Haoyu Ma

Ajay Jaiswal, Haoyu Ma, Tianlong Chen et al. · meta-ai

Pruning large neural networks to create high-quality, independently trainable sparse masks, which can maintain similar performance to their dense counterparts, is very desirable due to the reduced space and time complexity. As research effort is focused on increasingly sophisticated pruning methods that leads to sparse subnetworks trainable from the scratch, we argue for an orthogonal, under-explored theme: improving training techniques for pruned sub-networks, i.e. sparse training. Apart from the popular belief that only the quality of sparse masks matters for sparse training, in this paper we demonstrate an alternative opportunity: one can carefully customize the sparse training techniques to deviate from the default dense network training protocols, consisting of introducing ``ghost" neurons and skip connections at the early stage of training, and strategically modifying the initialization as well as labels. Our new sparse training recipe is generally applicable to improving training from scratch with various sparse masks. By adopting our newly curated techniques, we demonstrate significant performance gains across various popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet), architectures (ResNet-18/32/104, Vgg16, MobileNet), and sparse mask options (lottery ticket, SNIP/GRASP, SynFlow, or even randomly pruning), compared to the default training protocols, especially at high sparsity levels. Code is at https://github.com/VITA-Group/ToST

Zhengang Li, Mengshu Sun, Alec Lu et al. · meta-ai

Vision transformers (ViTs) are emerging with significantly improved accuracy in computer vision tasks. However, their complex architecture and enormous computation/storage demand impose urgent needs for new hardware accelerator design methodology. This work proposes an FPGA-aware automatic ViT acceleration framework based on the proposed mixed-scheme quantization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FPGA-based ViT acceleration framework exploring model quantization. Compared with state-of-the-art ViT quantization work (algorithmic approach only without hardware acceleration), our quantization achieves 0.47% to 1.36% higher Top-1 accuracy under the same bit-width. Compared with the 32-bit floating-point baseline FPGA accelerator, our accelerator achieves around 5.6x improvement on the frame rate (i.e., 56.8 FPS vs. 10.0 FPS) with 0.71% accuracy drop on ImageNet dataset for DeiT-base.

Zhenglun Kong, Haoyu Ma, Geng Yuan et al. · harvard, meta-ai

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently obtained success in many applications, but their intensive computation and heavy memory usage at both training and inference time limit their generalization. Previous compression algorithms usually start from the pre-trained dense models and only focus on efficient inference, while time-consuming training is still unavoidable. In contrast, this paper points out that the million-scale training data is redundant, which is the fundamental reason for the tedious training. To address the issue, this paper aims to introduce sparsity into data and proposes an end-to-end efficient training framework from three sparse perspectives, dubbed Tri-Level E-ViT. Specifically, we leverage a hierarchical data redundancy reduction scheme, by exploring the sparsity under three levels: number of training examples in the dataset, number of patches (tokens) in each example, and number of connections between tokens that lie in attention weights. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed technique can noticeably accelerate training for various ViT architectures while maintaining accuracy. Remarkably, under certain ratios, we are able to improve the ViT accuracy rather than compromising it. For example, we can achieve 15.2% speedup with 72.6% (+0.4) Top-1 accuracy on Deit-T, and 15.7% speedup with 79.9% (+0.1) Top-1 accuracy on Deit-S. This proves the existence of data redundancy in ViT.

Haoyu Ma, Zhe Wang, Yifei Chen et al. · meta-ai

Recently, the vision transformer and its variants have played an increasingly important role in both monocular and multi-view human pose estimation. Considering image patches as tokens, transformers can model the global dependencies within the entire image or across images from other views. However, global attention is computationally expensive. As a consequence, it is difficult to scale up these transformer-based methods to high-resolution features and many views. In this paper, we propose the token-Pruned Pose Transformer (PPT) for 2D human pose estimation, which can locate a rough human mask and performs self-attention only within selected tokens. Furthermore, we extend our PPT to multi-view human pose estimation. Built upon PPT, we propose a new cross-view fusion strategy, called human area fusion, which considers all human foreground pixels as corresponding candidates. Experimental results on COCO and MPII demonstrate that our PPT can match the accuracy of previous pose transformer methods while reducing the computation. Moreover, experiments on Human 3.6M and Ski-Pose demonstrate that our Multi-view PPT can efficiently fuse cues from multiple views and achieve new state-of-the-art results.

