageNet-1k pretraining. This all stems from what is essentially a 3 line bug fix, which we name "absolute win"., Comment: Preprint. Code release will be coming in the future

Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose. Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here: https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones, Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023

Computer vision datasets frequently contain spurious correlations between task-relevant labels and (easy to learn) latent task-irrelevant attributes (e.g. context). Models trained on such datasets learn "shortcuts" and underperform on bias-conflicting slices of data where the correlation does not hold. In this work, we study the problem of identifying such slices to inform downstream bias mitigation strategies. We propose First Amplify Correlations and Then Slice to Discover Bias (FACTS), wherein we first amplify correlations to fit a simple bias-aligned hypothesis via strongly regularized empirical risk minimization. Next, we perform correlation-aware slicing via mixture modeling in bias-aligned feature space to discover underperforming data slices that capture distinct correlations. Despite its simplicity, our method considerably improves over prior work (by as much as 35% precision@10) in correlation bias identification across a range of diverse evaluation settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yvsriram/FACTS., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023

The generative process of Diffusion Models (DMs) has recently set state-of-the-art on many AI generation benchmarks. Though the generative process is traditionally understood as an "iterative denoiser", there is no universally accepted language to describe it. We introduce a novel perspective to describe DMs using the mathematical language of memory retrieval from the field of energy-based Associative Memories (AMs), making efforts to keep our presentation approachable to newcomers to both of these fields. Unifying these two fields provides insight that DMs can be seen as a particular kind of AM where Lyapunov stability guarantees are bypassed by intelligently engineering the dynamics (i.e., the noise and step size schedules) of the denoising process. Finally, we present a growing body of evidence that records DMs exhibiting empirical behavior we would expect from AMs, and conclude by discussing research opportunities that are revealed by understanding DMs as a form of energy-based memory., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

As computer vision systems are being increasingly deployed at scale in high-stakes applications like autonomous driving, concerns about social bias in these systems are rising. Analysis of fairness in real-world vision systems, such as object detection in driving scenes, has been limited to observing predictive inequity across attributes such as pedestrian skin tone, and lacks a consistent methodology to disentangle the role of confounding variables e.g. does my model perform worse for a certain skin tone, or are such scenes in my dataset more challenging due to occlusion and crowds? In this work, we introduce ICON$^2$, a framework for robustly answering this question. ICON$^2$ leverages prior knowledge on the deficiencies of object detection systems to identify performance discrepancies across sub-populations, compute correlations between these potential confounders and a given sensitive attribute, and control for the most likely confounders to obtain a more reliable estimate of model bias. Using our approach, we conduct an in-depth study on the performance of object detection with respect to income from the BDD100K driving dataset, revealing useful insights., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023 SSAD Workshop

Modern hierarchical vision transformers have added several vision-specific components in the pursuit of supervised classification performance. While these components lead to effective accuracies and attractive FLOP counts, the added complexity actually makes these transformers slower than their vanilla ViT counterparts. In this paper, we argue that this additional bulk is unnecessary. By pretraining with a strong visual pretext task (MAE), we can strip out all the bells-and-whistles from a state-of-the-art multi-stage vision transformer without losing accuracy. In the process, we create Hiera, an extremely simple hierarchical vision transformer that is more accurate than previous models while being significantly faster both at inference and during training. We evaluate Hiera on a variety of tasks for image and video recognition. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/hiera., Comment: ICML 2023 Oral version. Code+Models: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hiera

We propose an automated algorithm to stress-test a trained visual model by generating language-guided counterfactual test images (LANCE). Our method leverages recent progress in large language modeling and text-based image editing to augment an IID test set with a suite of diverse, realistic, and challenging test images without altering model weights. We benchmark the performance of a diverse set of pre-trained models on our generated data and observe significant and consistent performance drops. We further analyze model sensitivity across different types of edits, and demonstrate its applicability at surfacing previously unknown class-level model biases in ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/virajprabhu/lance., Comment: NeurIPS 2023 camera ready. Project webpage: https://virajprabhu.github.io/lance-web/

Typical deep visual recognition models are capable of performing the one task they were trained on. In this paper, we tackle the extremely difficult problem of combining distinct models with different initializations, each solving a separate task, into one multi-task model without any additional training. Prior work in model merging permutes one model to the space of the other then averages them together. While this works for models trained on the same task, we find that this fails to account for the differences in models trained on disjoint tasks. Thus, we introduce "ZipIt!", a general method for merging two arbitrary models of the same architecture that incorporates two simple strategies. First, in order to account for features that aren't shared between models, we expand the model merging problem to allow for merging features within each model by defining a general "zip" operation. Second, we add support for partially zipping the models up until a specified layer, naturally creating a multi-head model. We find that these two changes combined account for 20-60% improvement over prior work, making it more feasible to merge models trained on disjoint tasks without retraining.

