Yaoyao Liu

Yaoyao Liu, Yingying Li, Bernt Schiele et al.

Not forgetting old class knowledge is a key challenge for class-incremental learning (CIL) when the model continuously adapts to new classes. A common technique to address this is knowledge distillation (KD), which penalizes prediction inconsistencies between old and new models. Such prediction is made with almost new class data, as old class data is extremely scarce due to the strict memory limitation in CIL. In this paper, we take a deep dive into KD losses and find that "using new class data for KD" not only hinders the model adaption (for learning new classes) but also results in low efficiency for preserving old class knowledge. We address this by "using the placebos of old classes for KD", where the placebos are chosen from a free image stream, such as Google Images, in an automatical and economical fashion. To this end, we train an online placebo selection policy to quickly evaluate the quality of streaming images (good or bad placebos) and use only good ones for one-time feed-forward computation of KD. We formulate the policy training process as an online Markov Decision Process (MDP), and introduce an online learning algorithm to solve this MDP problem without causing much computation costs. In experiments, we show that our method 1) is surprisingly effective even when there is no class overlap between placebos and original old class data, 2) does not require any additional supervision or memory budget, and 3) significantly outperforms a number of top-performing CIL methods, in particular when using lower memory budgets for old class exemplars, e.g., five exemplars per class.

Wei Cao, Hao Zhang, Fengrui Tian et al.

Camera redirection aims to replay a dynamic scene from a single monocular video under a user-specified camera trajectory. However, large-angle redirection is inherently ill-posed: a monocular video captures only a narrow spatio-temporal view of a dynamic 3D scene, providing highly partial observations of the underlying 4D world. The key challenge is therefore to recover a complete and coherent representation from this limited input, with consistent geometry and motion. While recent diffusion-based methods achieve impressive results, they often break down under large-angle viewpoint changes far from the original trajectory, where missing visual grounding leads to severe geometric ambiguity and temporal inconsistency. To address this, we present FreeOrbit4D, an effective training-free framework that tackles this geometric ambiguity by recovering a geometry-complete 4D proxy as structural grounding for video generation. We obtain this proxy by decoupling foreground and background reconstructions: we unproject the monocular video into a static background and geometry-incomplete foreground point clouds in a unified global space, then leverage an object-centric multi-view diffusion model to synthesize multi-view images and reconstruct geometry-complete foreground point clouds in canonical object space. By aligning the canonical foreground point cloud to the global scene space via dense pixel-synchronized 3D--3D correspondences and projecting the geometry-complete 4D proxy onto target camera viewpoints, we provide geometric scaffolds that guide a conditional video diffusion model. Extensive experiments show that FreeOrbit4D produces more faithful redirected videos under challenging large-angle trajectories, and our geometry-complete 4D proxy further opens a potential avenue for practical applications such as edit propagation and 4D data generation. Project page and code will be released soon.

Yaoyao Liu, Bernt Schiele, Qianru Sun

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn a classification model with the number of classes increasing phase-by-phase. An inherent problem in CIL is the stability-plasticity dilemma between the learning of old and new classes, i.e., high-plasticity models easily forget old classes, but high-stability models are weak to learn new classes. We alleviate this issue by proposing a novel network architecture called Adaptive Aggregation Networks (AANets), in which we explicitly build two types of residual blocks at each residual level (taking ResNet as the baseline architecture): a stable block and a plastic block. We aggregate the output feature maps from these two blocks and then feed the results to the next-level blocks. We adapt the aggregation weights in order to balance these two types of blocks, i.e., to balance stability and plasticity, dynamically. We conduct extensive experiments on three CIL benchmarks: CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet, and show that many existing CIL methods can be straightforwardly incorporated into the architecture of AANets to boost their performances.

Qianru Sun, Yaoyao Liu, Tat-Seng Chua et al.

Meta-learning has been proposed as a framework to address the challenging few-shot learning setting. The key idea is to leverage a large number of similar few-shot tasks in order to learn how to adapt a base-learner to a new task for which only a few labeled samples are available. As deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to overfit using a few samples only, meta-learning typically uses shallow neural networks (SNNs), thus limiting its effectiveness. In this paper we propose a novel few-shot learning method called meta-transfer learning (MTL) which learns to adapt a deep NN for few shot learning tasks. Specifically, "meta" refers to training multiple tasks, and "transfer" is achieved by learning scaling and shifting functions of DNN weights for each task. In addition, we introduce the hard task (HT) meta-batch scheme as an effective learning curriculum for MTL. We conduct experiments using (5-class, 1-shot) and (5-class, 5-shot) recognition tasks on two challenging few-shot learning benchmarks: miniImageNet and Fewshot-CIFAR100. Extensive comparisons to related works validate that our meta-transfer learning approach trained with the proposed HT meta-batch scheme achieves top performance. An ablation study also shows that both components contribute to fast convergence and high accuracy.