Xiangyi Yan, Junayed Naushad, Chenyu You et al. · meta-ai

Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have demonstrated that effective visual representations can be learned from unlabeled images. This has led to increased interest in applying self-supervised learning to the medical domain, where unlabeled images are abundant and labeled images are difficult to obtain. However, most self-supervised learning approaches are modeled as image level discriminative or generative proxy tasks, which may not capture the finer level representations necessary for dense prediction tasks like multi-organ segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework that integrates Localized Region Contrast (LRC) to enhance existing self-supervised pre-training methods for medical image segmentation. Our approach involves identifying Super-pixels by Felzenszwalb's algorithm and performing local contrastive learning using a novel contrastive sampling loss. Through extensive experiments on three multi-organ segmentation datasets, we demonstrate that integrating LRC to an existing self-supervised method in a limited annotation setting significantly improves segmentation performance. Moreover, we show that LRC can also be applied to fully-supervised pre-training methods to further boost performance.

Shanlin Sun, Thanh-Tung Le, Chenyu You et al. · meta-ai

We present Hybrid-CSR, a geometric deep-learning model that combines explicit and implicit shape representations for cortical surface reconstruction. Specifically, Hybrid-CSR begins with explicit deformations of template meshes to obtain coarsely reconstructed cortical surfaces, based on which the oriented point clouds are estimated for the subsequent differentiable poisson surface reconstruction. By doing so, our method unifies explicit (oriented point clouds) and implicit (indicator function) cortical surface reconstruction. Compared to explicit representation-based methods, our hybrid approach is more friendly to capture detailed structures, and when compared with implicit representation-based methods, our method can be topology aware because of end-to-end training with a mesh-based deformation module. In order to address topology defects, we propose a new topology correction pipeline that relies on optimization-based diffeomorphic surface registration. Experimental results on three brain datasets show that our approach surpasses existing implicit and explicit cortical surface reconstruction methods in numeric metrics in terms of accuracy, regularity, and consistency.

Yifeng Xiong, Haoyu Ma, Shanlin Sun et al. · meta-ai

Single-view novel view synthesis (NVS), the task of generating images from new viewpoints based on a single reference image, is important but challenging in computer vision. Recent advancements in NVS have leveraged Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) for their exceptional ability to produce high-fidelity images. However, current diffusion-based methods typically utilize camera pose matrices to globally and implicitly enforce 3D constraints, which can lead to inconsistencies in images generated from varying viewpoints, particularly in regions with complex textures and structures. To address these limitations, we present Light Field Diffusion (LFD), a novel conditional diffusion-based approach that transcends the conventional reliance on camera pose matrices. Starting from the camera pose matrices, LFD transforms them into light field encoding, with the same shape as the reference image, to describe the direction of each ray. By integrating light field encoding with the reference image, our method imposes local pixel-wise constraints within the diffusion process, fostering enhanced view consistency. Our approach not only involves training image LFD on the ShapeNet Car dataset but also includes fine-tuning a pre-trained latent diffusion model on the Objaverse dataset. This enables our latent LFD model to exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities across out-of-distribution datasets like RTMV as well as in-the-wild images. Experiments demonstrate that LFD not only produces high-fidelity images but also achieves superior 3D consistency in complex regions, outperforming existing novel view synthesis methods.

Xiaopeng Sun, Weiqi Li, Zhenyu Zhang et al.

360° omnidirectional images have gained research attention due to their immersive and interactive experience, particularly in AR/VR applications. However, they suffer from lower angular resolution due to being captured by fisheye lenses with the same sensor size for capturing planar images. To solve the above issues, we propose a two-stage framework for 360° omnidirectional image superresolution. The first stage employs two branches: model A, which incorporates omnidirectional position-aware deformable blocks (OPDB) and Fourier upsampling, and model B, which adds a spatial frequency fusion module (SFF) to model A. Model A aims to enhance the feature extraction ability of 360° image positional information, while Model B further focuses on the high-frequency information of 360° images. The second stage performs same-resolution enhancement based on the structure of model A with a pixel unshuffle operation. In addition, we collected data from YouTube to improve the fitting ability of the transformer, and created pseudo low-resolution images using a degradation network. Our proposed method achieves superior performance and wins the NTIRE 2023 challenge of 360° omnidirectional image super-resolution.

Adam Polyak, Amit Zohar, Andrew Brown et al. · meta-ai

We present Movie Gen, a cast of foundation models that generates high-quality, 1080p HD videos with different aspect ratios and synchronized audio. We also show additional capabilities such as precise instruction-based video editing and generation of personalized videos based on a user's image. Our models set a new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks: text-to-video synthesis, video personalization, video editing, video-to-audio generation, and text-to-audio generation. Our largest video generation model is a 30B parameter transformer trained with a maximum context length of 73K video tokens, corresponding to a generated video of 16 seconds at 16 frames-per-second. We show multiple technical innovations and simplifications on the architecture, latent spaces, training objectives and recipes, data curation, evaluation protocols, parallelization techniques, and inference optimizations that allow us to reap the benefits of scaling pre-training data, model size, and training compute for training large scale media generation models. We hope this paper helps the research community to accelerate progress and innovation in media generation models. All videos from this paper are available at https://go.fb.me/MovieGenResearchVideos.