Robustness to natural distribution shifts has seen remarkable progress thanks to recent pre-training strategies combined with better fine-tuning methods. However, such fine-tuning assumes access to large amounts of labelled data, and the extent to which the observations hold when the amount of training data is not as high remains unknown. We address this gap by performing the first in-depth study of robustness to various natural distribution shifts in different low-shot regimes: spanning datasets, architectures, pre-trained initializations, and state-of-the-art robustness interventions. Most importantly, we find that there is no single model of choice that is often more robust than others, and existing interventions can fail to improve robustness on some datasets even if they do so in the full-shot regime. We hope that our work will motivate the community to focus on this problem of practical importance., Comment: 22 Pages, 18 Tables, 12 Figures

The landscape of image generation has been forever changed by open vocabulary diffusion models. However, at their core these models use transformers, which makes generation slow. Better implementations to increase the throughput of these transformers have emerged, but they still evaluate the entire model. In this paper, we instead speed up diffusion models by exploiting natural redundancy in generated images by merging redundant tokens. After making some diffusion-specific improvements to Token Merging (ToMe), our ToMe for Stable Diffusion can reduce the number of tokens in an existing Stable Diffusion model by up to 60% while still producing high quality images without any extra training. In the process, we speed up image generation by up to 2x and reduce memory consumption by up to 5.6x. Furthermore, this speed-up stacks with efficient implementations such as xFormers, minimally impacting quality while being up to 5.4x faster for large images. Code is available at https://github.com/dbolya/tomesd., Comment: Check out the code at https://github.com/dbolya/tomesd

Human action recognition is a challenging problem, particularly when there is high variability in factors such as subject appearance, backgrounds and viewpoint. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to perform well on action recognition tasks, they typically require large amounts of high-quality labeled data to achieve robust performance across a variety of conditions. Synthetic data has shown promise as a way to avoid the substantial costs and potential ethical concerns associated with collecting and labeling enormous amounts of data in the real-world. However, synthetic data may differ from real data in important ways. This phenomenon, known as \textit{domain shift}, can limit the utility of synthetic data in robotics applications. To mitigate the effects of domain shift, substantial effort is being dedicated to the development of domain adaptation (DA) techniques. Yet, much remains to be understood about how best to develop these techniques. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset called Robot Control Gestures (RoCoG-v2). The dataset is composed of both real and synthetic videos from seven gesture classes, and is intended to support the study of synthetic-to-real domain shift for video-based action recognition. Our work expands upon existing datasets by focusing the action classes on gestures for human-robot teaming, as well as by enabling investigation of domain shift in both ground and aerial views. We present baseline results using state-of-the-art action recognition and domain adaptation algorithms and offer initial insight on tackling the synthetic-to-real and ground-to-air domain shifts., Comment: ICRA 2023. The first two authors contributed equally. Dataset available at: https://github.com/reddyav1/RoCoG-v2

Sim2Real domain adaptation (DA) research focuses on the constrained setting of adapting from a labeled synthetic source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled real target domain. However, for high-stakes applications (e.g. autonomous driving), it is common to have a modest amount of human-labeled real data in addition to plentiful auto-labeled source data (e.g. from a driving simulator). We study this setting of supervised sim2real DA applied to 2D object detection. We propose Domain Translation via Conditional Alignment and Reweighting (CARE) a novel algorithm that systematically exploits target labels to explicitly close the sim2real appearance and content gaps. We present an analytical justification of our algorithm and demonstrate strong gains over competing methods on standard benchmarks.

