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Small CNN-based models usually require transferring knowledge from a large model before they are deployed in computationally resource-limited edge devices. Masked image modeling (MIM) methods achieve great success in various visual tasks but remain largely unexplored in knowledge distillation for heterogeneous deep models. The reason is mainly due to the significant discrepancy between the Transformer-based large model and the CNN-based small network. In this paper, we develop the first Heterogeneous Generative Knowledge Distillation (H-GKD) based on MIM, which can efficiently transfer knowledge from large Transformer models to small CNN-based models in a generative self-supervised fashion. Our method builds a bridge between Transformer-based models and CNNs by training a UNet-style student with sparse convolution, which can effectively mimic the visual representation inferred by a teacher over masked modeling. Our method is a simple yet effective learning paradigm to learn the visual representation and distribution of data from heterogeneous teacher models, which can be pre-trained using advanced generative methods. Extensive experiments show that it adapts well to various models and sizes, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks. For example, in the Imagenet 1K dataset, H-GKD improves the accuracy of Resnet50 (sparse) from 76.98% to 80.01%.

Recently large-scale language-image models (e.g., text-guided diffusion models) have considerably improved the image generation capabilities to generate photorealistic images in various domains. Based on this success, current image editing methods use texts to achieve intuitive and versatile modification of images. To edit a real image using diffusion models, one must first invert the image to a noisy latent from which an edited image is sampled with a target text prompt. However, most methods lack one of the following: user-friendliness (e.g., additional masks or precise descriptions of the input image are required), generalization to larger domains, or high fidelity to the input image. In this paper, we design an accurate and quick inversion technique, Prompt Tuning Inversion, for text-driven image editing. Specifically, our proposed editing method consists of a reconstruction stage and an editing stage. In the first stage, we encode the information of the input image into a learnable conditional embedding via Prompt Tuning Inversion. In the second stage, we apply classifier-free guidance to sample the edited image, where the conditional embedding is calculated by linearly interpolating between the target embedding and the optimized one obtained in the first stage. This technique ensures a superior trade-off between editability and high fidelity to the input image of our method. For example, we can change the color of a specific object while preserving its original shape and background under the guidance of only a target text prompt. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate the superior editing performance of our method compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Pretraining on large-scale datasets can boost the performance of object detectors while the annotated datasets for object detection are hard to scale up due to the high labor cost. What we possess are numerous isolated filed-specific datasets, thus, it is appealing to jointly pretrain models across aggregation of datasets to enhance data volume and diversity. In this paper, we propose a strong framework for utilizing Multiple datasets to pretrain DETR-like detectors, termed METR, without the need for manual label spaces integration. It converts the typical multi-classification in object detection into binary classification by introducing a pre-trained language model. Specifically, we design a category extraction module for extracting potential categories involved in an image and assign these categories into different queries by language embeddings. Each query is only responsible for predicting a class-specific object. Besides, to adapt our novel detection paradigm, we propose a group bipartite matching strategy that limits the ground truths to match queries assigned to the same category. Extensive experiments demonstrate that METR achieves extraordinary results on either multi-task joint training or the pretrain & finetune paradigm. Notably, our pre-trained models have high flexible transferability and increase the performance upon various DETR-like detectors on COCO val2017 benchmark. Codes will be available after this paper is published.

Robust Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is usually adopted to train a meta-model which may fast adapt to novel classes with only a few exemplars and meanwhile remain robust to adversarial attacks. The conventional solution for robust MAML is to introduce robustness-promoting regularization during meta-training stage. With such a regularization, previous robust MAML methods simply follow the typical MAML practice that the number of training shots should match with the number of test shots to achieve an optimal adaptation performance. However, although the robustness can be largely improved, previous methods sacrifice clean accuracy a lot. In this paper, we observe that introducing robustness-promoting regularization into MAML reduces the intrinsic dimension of clean sample features, which results in a lower capacity of clean representations. This may explain why the clean accuracy of previous robust MAML methods drops severely. Based on this observation, we propose a simple strategy, i.e., increasing the number of training shots, to mitigate the loss of intrinsic dimension caused by robustness-promoting regularization. Though simple, our method remarkably improves the clean accuracy of MAML without much loss of robustness, producing a robust yet accurate model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior arts in achieving a better trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Besides, we observe that our method is less sensitive to the number of fine-tuning steps during meta-training, which allows for a reduced number of fine-tuning steps to improve training efficiency.