Yunhan Zhao, Haoyu Ma, Shu Kong et al. · meta-ai

Egocentric sensors such as AR/VR devices capture human-object interactions and offer the potential to provide task-assistance by recalling 3D locations of objects of interest in the surrounding environment. This capability requires instance tracking in real-world 3D scenes from egocentric videos (IT3DEgo). We explore this problem by first introducing a new benchmark dataset, consisting of RGB and depth videos, per-frame camera pose, and instance-level annotations in both 2D camera and 3D world coordinates. We present an evaluation protocol which evaluates tracking performance in 3D coordinates with two settings for enrolling instances to track: (1) single-view online enrollment where an instance is specified on-the-fly based on the human wearer's interactions. and (2) multi-view pre-enrollment where images of an instance to be tracked are stored in memory ahead of time. To address IT3DEgo, we first re-purpose methods from relevant areas, e.g., single object tracking (SOT) -- running SOT methods to track instances in 2D frames and lifting them to 3D using camera pose and depth. We also present a simple method that leverages pretrained segmentation and detection models to generate proposals from RGB frames and match proposals with enrolled instance images. Our experiments show that our method (with no finetuning) significantly outperforms SOT-based approaches in the egocentric setting. We conclude by arguing that the problem of egocentric instance tracking is made easier by leveraging camera pose and using a 3D allocentric (world) coordinate representation.

Haoyu Ma, Yushu Chen, Wenlai Zhao et al. · tsinghua

Time series foundation models have demonstrated strong performance in zero-shot learning, making them well-suited for predicting rapidly evolving patterns in real-world applications where relevant training data are scarce. However, most of these models rely on the Transformer architecture, which incurs quadratic complexity as input length increases. To address this, we introduce TSMamba, a linear-complexity foundation model for time series forecasting built on the Mamba architecture. The model captures temporal dependencies through both forward and backward Mamba encoders, achieving high prediction accuracy. To reduce reliance on large datasets and lower training costs, TSMamba employs a two-stage transfer learning process that leverages pretrained Mamba LLMs, allowing effective time series modeling with a moderate training set. In the first stage, the forward and backward backbones are optimized via patch-wise autoregressive prediction; in the second stage, the model trains a prediction head and refines other components for long-term forecasting. While the backbone assumes channel independence to manage varying channel numbers across datasets, a channel-wise compressed attention module is introduced to capture cross-channel dependencies during fine-tuning on specific multivariate datasets. Experiments show that TSMamba's zero-shot performance is comparable to state-of-the-art time series foundation models, despite using significantly less training data. It also achieves competitive or superior full-shot performance compared to task-specific prediction models. The code will be made publicly available.

Haoyu Ma, Shahin Mahdizadehaghdam, Bichen Wu et al. · meta-ai

Recent advances in generative AI have significantly enhanced image and video editing, particularly in the context of text prompt control. State-of-the-art approaches predominantly rely on diffusion models to accomplish these tasks. However, the computational demands of diffusion-based methods are substantial, often necessitating large-scale paired datasets for training, and therefore challenging the deployment in real applications. To address these issues, this paper breaks down the text-based video editing task into two stages. First, we leverage an pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to simultaneously edit few keyframes in an zero-shot way. Second, we introduce an efficient model called MaskINT, which is built on non-autoregressive masked generative transformers and specializes in frame interpolation between the edited keyframes, using the structural guidance from intermediate frames. Experimental results suggest that our MaskINT achieves comparable performance with diffusion-based methodologies, while significantly improve the inference time. This research offers a practical solution for text-based video editing and showcases the potential of non-autoregressive masked generative transformers in this domain.

Ming Cheng, Haoyu Ma, Qiufang Ma et al.

Multi-stage strategies are frequently employed in image restoration tasks. While transformer-based methods have exhibited high efficiency in single-image super-resolution tasks, they have not yet shown significant advantages over CNN-based methods in stereo super-resolution tasks. This can be attributed to two key factors: first, current single-image super-resolution transformers are unable to leverage the complementary stereo information during the process; second, the performance of transformers is typically reliant on sufficient data, which is absent in common stereo-image super-resolution algorithms. To address these issues, we propose a Hybrid Transformer and CNN Attention Network (HTCAN), which utilizes a transformer-based network for single-image enhancement and a CNN-based network for stereo information fusion. Furthermore, we employ a multi-patch training strategy and larger window sizes to activate more input pixels for super-resolution. We also revisit other advanced techniques, such as data augmentation, data ensemble, and model ensemble to reduce overfitting and data bias. Finally, our approach achieved a score of 23.90dB and emerged as the winner in Track 1 of the NTIRE 2023 Stereo Image Super-Resolution Challenge.