As transformer architectures become increasingly prevalent in computer vision, it is critical to understand their fairness implications. We perform the first study of the fairness of transformers applied to computer vision and benchmark several bias mitigation approaches from prior work. We visualize the feature space of the transformer self-attention modules and discover that a significant portion of the bias is encoded in the query matrix. With this knowledge, we propose TADeT, a targeted alignment strategy for debiasing transformers that aims to discover and remove bias primarily from query matrix features. We measure performance using Balanced Accuracy and Standard Accuracy, and fairness using Equalized Odds and Balanced Accuracy Difference. TADeT consistently leads to improved fairness over prior work on multiple attribute prediction tasks on the CelebA dataset, without compromising performance.

Synthetic data offers the promise of cheap and bountiful training data for settings where labeled real-world data is scarce. However, models trained on synthetic data significantly underperform when evaluated on real-world data. In this paper, we propose Proportional Amplitude Spectrum Training Augmentation (PASTA), a simple and effective augmentation strategy to improve out-of-the-box synthetic-to-real (syn-to-real) generalization performance. PASTA perturbs the amplitude spectra of synthetic images in the Fourier domain to generate augmented views. Specifically, with PASTA we propose a structured perturbation strategy where high-frequency components are perturbed relatively more than the low-frequency ones. For the tasks of semantic segmentation (GTAV-to-Real), object detection (Sim10K-to-Real), and object recognition (VisDA-C Syn-to-Real), across a total of 5 syn-to-real shifts, we find that PASTA outperforms more complex state-of-the-art generalization methods while being complementary to the same., Comment: Accepted at ICCV 2023, Code: https://github.com/prithv1/PASTA

Efficient inference of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is essential to making AI ubiquitous. Two important algorithmic techniques have shown promise for enabling efficient inference - sparsity and binarization. These techniques translate into weight sparsity and weight repetition at the hardware-software level enabling the deployment of DNNs with critically low power and latency requirements. We propose a new method called signed-binary networks to improve efficiency further (by exploiting both weight sparsity and weight repetition together) while maintaining similar accuracy. Our method achieves comparable accuracy on ImageNet and CIFAR10 datasets with binary and can lead to 69% sparsity. We observe real speedup when deploying these models on general-purpose devices and show that this high percentage of unstructured sparsity can lead to a further reduction in energy consumption on ASICs., Comment: it is being updated

In Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), researchers typically take an image encoder pre-trained on ImageNet without fine-tuning on the environments that the agent will be trained or tested on. However, the distribution shift between the training images from ImageNet and the views in the navigation environments may render the ImageNet pre-trained image encoder suboptimal. Therefore, in this paper, we design a set of structure-encoding auxiliary tasks (SEA) that leverage the data in the navigation environments to pre-train and improve the image encoder. Specifically, we design and customize (1) 3D jigsaw, (2) traversability prediction, and (3) instance classification to pre-train the image encoder. Through rigorous ablations, our SEA pre-trained features are shown to better encode structural information of the scenes, which ImageNet pre-trained features fail to properly encode but is crucial for the target navigation task. The SEA pre-trained features can be easily plugged into existing VLN agents without any tuning. For example, on Test-Unseen environments, the VLN agents combined with our SEA pre-trained features achieve absolute success rate improvement of 12% for Speaker-Follower, 5% for Env-Dropout, and 4% for AuxRN.

We introduce Token Merging (ToMe), a simple method to increase the throughput of existing ViT models without needing to train. ToMe gradually combines similar tokens in a transformer using a general and light-weight matching algorithm that is as fast as pruning while being more accurate. Off-the-shelf, ToMe can 2x the throughput of state-of-the-art ViT-L @ 512 and ViT-H @ 518 models on images and 2.2x the throughput of ViT-L on video with only a 0.2-0.3% accuracy drop in each case. ToMe can also easily be applied during training, improving in practice training speed up to 2x for MAE fine-tuning on video. Training with ToMe further minimizes accuracy drop, leading to 2x the throughput of ViT-B on audio for only a 0.4% mAP drop. Qualitatively, we find that ToMe merges object parts into one token, even over multiple frames of video. Overall, ToMe's accuracy and speed are competitive with state-of-the-art on images, video, and audio., Comment: Accepted ICLR 2023 Oral (top 5%) [final v2]. This version includes stable diffusion experiments. See code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ToMe

