Eli Schwartz

Eli Schwartz, Assaf Arbelle, Leonid Karlinsky et al.

We propose using Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE), a transformer model self-supervisedly trained on image inpainting, for anomaly detection (AD). Assuming anomalous regions are harder to reconstruct compared with normal regions. MAEDAY is the first image-reconstruction-based anomaly detection method that utilizes a pre-trained model, enabling its use for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection (FSAD). We also show the same method works surprisingly well for the novel tasks of Zero-Shot AD (ZSAD) and Zero-Shot Foreign Object Detection (ZSFOD), where no normal samples are available. Code is available at https://github.com/EliSchwartz/MAEDAY .

Jovana Kondic, Pengyuan Li, Dhiraj Joshi et al. · ibm-research

Understanding charts requires models to jointly reason over geometric visual patterns, structured numerical data, and natural language -- a capability where current vision-language models (VLMs) remain limited. We introduce ChartNet, a high-quality, million-scale multimodal dataset designed to advance chart interpretation and reasoning. ChartNet leverages a novel code-guided synthesis pipeline to generate 1.5 million diverse chart samples spanning 24 chart types and 6 plotting libraries. Each sample consists of five aligned components: plotting code, rendered chart image, data table, natural language summary, and question-answering with reasoning, providing fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To capture the full spectrum of chart comprehension, ChartNet additionally includes specialized subsets encompassing human annotated data, real-world data, safety, and grounding. Moreover, a rigorous quality-filtering pipeline ensures visual fidelity, semantic accuracy, and diversity across chart representations. Fine-tuning on ChartNet consistently improves results across benchmarks, demonstrating its utility as large-scale supervision for multimodal models. As the largest open-source dataset of its kind, ChartNet aims to support the development of foundation models with robust and generalizable capabilities for data visualization understanding. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-granite/ChartNet

Sivan Doveh, Assaf Arbelle, Sivan Harary et al.

Vision and Language (VL) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot performance in a variety of tasks. However, some aspects of complex language understanding still remain a challenge. We introduce the collective notion of Structured Vision&Language Concepts (SVLC) which includes object attributes, relations, and states which are present in the text and visible in the image. Recent studies have shown that even the best VL models struggle with SVLC. A possible way of fixing this issue is by collecting dedicated datasets for teaching each SVLC type, yet this might be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, we propose a more elegant data-driven approach for enhancing VL models' understanding of SVLCs that makes more effective use of existing VL pre-training datasets and does not require any additional data. While automatic understanding of image structure still remains largely unsolved, language structure is much better modeled and understood, allowing for its effective utilization in teaching VL models. In this paper, we propose various techniques based on language structure understanding that can be used to manipulate the textual part of off-the-shelf paired VL datasets. VL models trained with the updated data exhibit a significant improvement of up to 15% in their SVLC understanding with only a mild degradation in their zero-shot capabilities both when training from scratch or fine-tuning a pre-trained model.

Roi Pony, Adi Raz Goldfarb, Oshri Naparstek et al.

Multi-vector late-interaction retrievers such as ColBERT achieve state-of-the-art quality, but their query-time cost is dominated by exhaustively computing token-level MaxSim interactions for every candidate document. The MaxSim scores of $N$ candidates against $T$ query tokens form an $N\times T$ matrix whose row-sums are the late-interaction scores, and identifying the top-$K$ rarely requires every entry. We introduce Col-Bandit, a query-time estimator of the exhaustive-MaxSim top-$K$: it reveals matrix entries in batches, maintains a finite-population Bernstein-Serfling confidence interval on each candidate's score, and permanently drops any document whose upper bound falls below the $K$-th largest lower bound, computing only the cells needed to separate the top-$K$. A single relaxation knob $α_{\mathrm{ef}}\in(0,1]$ tunes the compute-fidelity trade-off. We deploy $α_{\mathrm{ef}}{=}0.2$, while $α_{\mathrm{ef}}{=}1$ admits a $δ$-PAC guarantee under a simplified radius. On BEIR and REAL-MM-RAG, Col-Bandit preserves $\geq 90\%$ fidelity to the exhaustive top-$5$ on every corpus while cutting MaxSim FLOPs by up to ${\sim}8\times$, for up to ${\sim}13\times$ single-thread CPU speedups across x86 and ARM. A drop-in reranking layer, it needs no retraining or index changes.

