Low-Rank Adaptation

Images captured in low-light conditions often suffer from significant quality degradation. Recent works have built a large variety of deep Retinex-based networks to enhance low-light images. The Retinex-based methods require decomposing the image into reflectance and illumination components, which is a highly ill-posed problem and there is no available ground truth. Previous works addressed this problem by imposing some additional priors or regularizers. However, finding an effective prior or regularizer that can be applied in various scenes is challenging, and the performance of the model suffers from too many additional constraints. We propose a contrastive learning method and a self-knowledge distillation method that allow training our Retinex-based model for Retinex decomposition without elaborate hand-crafted regularization functions. Rather than estimating reflectance and illuminance images and representing the final images as their element-wise products as in previous works, our regularizer-free Retinex decomposition and synthesis network (RFR) extracts reflectance and illuminance features and synthesizes them end-to-end. In addition, we propose a loss function for contrastive learning and a progressive learning strategy for self-knowledge distillation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods can achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

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.

Optical flow has achieved great success under clean scenes, but suffers from restricted performance under foggy scenes. To bridge the clean-to-foggy domain gap, the existing methods typically adopt the domain adaptation to transfer the motion knowledge from clean to synthetic foggy domain. However, these methods unexpectedly neglect the synthetic-to-real domain gap, and thus are erroneous when applied to real-world scenes. To handle the practical optical flow under real foggy scenes, in this work, we propose a novel unsupervised cumulative domain adaptation optical flow (UCDA-Flow) framework: depth-association motion adaptation and correlation-alignment motion adaptation. Specifically, we discover that depth is a key ingredient to influence the optical flow: the deeper depth, the inferior optical flow, which motivates us to design a depth-association motion adaptation module to bridge the clean-to-foggy domain gap. Moreover, we figure out that the cost volume correlation shares similar distribution of the synthetic and real foggy images, which enlightens us to devise a correlation-alignment motion adaptation module to distill motion knowledge of the synthetic foggy domain to the real foggy domain. Note that synthetic fog is designed as the intermediate domain. Under this unified framework, the proposed cumulative adaptation progressively transfers knowledge from clean scenes to real foggy scenes. Extensive experiments have been performed to verify the superiority of the proposed method.

Recent studies on transfer learning have shown that selectively fine-tuning a subset of layers or customizing different learning rates for each layer can greatly improve robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) data and retain generalization capability in the pre-trained models. However, most of these methods employ manually crafted heuristics or expensive hyper-parameter search, which prevent them from scaling up to large datasets and neural networks. To solve this problem, we propose Trainable Projected Gradient Method (TPGM) to automatically learn the constraint imposed for each layer for a fine-grained fine-tuning regularization. This is motivated by formulating fine-tuning as a bi-level constrained optimization problem. Specifically, TPGM maintains a set of projection radii, i.e., distance constraints between the fine-tuned model and the pre-trained model, for each layer, and enforces them through weight projections. To learn the constraints, we propose a bi-level optimization to automatically learn the best set of projection radii in an end-to-end manner. Theoretically, we show that the bi-level optimization formulation is the key to learn different constraints for each layer. Empirically, with little hyper-parameter search cost, TPGM outperforms existing fine-tuning methods in OOD performance while matching the best in-distribution (ID) performance. For example, when fine-tuned on DomainNet-Real and ImageNet, compared to vanilla fine-tuning, TPGM shows 22% and 10% relative OOD improvement respectively on their sketch counterparts.

We introduce Train/Test-Time Adaptation with Retrieval (T3AR), a method to adapt models both at train and test time by means of a retrieval module and a searchable pool of external samples. Before inference, T3AR adapts a given model to the downstream task using refined pseudo-labels and a self-supervised contrastive objective function whose noise distribution leverages retrieved real samples to improve feature adaptation on the target data manifold. The retrieval of real images is key to T3AR since it does not rely solely on synthetic data augmentations to compensate for the lack of adaptation data, as typically done by other adaptation algorithms. Furthermore, thanks to the retrieval module, our method gives the user or service provider the possibility to improve model adaptation on the downstream task by incorporating further relevant data or to fully remove samples that may no longer be available due to changes in user preference after deployment. First, we show that T3AR can be used at training time to improve downstream fine-grained classification over standard fine-tuning baselines, and the fewer the adaptation data the higher the relative improvement (up to 13%). Second, we apply T3AR for test-time adaptation and show that exploiting a pool of external images at test-time leads to more robust representations over existing methods on DomainNet-126 and VISDA-C, especially when few adaptation data are available (up to 8%).