Masked image modeling (MIM) learns visual representation by masking and reconstructing image patches. Applying the reconstruction supervision on the CLIP representation has been proven effective for MIM. However, it is still under-explored how CLIP supervision in MIM influences performance. To investigate strategies for refining the CLIP-targeted MIM, we study two critical elements in MIM, i.e., the supervision position and the mask ratio, and reveal two interesting perspectives, relying on our developed simple pipeline, context autodecoder with CLIP target (CAE v2). Firstly, we observe that the supervision on visible patches achieves remarkable performance, even better than that on masked patches, where the latter is the standard format in the existing MIM methods. Secondly, the optimal mask ratio positively correlates to the model size. That is to say, the smaller the model, the lower the mask ratio needs to be. Driven by these two discoveries, our simple and concise approach CAE v2 achieves superior performance on a series of downstream tasks. For example, a vanilla ViT-Large model achieves 81.7% and 86.7% top-1 accuracy on linear probing and fine-tuning on ImageNet-1K, and 55.9% mIoU on semantic segmentation on ADE20K with the pre-training for 300 epochs. We hope our findings can be helpful guidelines for the pre-training in the MIM area, especially for the small-scale models.

Vision Transformer and its variants have demonstrated great potential in various computer vision tasks. But conventional vision transformers often focus on global dependency at a coarse level, which suffer from a learning challenge on global relationships and fine-grained representation at a token level. In this paper, we introduce Multi-scale Attention Fusion into transformer (MAFormer), which explores local aggregation and global feature extraction in a dual-stream framework for visual recognition. We develop a simple but effective module to explore the full potential of transformers for visual representation by learning fine-grained and coarse-grained features at a token level and dynamically fusing them. Our Multi-scale Attention Fusion (MAF) block consists of: i) a local window attention branch that learns short-range interactions within windows, aggregating fine-grained local features; ii) global feature extraction through a novel Global Learning with Down-sampling (GLD) operation to efficiently capture long-range context information within the whole image; iii) a fusion module that self-explores the integration of both features via attention. Our MAFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on common vision tasks. In particular, MAFormer-L achieves 85.9$\%$ Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing CSWin-B and LV-ViT-L by 1.7$\%$ and 0.6$\%$ respectively. On MSCOCO, MAFormer outperforms the prior art CSWin by 1.7$\%$ mAPs on object detection and 1.4$\%$ on instance segmentation with similar-sized parameters, demonstrating the potential to be a general backbone network., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

We present a novel masked image modeling (MIM) approach, context autoencoder (CAE), for self-supervised representation pretraining. We pretrain an encoder by making predictions in the encoded representation space. The pretraining tasks include two tasks: masked representation prediction - predict the representations for the masked patches, and masked patch reconstruction - reconstruct the masked patches. The network is an encoder-regressor-decoder architecture: the encoder takes the visible patches as input; the regressor predicts the representations of the masked patches, which are expected to be aligned with the representations computed from the encoder, using the representations of visible patches and the positions of visible and masked patches; the decoder reconstructs the masked patches from the predicted encoded representations. The CAE design encourages the separation of learning the encoder (representation) from completing the pertaining tasks: masked representation prediction and masked patch reconstruction tasks, and making predictions in the encoded representation space empirically shows the benefit to representation learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our CAE through superior transfer performance in downstream tasks: semantic segmentation, object detection and instance segmentation, and classification. The code will be available at https://github.com/Atten4Vis/CAE., Comment: Accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)

Object detection with Transformers (DETR) has achieved a competitive performance over traditional detectors, such as Faster R-CNN. However, the potential of DETR remains largely unexplored for the more challenging task of arbitrary-oriented object detection problem. We provide the first attempt and implement Oriented Object DEtection with TRansformer ($\bf O^2DETR$) based on an end-to-end network. The contributions of $\rm O^2DETR$ include: 1) we provide a new insight into oriented object detection, by applying Transformer to directly and efficiently localize objects without a tedious process of rotated anchors as in conventional detectors; 2) we design a simple but highly efficient encoder for Transformer by replacing the attention mechanism with depthwise separable convolution, which can significantly reduce the memory and computational cost of using multi-scale features in the original Transformer; 3) our $\rm O^2DETR$ can be another new benchmark in the field of oriented object detection, which achieves up to 3.85 mAP improvement over Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet. We simply fine-tune the head mounted on $\rm O^2DETR$ in a cascaded architecture and achieve a competitive performance over SOTA in the DOTA dataset.