Amit Alfassy, Assaf Arbelle, Oshri Halimi et al.

Foundation Models (FMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities including zero-shot learning, high fidelity data synthesis, and out of domain generalization. However, as we show in this paper, FMs still have poor out-of-the-box performance on expert tasks (e.g. retrieval of car manuals technical illustrations from language queries), data for which is either unseen or belonging to a long-tail part of the data distribution of the huge datasets used for FM pre-training. This underlines the necessity to explicitly evaluate and finetune FMs on such expert tasks, arguably ones that appear the most in practical real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a first of its kind FETA benchmark built around the task of teaching FMs to understand technical documentation, via learning to match their graphical illustrations to corresponding language descriptions. Our FETA benchmark focuses on text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval in public car manuals and sales catalogue brochures. FETA is equipped with a procedure for completely automatic annotation extraction (code would be released upon acceptance), allowing easy extension of FETA to more documentation types and application domains in the future. Our automatic annotation leads to an automated performance metric shown to be consistent with metrics computed on human-curated annotations (also released). We provide multiple baselines and analysis of popular FMs on FETA leading to several interesting findings that we believe would be very valuable to the FM community, paving the way towards real-world application of FMs for practical expert tasks currently 'overlooked' by standard benchmarks focusing on common objects.

Nimrod Shabtay, Eli Schwartz, Raja Giryes

In Deep Image Prior (DIP), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is fitted to map a latent space to a degraded (e.g. noisy) image but in the process learns to reconstruct the clean image. This phenomenon is attributed to CNN's internal image-prior. We revisit the DIP framework, examining it from the perspective of a neural implicit representation. Motivated by this perspective, we replace the random or learned latent with Fourier-Features (Positional Encoding). We show that thanks to the Fourier features properties, we can replace the convolution layers with simple pixel-level MLPs. We name this scheme ``Positional Encoding Image Prior" (PIP) and exhibit that it performs very similarly to DIP on various image-reconstruction tasks with much less parameters required. Additionally, we demonstrate that PIP can be easily extended to videos, where 3D-DIP struggles and suffers from instability. Code and additional examples for all tasks, including videos, are available on the project page https://nimrodshabtay.github.io/PIP/

Nimrod Shabtay, Moshe Kimhi, Artem Spector et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) typically process images at a native high-resolution, forcing a trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency: high-resolution inputs capture fine details but incur significant computational costs, while low-resolution inputs advocate for efficiency, they potentially miss critical visual information, like small text. We present AwaRes, a spatial-on-demand framework that resolves this accuracy-efficiency trade-off by operating on a low-resolution global view and using tool-calling to retrieve only high-resolution segments needed for a given query. We construct supervised data automatically: a judge compares low- vs.\ high-resolution answers to label whether cropping is needed, and an oracle grounding model localizes the evidence for the correct answer, which we map to a discrete crop set to form multi-turn tool-use trajectories. We train our framework with cold-start SFT followed by multi-turn GRPO with a composite reward that combines semantic answer correctness with explicit crop-cost penalties. Project page: https://nimrodshabtay.github.io/AwaRes

Granite Vision Team, Leonid Karlinsky, Assaf Arbelle et al.

We introduce Granite Vision, a lightweight large language model with vision capabilities, specifically designed to excel in enterprise use cases, particularly in visual document understanding. Our model is trained on a comprehensive instruction-following dataset, including document-related tasks, such as content extraction from tables, charts, diagrams, sketches, and infographics, as well as general image tasks. The architecture of Granite Vision is centered around visual modality alignment with a decoder-only, 2 billion parameter Granite large language model. Additionally, we introduce a dedicated safety classification approach in test-time that leverages a sparse set of attention vectors to identify potential harmful inputs. Despite its lightweight architecture, Granite Vision achieves strong results in standard benchmarks related to visual document understanding, as well as on the LiveXiv benchmark, which is designed to avoid test set contamination by using a constantly updated corpus of recently published Arxiv papers. We are releasing the model under the Apache-2 license, allowing for both research and commercial use, while offering complete visibility into the training data and other relevant details. See https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/ for model weights.

