Self-Guided Masked Autoencoders for Domain-Agnostic Self-Supervised LearningJohnathan Xie, Yoonho Lee, Annie S. Chen et al.
Self-supervised learning excels in learning representations from large amounts of unlabeled data, demonstrating success across multiple data modalities. Yet, extending self-supervised learning to new modalities is non-trivial because the specifics of existing methods are tailored to each domain, such as domain-specific augmentations which reflect the invariances in the target task. While masked modeling is promising as a domain-agnostic framework for self-supervised learning because it does not rely on input augmentations, its mask sampling procedure remains domain-specific. We present Self-guided Masked Autoencoders (SMA), a fully domain-agnostic masked modeling method. SMA trains an attention based model using a masked modeling objective, by learning masks to sample without any domain-specific assumptions. We evaluate SMA on three self-supervised learning benchmarks in protein biology, chemical property prediction, and particle physics. We find SMA is capable of learning representations without domain-specific knowledge and achieves state-of-the-art performance on these three benchmarks.
Zero-shot Object Detection Through Vision-Language Embedding AlignmentJohnathan Xie, Shuai Zheng
Recent approaches have shown that training deep neural networks directly on large-scale image-text pair collections enables zero-shot transfer on various recognition tasks. One central issue is how this can be generalized to object detection, which involves the non-semantic task of localization as well as semantic task of classification. To solve this problem, we introduce a vision-language embedding alignment method that transfers the generalization capabilities of a pretrained model such as CLIP to an object detector like YOLOv5. We formulate a loss function that allows us to align the image and text embeddings from the pretrained model CLIP with the modified semantic prediction head from the detector. With this method, we are able to train an object detector that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO, ILSVRC, and Visual Genome zero-shot detection benchmarks. During inference, our model can be adapted to detect any number of object classes without additional training. We also find that standard object detection scaling can transfer well to our method and find consistent improvements across various scales of YOLOv5 models and the YOLOv3 model. Lastly, we develop a self-labeling method that provides a significant score improvement without needing extra images nor labels.