Transformers with remarkable global representation capacities achieve competitive results for visual tasks, but fail to consider high-level local pattern information in input images. In this paper, we present a generic Dual-stream Network (DS-Net) to fully explore the representation capacity of local and global pattern features for image classification. Our DS-Net can simultaneously calculate fine-grained and integrated features and efficiently fuse them. Specifically, we propose an Intra-scale Propagation module to process two different resolutions in each block and an Inter-Scale Alignment module to perform information interaction across features at dual scales. Besides, we also design a Dual-stream FPN (DS-FPN) to further enhance contextual information for downstream dense predictions. Without bells and whistles, the proposed DS-Net outperforms DeiT-Small by 2.4% in terms of top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k and achieves state-of-the-art performance over other Vision Transformers and ResNets. For object detection and instance segmentation, DS-Net-Small respectively outperforms ResNet-50 by 6.4% and 5.5% in terms of mAP on MSCOCO 2017, and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art scheme, which significantly demonstrates its potential to be a general backbone in vision tasks. The code will be released soon., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2021

Model ensembles are becoming one of the most effective approaches for improving object detection performance already optimized for a single detector. Conventional methods directly fuse bounding boxes but typically fail to consider proposal qualities when combining detectors. This leads to a new problem of confidence discrepancy for the detector ensembles. The confidence has little effect on single detectors but significantly affects detector ensembles. To address this issue, we propose a novel ensemble called the Probabilistic Ranking Aware Ensemble (PRAE) that refines the confidence of bounding boxes from detectors. By simultaneously considering the category and the location on the same validation set, we obtain a more reliable confidence based on statistical probability. We can then rank the detected bounding boxes for assembly. We also introduce a bandit approach to address the confidence imbalance problem caused by the need to deal with different numbers of boxes at different confidence levels. We use our PRAE-based non-maximum suppression (P-NMS) to replace the conventional NMS method in ensemble learning. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO2017 datasets demonstrate that our PRAE method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins.

Object detection is a basic but challenging task in computer vision, which plays a key role in a variety of industrial applications. However, object detectors based on deep learning usually require greater storage requirements and longer inference time, which hinders its practicality seriously. Therefore, a trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency is necessary in practical scenarios. Considering that without constraint of pre-defined anchors, anchor-free detectors can achieve acceptable accuracy and inference speed simultaneously. In this paper, we start from an anchor-free detector called TTFNet, modify the structure of TTFNet and introduce multiple existing tricks to realize effective server and mobile solutions respectively. Since all experiments in this paper are conducted based on PaddlePaddle, we call the model as PAFNet(Paddle Anchor Free Network). For server side, PAFNet can achieve a better balance between effectiveness (42.2% mAP) and efficiency (67.15 FPS) on a single V100 GPU. For moblie side, PAFNet-lite can achieve a better accuracy of (23.9% mAP) and 26.00 ms on Kirin 990 ARM CPU, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art anchor-free detectors by significant margins. Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

Being effective and efficient is essential to an object detector for practical use. To meet these two concerns, we comprehensively evaluate a collection of existing refinements to improve the performance of PP-YOLO while almost keep the infer time unchanged. This paper will analyze a collection of refinements and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model performance through incremental ablation study. Things we tried that didn't work will also be discussed. By combining multiple effective refinements, we boost PP-YOLO's performance from 45.9% mAP to 49.5% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Since a significant margin of performance has been made, we present PP-YOLOv2. In terms of speed, PP-YOLOv2 runs in 68.9FPS at 640x640 input size. Paddle inference engine with TensorRT, FP16-precision, and batch size = 1 further improves PP-YOLOv2's infer speed, which achieves 106.5 FPS. Such a performance surpasses existing object detectors with roughly the same amount of parameters (i.e., YOLOv4-CSP, YOLOv5l). Besides, PP-YOLOv2 with ResNet101 achieves 50.3% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

Anomaly detection is a challenging task and usually formulated as an one-class learning problem for the unexpectedness of anomalies. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful approach to this issue, which is implemented in the student-teacher framework for its advantages but substantially extends it in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Given a strong model pre-trained on image classification as the teacher, we distill the knowledge into a single student network with the identical architecture to learn the distribution of anomaly-free images and this one-step transfer preserves the crucial clues as much as possible. Moreover, we integrate the multi-scale feature matching strategy into the framework, and this hierarchical feature matching enables the student network to receive a mixture of multi-level knowledge from the feature pyramid under better supervision, thus allowing to detect anomalies of various sizes. The difference between feature pyramids generated by the two networks serves as a scoring function indicating the probability of anomaly occurring. Due to such operations, our approach achieves accurate and fast pixel-level anomaly detection. Very competitive results are delivered on the MVTec anomaly detection dataset, superior to the state of the art ones., Comment: Accepted by BMVC'2021