While transformers have begun to dominate many tasks in vision, applying them to large images is still computationally difficult. A large reason for this is that self-attention scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which in turn, scales quadratically with the image size. On larger images (e.g., 1080p), over 60% of the total computation in the network is spent solely on creating and applying attention matrices. We take a step toward solving this issue by introducing Hydra Attention, an extremely efficient attention operation for Vision Transformers (ViTs). Paradoxically, this efficiency comes from taking multi-head attention to its extreme: by using as many attention heads as there are features, Hydra Attention is computationally linear in both tokens and features with no hidden constants, making it significantly faster than standard self-attention in an off-the-shelf ViT-B/16 by a factor of the token count. Moreover, Hydra Attention retains high accuracy on ImageNet and, in some cases, actually improves it., Comment: Accepted CADL 2022 (ECCV Workshop)

We present a scalable approach for learning open-world object-goal navigation (ObjectNav) -- the task of asking a virtual robot (agent) to find any instance of an object in an unexplored environment (e.g., "find a sink"). Our approach is entirely zero-shot -- i.e., it does not require ObjectNav rewards or demonstrations of any kind. Instead, we train on the image-goal navigation (ImageNav) task, in which agents find the location where a picture (i.e., goal image) was captured. Specifically, we encode goal images into a multimodal, semantic embedding space to enable training semantic-goal navigation (SemanticNav) agents at scale in unannotated 3D environments (e.g., HM3D). After training, SemanticNav agents can be instructed to find objects described in free-form natural language (e.g., "sink", "bathroom sink", etc.) by projecting language goals into the same multimodal, semantic embedding space. As a result, our approach enables open-world ObjectNav. We extensively evaluate our agents on three ObjectNav datasets (Gibson, HM3D, and MP3D) and observe absolute improvements in success of 4.2% - 20.0% over existing zero-shot methods. For reference, these gains are similar or better than the 5% improvement in success between the Habitat 2020 and 2021 ObjectNav challenge winners. In an open-world setting, we discover that our agents can generalize to compound instructions with a room explicitly mentioned (e.g., "Find a kitchen sink") and when the target room can be inferred (e.g., "Find a sink and a stove")., Comment: code: https://github.com/gunagg/zson

Visual domain adaptation (DA) seeks to transfer trained models to unseen, unlabeled domains across distribution shift, but approaches typically focus on adapting convolutional neural network architectures initialized with supervised ImageNet representations. In this work, we shift focus to adapting modern architectures for object recognition -- the increasingly popular Vision Transformer (ViT) -- and modern pretraining based on self-supervised learning (SSL). Inspired by the design of recent SSL approaches based on learning from partial image inputs generated via masking or cropping -- either by learning to predict the missing pixels, or learning representational invariances to such augmentations -- we propose PACMAC, a simple two-stage adaptation algorithm for self-supervised ViTs. PACMAC first performs in-domain SSL on pooled source and target data to learn task-discriminative features, and then probes the model's predictive consistency across a set of partial target inputs generated via a novel attention-conditioned masking strategy, to identify reliable candidates for self-training. Our simple approach leads to consistent performance gains over competing methods that use ViTs and self-supervised initializations on standard object recognition benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/virajprabhu/PACMAC

Despite the rapid progress in deep visual recognition, modern computer vision datasets significantly overrepresent the developed world and models trained on such datasets underperform on images from unseen geographies. We investigate the effectiveness of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) of such models across geographies at closing this performance gap. To do so, we first curate two shifts from existing datasets to study the Geographical DA problem, and discover new challenges beyond data distribution shift: context shift, wherein object surroundings may change significantly across geographies, and subpopulation shift, wherein the intra-category distributions may shift. We demonstrate the inefficacy of standard DA methods at Geographical DA, highlighting the need for specialized geographical adaptation solutions to address the challenge of making object recognition work for everyone., Comment: Published at the L3D-IVU workshop at CVPR 2022

CNN image classifiers are widely used, thanks to their efficiency and accuracy. However, they can suffer from biases that impede their practical applications. Most existing bias investigation techniques are either inapplicable to general image classification tasks or require significant user efforts in perusing all data subgroups to manually specify which data attributes to inspect. We present VisCUIT, an interactive visualization system that reveals how and why a CNN classifier is biased. VisCUIT visually summarizes the subgroups on which the classifier underperforms and helps users discover and characterize the cause of the underperformances by revealing image concepts responsible for activating neurons that contribute to misclassifications. VisCUIT runs in modern browsers and is open-source, allowing people to easily access and extend the tool to other model architectures and datasets. VisCUIT is available at the following public demo link: https://poloclub.github.io/VisCUIT. A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/eNDbSyM4R_4., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