Shaked Perek, Ben Wiesel, Avihu Dekel et al.

Multimodal reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) typically relies on a two-stage process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In standard SFT, all tokens contribute equally to the loss, even though reasoning data are inherently token-imbalanced. Long <think> traces overshadow short but task-critical <answer> segments, leading to verbose reasoning and inaccurate answers. We propose SCALe (Scheduled Curriculum Adaptive Loss), which explicitly separates supervision over reasoning and answer segments using dynamic, length-independent weighting. Unlike vanilla SFT, which overweights the <think> segment, SCALe-SFT gradually shifts the focus from <think> to <answer> throughout training via a cosine scheduling policy, encouraging concise and well-grounded reasoning. We evaluate SCALe across diverse benchmarks and architectures. Results show that SCALe consistently improves accuracy over vanilla SFT and matches the performance of the full two-phase SFT + GRPO pipeline while requiring only about one-seventh of the training time, making it a lightweight yet effective alternative. When combined with GRPO, SCALe achieves the best overall performance, highlighting its value both as a standalone method and as a strong foundation for reinforcement refinement.

Jovana Kondic, Pengyuan Li, Dhiraj Joshi et al.

Chart-to-code reconstruction -- the task of recovering executable plotting scripts from chart images -- provides important insights into a model's ability to ground data visualizations in precise, machine-readable form. Yet many existing multimodal benchmarks largely focus primarily on answering questions about charts or summarizing them. To bridge this gap, we present ChartGen, a fully-automated pipeline for code-guided synthetic chart generation. Starting from seed chart images, ChartGen (i) prompts a vision-language model (VLM) to reconstruct each image into a python script, and (ii) iteratively augments that script with a code-oriented large language model (LLM). Using ChartGen, we create 222.5K unique chart-image code pairs from 13K seed chart images, and present an open-source synthetic chart dataset covering 27 chart types, 11 plotting libraries, and multiple data modalities (image, code, text, CSV, DocTags). From this corpus, we curate a held-out chart-to-code evaluation subset of 4.3K chart image-code pairs, and evaluate six open-weight VLMs (3B - 26B parameters), highlighting substantial room for progress. We release the pipeline, prompts, and the dataset to help accelerate efforts towards robust chart understanding and vision-conditioned code generation: https://github.com/SD122025/ChartGen/

Chaim Baskin, Natan Liss, Yoav Chai et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very popular in many fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, to name a few. Though deep learning leads to groundbreaking performance in these domains, the networks used are very demanding computationally and are far from real-time even on a GPU, which is not power efficient and therefore does not suit low power systems such as mobile devices. To overcome this challenge, some solutions have been proposed for quantizing the weights and activations of these networks, which accelerate the runtime significantly. Yet, this acceleration comes at the cost of a larger error. The \uniqname method proposed in this work trains quantized neural networks by noise injection and a learned clamping, which improve the accuracy. This leads to state-of-the-art results on various regression and classification tasks, e.g., ImageNet classification with architectures such as ResNet-18/34/50 with low as 3-bit weights and activations. We implement the proposed solution on an FPGA to demonstrate its applicability for low power real-time applications. The implementation of the paper is available at https://github.com/Lancer555/NICE

Eli Schwartz, Leshem Choshen, Joseph Shtok et al.

Language models struggle with handling numerical data and performing arithmetic operations. We hypothesize that this limitation can be partially attributed to non-intuitive textual numbers representation. When a digit is read or generated by a causal language model it does not know its place value (e.g. thousands vs. hundreds) until the entire number is processed. To address this issue, we propose a simple adjustment to how numbers are represented by including the count of digits before each number. For instance, instead of "42", we suggest using "{2:42}" as the new format. This approach, which we term NumeroLogic, offers an added advantage in number generation by serving as a Chain of Thought (CoT). By requiring the model to consider the number of digits first, it enhances the reasoning process before generating the actual number. We use arithmetic tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NumeroLogic formatting. We further demonstrate NumeroLogic applicability to general natural language modeling, improving language understanding performance in the MMLU benchmark.

Navve Wasserman, Roi Pony, Oshri Naparstek et al.

