Efficient Training

Bundle adjustment is a key component in practically all available Structure from Motion systems. While it is crucial for achieving accurate reconstruction, convergence to the right solution hinges on good initialization. The recently introduced factorization-based pOSE methods formulate a surrogate for the bundle adjustment error without reliance on good initialization. In this paper, we show that pOSE has an undesirable penalization of large depths. To address this we propose expOSE which has an exponential regularization that is negligible for positive depths. To achieve efficient inference we use a quadratic approximation that allows an iterative solution with VarPro. Furthermore, we extend the method with radial distortion robustness by decomposing the Object Space Error into radial and tangential components. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method is robust to initialization and improves reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods even without bundle adjustment refinement.

Recently, self-supervised neural networks have shown excellent image denoising performance. However, current dataset free methods are either computationally expensive, require a noise model, or have inadequate image quality. In this work we show that a simple 2-layer network, without any training data or knowledge of the noise distribution, can enable high-quality image denoising at low computational cost. Our approach is motivated by Noise2Noise and Neighbor2Neighbor and works well for denoising pixel-wise independent noise. Our experiments on artificial, real-world camera, and microscope noise show that our method termed ZS-N2N (Zero Shot Noise2Noise) often outperforms existing dataset-free methods at a reduced cost, making it suitable for use cases with scarce data availability and limited compute.

Given an untrimmed video, temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to locate a target moment semantically according to a sentence query. Although previous respectable works have made decent success, they only focus on high-level visual features extracted from the consecutive decoded frames and fail to handle the compressed videos for query modelling, suffering from insufficient representation capability and significant computational complexity during training and testing. In this paper, we pose a new setting, compressed-domain TSG, which directly utilizes compressed videos rather than fully-decompressed frames as the visual input. To handle the raw video bit-stream input, we propose a novel Three-branch Compressed-domain Spatial-temporal Fusion (TCSF) framework, which extracts and aggregates three kinds of low-level visual features (I-frame, motion vector and residual features) for effective and efficient grounding. Particularly, instead of encoding the whole decoded frames like previous works, we capture the appearance representation by only learning the I-frame feature to reduce delay or latency. Besides, we explore the motion information not only by learning the motion vector feature, but also by exploring the relations of neighboring frames via the residual feature. In this way, a three-branch spatial-temporal attention layer with an adaptive motion-appearance fusion module is further designed to extract and aggregate both appearance and motion information for the final grounding. Experiments on three challenging datasets shows that our TCSF achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods with lower complexity.

Intermediate features of a pre-trained model have been shown informative for making accurate predictions on downstream tasks, even if the model backbone is frozen. The key challenge is how to utilize them, given the gigantic amount. We propose visual query tuning (VQT), a simple yet effective approach to aggregate intermediate features of Vision Transformers. Through introducing a handful of learnable "query" tokens to each layer, VQT leverages the inner workings of Transformers to "summarize" rich intermediate features of each layer, which can then be used to train the prediction heads of downstream tasks. As VQT keeps the intermediate features intact and only learns to combine them, it enjoys memory efficiency in training, compared to many other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches that learn to adapt features and need back-propagation through the entire backbone. This also suggests the complementary role between VQT and those approaches in transfer learning. Empirically, VQT consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art approach that utilizes intermediate features for transfer learning and outperforms full fine-tuning in many cases. Compared to parameter-efficient approaches that adapt features, VQT achieves much higher accuracy under memory constraints. Most importantly, VQT is compatible with these approaches to attain higher accuracy, making it a simple add-on to further boost transfer learning.

Previous Knowledge Distillation based efficient image retrieval methods employ a lightweight network as the student model for fast inference. However, the lightweight student model lacks adequate representation capacity for effective knowledge imitation during the most critical early training period, causing final performance degeneration. To tackle this issue, we propose a Capacity Dynamic Distillation framework, which constructs a student model with editable representation capacity. Specifically, the employed student model is initially a heavy model to fruitfully learn distilled knowledge in the early training epochs, and the student model is gradually compressed during the training. To dynamically adjust the model capacity, our dynamic framework inserts a learnable convolutional layer within each residual block in the student model as the channel importance indicator. The indicator is optimized simultaneously by the image retrieval loss and the compression loss, and a retrieval-guided gradient resetting mechanism is proposed to release the gradient conflict. Extensive experiments show that our method has superior inference speed and accuracy, e.g., on the VeRi-776 dataset, given the ResNet101 as a teacher, our method saves 67.13% model parameters and 65.67% FLOPs without sacrificing accuracy.

As deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in various fields of computer vision, leveraging the overfitting ability of the DNN to achieve video resolution upscaling has become a new trend in the modern video delivery system. By dividing videos into chunks and overfitting each chunk with a super-resolution model, the server encodes videos before transmitting them to the clients, thus achieving better video quality and transmission efficiency. However, a large number of chunks are expected to ensure good overfitting quality, which substantially increases the storage and consumes more bandwidth resources for data transmission. On the other hand, decreasing the number of chunks through training optimization techniques usually requires high model capacity, which significantly slows down execution speed. To reconcile such, we propose a novel method for high-quality and efficient video resolution upscaling tasks, which leverages the spatial-temporal information to accurately divide video into chunks, thus keeping the number of chunks as well as the model size to a minimum. Additionally, we advance our method into a single overfitting model by a data-aware joint training technique, which further reduces the storage requirement with negligible quality drop. We deploy our proposed overfitting models on an off-the-shelf mobile phone, and experimental results show that our method achieves real-time video super-resolution with high video quality. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method achieves 28 fps streaming speed with 41.60 PSNR, which is 14 times faster and 2.29 dB better in the live video resolution upscaling tasks.

Multi-scale features have been proven highly effective for object detection but often come with huge and even prohibitive extra computation costs, especially for the recent Transformer-based detectors. In this paper, we propose Iterative Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (IMFA) - a generic paradigm that enables efficient use of multi-scale features in Transformer-based object detectors. The core idea is to exploit sparse multi-scale features from just a few crucial locations, and it is achieved with two novel designs. First, IMFA rearranges the Transformer encoder-decoder pipeline so that the encoded features can be iteratively updated based on the detection predictions. Second, IMFA sparsely samples scale-adaptive features for refined detection from just a few keypoint locations under the guidance of prior detection predictions. As a result, the sampled multi-scale features are sparse yet still highly beneficial for object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IMFA boosts the performance of multiple Transformer-based object detectors significantly yet with only slight computational overhead.

Head pose estimation (HPE) has been widely used in the fields of human machine interaction, self-driving, and attention estimation. However, existing methods cannot deal with extreme head pose randomness and serious occlusions. To address these challenges, we identify three cues from head images, namely, neighborhood similarities, significant facial changes, and critical minority relationships. To leverage the observed findings, we propose a novel critical minority relationship-aware method based on the Transformer architecture in which the facial part relationships can be learned. Specifically, we design several orientation tokens to explicitly encode the basic orientation regions. Meanwhile, a novel token guide multi-loss function is designed to guide the orientation tokens as they learn the desired regional similarities and relationships. We evaluate the proposed method on three challenging benchmark HPE datasets. Experiments show that our method achieves better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zc2023/TokenHPE.

Recent advancements in deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained devices have generated interest in input-adaptive dynamic neural networks (DyNNs). DyNNs offer more efficient inferences and enable the deployment of DNNs on devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices. However, we have discovered a new vulnerability in DyNNs that could potentially compromise their efficiency. Specifically, we investigate whether adversaries can manipulate DyNNs' computational costs to create a false sense of efficiency. To address this question, we propose EfficFrog, an adversarial attack that injects universal efficiency backdoors in DyNNs. To inject a backdoor trigger into DyNNs, EfficFrog poisons only a minimal percentage of the DyNNs' training data. During the inference phase, EfficFrog can slow down the backdoored DyNNs and abuse the computational resources of systems running DyNNs by adding the trigger to any input. To evaluate EfficFrog, we tested it on three DNN backbone architectures (based on VGG16, MobileNet, and ResNet56) using two popular datasets (CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet). Our results demonstrate that EfficFrog reduces the efficiency of DyNNs on triggered input samples while keeping the efficiency of clean samples almost the same.

We present Tensor4D, an efficient yet effective approach to dynamic scene modeling. The key of our solution is an efficient 4D tensor decomposition method so that the dynamic scene can be directly represented as a 4D spatio-temporal tensor. To tackle the accompanying memory issue, we decompose the 4D tensor hierarchically by projecting it first into three time-aware volumes and then nine compact feature planes. In this way, spatial information over time can be simultaneously captured in a compact and memory-efficient manner. When applying Tensor4D for dynamic scene reconstruction and rendering, we further factorize the 4D fields to different scales in the sense that structural motions and dynamic detailed changes can be learned from coarse to fine. The effectiveness of our method is validated on both synthetic and real-world scenes. Extensive experiments show that our method is able to achieve high-quality dynamic reconstruction and rendering from sparse-view camera rigs or even a monocular camera.

