Hanshu Yan

Yujun Shi, Chuhui Xue, Jun Hao Liew et al.

Accurate and controllable image editing is a challenging task that has attracted significant attention recently. Notably, DragGAN is an interactive point-based image editing framework that achieves impressive editing results with pixel-level precision. However, due to its reliance on generative adversarial networks (GANs), its generality is limited by the capacity of pretrained GAN models. In this work, we extend this editing framework to diffusion models and propose a novel approach DragDiffusion. By harnessing large-scale pretrained diffusion models, we greatly enhance the applicability of interactive point-based editing on both real and diffusion-generated images. Our approach involves optimizing the diffusion latents to achieve precise spatial control. The supervision signal of this optimization process is from the diffusion model's UNet features, which are known to contain rich semantic and geometric information. Moreover, we introduce two additional techniques, namely LoRA fine-tuning and latent-MasaCtrl, to further preserve the identity of the original image. Lastly, we present a challenging benchmark dataset called DragBench -- the first benchmark to evaluate the performance of interactive point-based image editing methods. Experiments across a wide range of challenging cases (e.g., images with multiple objects, diverse object categories, various styles, etc.) demonstrate the versatility and generality of DragDiffusion. Code: https://github.com/Yujun-Shi/DragDiffusion.

Daquan Zhou, Weimin Wang, Hanshu Yan et al.

We present an efficient text-to-video generation framework based on latent diffusion models, termed MagicVideo. MagicVideo can generate smooth video clips that are concordant with the given text descriptions. Due to a novel and efficient 3D U-Net design and modeling video distributions in a low-dimensional space, MagicVideo can synthesize video clips with 256x256 spatial resolution on a single GPU card, which takes around 64x fewer computations than the Video Diffusion Models (VDM) in terms of FLOPs. In specific, unlike existing works that directly train video models in the RGB space, we use a pre-trained VAE to map video clips into a low-dimensional latent space and learn the distribution of videos' latent codes via a diffusion model. Besides, we introduce two new designs to adapt the U-Net denoiser trained on image tasks to video data: a frame-wise lightweight adaptor for the image-to-video distribution adjustment and a directed temporal attention module to capture temporal dependencies across frames. Thus, we can exploit the informative weights of convolution operators from a text-to-image model for accelerating video training. To ameliorate the pixel dithering in the generated videos, we also propose a novel VideoVAE auto-encoder for better RGB reconstruction. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that MagicVideo can generate high-quality video clips with either realistic or imaginary content. Refer to \url{https://magicvideo.github.io/#} for more examples.

Zhongcong Xu, Jianfeng Zhang, Jun Hao Liew et al.

This paper studies the human image animation task, which aims to generate a video of a certain reference identity following a particular motion sequence. Existing animation works typically employ the frame-warping technique to animate the reference image towards the target motion. Despite achieving reasonable results, these approaches face challenges in maintaining temporal consistency throughout the animation due to the lack of temporal modeling and poor preservation of reference identity. In this work, we introduce MagicAnimate, a diffusion-based framework that aims at enhancing temporal consistency, preserving reference image faithfully, and improving animation fidelity. To achieve this, we first develop a video diffusion model to encode temporal information. Second, to maintain the appearance coherence across frames, we introduce a novel appearance encoder to retain the intricate details of the reference image. Leveraging these two innovations, we further employ a simple video fusion technique to encourage smooth transitions for long video animation. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline approaches on two benchmarks. Notably, our approach outperforms the strongest baseline by over 38% in terms of video fidelity on the challenging TikTok dancing dataset. Code and model will be made available.

Jun Hao Liew, Hanshu Yan, Daquan Zhou et al.

