Xuesen Zhang

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

Given labeled data in a source domain, unsupervised domain adaptation has been widely adopted to generalize models for unlabeled data in a target domain, whose data distributions are different. However, existing works are inapplicable to face recognition under privacy constraints because they require sharing of sensitive face images between domains. To address this problem, we propose federated unsupervised domain adaptation for face recognition, FedFR. FedFR jointly optimizes clustering-based domain adaptation and federated learning to elevate performance on the target domain. Specifically, for unlabeled data in the target domain, we enhance a clustering algorithm with distance constrain to improve the quality of predicted pseudo labels. Besides, we propose a new domain constraint loss (DCL) to regularize source domain training in federated learning. Extensive experiments on a newly constructed benchmark demonstrate that FedFR outperforms the baseline and classic methods on the target domain by 3% to 14% on different evaluation metrics.

Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation has been widely adopted to generalize models for unlabeled data in a target domain, given labeled data in a source domain, whose data distributions differ from the target domain. However, existing works are inapplicable to face recognition under privacy constraints because they require sharing sensitive face images between two domains. To address this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised federated face recognition approach (FedFR). FedFR improves the performance in the target domain by iteratively aggregating knowledge from the source domain through federated learning. It protects data privacy by transferring models instead of raw data between domains. Besides, we propose a new domain constraint loss (DCL) to regularize source domain training. DCL suppresses the data volume dominance of the source domain. We also enhance a hierarchical clustering algorithm to predict pseudo labels for the unlabeled target domain accurately. To this end, FedFR forms an end-to-end training pipeline: (1) pre-train in the source domain; (2) predict pseudo labels by clustering in the target domain; (3) conduct domain-constrained federated learning across two domains. Extensive experiments and analysis on two newly constructed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FedFR. It outperforms the baseline and classic methods in the target domain by over 4% on the more realistic benchmark. We believe that FedFR will shed light on applying federated learning to more computer vision tasks under privacy constraints.

Weiming Zhuang, Yonggang Wen, Xuesen Zhang et al.

Federated learning is a privacy-preserving machine learning technique that learns a shared model across decentralized clients. It can alleviate privacy concerns of personal re-identification, an important computer vision task. In this work, we implement federated learning to person re-identification (FedReID) and optimize its performance affected by statistical heterogeneity in the real-world scenario. We first construct a new benchmark to investigate the performance of FedReID. This benchmark consists of (1) nine datasets with different volumes sourced from different domains to simulate the heterogeneous situation in reality, (2) two federated scenarios, and (3) an enhanced federated algorithm for FedReID. The benchmark analysis shows that the client-edge-cloud architecture, represented by the federated-by-dataset scenario, has better performance than client-server architecture in FedReID. It also reveals the bottlenecks of FedReID under the real-world scenario, including poor performance of large datasets caused by unbalanced weights in model aggregation and challenges in convergence. Then we propose two optimization methods: (1) To address the unbalanced weight problem, we propose a new method to dynamically change the weights according to the scale of model changes in clients in each training round; (2) To facilitate convergence, we adopt knowledge distillation to refine the server model with knowledge generated from client models on a public dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our strategies can achieve much better convergence with superior performance on all datasets. We believe that our work will inspire the community to further explore the implementation of federated learning on more computer vision tasks in real-world scenarios.

Yushi Lan, Yuan Liu, Maoqing Tian et al.

Although person re-identification (ReID) has achieved significant improvement recently by enforcing part alignment, it is still a challenging task when it comes to distinguishing visually similar identities or identifying the occluded person. In these scenarios, magnifying details in each part features and selectively fusing them together may provide a feasible solution. In this work, we propose MagnifierNet, a triple-branch network which accurately mines details from whole to parts. Firstly, the holistic salient features are encoded by a global branch. Secondly, to enhance detailed representation for each semantic region, the "Semantic Adversarial Branch" is designed to learn from dynamically generated semantic-occluded samples during training. Meanwhile, we introduce "Semantic Fusion Branch" to filter out irrelevant noises by selectively fusing semantic region information sequentially. To further improve feature diversity, we introduce a novel loss function "Semantic Diversity Loss" to remove redundant overlaps across learned semantic representations. State-of-the-art performance has been achieved on three benchmarks by large margins. Specifically, the mAP score is improved by 6% and 5% on the most challenging CUHK03-L and CUHK03-D benchmarks.

Dongzhan Zhou, Xinchi Zhou, Wenwei Zhang et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieves significant progress in many computer vision tasks. While many methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of NAS, the search progress is still laborious because training and evaluating plausible architectures over large search space is time-consuming. Assessing network candidates under a proxy (i.e., computationally reduced setting) thus becomes inevitable. In this paper, we observe that most existing proxies exhibit different behaviors in maintaining the rank consistency among network candidates. In particular, some proxies can be more reliable -- the rank of candidates does not differ much comparing their reduced setting performance and final performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate some widely adopted reduction factors and report our observations. Inspired by these observations, we present a reliable proxy and further formulate a hierarchical proxy strategy. The strategy spends more computations on candidate networks that are potentially more accurate, while discards unpromising ones in early stage with a fast proxy. This leads to an economical evolutionary-based NAS (EcoNAS), which achieves an impressive 400x search time reduction in comparison to the evolutionary-based state of the art (8 vs. 3150 GPU days). Some new proxies led by our observations can also be applied to accelerate other NAS methods while still able to discover good candidate networks with performance matching those found by previous proxy strategies.