Accurate multi-modal document retrieval is crucial for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), yet existing benchmarks do not fully capture real-world challenges with their current design. We introduce REAL-MM-RAG, an automatically generated benchmark designed to address four key properties essential for real-world retrieval: (i) multi-modal documents, (ii) enhanced difficulty, (iii) Realistic-RAG queries and (iv) accurate labeling. Additionally, we propose a multi-difficulty-level scheme based on query rephrasing to evaluate models' semantic understanding beyond keyword matching. Our benchmark reveals significant model weaknesses, particularly in handling table-heavy documents and robustness to query rephrasing. To mitigate these shortcomings, we curate a rephrased training set and introduce a new finance-focused, table-heavy dataset. Fine-tuning on these datasets enables models to achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance on REAL-MM-RAG benchmark. Our work offers a better way to evaluate and improve retrieval in multi-modal RAG systems while also providing training data and models that address current limitations.

Sivan Doveh, Nimrod Shabtay, Wei Lin et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse visual tasks, including image recognition, video understanding, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) when explicitly trained for these tasks. Despite these advances, we find that present-day VLMs (including the proprietary GPT-4o) lack a fundamental cognitive ability: learning to localize specific objects in a scene by taking into account the context. In this work, we focus on the task of few-shot personalized localization, where a model is given a small set of annotated images (in-context examples) -- each with a category label and bounding box -- and is tasked with localizing the same object type in a query image. Personalized localization can be particularly important in cases of ambiguity of several related objects that can respond to a text or an object that is hard to describe with words. To provoke personalized localization abilities in models, we present a data-centric solution that fine-tunes them using carefully curated data from video object tracking datasets. By leveraging sequences of frames tracking the same object across multiple shots, we simulate instruction-tuning dialogues that promote context awareness. To reinforce this, we introduce a novel regularization technique that replaces object labels with pseudo-names, ensuring the model relies on visual context rather than prior knowledge. Our method significantly enhances the few-shot localization performance of recent VLMs ranging from 7B to 72B in size, without sacrificing generalization, as demonstrated on several benchmarks tailored towards evaluating personalized localization abilities. This work is the first to explore and benchmark personalized few-shot localization for VLMs -- exposing critical weaknesses in present-day VLMs, and laying a foundation for future research in context-driven vision-language applications.

Moshe Kimhi, Erez Koifman, Ehud Rivlin et al.

We introduce WAVECLIP, a single unified model for adaptive resolution inference in CLIP, enabled by wavelet-based tokenization. WAVECLIP replaces standard patch embeddings with a multi-level wavelet decomposition, enabling the model to process images coarse to fine while naturally supporting multiple resolutions within the same model. At inference time, the model begins with low resolution tokens and refines only when needed, using key-value caching and causal cross-level attention to reuse computation, effectively introducing to the model only new information when needed. We evaluate WAVECLIP in zero-shot classification, demonstrating that a simple confidence-based gating mechanism enables adaptive early exits. This allows users to dynamically choose a compute-accuracy trade-off using a single deployed model. Our approach requires only lightweight distillation from a frozen CLIP teacher and achieves competitive accuracy with significant computational savings.

Moshe Kimhi, Nimrod Shabtay, Raja Giryes et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) commonly process images at native or high resolution to remain effective across tasks. This inflates visual tokens ofter to 97-99% of total tokens, resulting in high compute and latency, even when low-resolution images would suffice. We introduce \emph{CARES}-a \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{R}esolution \textbf{S}elector, a lightweight preprocessing module that, given an image-query pair, predicts the \emph{minimal} sufficient input resolution. CARES uses a compact VLM (350M) to extract features and predict when a target pretrained VLM's response converges to its peak ability to answer correctly. Though trained as a discrete classifier over a set of optional resolutions, CARES interpolates continuous resolutions at inference for fine-grained control. Across five multimodal benchmarks spanning documents and natural images, as well as diverse target VLMs, CARES preserves task performance while reducing compute by up to 80%.

Avishai Elmakies, Hagai Aronowitz, Nimrod Shabtay et al.

