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Recently, vision Transformers (ViTs) are developing rapidly and starting to challenge the domination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the realm of computer vision (CV). With the general-purpose Transformer architecture replacing the hard-coded inductive biases of convolution, ViTs have surpassed CNNs, especially in data-sufficient circumstances. However, ViTs are prone to over-fit on small datasets and thus rely on large-scale pre-training, which expends enormous time. In this paper, we strive to liberate ViTs from pre-training by introducing CNNs' inductive biases back to ViTs while preserving their network architectures for higher upper bound and setting up more suitable optimization objectives. To begin with, an agent CNN is designed based on the given ViT with inductive biases. Then a bootstrapping training algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the agent and ViT with weight sharing, during which the ViT learns inductive biases from the intermediate features of the agent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet-1k with limited training data have shown encouraging results that the inductive biases help ViTs converge significantly faster and outperform conventional CNNs with even fewer parameters. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhfeing/Bootstrapping-ViTs-pytorch., Comment: Accepted as a conference paper by CVPR2022

Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently emerged as a powerful strategy to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model to a lightweight student, and has demonstrated its unprecedented success over a wide spectrum of applications. In spite of the encouraging results, the KD process per se poses a potential threat to network ownership protection, since the knowledge contained in network can be effortlessly distilled and hence exposed to a malicious user. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed as Safe Distillation Box (SDB), that allows us to wrap a pre-trained model in a virtual box for intellectual property protection. Specifically, SDB preserves the inference capability of the wrapped model to all users, but precludes KD from unauthorized users. For authorized users, on the other hand, SDB carries out a knowledge augmentation scheme to strengthen the KD performances and the results of the student model. In other words, all users may employ a model in SDB for inference, but only authorized users get access to KD from the model. The proposed SDB imposes no constraints over the model architecture, and may readily serve as a plug-and-play solution to protect the ownership of a pre-trained network. Experiments across various datasets and architectures demonstrate that, with SDB, the performance of an unauthorized KD drops significantly while that of an authorized gets enhanced, demonstrating the effectiveness of SDB., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2022

The dynamics of temporal networks lie in the continuous interactions between nodes, which exhibit the dynamic node preferences with time elapsing. The challenges of mining temporal networks are thus two-fold: the dynamic structure of networks and the dynamic node preferences. In this paper, we investigate the dynamic graph sampling problem, aiming to capture the preference structure of nodes dynamically in cooperation with GNNs. Our proposed Dynamic Preference Structure (DPS) framework consists of two stages: structure sampling and graph fusion. In the first stage, two parameterized samplers are designed to learn the preference structure adaptively with network reconstruction tasks. In the second stage, an additional attention layer is designed to fuse two sampled temporal subgraphs of a node, generating temporal node embeddings for downstream tasks. Experimental results on many real-life temporal networks show that our DPS outperforms several state-of-the-art methods substantially owing to learning an adaptive preference structure. The code will be released soon at https://github.com/doujiang-zheng/Dynamic-Preference-Structure., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Accepted by ICBK 2021

Graph-level representation learning is the pivotal step for downstream tasks that operate on the whole graph. The most common approach to this problem heretofore is graph pooling, where node features are typically averaged or summed to obtain the graph representations. However, pooling operations like averaging or summing inevitably cause massive information missing, which may severely downgrade the final performance. In this paper, we argue what is crucial to graph-level downstream tasks includes not only the topological structure but also the distribution from which nodes are sampled. Therefore, powered by existing Graph Neural Networks (GNN), we propose a new plug-and-play pooling module, termed as Distribution Knowledge Embedding (DKEPool), where graphs are rephrased as distributions on top of GNNs and the pooling goal is to summarize the entire distribution information instead of retaining a certain feature vector by simple predefined pooling operations. A DKEPool network de facto disassembles representation learning into two stages, structure learning and distribution learning. Structure learning follows a recursive neighborhood aggregation scheme to update node features where structure information is obtained. Distribution learning, on the other hand, omits node interconnections and focuses more on the distribution depicted by all the nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DKEPool significantly and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

In this paper, we study a novel meta aggregation scheme towards binarizing graph neural networks (GNNs). We begin by developing a vanilla 1-bit GNN framework that binarizes both the GNN parameters and the graph features. Despite the lightweight architecture, we observed that this vanilla framework suffered from insufficient discriminative power in distinguishing graph topologies, leading to a dramatic drop in performance. This discovery motivates us to devise meta aggregators to improve the expressive power of vanilla binarized GNNs, of which the aggregation schemes can be adaptively changed in a learnable manner based on the binarized features. Towards this end, we propose two dedicated forms of meta neighborhood aggregators, an exclusive meta aggregator termed as Greedy Gumbel Neighborhood Aggregator (GNA), and a diffused meta aggregator termed as Adaptable Hybrid Neighborhood Aggregator (ANA). GNA learns to exclusively pick one single optimal aggregator from a pool of candidates, while ANA learns a hybrid aggregation behavior to simultaneously retain the benefits of several individual aggregators. Furthermore, the proposed meta aggregators may readily serve as a generic plugin module into existing full-precision GNNs. Experiments across various domains demonstrate that the proposed method yields results superior to the state of the art., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2021

