Zhou Jie

Xu Wu, Zhihui Lai, Zhou Jie et al.

Low-light images are commonly encountered in real-world scenarios, and numerous low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods have been proposed to improve the visibility of these images. The primary goal of LLIE is to generate clearer images that are more visually pleasing to humans. However, the impact of LLIE methods in high-level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection, which rely on high-quality image datasets, is not well {explored}. To explore the impact, we comprehensively evaluate LLIE methods on these high-level vision tasks by utilizing an empirical investigation comprising image classification and object detection experiments. The evaluation reveals a dichotomy: {\textit{While Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods enhance human visual interpretation, their effect on computer vision tasks is inconsistent and can sometimes be harmful. }} Our findings suggest a disconnect between image enhancement for human visual perception and for machine analysis, indicating a need for LLIE methods tailored to support high-level vision tasks effectively. This insight is crucial for the development of LLIE techniques that align with the needs of both human and machine vision.

Yufei Guo, Yuanpei Chen, Zecheng Hao et al.

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN) is a biologically inspired neural network infrastructure that has recently garnered significant attention. It utilizes binary spike activations to transmit information, thereby replacing multiplications with additions and resulting in high energy efficiency. However, training an SNN directly poses a challenge due to the undefined gradient of the firing spike process. Although prior works have employed various surrogate gradient training methods that use an alternative function to replace the firing process during back-propagation, these approaches ignore an intrinsic problem: gradient vanishing. To address this issue, we propose a shortcut back-propagation method in our paper, which advocates for transmitting the gradient directly from the loss to the shallow layers. This enables us to present the gradient to the shallow layers directly, thereby significantly mitigating the gradient vanishing problem. Additionally, this method does not introduce any burden during the inference phase. To strike a balance between final accuracy and ease of training, we also propose an evolutionary training framework and implement it by inducing a balance coefficient that dynamically changes with the training epoch, which further improves the network's performance. Extensive experiments conducted over static and dynamic datasets using several popular network structures reveal that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Yufei Guo, Yuhan Zhang, Zhou Jie et al.

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN), a biologically inspired neural network infrastructure, has garnered significant attention recently. SNNs utilize binary spike activations for efficient information transmission, replacing multiplications with additions, thereby enhancing energy efficiency. However, binary spike activation maps often fail to capture sufficient data information, resulting in reduced accuracy. To address this challenge, we advocate reversing the bit of the weight and activation for SNNs, called \textbf{ReverB-SNN}, inspired by recent findings that highlight greater accuracy degradation from quantizing activations compared to weights. Specifically, our method employs real-valued spike activations alongside binary weights in SNNs. This preserves the event-driven and multiplication-free advantages of standard SNNs while enhancing the information capacity of activations. Additionally, we introduce a trainable factor within binary weights to adaptively learn suitable weight amplitudes during training, thereby increasing network capacity. To maintain efficiency akin to vanilla \textbf{ReverB-SNN}, our trainable binary weight SNNs are converted back to standard form using a re-parameterization technique during inference. Extensive experiments across various network architectures and datasets, both static and dynamic, demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.