In this paper, we introduce a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based method for training Speech-Aware Large Language Models (SALLMs) on open-format speech understanding tasks, such as Spoken Question Answering and Automatic Speech Translation. SALLMs have proven highly effective for speech understanding tasks. GRPO has recently gained traction for its efficiency in training LLMs, and prior work has explored its application to SALLMs, primarily in multiple-choice tasks. Building on this, we focus on open-format tasks that better reflect the generative abilities of the models. Our approach leverages GRPO with BLEU as the reward signal to optimize SALLMs, and we demonstrate empirically that it surpasses standard SFT across several key metrics. Finally, we explore the potential of incorporating off-policy samples within GRPO for these tasks, highlighting avenues for further improvement and further research.

Nimrod Shabtay, Eli Schwartz, Raja Giryes

Phase-coded imaging is a computational imaging method designed to tackle tasks such as passive depth estimation and extended depth of field (EDOF) using depth cues inserted during image capture. Most of the current deep learning-based methods for depth estimation or all-in-focus imaging require a training dataset with high-quality depth maps and an optimal focus point at infinity for all-in-focus images. Such datasets are difficult to create, usually synthetic, and require external graphic programs. We propose a new method named "Deep Phase Coded Image Prior" (DPCIP) for jointly recovering the depth map and all-in-focus image from a coded-phase image using solely the captured image and the optical information of the imaging system. Our approach does not depend on any specific dataset and surpasses prior supervised techniques utilizing the same imaging system. This improvement is achieved through the utilization of a problem formulation based on implicit neural representation (INR) and deep image prior (DIP). Due to our zero-shot method, we overcome the barrier of acquiring accurate ground-truth data of depth maps and all-in-focus images for each new phase-coded system introduced. This allows focusing mainly on developing the imaging system, and not on ground-truth data collection.

Sivan Harary, Eli Schwartz, Assaf Arbelle et al.

The ability to generalize learned representations across significantly different visual domains, such as between real photos, clipart, paintings, and sketches, is a fundamental capacity of the human visual system. In this paper, different from most cross-domain works that utilize some (or full) source domain supervision, we approach a relatively new and very practical Unsupervised Domain Generalization (UDG) setup of having no training supervision in neither source nor target domains. Our approach is based on self-supervised learning of a Bridge Across Domains (BrAD) - an auxiliary bridge domain accompanied by a set of semantics preserving visual (image-to-image) mappings to BrAD from each of the training domains. The BrAD and mappings to it are learned jointly (end-to-end) with a contrastive self-supervised representation model that semantically aligns each of the domains to its BrAD-projection, and hence implicitly drives all the domains (seen or unseen) to semantically align to each other. In this work, we show how using an edge-regularized BrAD our approach achieves significant gains across multiple benchmarks and a range of tasks, including UDG, Few-shot UDA, and unsupervised generalization across multi-domain datasets (including generalization to unseen domains and classes).

Assaf Arbelle, Sivan Doveh, Amit Alfassy et al.

Nowadays, there is an abundance of data involving images and surrounding free-form text weakly corresponding to those images. Weakly Supervised phrase-Grounding (WSG) deals with the task of using this data to learn to localize (or to ground) arbitrary text phrases in images without any additional annotations. However, most recent SotA methods for WSG assume the existence of a pre-trained object detector, relying on it to produce the ROIs for localization. In this work, we focus on the task of Detector-Free WSG (DF-WSG) to solve WSG without relying on a pre-trained detector. We directly learn everything from the images and associated free-form text pairs, thus potentially gaining an advantage on the categories unsupported by the detector. The key idea behind our proposed Grounding by Separation (GbS) method is synthesizing `text to image-regions' associations by random alpha-blending of arbitrary image pairs and using the corresponding texts of the pair as conditions to recover the alpha map from the blended image via a segmentation network. At test time, this allows using the query phrase as a condition for a non-blended query image, thus interpreting the test image as a composition of a region corresponding to the phrase and the complement region. Using this approach we demonstrate a significant accuracy improvement, of up to $8.5\%$ over previous DF-WSG SotA, for a range of benchmarks including Flickr30K, Visual Genome, and ReferIt, as well as a significant complementary improvement (above $7\%$) over the detector-based approaches for WSG.