We present ConceptEvo, a unified interpretation framework for deep neural networks (DNNs) that reveals the inception and evolution of learned concepts during training. Our work addresses a critical gap in DNN interpretation research, as existing methods primarily focus on post-training interpretation. ConceptEvo introduces two novel technical contributions: (1) an algorithm that generates a unified semantic space, enabling side-by-side comparison of different models during training, and (2) an algorithm that discovers and quantifies important concept evolutions for class predictions. Through a large-scale human evaluation and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that ConceptEvo successfully identifies concept evolutions across different models, which are not only comprehensible to humans but also crucial for class predictions. ConceptEvo is applicable to both modern DNN architectures, such as ConvNeXt, and classic DNNs, such as VGGs and InceptionV3., Comment: Accepted at CIKM'23

With the preponderance of pretrained deep learning models available off-the-shelf from model banks today, finding the best weights to fine-tune to your use-case can be a daunting task. Several methods have recently been proposed to find good models for transfer learning, but they either don't scale well to large model banks or don't perform well on the diversity of off-the-shelf models. Ideally the question we want to answer is, "given some data and a source model, can you quickly predict the model's accuracy after fine-tuning?" In this paper, we formalize this setting as "Scalable Diverse Model Selection" and propose several benchmarks for evaluating on this task. We find that existing model selection and transferability estimation methods perform poorly here and analyze why this is the case. We then introduce simple techniques to improve the performance and speed of these algorithms. Finally, we iterate on existing methods to create PARC, which outperforms all other methods on diverse model selection. We have released the benchmarks and method code in hope to inspire future work in model selection for accessible transfer learning., Comment: NeurIPS 2021 camera ready v2 + Appendix. Added a missing citation and fixed Table 4 header. Table 1 is still purple. No, I do not know why

Deep learning models have been shown to learn spurious correlations from data that sometimes lead to systematic failures for certain subpopulations. Prior work has typically diagnosed this by crowdsourcing annotations for various protected attributes and measuring performance, which is both expensive to acquire and difficult to scale. In this work, we propose UDIS, an unsupervised algorithm for surfacing and analyzing such failure modes. UDIS identifies subpopulations via hierarchical clustering of dataset embeddings and surfaces systematic failure modes by visualizing low performing clusters along with their gradient-weighted class-activation maps. We show the effectiveness of UDIS in identifying failure modes in models trained for image classification on the CelebA and MSCOCO datasets.

Most modern approaches for domain adaptive semantic segmentation rely on continued access to source data during adaptation, which may be infeasible due to computational or privacy constraints. We focus on source-free domain adaptation for semantic segmentation, wherein a source model must adapt itself to a new target domain given only unlabeled target data. We propose Augmentation Consistency-guided Self-training (AUGCO), a source-free adaptation algorithm that uses the model's pixel-level predictive consistency across diverse, automatically generated views of each target image along with model confidence to identify reliable pixel predictions, and selectively self-trains on those. AUGCO achieves state-of-the-art results for source-free adaptation on 3 standard benchmarks for semantic segmentation, all within a simple to implement and fast to converge method.

As an attempt towards assessing the robustness of embodied navigation agents, we propose RobustNav, a framework to quantify the performance of embodied navigation agents when exposed to a wide variety of visual - affecting RGB inputs - and dynamics - affecting transition dynamics - corruptions. Most recent efforts in visual navigation have typically focused on generalizing to novel target environments with similar appearance and dynamics characteristics. With RobustNav, we find that some standard embodied navigation agents significantly underperform (or fail) in the presence of visual or dynamics corruptions. We systematically analyze the kind of idiosyncrasies that emerge in the behavior of such agents when operating under corruptions. Finally, for visual corruptions in RobustNav, we show that while standard techniques to improve robustness such as data-augmentation and self-supervised adaptation offer some zero-shot resistance and improvements in navigation performance, there is still a long way to go in terms of recovering lost performance relative to clean "non-corrupt" settings, warranting more research in this direction. Our code is available at https://github.com/allenai/robustnav, Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, Code: https://github.com/allenai/robustnav