Have you ever imagined what a corgi-alike coffee machine or a tiger-alike rabbit would look like? In this work, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring a new task called semantic mixing, aiming at blending two different semantics to create a new concept (e.g., corgi + coffee machine -- > corgi-alike coffee machine). Unlike style transfer, where an image is stylized according to the reference style without changing the image content, semantic blending mixes two different concepts in a semantic manner to synthesize a novel concept while preserving the spatial layout and geometry. To this end, we present MagicMix, a simple yet effective solution based on pre-trained text-conditioned diffusion models. Motivated by the progressive generation property of diffusion models where layout/shape emerges at early denoising steps while semantically meaningful details appear at later steps during the denoising process, our method first obtains a coarse layout (either by corrupting an image or denoising from a pure Gaussian noise given a text prompt), followed by injection of conditional prompt for semantic mixing. Our method does not require any spatial mask or re-training, yet is able to synthesize novel objects with high fidelity. To improve the mixing quality, we further devise two simple strategies to provide better control and flexibility over the synthesized content. With our method, we present our results over diverse downstream applications, including semantic style transfer, novel object synthesis, breed mixing, and concept removal, demonstrating the flexibility of our method. More results can be found on the project page https://magicmix.github.io

Jun Hao Liew, Hanshu Yan, Jianfeng Zhang et al.

In this report, we present MagicEdit, a surprisingly simple yet effective solution to the text-guided video editing task. We found that high-fidelity and temporally coherent video-to-video translation can be achieved by explicitly disentangling the learning of content, structure and motion signals during training. This is in contradict to most existing methods which attempt to jointly model both the appearance and temporal representation within a single framework, which we argue, would lead to degradation in per-frame quality. Despite its simplicity, we show that MagicEdit supports various downstream video editing tasks, including video stylization, local editing, video-MagicMix and video outpainting.

Jianfeng Zhang, Hanshu Yan, Zhongcong Xu et al.

This report presents MagicAvatar, a framework for multimodal video generation and animation of human avatars. Unlike most existing methods that generate avatar-centric videos directly from multimodal inputs (e.g., text prompts), MagicAvatar explicitly disentangles avatar video generation into two stages: (1) multimodal-to-motion and (2) motion-to-video generation. The first stage translates the multimodal inputs into motion/ control signals (e.g., human pose, depth, DensePose); while the second stage generates avatar-centric video guided by these motion signals. Additionally, MagicAvatar supports avatar animation by simply providing a few images of the target person. This capability enables the animation of the provided human identity according to the specific motion derived from the first stage. We demonstrate the flexibility of MagicAvatar through various applications, including text-guided and video-guided avatar generation, as well as multimodal avatar animation.

Jiachun Pan, Jun Hao Liew, Vincent Y. F. Tan et al.

Existing customization methods require access to multiple reference examples to align pre-trained diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) with user-provided concepts. This paper aims to address the challenge of DPM customization when the only available supervision is a differentiable metric defined on the generated contents. Since the sampling procedure of DPMs involves recursive calls to the denoising UNet, naïve gradient backpropagation requires storing the intermediate states of all iterations, resulting in extremely high memory consumption. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel method AdjointDPM, which first generates new samples from diffusion models by solving the corresponding probability-flow ODEs. It then uses the adjoint sensitivity method to backpropagate the gradients of the loss to the models' parameters (including conditioning signals, network weights, and initial noises) by solving another augmented ODE. To reduce numerical errors in both the forward generation and gradient backpropagation processes, we further reparameterize the probability-flow ODE and augmented ODE as simple non-stiff ODEs using exponential integration. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AdjointDPM on three interesting tasks: converting visual effects into identification text embeddings, finetuning DPMs for specific types of stylization, and optimizing initial noise to generate adversarial samples for security auditing.

Xiang Lan, Hanshu Yan, Shenda Hong et al.

Not all positive pairs are beneficial to time series contrastive learning. In this paper, we study two types of bad positive pairs that can impair the quality of time series representation learned through contrastive learning: the noisy positive pair and the faulty positive pair. We observe that, with the presence of noisy positive pairs, the model tends to simply learn the pattern of noise (Noisy Alignment). Meanwhile, when faulty positive pairs arise, the model wastes considerable amount of effort aligning non-representative patterns (Faulty Alignment). To address this problem, we propose a Dynamic Bad Pair Mining (DBPM) algorithm, which reliably identifies and suppresses bad positive pairs in time series contrastive learning. Specifically, DBPM utilizes a memory module to dynamically track the training behavior of each positive pair along training process. This allows us to identify potential bad positive pairs at each epoch based on their historical training behaviors. The identified bad pairs are subsequently down-weighted through a transformation module, thereby mitigating their negative impact on the representation learning process. DBPM is a simple algorithm designed as a lightweight plug-in without learnable parameters to enhance the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods. Through extensive experiments conducted on four large-scale, real-world time series datasets, we demonstrate DBPM's efficacy in mitigating the adverse effects of bad positive pairs.