Spatiotemporal predictive learning aims to generate future frames by learning from historical frames. In this paper, we investigate existing methods and present a general framework of spatiotemporal predictive learning, in which the spatial encoder and decoder capture intra-frame features and the middle temporal module catches inter-frame correlations. While the mainstream methods employ recurrent units to capture long-term temporal dependencies, they suffer from low computational efficiency due to their unparallelizable architectures. To parallelize the temporal module, we propose the Temporal Attention Unit (TAU), which decomposes temporal attention into intra-frame statical attention and inter-frame dynamical attention. Moreover, while the mean squared error loss focuses on intra-frame errors, we introduce a novel differential divergence regularization to take inter-frame variations into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method enables the derived model to achieve competitive performance on various spatiotemporal prediction benchmarks.

The high computational costs of video super-resolution (VSR) models hinder their deployment on resource-limited devices, e.g., smartphones and drones. Existing VSR models contain considerable redundant filters, which drag down the inference efficiency. To prune these unimportant filters, we develop a structured pruning scheme called Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) according to the properties of VSR. In SSL, we design pruning schemes for several key components in VSR models, including residual blocks, recurrent networks, and upsampling networks. Specifically, we develop a Residual Sparsity Connection (RSC) scheme for residual blocks of recurrent networks to liberate pruning restrictions and preserve the restoration information. For upsampling networks, we design a pixel-shuffle pruning scheme to guarantee the accuracy of feature channel-space conversion. In addition, we observe that pruning error would be amplified as the hidden states propagate along with recurrent networks. To alleviate the issue, we design Temporal Finetuning (TF). Extensive experiments show that SSL can significantly outperform recent methods quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/Zj-BinXia/SSL.

The public model zoo containing enormous powerful pretrained model families (e.g., ResNet/DeiT) has reached an unprecedented scope than ever, which significantly contributes to the success of deep learning. As each model family consists of pretrained models with diverse scales (e.g., DeiT-Ti/S/B), it naturally arises a fundamental question of how to efficiently assemble these readily available models in a family for dynamic accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. To this end, we present Stitchable Neural Networks (SN-Net), a novel scalable and efficient framework for model deployment. It cheaply produces numerous networks with different complexity and performance trade-offs given a family of pretrained neural networks, which we call anchors. Specifically, SN-Net splits the anchors across the blocks/layers and then stitches them together with simple stitching layers to map the activations from one anchor to another. With only a few epochs of training, SN-Net effectively interpolates between the performance of anchors with varying scales. At runtime, SN-Net can instantly adapt to dynamic resource constraints by switching the stitching positions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification demonstrate that SN-Net can obtain on-par or even better performance than many individually trained networks while supporting diverse deployment scenarios. For example, by stitching Swin Transformers, we challenge hundreds of models in Timm model zoo with a single network. We believe this new elastic model framework can serve as a strong baseline for further research in wider communities.

Training Generative adversarial networks (GANs) stably is a challenging task. The generator in GANs transform noise vectors, typically Gaussian distributed, into realistic data such as images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for training GANs with images as inputs, but without enforcing any pairwise constraints. The intuition is that images are more structured than noise, which the generator can leverage to learn a more robust transformation. The process can be made efficient by identifying closely related datasets, or a "friendly neighborhood" of the target distribution, inspiring the moniker, Spider GAN. To define friendly neighborhoods leveraging proximity between datasets, we propose a new measure called the signed inception distance (SID), inspired by the polyharmonic kernel. We show that the Spider GAN formulation results in faster convergence, as the generator can discover correspondence even between seemingly unrelated datasets, for instance, between Tiny-ImageNet and CelebA faces. Further, we demonstrate cascading Spider GAN, where the output distribution from a pre-trained GAN generator is used as the input to the subsequent network. Effectively, transporting one distribution to another in a cascaded fashion until the target is learnt -- a new flavor of transfer learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Spider approach on DCGAN, conditional GAN, PGGAN, StyleGAN2 and StyleGAN3. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art Frechet inception distance (FID) values, with one-fifth of the training iterations, in comparison to their baseline counterparts on high-resolution small datasets such as MetFaces, Ukiyo-E Faces and AFHQ-Cats.

We consider the problem of solving LP relaxations of MAP-MRF inference problems, and in particular the method proposed recently in (Swoboda, Kolmogorov 2019; Kolmogorov, Pock 2021). As a key computational subroutine, it uses a variant of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) method to minimize a smooth convex function over a combinatorial polytope. We propose an efficient implementation of this subproutine based on in-face Frank-Wolfe directions, introduced in (Freund et al. 2017) in a different context. More generally, we define an abstract data structure for a combinatorial subproblem that enables in-face FW directions, and describe its specialization for tree-structured MAP-MRF inference subproblems. Experimental results indicate that the resulting method is the current state-of-art LP solver for some classes of problems. Our code is available at pub.ist.ac.at/ vnk/papers/IN-FACE-FW.html.