Many existing approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) focus on adapting under only data distribution shift and offer limited success under additional cross-domain label distribution shift. Recent work based on self-training using target pseudo-labels has shown promise, but on challenging shifts pseudo-labels may be highly unreliable, and using them for self-training may cause error accumulation and domain misalignment. We propose Selective Entropy Optimization via Committee Consistency (SENTRY), a UDA algorithm that judges the reliability of a target instance based on its predictive consistency under a committee of random image transformations. Our algorithm then selectively minimizes predictive entropy to increase confidence on highly consistent target instances, while maximizing predictive entropy to reduce confidence on highly inconsistent ones. In combination with pseudo-label based approximate target class balancing, our approach leads to significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on 27/31 domain shifts from standard UDA benchmarks as well as benchmarks designed to stress-test adaptation under label distribution shift., Comment: Published at ICCV 2021. Code available at https://github.com/virajprabhu/SENTRY

Training temporal action detection in videos requires large amounts of labeled data, yet such annotation is expensive to collect. Incorporating unlabeled or weakly-labeled data to train action detection model could help reduce annotation cost. In this work, we first introduce the Semi-supervised Action Detection (SSAD) task with a mixture of labeled and unlabeled data and analyze different types of errors in the proposed SSAD baselines which are directly adapted from the semi-supervised classification task. To alleviate the main error of action incompleteness (i.e., missing parts of actions) in SSAD baselines, we further design an unsupervised foreground attention (UFA) module utilizing the "independence" between foreground and background motion. Then we incorporate weakly-labeled data into SSAD and propose Omni-supervised Action Detection (OSAD) with three levels of supervision. An information bottleneck (IB) suppressing the scene information in non-action frames while preserving the action information is designed to help overcome the accompanying action-context confusion problem in OSAD baselines. We extensively benchmark against the baselines for SSAD and OSAD on our created data splits in THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UFA and IB methods. Lastly, the benefit of our full OSAD-IB model under limited annotation budgets is shown by exploring the optimal annotation strategy for labeled, unlabeled and weakly-labeled data.

Supervised learning requires a large amount of training data, limiting its application where labeled data is scarce. To compensate for data scarcity, one possible method is to utilize auxiliary tasks to provide additional supervision for the main task. Assigning and optimizing the importance weights for different auxiliary tasks remains an crucial and largely understudied research question. In this work, we propose a method to automatically reweight auxiliary tasks in order to reduce the data requirement on the main task. Specifically, we formulate the weighted likelihood function of auxiliary tasks as a surrogate prior for the main task. By adjusting the auxiliary task weights to minimize the divergence between the surrogate prior and the true prior of the main task, we obtain a more accurate prior estimation, achieving the goal of minimizing the required amount of training data for the main task and avoiding a costly grid search. In multiple experimental settings (e.g. semi-supervised learning, multi-label classification), we demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively utilize limited labeled data of the main task with the benefit of auxiliary tasks compared with previous task reweighting methods. We also show that under extreme cases with only a few extra examples (e.g. few-shot domain adaptation), our algorithm results in significant improvement over the baseline., Comment: NeurIPS 2020. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/auxiliary-task-reweighting/home

Generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains is critical to their real-world utility. In practice, it may be feasible to get some target data labeled, but to be cost-effective it is desirable to select a maximally-informative subset via active learning (AL). We study the problem of AL under a domain shift, called Active Domain Adaptation (Active DA). We demonstrate how existing AL approaches based solely on model uncertainty or diversity sampling are less effective for Active DA. We propose Clustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings (CLUE), a novel label acquisition strategy for Active DA that performs uncertainty-weighted clustering to identify target instances for labeling that are both uncertain under the model and diverse in feature space. CLUE consistently outperforms competing label acquisition strategies for Active DA and AL across learning settings on 6 diverse domain shifts for image classification., Comment: Published at ICCV 2021. Our code is available at https://github.com/virajprabhu/CLUE

