Kai Krajsek

Alessio Quercia, Erenus Yildiz, Zhuo Cao et al.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a challenging task in computer vision, often hindered by the cost and scarcity of high-quality labeled datasets. We tackle this challenge using auxiliary datasets from related vision tasks for an alternating training scheme with a shared decoder built on top of a pre-trained vision foundation model, while giving a higher weight to MDE. Through extensive experiments we demonstrate the benefits of incorporating various in-domain auxiliary datasets and tasks to improve MDE quality on average by ~11%. Our experimental analysis shows that auxiliary tasks have different impacts, confirming the importance of task selection, highlighting that quality gains are not achieved by merely adding data. Remarkably, our study reveals that using semantic segmentation datasets as Multi-Label Dense Classification (MLDC) often results in additional quality gains. Lastly, our method significantly improves the data efficiency for the considered MDE datasets, enhancing their quality while reducing their size by at least 80%. This paves the way for using auxiliary data from related tasks to improve MDE quality despite limited availability of high-quality labeled data. Code is available at https://jugit.fz-juelich.de/ias-8/mdeaux.

Qin Wang, Kai Krajsek, Hanno Scharr

Augmentation-based self-supervised learning methods have shown remarkable success in self-supervised visual representation learning, excelling in learning invariant features but often neglecting equivariant ones. This limitation reduces the generalizability of foundation models, particularly for downstream tasks requiring equivariance. We propose integrating an image reconstruction task as an auxiliary component in augmentation-based self-supervised learning algorithms to facilitate equivariant feature learning without additional parameters. Our method implements a cross-attention mechanism to blend features learned from two augmented views, subsequently reconstructing one of them. This approach is adaptable to various datasets and augmented-pair based learning methods. We evaluate its effectiveness on learning equivariant features through multiple linear regression tasks and downstream applications on both artificial (3DIEBench) and natural (ImageNet) datasets. Results consistently demonstrate significant improvements over standard augmentation-based self-supervised learning methods and state-of-the-art approaches, particularly excelling in scenarios involving combined augmentations. Our method enhances the learning of both invariant and equivariant features, leading to more robust and generalizable visual representations for computer vision tasks.

Qin Wang, Benjamin Bruns, Hanno Scharr et al.

The equivariant behaviour of features is essential in many computer vision tasks, yet popular self-supervised learning (SSL) methods tend to constrain equivariance by design. We propose a self-supervised learning approach where the system learns transformations independently by reconstructing images that have undergone previously unseen transformations. Specifically, the model is tasked to reconstruct intermediate transformed images, e.g. translated or rotated images, without prior knowledge of these transformations. This auxiliary task encourages the model to develop equivariance-coherent features without relying on predefined transformation rules. To this end, we apply transformations to the input image, generating an image pair, and then split the extracted features into two sets per image. One set is used with a usual SSL loss encouraging invariance, the other with our loss based on the auxiliary task to reconstruct the intermediate transformed images. Our loss and the SSL loss are linearly combined with weighted terms. Evaluating on synthetic tasks with natural images, our proposed method strongly outperforms all competitors, regardless of whether they are designed to learn equivariance. Furthermore, when trained alongside augmentation-based methods as the invariance tasks, such as iBOT or DINOv2, we successfully learn a balanced combination of invariant and equivariant features. Our approach performs strong on a rich set of realistic computer vision downstream tasks, almost always improving over all baselines.

Stefan Kesselheim, Andreas Herten, Kai Krajsek et al.

In this article, we present JUWELS Booster, a recently commissioned high-performance computing system at the Jülich Supercomputing Center. With its system architecture, most importantly its large number of powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and its fast interconnect via InfiniBand, it is an ideal machine for large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and applications. We detail its system architecture, parallel, distributed model training, and benchmarks indicating its outstanding performance. We exemplify its potential for research application by presenting large-scale AI research highlights from various scientific fields that require such a facility.

Markus Götz, Daniel Coquelin, Charlotte Debus et al.

To cope with the rapid growth in available data, the efficiency of data analysis and machine learning libraries has recently received increased attention. Although great advancements have been made in traditional array-based computations, most are limited by the resources available on a single computation node. Consequently, novel approaches must be made to exploit distributed resources, e.g. distributed memory architectures. To this end, we introduce HeAT, an array-based numerical programming framework for large-scale parallel processing with an easy-to-use NumPy-like API. HeAT utilizes PyTorch as a node-local eager execution engine and distributes the workload on arbitrarily large high-performance computing systems via MPI. It provides both low-level array computations, as well as assorted higher-level algorithms. With HeAT, it is possible for a NumPy user to take full advantage of their available resources, significantly lowering the barrier to distributed data analysis. When compared to similar frameworks, HeAT achieves speedups of up to two orders of magnitude.