Chenghao Liu, Taha Aksu, Juncheng Liu et al.

We introduce Moirai 2.0, a decoder-only time-series foundation model trained on a new corpus of 36M series. The model adopts quantile forecasting and multi-token prediction, improving both probabilistic accuracy and inference efficiency. On the Gift-Eval benchmark, it ranks among the top pretrained models while achieving a strong trade-off between accuracy, speed, and model size. Compared to Moirai 1.0, Moirai 2.0 replaces masked-encoder training, multi-patch inputs, and mixture-distribution outputs with a simpler decoder-only architecture, single patch, and quantile loss. Ablation studies isolate these changes -- showing that the decoder-only backbone along with recursive multi-quantile decoding contribute most to the gains. Additional experiments show that Moirai 2.0 outperforms larger models from the same family and exhibits robust domain-level results. In terms of efficiency and model size, Moirai 2.0 is twice as fast and thirty times smaller than its prior best version, Moirai 1.0-Large, while also performing better. Model performance plateaus with increasing parameter count and declines at longer horizons, motivating future work on data scaling and long-horizon modeling. We release code and evaluation details to support further research.

Hanshu Yan, Xingchao Liu, Jiachun Pan et al.

We present Piecewise Rectified Flow (PeRFlow), a flow-based method for accelerating diffusion models. PeRFlow divides the sampling process of generative flows into several time windows and straightens the trajectories in each interval via the reflow operation, thereby approaching piecewise linear flows. PeRFlow achieves superior performance in a few-step generation. Moreover, through dedicated parameterizations, the PeRFlow models inherit knowledge from the pretrained diffusion models. Thus, the training converges fast and the obtained models show advantageous transfer ability, serving as universal plug-and-play accelerators that are compatible with various workflows based on the pre-trained diffusion models. Codes for training and inference are publicly released. https://github.com/magic-research/piecewise-rectified-flow

Hanshu Yan

Deep learning methods have achieved great success in solving computer vision tasks, and they have been widely utilized in artificially intelligent systems for image processing, analysis, and understanding. However, deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in input data. The security issues of deep neural networks have thus come to the fore. It is imperative to study the adversarial robustness of deep vision algorithms comprehensively. This talk focuses on the adversarial robustness of image classification models and image denoisers. We will discuss the robustness of deep vision algorithms from three perspectives: 1) robustness evaluation (we propose the ObsAtk to evaluate the robustness of denoisers), 2) robustness improvement (HAT, TisODE, and CIFS are developed to robustify vision models), and 3) the connection between adversarial robustness and generalization capability to new domains (we find that adversarially robust denoisers can deal with unseen types of real-world noise).

Yuanzhi Zhu, Ruiqing Wang, Shilin Lu et al.

Recent advances in diffusion and flow-based generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in image restoration tasks, achieving superior perceptual quality compared to traditional deep learning approaches. However, these methods either require numerous sampling steps to generate high-quality images, resulting in significant computational overhead, or rely on common model distillation, which usually imposes a fixed fidelity-realism trade-off and thus lacks flexibility. In this paper, we introduce OFTSR, a novel flow-based framework for one-step image super-resolution that can produce outputs with tunable levels of fidelity and realism. Our approach first trains a conditional flow-based super-resolution model to serve as a teacher model. We then distill this teacher model by applying a specialized constraint. Specifically, we force the predictions from our one-step student model for same input to lie on the same sampling ODE trajectory of the teacher model. This alignment ensures that the student model's single-step predictions from initial states match the teacher's predictions from a closer intermediate state. Through extensive experiments on datasets including FFHQ (256$\times$256), DIV2K, and ImageNet (256$\times$256), we demonstrate that OFTSR achieves state-of-the-art performance for one-step image super-resolution, while having the ability to flexibly tune the fidelity-realism trade-off. Codes: \href{https://github.com/yuanzhi-zhu/OFTSR}{https://github.com/yuanzhi-zhu/OFTSR}.