Recent work has presented embodied agents that can navigate to point-goal targets in novel indoor environments with near-perfect accuracy. However, these agents are equipped with idealized sensors for localization and take deterministic actions. This setting is practically sterile by comparison to the dirty reality of noisy sensors and actuations in the real world -- wheels can slip, motion sensors have error, actuations can rebound. In this work, we take a step towards this noisy reality, developing point-goal navigation agents that rely on visual estimates of egomotion under noisy action dynamics. We find these agents outperform naive adaptions of current point-goal agents to this setting as well as those incorporating classic localization baselines. Further, our model conceptually divides learning agent dynamics or odometry (where am I?) from task-specific navigation policy (where do I want to go?). This enables a seamless adaption to changing dynamics (a different robot or floor type) by simply re-calibrating the visual odometry model -- circumventing the expense of re-training of the navigation policy. Our agent was the runner-up in the PointNav track of CVPR 2020 Habitat Challenge.

We introduce Domain-specific Masks for Generalization, a model for improving both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization performance. For domain generalization, the goal is to learn from a set of source domains to produce a single model that will best generalize to an unseen target domain. As such, many prior approaches focus on learning representations which persist across all source domains with the assumption that these domain agnostic representations will generalize well. However, often individual domains contain characteristics which are unique and when leveraged can significantly aid in-domain recognition performance. To produce a model which best generalizes to both seen and unseen domains, we propose learning domain specific masks. The masks are encouraged to learn a balance of domain-invariant and domain-specific features, thus enabling a model which can benefit from the predictive power of specialized features while retaining the universal applicability of domain-invariant features. We demonstrate competitive performance compared to naive baselines and state-of-the-art methods on both PACS and DomainNet., Comment: Published at ECCV 2020

Convolutional Neural Networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are known to locate in subspaces close to where normal data lies but are not naturally occurring and of low probability. In this work, we investigate the potential effect defense techniques have on the geometry of the likelihood landscape - likelihood of the input images under the trained model. We first propose a way to visualize the likelihood landscape leveraging an energy-based model interpretation of discriminative classifiers. Then we introduce a measure to quantify the flatness of the likelihood landscape. We observe that a subset of adversarial defense techniques results in a similar effect of flattening the likelihood landscape. We further explore directly regularizing towards a flat landscape for adversarial robustness., Comment: ECCV 2020 Workshop on Adversarial Robustness in the Real World

We introduce TIDE, a framework and associated toolbox for analyzing the sources of error in object detection and instance segmentation algorithms. Importantly, our framework is applicable across datasets and can be applied directly to output prediction files without required knowledge of the underlying prediction system. Thus, our framework can be used as a drop-in replacement for the standard mAP computation while providing a comprehensive analysis of each model's strengths and weaknesses. We segment errors into six types and, crucially, are the first to introduce a technique for measuring the contribution of each error in a way that isolates its effect on overall performance. We show that such a representation is critical for drawing accurate, comprehensive conclusions through in-depth analysis across 4 datasets and 7 recognition models. Available at https://dbolya.github.io/tide/, Comment: Updated LVIS results with the v1.0.1 error calculation

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning require a large amount of training data and generally result in representations that are often over specialized to the target task. In this work, we present a methodology to study the underlying potential causes for this specialization. We use the recently proposed projection weighted Canonical Correlation Analysis (PWCCA) to measure the similarity of visual representations learned in the same environment by performing different tasks. We then leverage our proposed methodology to examine the task dependence of visual representations learned on related but distinct embodied navigation tasks. Surprisingly, we find that slight differences in task have no measurable effect on the visual representation for both SqueezeNet and ResNet architectures. We then empirically demonstrate that visual representations learned on one task can be effectively transferred to a different task.

We seek to learn a representation on a large annotated data source that generalizes to a target domain using limited new supervision. Many prior approaches to this problem have focused on learning "disentangled" representations so that as individual factors vary in a new domain, only a portion of the representation need be updated. In this work, we seek the generalization power of disentangled representations, but relax the requirement of explicit latent disentanglement and instead encourage linearity of individual factors of variation by requiring them to be manipulable by learned linear transformations. We dub these transformations latent canonicalizers, as they aim to modify the value of a factor to a pre-determined (but arbitrary) canonical value (e.g., recoloring the image foreground to black). Assuming a source domain with access to meta-labels specifying the factors of variation within an image, we demonstrate experimentally that our method helps reduce the number of observations needed to generalize to a similar target domain when compared to a number of supervised baselines.