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in semantic segmentation transfers the knowledge of the source domain to the target one to improve the adaptability of the segmentation model in the target domain. The need to access labeled source data makes UDA unable to handle adaptation scenarios involving privacy, property rights protection, and confidentiality. In this paper, we focus on unsupervised model adaptation (UMA), also called source-free domain adaptation, which adapts a source-trained model to the target domain without accessing source data. We find that the online self-training method has the potential to be deployed in UMA, but the lack of source domain loss will greatly weaken the stability and adaptability of the method. We analyze the two possible reasons for the degradation of online self-training, i.e. inopportune updates of the teacher model and biased knowledge from source-trained model. Based on this, we propose a dynamic teacher update mechanism and a training-consistency based resampling strategy to improve the stability and adaptability of online self training. On multiple model adaptation benchmarks, our method obtains new state-of-the-art performance, which is comparable or even better than state-of-the-art UDA methods.

Recent years have witnessed significant developments in point cloud processing, including classification and segmentation. However, supervised learning approaches need a lot of well-labeled data for training, and annotation is labor- and time-intensive. Self-supervised learning, on the other hand, uses unlabeled data, and pre-trains a backbone with a pretext task to extract latent representations to be used with the downstream tasks. Compared to 2D images, self-supervised learning of 3D point clouds is under-explored. Existing models, for self-supervised learning of 3D point clouds, rely on a large number of data samples, and require significant amount of computational resources and training time. To address this issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning approach, referred to as ToThePoint. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods, which maximize agreement between features obtained from a pair of point clouds formed only with different types of augmentation, ToThePoint also maximizes the agreement between the permutation invariant features and features discarded after max pooling. We first perform self-supervised learning on the ShapeNet dataset, and then evaluate the performance of the network on different downstream tasks. In the downstream task experiments, performed on the ModelNet40, ModelNet40C, ScanobjectNN and ShapeNet-Part datasets, our proposed ToThePoint achieves competitive, if not better results compared to the state-of-the-art baselines, and does so with significantly less training time (200 times faster than baselines)

We propose TensoIR, a novel inverse rendering approach based on tensor factorization and neural fields. Unlike previous works that use purely MLP-based neural fields, thus suffering from low capacity and high computation costs, we extend TensoRF, a state-of-the-art approach for radiance field modeling, to estimate scene geometry, surface reflectance, and environment illumination from multi-view images captured under unknown lighting conditions. Our approach jointly achieves radiance field reconstruction and physically-based model estimation, leading to photo-realistic novel view synthesis and relighting. Benefiting from the efficiency and extensibility of the TensoRF-based representation, our method can accurately model secondary shading effects (like shadows and indirect lighting) and generally support input images captured under a single or multiple unknown lighting conditions. The low-rank tensor representation allows us to not only achieve fast and compact reconstruction but also better exploit shared information under an arbitrary number of capturing lighting conditions. We demonstrate the superiority of our method to baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively on various challenging synthetic and real-world scenes.

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.

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) is an emerging research topic that studies how to adapt a pretrained source model using unlabeled target data. It is derived from unsupervised domain adaptation but has the advantage of not requiring labeled source data to learn adaptive models. This makes it particularly useful in real-world applications where access to source data is restricted. While there has been some SFDA work for images, little attention has been paid to videos. Naively extending image-based methods to videos without considering the unique properties of videos often leads to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a simple and highly flexible method for Source-Free Video Domain Adaptation (SFVDA), which extensively exploits consistency learning for videos from spatial, temporal, and historical perspectives. Our method is based on the assumption that videos of the same action category are drawn from the same low-dimensional space, regardless of the spatio-temporal variations in the high-dimensional space that cause domain shifts. To overcome domain shifts, we simulate spatio-temporal variations by applying spatial and temporal augmentations on target videos, and encourage the model to make consistent predictions from a video and its augmented versions. Due to the simple design, our method can be applied to various SFVDA settings, and experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for all the settings.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) involves learning to classify unseen target data with a few labeled and lots of unlabeled target data, along with many labeled source data from a related domain. Current SSDA approaches usually aim at aligning the target data to the labeled source data with feature space mapping and pseudo-label assignments. Nevertheless, such a source-oriented model can sometimes align the target data to source data of the wrong classes, degrading the classification performance. This paper presents a novel source-adaptive paradigm that adapts the source data to match the target data. Our key idea is to view the source data as a noisily-labeled version of the ideal target data. Then, we propose an SSDA model that cleans up the label noise dynamically with the help of a robust cleaner component designed from the target perspective. Since the paradigm is very different from the core ideas behind existing SSDA approaches, our proposed model can be easily coupled with them to improve their performance. Empirical results on two state-of-the-art SSDA approaches demonstrate that the proposed model effectively cleans up the noise within the source labels and exhibits superior performance over those approaches across benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/chu0802/SLA.