Eli Schwartz, Alex Bronstein, Raja Giryes

Nowadays, many of the images captured are `observed' by machines only and not by humans, e.g., in autonomous systems. High-level machine vision models, such as object recognition or semantic segmentation, assume images are transformed into some canonical image space by the camera \ans{Image Signal Processor (ISP)}. However, the camera ISP is optimized for producing visually pleasing images for human observers and not for machines. Therefore, one may spare the ISP compute time and apply vision models directly to RAW images. Yet, it has been shown that training such models directly on RAW images results in a performance drop. To mitigate this drop, we use a RAW and RGB image pairs dataset, which can be easily acquired with no human labeling. We then train a model that is applied directly to the RAW data by using knowledge distillation such that the model predictions for RAW images will be aligned with the predictions of an off-the-shelf pre-trained model for processed RGB images. Our experiments show that our performance on RAW images for object classification and semantic segmentation is significantly better than models trained on labeled RAW images. It also reasonably matches the predictions of a pre-trained model on processed RGB images, while saving the ISP compute overhead.

Guy Bukchin, Eli Schwartz, Kate Saenko et al.

Few-shot learning methods offer pre-training techniques optimized for easier later adaptation of the model to new classes (unseen during training) using one or a few examples. This adaptivity to unseen classes is especially important for many practical applications where the pre-trained label space cannot remain fixed for effective use and the model needs to be "specialized" to support new categories on the fly. One particularly interesting scenario, essentially overlooked by the few-shot literature, is Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS), where the training classes (e.g. animals) are of much `coarser granularity' than the target (test) classes (e.g. breeds). A very practical example of C2FS is when the target classes are sub-classes of the training classes. Intuitively, it is especially challenging as (both regular and few-shot) supervised pre-training tends to learn to ignore intra-class variability which is essential for separating sub-classes. In this paper, we introduce a novel 'Angular normalization' module that allows to effectively combine supervised and self-supervised contrastive pre-training to approach the proposed C2FS task, demonstrating significant gains in a broad study over multiple baselines and datasets. We hope that this work will help to pave the way for future research on this new, challenging, and very practical topic of C2FS classification.

Leonid Karlinsky, Joseph Shtok, Amit Alfassy et al.

Few-shot detection and classification have advanced significantly in recent years. Yet, detection approaches require strong annotation (bounding boxes) both for pre-training and for adaptation to novel classes, and classification approaches rarely provide localization of objects in the scene. In this paper, we introduce StarNet - a few-shot model featuring an end-to-end differentiable non-parametric star-model detection and classification head. Through this head, the backbone is meta-trained using only image-level labels to produce good features for jointly localizing and classifying previously unseen categories of few-shot test tasks using a star-model that geometrically matches between the query and support images (to find corresponding object instances). Being a few-shot detector, StarNet does not require any bounding box annotations, neither during pre-training nor for novel classes adaptation. It can thus be applied to the previously unexplored and challenging task of Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection (WS-FSOD), where it attains significant improvements over the baselines. In addition, StarNet shows significant gains on few-shot classification benchmarks that are less cropped around the objects (where object localization is key).

Sivan Doveh, Eli Schwartz, Chao Xue et al.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a topic of rapidly growing interest. Typically, in FSL a model is trained on a dataset consisting of many small tasks (meta-tasks) and learns to adapt to novel tasks that it will encounter during test time. This is also referred to as meta-learning. Another topic closely related to meta-learning with a lot of interest in the community is Neural Architecture Search (NAS), automatically finding optimal architecture instead of engineering it manually. In this work, we combine these two aspects of meta-learning. So far, meta-learning FSL methods have focused on optimizing parameters of pre-defined network architectures, in order to make them easily adaptable to novel tasks. Moreover, it was observed that, in general, larger architectures perform better than smaller ones up to a certain saturation point (where they start to degrade due to over-fitting). However, little attention has been given to explicitly optimizing the architectures for FSL, nor to an adaptation of the architecture at test time to particular novel tasks. In this work, we propose to employ tools inspired by the Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (D-NAS) literature in order to optimize the architecture for FSL without over-fitting. Additionally, to make the architecture task adaptive, we propose the concept of `MetAdapt Controller' modules. These modules are added to the model and are meta-trained to predict the optimal network connections for a given novel task. Using the proposed approach we observe state-of-the-art results on two popular few-shot benchmarks: miniImageNet and FC100.