Existing state-of-the-art human pose estimation methods require heavy computational resources for accurate predictions. One promising technique to obtain an accurate yet lightweight pose estimator is knowledge distillation, which distills the pose knowledge from a powerful teacher model to a less-parameterized student model. However, existing pose distillation works rely on a heavy pre-trained estimator to perform knowledge transfer and require a complex two-stage learning procedure. In this work, we investigate a novel Online Knowledge Distillation framework by distilling Human Pose structure knowledge in a one-stage manner to guarantee the distillation efficiency, termed OKDHP. Specifically, OKDHP trains a single multi-branch network and acquires the predicted heatmaps from each, which are then assembled by a Feature Aggregation Unit (FAU) as the target heatmaps to teach each branch in reverse. Instead of simply averaging the heatmaps, FAU which consists of multiple parallel transformations with different receptive fields, leverages the multi-scale information, thus obtains target heatmaps with higher-quality. Specifically, the pixel-wise Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is utilized to minimize the discrepancy between the target heatmaps and the predicted ones, which enables the student network to learn the implicit keypoint relationship. Besides, an unbalanced OKDHP scheme is introduced to customize the student networks with different compression rates. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by extensive experiments on two common benchmark datasets, MPII and COCO., Comment: ICCV 2021

Given a reference object of an unknown type in an image, human observers can effortlessly find the objects of the same category in another image and precisely tell their visual boundaries. Such visual cognition capability of humans seems absent from the current research spectrum of computer vision. Existing segmentation networks, for example, rely on a humongous amount of labeled data, which is laborious and costly to collect and annotate; besides, the performance of segmentation networks tend to downgrade as the number of the category increases. In this paper, we introduce a novel Reference semantic segmentation Network (Ref-Net) to conduct visual boundary knowledge translation. Ref-Net contains a Reference Segmentation Module (RSM) and a Boundary Knowledge Translation Module (BKTM). Inspired by the human recognition mechanism, RSM is devised only to segment the same category objects based on the features of the reference objects. BKTM, on the other hand, introduces two boundary discriminator branches to conduct inner and outer boundary segmentation of the target objectin an adversarial manner, and translate the annotated boundary knowledge of open-source datasets into the segmentation network. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that, with tens of finely-grained annotated samples as guidance, Ref-Net achieves results on par with fully supervised methods on six datasets., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2021. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.00379

Image virtual try-on task has abundant applications and has become a hot research topic recently. Existing 2D image-based virtual try-on methods aim to transfer a target clothing image onto a reference person, which has two main disadvantages: cannot control the size and length precisely; unable to accurately estimate the user's figure in the case of users wearing thick clothes, resulting in inaccurate dressing effect. In this paper, we put forward an akin task that aims to dress clothing for underwear models. %, which is also an urgent need in e-commerce scenarios. To solve the above drawbacks, we propose a Shape Controllable Virtual Try-On Network (SC-VTON), where a graph attention network integrates the information of model and clothing to generate the warped clothing image. In addition, the control points are incorporated into SC-VTON for the desired clothing shape. Furthermore, by adding a Splitting Network and a Synthesis Network, we can use clothing/model pair data to help optimize the deformation module and generalize the task to the typical virtual try-on task. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can achieve accurate shape control. Meanwhile, compared with other methods, our method can generate high-resolution results with detailed textures., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, conference

Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently emerged as an efficacious scheme for learning compact deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite the promising results achieved, the rationale that interprets the behavior of KD has yet remained largely understudied. In this paper, we introduce a novel task-oriented attention model, termed as KDExplainer, to shed light on the working mechanism underlying the vanilla KD. At the heart of KDExplainer is a Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HME), in which a multi-class classification is reformulated as a multi-task binary one. Through distilling knowledge from a free-form pre-trained DNN to KDExplainer, we observe that KD implicitly modulates the knowledge conflicts between different subtasks, and in reality has much more to offer than label smoothing. Based on such findings, we further introduce a portable tool, dubbed as virtual attention module (VAM), that can be seamlessly integrated with various DNNs to enhance their performance under KD. Experimental results demonstrate that with a negligible additional cost, student models equipped with VAM consistently outperform their non-VAM counterparts across different benchmarks. Furthermore, when combined with other KD methods, VAM remains competent in promoting results, even though it is only motivated by vanilla KD. The code is available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/KDExplainer., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted to IJCAI 2021

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated unprecedented success in various image generation tasks. The encouraging results, however, come at the price of a cumbersome training process, during which the generator and discriminator are alternately updated in two stages. In this paper, we investigate a general training scheme that enables training GANs efficiently in only one stage. Based on the adversarial losses of the generator and discriminator, we categorize GANs into two classes, Symmetric GANs and Asymmetric GANs, and introduce a novel gradient decomposition method to unify the two, allowing us to train both classes in one stage and hence alleviate the training effort. We also computationally analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, and empirically demonstrate that, the proposed method yields a solid $1.5\times$ acceleration across various datasets and network architectures. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method is readily applicable to other adversarial-training scenarios, such as data-free knowledge distillation. The code is available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/OSGAN., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2021

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) have recently demonstrated their potential in analyzing non-grid structure data that can be represented as graphs. The core idea is to encode the local topology of a graph, via convolutions, into the feature of a center node. In this paper, we propose a novel GCN model, which we term as Shortest Path Graph Attention Network (SPAGAN). Unlike conventional GCN models that carry out node-based attentions within each layer, the proposed SPAGAN conducts path-based attention that explicitly accounts for the influence of a sequence of nodes yielding the minimum cost, or shortest path, between the center node and its higher-order neighbors. SPAGAN therefore allows for a more informative and intact exploration of the graph structure and further {a} more effective aggregation of information from distant neighbors into the center node, as compared to node-based GCN methods. We test SPAGAN on the downstream classification task on several standard datasets, and achieve performances superior to the state of the art. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ihollywhy/SPAGAN., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2019