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.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) intends to adapt the pretrained model to test distributions with only unlabeled test data streams. Most of the previous TTA methods have achieved great success on simple test data streams such as independently sampled data from single or multiple distributions. However, these attempts may fail in dynamic scenarios of real-world applications like autonomous driving, where the environments gradually change and the test data is sampled correlatively over time. In this work, we explore such practical test data streams to deploy the model on the fly, namely practical test-time adaptation (PTTA). To do so, we elaborate a Robust Test-Time Adaptation (RoTTA) method against the complex data stream in PTTA. More specifically, we present a robust batch normalization scheme to estimate the normalization statistics. Meanwhile, a memory bank is utilized to sample category-balanced data with consideration of timeliness and uncertainty. Further, to stabilize the training procedure, we develop a time-aware reweighting strategy with a teacher-student model. Extensive experiments prove that RoTTA enables continual testtime adaptation on the correlatively sampled data streams. Our method is easy to implement, making it a good choice for rapid deployment. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/RoTTA

Since experiencing domain shifts during test-time is inevitable in practice, test-time adaption (TTA) continues to adapt the model after deployment. Recently, the area of continual and gradual test-time adaptation (TTA) emerged. In contrast to standard TTA, continual TTA considers not only a single domain shift, but a sequence of shifts. Gradual TTA further exploits the property that some shifts evolve gradually over time. Since in both settings long test sequences are present, error accumulation needs to be addressed for methods relying on self-training. In this work, we propose and show that in the setting of TTA, the symmetric cross-entropy is better suited as a consistency loss for mean teachers compared to the commonly used cross-entropy. This is justified by our analysis with respect to the (symmetric) cross-entropy's gradient properties. To pull the test feature space closer to the source domain, where the pre-trained model is well posed, contrastive learning is leveraged. Since applications differ in their requirements, we address several settings, including having source data available and the more challenging source-free setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method "robust mean teacher" (RMT) on the continual and gradual corruption benchmarks CIFAR10C, CIFAR100C, and Imagenet-C. We further consider ImageNet-R and propose a new continual DomainNet-126 benchmark. State-of-the-art results are achieved on all benchmarks.

This paper introduces a novel representation of volumetric videos for real-time view synthesis of dynamic scenes. Recent advances in neural scene representations demonstrate their remarkable capability to model and render complex static scenes, but extending them to represent dynamic scenes is not straightforward due to their slow rendering speed or high storage cost. To solve this problem, our key idea is to represent the radiance field of each frame as a set of shallow MLP networks whose parameters are stored in 2D grids, called MLP maps, and dynamically predicted by a 2D CNN decoder shared by all frames. Representing 3D scenes with shallow MLPs significantly improves the rendering speed, while dynamically predicting MLP parameters with a shared 2D CNN instead of explicitly storing them leads to low storage cost. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality on the NHR and ZJU-MoCap datasets, while being efficient for real-time rendering with a speed of 41.7 fps for 512 x 512 images on an RTX 3090 GPU. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/mlp_maps/.

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.

Very low-resolution face recognition (VLRFR) poses unique challenges, such as tiny regions of interest and poor resolution due to extreme standoff distance or wide viewing angle of the acquisition device. In this paper, we study principled approaches to elevate the recognizability of a face in the embedding space instead of the visual quality. We first formulate a robust learning-based face recognizability measure, namely recognizability index (RI), based on two criteria: (i) proximity of each face embedding against the unrecognizable faces cluster center and (ii) closeness of each face embedding against its positive and negative class prototypes. We then devise an index diversion loss to push the hard-to-recognize face embedding with low RI away from unrecognizable faces cluster to boost the RI, which reflects better recognizability. Additionally, a perceptibility-aware attention mechanism is introduced to attend to the salient recognizable face regions, which offers better explanatory and discriminative content for embedding learning. Our proposed model is trained end-to-end and simultaneously serves recognizability-aware embedding learning and face quality estimation. To address VLRFR, extensive evaluations on three challenging low-resolution datasets and face quality assessment demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.

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