Yujun Shi, Jun Hao Liew, Hanshu Yan et al.

Accuracy and speed are critical in image editing tasks. Pan et al. introduced a drag-based image editing framework that achieves pixel-level control using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). A flurry of subsequent studies enhanced this framework's generality by leveraging large-scale diffusion models. However, these methods often suffer from inordinately long processing times (exceeding 1 minute per edit) and low success rates. Addressing these issues head on, we present LightningDrag, a rapid approach enabling high quality drag-based image editing in ~1 second. Unlike most previous methods, we redefine drag-based editing as a conditional generation task, eliminating the need for time-consuming latent optimization or gradient-based guidance during inference. In addition, the design of our pipeline allows us to train our model on large-scale paired video frames, which contain rich motion information such as object translations, changing poses and orientations, zooming in and out, etc. By learning from videos, our approach can significantly outperform previous methods in terms of accuracy and consistency. Despite being trained solely on videos, our model generalizes well to perform local shape deformations not presented in the training data (e.g., lengthening of hair, twisting rainbows, etc.). Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on benchmark datasets corroborate the superiority of our approach. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/magic-research/LightningDrag.

Ruiqing Wang, Kai Zhang, Yuanzhi Zhu et al.

Diffusion- and flow-based models have advanced Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR), but their multi-step sampling makes inference slow and hard to deploy. One-step distillation alleviates the cost, yet often degrades restoration quality and removes the option to refine with more steps. We present Mean Flows for Super-Resolution (MFSR), a new distillation framework that produces photorealistic results in a single step while still allowing an optional few-step path for further improvement. Our approach uses MeanFlow as the learning target, enabling the student to approximate the average velocity between arbitrary states of the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE) and effectively capture the teacher's dynamics without explicit rollouts. To better leverage pretrained generative priors, we additionally improve original MeanFlow's Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) formulation with teacher CFG distillation strategy, which enhances restoration capability and preserves fine details. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that MFSR achieves efficient, flexible, and high-quality super-resolution, delivering results on par with or even better than multi-step teachers while requiring much lower computational cost.

Hanshu Yan, Jingfeng Zhang, Gang Niu et al.

We investigate the adversarial robustness of CNNs from the perspective of channel-wise activations. By comparing \textit{non-robust} (normally trained) and \textit{robustified} (adversarially trained) models, we observe that adversarial training (AT) robustifies CNNs by aligning the channel-wise activations of adversarial data with those of their natural counterparts. However, the channels that are \textit{negatively-relevant} (NR) to predictions are still over-activated when processing adversarial data. Besides, we also observe that AT does not result in similar robustness for all classes. For the robust classes, channels with larger activation magnitudes are usually more \textit{positively-relevant} (PR) to predictions, but this alignment does not hold for the non-robust classes. Given these observations, we hypothesize that suppressing NR channels and aligning PR ones with their relevances further enhances the robustness of CNNs under AT. To examine this hypothesis, we introduce a novel mechanism, i.e., \underline{C}hannel-wise \underline{I}mportance-based \underline{F}eature \underline{S}election (CIFS). The CIFS manipulates channels' activations of certain layers by generating non-negative multipliers to these channels based on their relevances to predictions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets including CIFAR10 and SVHN clearly verify the hypothesis and CIFS's effectiveness of robustifying CNNs. \url{https://github.com/HanshuYAN/CIFS}

Weimin Wang, Jiawei Liu, Zhijie Lin et al.

The growing demand for high-fidelity video generation from textual descriptions has catalyzed significant research in this field. In this work, we introduce MagicVideo-V2 that integrates the text-to-image model, video motion generator, reference image embedding module and frame interpolation module into an end-to-end video generation pipeline. Benefiting from these architecture designs, MagicVideo-V2 can generate an aesthetically pleasing, high-resolution video with remarkable fidelity and smoothness. It demonstrates superior performance over leading Text-to-Video systems such as Runway, Pika 1.0, Morph, Moon Valley and Stable Video Diffusion model via user evaluation at large scale.

Jiachun Pan, Hanshu Yan, Jun Hao Liew et al.