In this paper, we study the second order properties of the loss of trained deep neural networks with respect to the training data points to understand the curvature of the loss surface in the vicinity of these points. We find that there is an unexpected concentration of samples with very low curvature. We note that these low curvature samples are largely consistent across completely different architectures, and identifiable in the early epochs of training. We show that the curvature relates to the 'cleanliness' of the data points, with low curvatures samples corresponding to clean, higher clarity samples, representative of their category. Alternatively, high curvature samples are often occluded, have conflicting features and visually atypical of their category. Armed with this insight, we introduce SLo-Curves, a novel coreset identification and training algorithm. SLo-curves identifies the samples with low curvatures as being more data-efficient and trains on them with an additional regularizer that penalizes high curvature of the loss surface in their vicinity. We demonstrate the efficacy of SLo-Curves on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, where it outperforms state of the art coreset selection methods at small coreset sizes by up to 9%. The identified coresets generalize across architectures, and hence can be pre-computed to generate condensed versions of datasets for use in downstream tasks.

We present the first neural relighting approach for rendering high-fidelity personalized hands that can be animated in real-time under novel illumination. Our approach adopts a teacher-student framework, where the teacher learns appearance under a single point light from images captured in a light-stage, allowing us to synthesize hands in arbitrary illuminations but with heavy compute. Using images rendered by the teacher model as training data, an efficient student model directly predicts appearance under natural illuminations in real-time. To achieve generalization, we condition the student model with physics-inspired illumination features such as visibility, diffuse shading, and specular reflections computed on a coarse proxy geometry, maintaining a small computational overhead. Our key insight is that these features have strong correlation with subsequent global light transport effects, which proves sufficient as conditioning data for the neural relighting network. Moreover, in contrast to bottleneck illumination conditioning, these features are spatially aligned based on underlying geometry, leading to better generalization to unseen illuminations and poses. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of our illumination feature representations, outperforming baseline approaches. We also show that our approach can photorealistically relight two interacting hands at real-time speeds.

Training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on high-fidelity images usually requires a vast number of training images. Recent research on GAN tickets reveals that dense GANs models contain sparse sub-networks or "lottery tickets" that, when trained separately, yield better results under limited data. However, finding GANs tickets requires an expensive process of train-prune-retrain. In this paper, we propose Re-GAN, a data-efficient GANs training that dynamically reconfigures GANs architecture during training to explore different sub-network structures in training time. Our method repeatedly prunes unimportant connections to regularize GANs network and regrows them to reduce the risk of prematurely pruning important connections. Re-GAN stabilizes the GANs models with less data and offers an alternative to the existing GANs tickets and progressive growing methods. We demonstrate that Re-GAN is a generic training methodology which achieves stability on datasets of varying sizes, domains, and resolutions (CIFAR-10, Tiny-ImageNet, and multiple few-shot generation datasets) as well as different GANs architectures (SNGAN, ProGAN, StyleGAN2 and AutoGAN). Re-GAN also improves performance when combined with the recent augmentation approaches. Moreover, Re-GAN requires fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) and less training time by removing the unimportant connections during GANs training while maintaining comparable or even generating higher-quality samples. When compared to state-of-the-art StyleGAN2, our method outperforms without requiring any additional fine-tuning step. Code can be found at this link: https://github.com/IntellicentAI-Lab/Re-GAN

The recent detection transformer (DETR) has advanced object detection, but its application on resource-constrained devices requires massive computation and memory resources. Quantization stands out as a solution by representing the network in low-bit parameters and operations. However, there is a significant performance drop when performing low-bit quantized DETR (Q-DETR) with existing quantization methods. We find that the bottlenecks of Q-DETR come from the query information distortion through our empirical analyses. This paper addresses this problem based on a distribution rectification distillation (DRD). We formulate our DRD as a bi-level optimization problem, which can be derived by generalizing the information bottleneck (IB) principle to the learning of Q-DETR. At the inner level, we conduct a distribution alignment for the queries to maximize the self-information entropy. At the upper level, we introduce a new foreground-aware query matching scheme to effectively transfer the teacher information to distillation-desired features to minimize the conditional information entropy. Extensive experimental results show that our method performs much better than prior arts. For example, the 4-bit Q-DETR can theoretically accelerate DETR with ResNet-50 backbone by 6.6x and achieve 39.4% AP, with only 2.6% performance gaps than its real-valued counterpart on the COCO dataset.