Adversarial training is by far the most successful strategy for improving robustness of neural networks to adversarial attacks. Despite its success as a defense mechanism, adversarial training fails to generalize well to unperturbed test set. We hypothesize that this poor generalization is a consequence of adversarial training with uniform perturbation radius around every training sample. Samples close to decision boundary can be morphed into a different class under a small perturbation budget, and enforcing large margins around these samples produce poor decision boundaries that generalize poorly. Motivated by this hypothesis, we propose instance adaptive adversarial training -- a technique that enforces sample-specific perturbation margins around every training sample. We show that using our approach, test accuracy on unperturbed samples improve with a marginal drop in robustness. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Imagenet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Design of reliable systems must guarantee stability against input perturbations. In machine learning, such guarantee entails preventing overfitting and ensuring robustness of models against corruption of input data. In order to maximize stability, we analyze and develop a computationally efficient implementation of Jacobian regularization that increases classification margins of neural networks. The stabilizing effect of the Jacobian regularizer leads to significant improvements in robustness, as measured against both random and adversarial input perturbations, without severely degrading generalization properties on clean data., Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures

We propose SplitNet, a method for decoupling visual perception and policy learning. By incorporating auxiliary tasks and selective learning of portions of the model, we explicitly decompose the learning objectives for visual navigation into perceiving the world and acting on that perception. We show dramatic improvements over baseline models on transferring between simulators, an encouraging step towards Sim2Real. Additionally, SplitNet generalizes better to unseen environments from the same simulator and transfers faster and more effectively to novel embodied navigation tasks. Further, given only a small sample from a target domain, SplitNet can match the performance of traditional end-to-end pipelines which receive the entire dataset. Code is available https://github.com/facebookresearch/splitnet

In this work, we investigate whether state-of-the-art object detection systems have equitable predictive performance on pedestrians with different skin tones. This work is motivated by many recent examples of ML and vision systems displaying higher error rates for certain demographic groups than others. We annotate an existing large scale dataset which contains pedestrians, BDD100K, with Fitzpatrick skin tones in ranges [1-3] or [4-6]. We then provide an in-depth comparative analysis of performance between these two skin tone groupings, finding that neither time of day nor occlusion explain this behavior, suggesting this disparity is not merely the result of pedestrians in the 4-6 range appearing in more difficult scenes for detection. We investigate to what extent time of day, occlusion, and reweighting the supervised loss during training affect this predictive bias.

Unsupervised transfer of object recognition models from synthetic to real data is an important problem with many potential applications. The challenge is how to "adapt" a model trained on simulated images so that it performs well on real-world data without any additional supervision. Unfortunately, current benchmarks for this problem are limited in size and task diversity. In this paper, we present a new large-scale benchmark called Syn2Real, which consists of a synthetic domain rendered from 3D object models and two real-image domains containing the same object categories. We define three related tasks on this benchmark: closed-set object classification, open-set object classification, and object detection. Our evaluation of multiple state-of-the-art methods reveals a large gap in adaptation performance between the easier closed-set classification task and the more difficult open-set and detection tasks. We conclude that developing adaptation methods that work well across all three tasks presents a significant future challenge for syn2real domain transfer.

This work includes a number of novel contributions for the multiple-source adaptation problem. We present new normalized solutions with strong theoretical guarantees for the cross-entropy loss and other similar losses. We also provide new guarantees that hold in the case where the conditional probabilities for the source domains are distinct. Moreover, we give new algorithms for determining the distribution-weighted combination solution for the cross-entropy loss and other losses. We report the results of a series of experiments with real-world datasets. We find that our algorithm outperforms competing approaches by producing a single robust model that performs well on any target mixture distribution. Altogether, our theory, algorithms, and empirical results provide a full solution for the multiple-source adaptation problem with very practical benefits., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.05037

We propose a framework that learns a representation transferable across different domains and tasks in a label efficient manner. Our approach battles domain shift with a domain adversarial loss, and generalizes the embedding to novel task using a metric learning-based approach. Our model is simultaneously optimized on labeled source data and unlabeled or sparsely labeled data in the target domain. Our method shows compelling results on novel classes within a new domain even when only a few labeled examples per class are available, outperforming the prevalent fine-tuning approach. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the transfer learning task from image object recognition to video action recognition., Comment: NIPS 2017