Training-free guided sampling in diffusion models leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained networks, such as an aesthetic evaluation model, to guide the generation process. Current training-free guided sampling algorithms obtain the guidance energy function based on a one-step estimate of the clean image. However, since the off-the-shelf pre-trained networks are trained on clean images, the one-step estimation procedure of the clean image may be inaccurate, especially in the early stages of the generation process in diffusion models. This causes the guidance in the early time steps to be inaccurate. To overcome this problem, we propose Symplectic Adjoint Guidance (SAG), which calculates the gradient guidance in two inner stages. Firstly, SAG estimates the clean image via $n$ function calls, where $n$ serves as a flexible hyperparameter that can be tailored to meet specific image quality requirements. Secondly, SAG uses the symplectic adjoint method to obtain the gradients accurately and efficiently in terms of the memory requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAG generates images with higher qualities compared to the baselines in both guided image and video generation tasks.

Yuanzhi Zhu, Hanshu Yan, Huan Yang et al.

Generative models, particularly diffusion models, have made significant success in data synthesis across various modalities, including images, videos, and 3D assets. However, current diffusion models are computationally intensive, often requiring numerous sampling steps that limit their practical application, especially in video generation. This work introduces a novel framework for diffusion distillation and distribution matching that dramatically reduces the number of inference steps while maintaining-and potentially improving-generation quality. Our approach focuses on distilling pre-trained diffusion models into a more efficient few-step generator, specifically targeting video generation. By leveraging a combination of video GAN loss and a novel 2D score distribution matching loss, we demonstrate the potential to generate high-quality video frames with substantially fewer sampling steps. To be specific, the proposed method incorporates a denoising GAN discriminator to distil from the real data and a pre-trained image diffusion model to enhance the frame quality and the prompt-following capabilities. Experimental results using AnimateDiff as the teacher model showcase the method's effectiveness, achieving superior performance in just four sampling steps compared to existing techniques.

Hanshu Yan, Jun Hao Liew, Long Mai et al.

This paper addresses the issue of modifying the visual appearance of videos while preserving their motion. A novel framework, named MagicProp, is proposed, which disentangles the video editing process into two stages: appearance editing and motion-aware appearance propagation. In the first stage, MagicProp selects a single frame from the input video and applies image-editing techniques to modify the content and/or style of the frame. The flexibility of these techniques enables the editing of arbitrary regions within the frame. In the second stage, MagicProp employs the edited frame as an appearance reference and generates the remaining frames using an autoregressive rendering approach. To achieve this, a diffusion-based conditional generation model, called PropDPM, is developed, which synthesizes the target frame by conditioning on the reference appearance, the target motion, and its previous appearance. The autoregressive editing approach ensures temporal consistency in the resulting videos. Overall, MagicProp combines the flexibility of image-editing techniques with the superior temporal consistency of autoregressive modeling, enabling flexible editing of object types and aesthetic styles in arbitrary regions of input videos while maintaining good temporal consistency across frames. Extensive experiments in various video editing scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicProp.

Hanshu Yan, Jingfeng Zhang, Jiashi Feng et al.

This work systematically investigates the adversarial robustness of deep image denoisers (DIDs), i.e, how well DIDs can recover the ground truth from noisy observations degraded by adversarial perturbations. Firstly, to evaluate DIDs' robustness, we propose a novel adversarial attack, namely Observation-based Zero-mean Attack ({\sc ObsAtk}), to craft adversarial zero-mean perturbations on given noisy images. We find that existing DIDs are vulnerable to the adversarial noise generated by {\sc ObsAtk}. Secondly, to robustify DIDs, we propose an adversarial training strategy, hybrid adversarial training ({\sc HAT}), that jointly trains DIDs with adversarial and non-adversarial noisy data to ensure that the reconstruction quality is high and the denoisers around non-adversarial data are locally smooth. The resultant DIDs can effectively remove various types of synthetic and adversarial noise. We also uncover that the robustness of DIDs benefits their generalization capability on unseen real-world noise. Indeed, {\sc HAT}-trained DIDs can recover high-quality clean images from real-world noise even without training on real noisy data. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including Set68, PolyU, and SIDD, corroborate the effectiveness of {\sc ObsAtk} and {\sc HAT}.