Xiangyi Yan, Hao Tang, Shanlin Sun et al.

Recent advances in transformer-based models have drawn attention to exploring these techniques in medical image segmentation, especially in conjunction with the U-Net model (or its variants), which has shown great success in medical image segmentation, under both 2D and 3D settings. Current 2D based methods either directly replace convolutional layers with pure transformers or consider a transformer as an additional intermediate encoder between the encoder and decoder of U-Net. However, these approaches only consider the attention encoding within one single slice and do not utilize the axial-axis information naturally provided by a 3D volume. In the 3D setting, convolution on volumetric data and transformers both consume large GPU memory. One has to either downsample the image or use cropped local patches to reduce GPU memory usage, which limits its performance. In this paper, we propose Axial Fusion Transformer UNet (AFTer-UNet), which takes both advantages of convolutional layers' capability of extracting detailed features and transformers' strength on long sequence modeling. It considers both intra-slice and inter-slice long-range cues to guide the segmentation. Meanwhile, it has fewer parameters and takes less GPU memory to train than the previous transformer-based models. Extensive experiments on three multi-organ segmentation datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Haoyu Ma, Tianlong Chen et al.

Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests that a dense neural network contains a sparse sub-network that can match the performance of the original dense network when trained in isolation from scratch. Most works retrain the sparse sub-network with the same training protocols as its dense network, such as initialization, architecture blocks, and training recipes. However, till now it is unclear that whether these training protocols are optimal for sparse networks. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is unnecessary for spare retraining to strictly inherit those properties from the dense network. Instead, by plugging in purposeful "tweaks" of the sparse subnetwork architecture or its training recipe, its retraining can be significantly improved than the default, especially at high sparsity levels. Combining all our proposed "tweaks" can yield the new state-of-the-art performance of LTH, and these modifications can be easily adapted to other sparse training algorithms in general. Specifically, we have achieved a significant and consistent performance gain of1.05% - 4.93% for ResNet18 on CIFAR-100 over vanilla-LTH. Moreover, our methods are shown to generalize across datasets (CIFAR10, CIFAR100, TinyImageNet) and architectures (Vgg16, ResNet-18/ResNet-34, MobileNet). All codes will be publicly available.

Juncheng Zhang, Qingmin Liao, Shaojun Liu et al.

Multi-focus image fusion, a technique to generate an all-in-focus image from two or more partially-focused source images, can benefit many computer vision tasks. However, currently there is no large and realistic dataset to perform convincing evaluation and comparison of algorithms in multi-focus image fusion. Moreover, it is difficult to train a deep neural network for multi-focus image fusion without a suitable dataset. In this letter, we introduce a large and realistic multi-focus dataset called Real-MFF, which contains 710 pairs of source images with corresponding ground truth images. The dataset is generated by light field images, and both the source images and the ground truth images are realistic. To serve as both a well-established benchmark for existing multi-focus image fusion algorithms and an appropriate training dataset for future development of deep-learning-based methods, the dataset contains a variety of scenes, including buildings, plants, humans, shopping malls, squares and so on. We also evaluate 10 typical multi-focus algorithms on this dataset for the purpose of illustration.

Haoyu Ma, Qingmin Liao, Juncheng Zhang et al.

Capturing an all-in-focus image with a single camera is difficult since the depth of field of the camera is usually limited. An alternative method to obtain the all-in-focus image is to fuse several images focusing at different depths. However, existing multi-focus image fusion methods cannot obtain clear results for areas near the focused/defocused boundary (FDB). In this paper, a novel α-matte boundary defocus model is proposed to generate realistic training data with the defocus spread effect precisely modeled, especially for areas near the FDB. Based on this α-matte defocus model and the generated data, a cascaded boundary aware convolutional network termed MMF-Net is proposed and trained, aiming to achieve clearer fusion results around the FDB. More specifically, the MMF-Net consists of two cascaded sub-nets for initial fusion and boundary fusion, respectively; these two sub-nets are designed to first obtain a guidance map of FDB and then refine the fusion near the FDB. Experiments demonstrate that with the help of the new α-matte boundary defocus model, the proposed MMF-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.