Jingwen Fu

Jingwen Fu, Tao Yang, Yuwang Wang et al.

In-context learning, i.e., learning from context examples, is an impressive ability of Transformer. Training Transformers to possess this in-context learning skill is computationally intensive due to the occurrence of learning plateaus, which are periods within the training process where there is minimal or no enhancement in the model's in-context learning capability. To study the mechanism behind the learning plateaus, we conceptually seperate a component within the model's internal representation that is exclusively affected by the model's weights. We call this the "weights component", and the remainder is identified as the "context component". By conducting meticulous and controlled experiments on synthetic tasks, we note that the persistence of learning plateaus correlates with compromised functionality of the weights component. Recognizing the impaired performance of the weights component as a fundamental behavior drives learning plateaus, we have developed three strategies to expedite the learning of Transformers. The effectiveness of these strategies is further confirmed in natural language processing tasks. In conclusion, our research demonstrates the feasibility of cultivating a powerful in-context learning ability within AI systems in an eco-friendly manner.

Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou, Jingwen Fu et al.

Visual place recognition (VPR) is usually considered as a specific image retrieval problem. Limited by existing training frameworks, most deep learning-based works cannot extract sufficiently stable global features from RGB images and rely on a time-consuming re-ranking step to exploit spatial structural information for better performance. In this paper, we propose StructVPR, a novel training architecture for VPR, to enhance structural knowledge in RGB global features and thus improve feature stability in a constantly changing environment. Specifically, StructVPR uses segmentation images as a more definitive source of structural knowledge input into a CNN network and applies knowledge distillation to avoid online segmentation and inference of seg-branch in testing. Considering that not all samples contain high-quality and helpful knowledge, and some even hurt the performance of distillation, we partition samples and weigh each sample's distillation loss to enhance the expected knowledge precisely. Finally, StructVPR achieves impressive performance on several benchmarks using only global retrieval and even outperforms many two-stage approaches by a large margin. After adding additional re-ranking, ours achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a low computational cost.

Yuhan Liu, Jingwen Fu, Yang Wu et al.

Leveraging the vision foundation models has emerged as a mainstream paradigm that improves the performance of image feature matching. However, previous works have ignored the misalignment when introducing the foundation models into feature matching. The misalignment arises from the discrepancy between the foundation models focusing on single-image understanding and the cross-image understanding requirement of feature matching. Specifically, 1) the embeddings derived from commonly used foundation models exhibit discrepancies with the optimal embeddings required for feature matching; 2) lacking an effective mechanism to leverage the single-image understanding ability into cross-image understanding. A significant consequence of the misalignment is they struggle when addressing multi-instance feature matching problems. To address this, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called IMD (Image feature Matching with a pre-trained Diffusion model) with two parts: 1) Unlike the dominant solutions employing contrastive-learning based foundation models that emphasize global semantics, we integrate the generative-based diffusion models to effectively capture instance-level details. 2) We leverage the prompt mechanism in generative model as a natural tunnel, propose a novel cross-image interaction prompting module to facilitate bidirectional information interaction between image pairs. To more accurately measure the misalignment, we propose a new benchmark called IMIM, which focuses on multi-instance scenarios. Our proposed IMD establishes a new state-of-the-art in commonly evaluated benchmarks, and the superior improvement 12% in IMIM indicates our method efficiently mitigates the misalignment.