Jiawei Du, Hanshu Yan, Jiashi Feng et al.

Overparametrized Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often achieve astounding performances, but may potentially result in severe generalization error. Recently, the relation between the sharpness of the loss landscape and the generalization error has been established by Foret et al. (2020), in which the Sharpness Aware Minimizer (SAM) was proposed to mitigate the degradation of the generalization. Unfortunately, SAM s computational cost is roughly double that of base optimizers, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). This paper thus proposes Efficient Sharpness Aware Minimizer (ESAM), which boosts SAM s efficiency at no cost to its generalization performance. ESAM includes two novel and efficient training strategies-StochasticWeight Perturbation and Sharpness-Sensitive Data Selection. In the former, the sharpness measure is approximated by perturbing a stochastically chosen set of weights in each iteration; in the latter, the SAM loss is optimized using only a judiciously selected subset of data that is sensitive to the sharpness. We provide theoretical explanations as to why these strategies perform well. We also show, via extensive experiments on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets, that ESAM enhances the efficiency over SAM from requiring 100% extra computations to 40% vis-a-vis base optimizers, while test accuracies are preserved or even improved.

Haiyun He, Hanshu Yan, Vincent Y. F. Tan

Using information-theoretic principles, we consider the generalization error (gen-error) of iterative semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms that iteratively generate pseudo-labels for a large amount of unlabelled data to progressively refine the model parameters. In contrast to most previous works that {\em bound} the gen-error, we provide an {\em exact} expression for the gen-error and particularize it to the binary Gaussian mixture model. Our theoretical results suggest that when the class conditional variances are not too large, the gen-error decreases with the number of iterations, but quickly saturates. On the flip side, if the class conditional variances (and so amount of overlap between the classes) are large, the gen-error increases with the number of iterations. To mitigate this undesirable effect, we show that regularization can reduce the gen-error. The theoretical results are corroborated by extensive experiments on the MNIST and CIFAR datasets in which we notice that for easy-to-distinguish classes, the gen-error improves after several pseudo-labelling iterations, but saturates afterwards, and for more difficult-to-distinguish classes, regularization improves the generalization performance.

Meng-Jiun Chiou, Henghui Ding, Hanshu Yan et al.

Given input images, scene graph generation (SGG) aims to produce comprehensive, graphical representations describing visual relationships among salient objects. Recently, more efforts have been paid to the long tail problem in SGG; however, the imbalance in the fraction of missing labels of different classes, or reporting bias, exacerbating the long tail is rarely considered and cannot be solved by the existing debiasing methods. In this paper we show that, due to the missing labels, SGG can be viewed as a "Learning from Positive and Unlabeled data" (PU learning) problem, where the reporting bias can be removed by recovering the unbiased probabilities from the biased ones by utilizing label frequencies, i.e., the per-class fraction of labeled, positive examples in all the positive examples. To obtain accurate label frequency estimates, we propose Dynamic Label Frequency Estimation (DLFE) to take advantage of training-time data augmentation and average over multiple training iterations to introduce more valid examples. Extensive experiments show that DLFE is more effective in estimating label frequencies than a naive variant of the traditional estimate, and DLFE significantly alleviates the long tail and achieves state-of-the-art debiasing performance on the VG dataset. We also show qualitatively that SGG models with DLFE produce prominently more balanced and unbiased scene graphs.

Jiawei Du, Hanshu Yan, Vincent Y. F. Tan et al.

It has been shown that the majority of existing adversarial defense methods achieve robustness at the cost of sacrificing prediction accuracy. The undesirable severe drop in accuracy adversely affects the reliability of machine learning algorithms and prohibits their deployment in realistic applications. This paper aims to address this dilemma by proposing a novel preprocessing framework, which we term Robust and Accurate Image classificatioN(RAIN), to improve the robustness of given CNN classifiers and, at the same time, preserve their high prediction accuracies. RAIN introduces a new randomization-enhancement scheme. It applies randomization over inputs to break the ties between the model forward prediction path and the backward gradient path, thus improving the model robustness. However, similar to existing preprocessing-based methods, the randomized process will degrade the prediction accuracy. To understand why this is the case, we compare the difference between original and processed images, and find it is the loss of high-frequency components in the input image that leads to accuracy drop of the classifier. Based on this finding, RAIN enhances the input's high-frequency details to retain the CNN's high prediction accuracy. Concretely, RAIN consists of two novel randomization modules: randomized small circular shift (RdmSCS) and randomized down-upsampling (RdmDU). The RdmDU module randomly downsamples the input image, and then the RdmSCS module circularly shifts the input image along a randomly chosen direction by a small but random number of pixels. Finally, the RdmDU module performs upsampling with a detail-enhancement model, such as deep super-resolution networks. We conduct extensive experiments on the STL10 and ImageNet datasets to verify the effectiveness of RAIN against various types of adversarial attacks.