This paper addresses representational block named Hierarchical-Split Block, which can be taken as a plug-and-play block to upgrade existing convolutional neural networks, improves model performance significantly in a network. Hierarchical-Split Block contains many hierarchical split and concatenate connections within one single residual block. We find multi-scale features is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Moreover, Hierarchical-Split block is very flexible and efficient, which provides a large space of potential network architectures for different applications. In this work, we present a common backbone based on Hierarchical-Split block for tasks: image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and semantic image segmentation/parsing. Our approach shows significant improvements over all these core tasks in comparison with the baseline. As shown in Figure1, for image classification, our 50-layers network(HS-ResNet50) achieves 81.28% top-1 accuracy with competitive latency on ImageNet-1k dataset. It also outperforms most state-of-the-art models. The source code and models will be available on: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleClas

The 1st Tiny Object Detection (TOD) Challenge aims to encourage research in developing novel and accurate methods for tiny object detection in images which have wide views, with a current focus on tiny person detection. The TinyPerson dataset was used for the TOD Challenge and is publicly released. It has 1610 images and 72651 box-levelannotations. Around 36 participating teams from the globe competed inthe 1st TOD Challenge. In this paper, we provide a brief summary of the1st TOD Challenge including brief introductions to the top three methods.The submission leaderboard will be reopened for researchers that areinterested in the TOD challenge. The benchmark dataset and other information can be found at: https://github.com/ucas-vg/TinyBenchmark., Comment: ECCV2020 Workshop on Real-world Computer Vision from Inputs with Limited Quality (RLQ) and Tiny Object Detection Challenge

Object detection is one of the most important areas in computer vision, which plays a key role in various practical scenarios. Due to limitation of hardware, it is often necessary to sacrifice accuracy to ensure the infer speed of the detector in practice. Therefore, the balance between effectiveness and efficiency of object detector must be considered. The goal of this paper is to implement an object detector with relatively balanced effectiveness and efficiency that can be directly applied in actual application scenarios, rather than propose a novel detection model. Considering that YOLOv3 has been widely used in practice, we develop a new object detector based on YOLOv3. We mainly try to combine various existing tricks that almost not increase the number of model parameters and FLOPs, to achieve the goal of improving the accuracy of detector as much as possible while ensuring that the speed is almost unchanged. Since all experiments in this paper are conducted based on PaddlePaddle, we call it PP-YOLO. By combining multiple tricks, PP-YOLO can achieve a better balance between effectiveness (45.2% mAP) and efficiency (72.9 FPS), surpassing the existing state-of-the-art detectors such as EfficientDet and YOLOv4.Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

We present an object detection framework based on PaddlePaddle. We put all the strategies together (multi-scale training, FPN, Cascade, Dcnv2, Non-local, libra loss) based on ResNet200-vd backbone. Our model score on public leaderboard comes to 0.6269 with single scale test. We proposed a new voting method called top-k voting-nms, based on the SoftNMS detection results. The voting method helps us merge all the models' results more easily and achieve 2nd place in the Google AI Open Images Object Detection Track 2019.

Many advances of deep learning techniques originate from the efforts of addressing the image classification task on large-scale datasets. However, the construction of such clean datasets is costly and time-consuming since the Internet is overwhelmed by noisy images with inadequate and inaccurate tags. In this paper, we propose a Ubiquitous Reweighting Network (URNet) that learns an image classification model from large-scale noisy data. By observing the web data, we find that there are five key challenges, i.e., imbalanced class sizes, high intra-classes diversity and inter-class similarity, imprecise instances, insufficient representative instances, and ambiguous class labels. To alleviate these challenges, we assume that every training instance has the potential to contribute positively by alleviating the data bias and noise via reweighting the influence of each instance according to different class sizes, large instance clusters, its confidence, small instance bags and the labels. In this manner, the influence of bias and noise in the web data can be gradually alleviated, leading to the steadily improving performance of URNet. Experimental results in the WebVision 2018 challenge with 16 million noisy training images from 5000 classes show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models and ranks the first place in the image classification task.