Yunfeng Zhao

Yunfeng Zhao, Huiyu Zhou, Fei Wu et al.

Image classification is a fundamental computer vision task and an important baseline for deep metric learning. In decades efforts have been made on enhancing image classification accuracy by using deep learning models while less attention has been paid on the reasoning aspect of the recognition, i.e., predictions could be made because of background or other surrounding objects rather than the target object. Hierarchical knowledge about image categories depicts inter-class similarities or dissimilarities. Effective fusion of such knowledge with deep learning image classification models is promising in improving target object identification and enhancing the reasoning aspect of the recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel deep metric learning based method to effectively fuse prior knowledge about image categories with mainstream backbone image classification models and enhance the reasoning aspect of the recognition in an end-to-end manner. Existing deep metric learning incorporated image classification methods mainly focus on whether sampled images are from the same class. A new triplet loss function term that aligns distances in the model latent space with those in knowledge space is presented and incorporated in the proposed method to facilitate the dual-modality fusion. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Mini-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K datasets evaluated the proposed method, and results indicate that the proposed method is effective in enhancing the reasoning aspect of image recognition in terms of weakly-supervised object localization performance.

Ziming Dai, Chao Qiu, Fei Gao et al.

Pre-trained Transformer-based large models have revolutionized personal virtual assistants, but their deployment in cloud environments faces challenges related to data privacy and response latency. Deploying large models closer to the data and users has become a key research area to address these issues. However, applying these models directly often entails significant difficulties, such as model mismatching, resource constraints, and energy inefficiency. Automated design of customized models is necessary, but it faces three key challenges, namely, the high cost of centralized model customization, imbalanced performance from user heterogeneity, and suboptimal performance from data heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose ACME, an adaptive customization approach of Transformer-based large models via distributed systems. To avoid the low cost-efficiency of centralized methods, ACME employs a bidirectional single-loop distributed system to progressively achieve fine-grained collaborative model customization. In order to better match user heterogeneity, it begins by customizing the backbone generation and identifying the Pareto Front under model size constraints to ensure optimal resource utilization. Subsequently, it performs header generation and refines the model using data distribution-based personalized architecture aggregation to match data heterogeneity. Evaluation on different datasets shows that ACME achieves cost-efficient models under model size constraints. Compared to centralized systems, data transmission volume is reduced to 6 percent. Additionally, the average accuracy improves by 10 percent compared to the baseline, with the trade-off metrics increasing by nearly 30 percent.

Yunfeng Zhao, Guoxian Yu, Lei Liu et al.

Partial-label learning (PLL) generally focuses on inducing a noise-tolerant multi-class classifier by training on overly-annotated samples, each of which is annotated with a set of labels, but only one is the valid label. A basic promise of existing PLL solutions is that there are sufficient partial-label (PL) samples for training. However, it is more common than not to have just few PL samples at hand when dealing with new tasks. Furthermore, existing few-shot learning algorithms assume precise labels of the support set; as such, irrelevant labels may seriously mislead the meta-learner and thus lead to a compromised performance. How to enable PLL under a few-shot learning setting is an important problem, but not yet well studied. In this paper, we introduce an approach called FsPLL (Few-shot PLL). FsPLL first performs adaptive distance metric learning by an embedding network and rectifying prototypes on the tasks previously encountered. Next, it calculates the prototype of each class of a new task in the embedding network. An unseen example can then be classified via its distance to each prototype. Experimental results on widely-used few-shot datasets (Omniglot and miniImageNet) demonstrate that our FsPLL can achieve a superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods across different settings, and it needs fewer samples for quickly adapting to new tasks.