Dapeng Hu, Jian Liang, Qibin Hou et al.

In this work, we attempt to address unsupervised domain adaptation by devising simple and compact conditional domain adversarial training methods. We first revisit the simple concatenation conditioning strategy where features are concatenated with output predictions as the input of the discriminator. We find the concatenation strategy suffers from the weak conditioning strength. We further demonstrate that enlarging the norm of concatenated predictions can effectively energize the conditional domain alignment. Thus we improve concatenation conditioning by normalizing the output predictions to have the same norm of features, and term the derived method as Normalized OutpUt coNditioner~(NOUN). However, conditioning on raw output predictions for domain alignment, NOUN suffers from inaccurate predictions of the target domain. To this end, we propose to condition the cross-domain feature alignment in the prototype space rather than in the output space. Combining the novel prototype-based conditioning with NOUN, we term the enhanced method as PROtotype-based Normalized OutpUt coNditioner~(PRONOUN). Experiments on both object recognition and semantic segmentation show that NOUN can effectively align the multi-modal structures across domains and even outperform state-of-the-art domain adversarial training methods. Together with prototype-based conditioning, PRONOUN further improves the adaptation performance over NOUN on multiple object recognition benchmarks for UDA.

Hanshu Yan, Jiawei Du, Vincent Y. F. Tan et al.

Neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) have been attracting increasing attention in various research domains recently. There have been some works studying optimization issues and approximation capabilities of neural ODEs, but their robustness is still yet unclear. In this work, we fill this important gap by exploring robustness properties of neural ODEs both empirically and theoretically. We first present an empirical study on the robustness of the neural ODE-based networks (ODENets) by exposing them to inputs with various types of perturbations and subsequently investigating the changes of the corresponding outputs. In contrast to conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we find that the ODENets are more robust against both random Gaussian perturbations and adversarial attack examples. We then provide an insightful understanding of this phenomenon by exploiting a certain desirable property of the flow of a continuous-time ODE, namely that integral curves are non-intersecting. Our work suggests that, due to their intrinsic robustness, it is promising to use neural ODEs as a basic block for building robust deep network models. To further enhance the robustness of vanilla neural ODEs, we propose the time-invariant steady neural ODE (TisODE), which regularizes the flow on perturbed data via the time-invariant property and the imposition of a steady-state constraint. We show that the TisODE method outperforms vanilla neural ODEs and also can work in conjunction with other state-of-the-art architectural methods to build more robust deep networks.

Hanshu Yan, Xuan Chen, Vincent Y. F. Tan et al.

Noise modeling lies in the heart of many image processing tasks. However, existing deep learning methods for noise modeling generally require clean and noisy image pairs for model training; these image pairs are difficult to obtain in many realistic scenarios. To ameliorate this problem, we propose a self-consistent GAN (SCGAN), that can directly extract noise maps from noisy images, thus enabling unsupervised noise modeling. In particular, the SCGAN introduces three novel self-consistent constraints that are complementary to one another, viz.: the noise model should produce a zero response over a clean input; the noise model should return the same output when fed with a specific pure noise input; and the noise model also should re-extract a pure noise map if the map is added to a clean image. These three constraints are simple yet effective. They jointly facilitate unsupervised learning of a noise model for various noise types. To demonstrate its wide applicability, we deploy the SCGAN on three image processing tasks including blind image denoising, rain streak removal, and noisy image super-resolution. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods on a variety of benchmark datasets, even though the noise types vary significantly and paired clean images are not available.