Eli Schwartz, Leonid Karlinsky, Rogerio Feris et al.

Learning from one or few visual examples is one of the key capabilities of humans since early infancy, but is still a significant challenge for modern AI systems. While considerable progress has been achieved in few-shot learning from a few image examples, much less attention has been given to the verbal descriptions that are usually provided to infants when they are presented with a new object. In this paper, we focus on the role of additional semantics that can significantly facilitate few-shot visual learning. Building upon recent advances in few-shot learning with additional semantic information, we demonstrate that further improvements are possible by combining multiple and richer semantics (category labels, attributes, and natural language descriptions). Using these ideas, we offer the community new results on the popular miniImageNet and CUB few-shot benchmarks, comparing favorably to the previous state-of-the-art results for both visual only and visual plus semantics-based approaches. We also performed an ablation study investigating the components and design choices of our approach.

Nir Diamant, Dean Zadok, Chaim Baskin et al.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This maxim, emphasizing the subjectivity of the perception of beauty, has enjoyed a wide consensus since ancient times. In the digitalera, data-driven methods have been shown to be able to predict human-assigned beauty scores for facial images. In this work, we augment this ability and train a generative model that generates faces conditioned on a requested beauty score. In addition, we show how this trained generator can be used to beautify an input face image. By doing so, we achieve an unsupervised beautification model, in the sense that it relies on no ground truth target images.

Eli Schwartz, Leonid Karlinsky, Joseph Shtok et al.

Learning to classify new categories based on just one or a few examples is a long-standing challenge in modern computer vision. In this work, we proposes a simple yet effective method for few-shot (and one-shot) object recognition. Our approach is based on a modified auto-encoder, denoted Delta-encoder, that learns to synthesize new samples for an unseen category just by seeing few examples from it. The synthesized samples are then used to train a classifier. The proposed approach learns to both extract transferable intra-class deformations, or "deltas", between same-class pairs of training examples, and to apply those deltas to the few provided examples of a novel class (unseen during training) in order to efficiently synthesize samples from that new class. The proposed method improves over the state-of-the-art in one-shot object-recognition and compares favorably in the few-shot case. Upon acceptance code will be made available.

Leonid Karlinsky, Joseph Shtok, Sivan Harary et al.

Distance metric learning (DML) has been successfully applied to object classification, both in the standard regime of rich training data and in the few-shot scenario, where each category is represented by only a few examples. In this work, we propose a new method for DML that simultaneously learns the backbone network parameters, the embedding space, and the multi-modal distribution of each of the training categories in that space, in a single end-to-end training process. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for DML-based object classification on a variety of standard fine-grained datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the problem of few-shot object detection, by incorporating the proposed DML architecture as a classification head into a standard object detection model. We achieve the best results on the ImageNet-LOC dataset compared to strong baselines, when only a few training examples are available. We also offer the community a new episodic benchmark based on the ImageNet dataset for the few-shot object detection task.

Chaim Baskin, Eli Schwartz, Evgenii Zheltonozhskii et al.

We present a novel method for neural network quantization that emulates a non-uniform $k$-quantile quantizer, which adapts to the distribution of the quantized parameters. Our approach provides a novel alternative to the existing uniform quantization techniques for neural networks. We suggest to compare the results as a function of the bit-operations (BOPS) performed, assuming a look-up table availability for the non-uniform case. In this setup, we show the advantages of our strategy in the low computational budget regime. While the proposed solution is harder to implement in hardware, we believe it sets a basis for new alternatives to neural networks quantization.

Eli Schwartz, Raja Giryes, Alex M. Bronstein

We present DeepISP, a full end-to-end deep neural model of the camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline. Our model learns a mapping from the raw low-light mosaiced image to the final visually compelling image and encompasses low-level tasks such as demosaicing and denoising as well as higher-level tasks such as color correction and image adjustment. The training and evaluation of the pipeline were performed on a dedicated dataset containing pairs of low-light and well-lit images captured by a Samsung S7 smartphone camera in both raw and processed JPEG formats. The proposed solution achieves state-of-the-art performance in objective evaluation of PSNR on the subtask of joint denoising and demosaicing. For the full end-to-end pipeline, it achieves better visual quality compared to the manufacturer ISP, in both a subjective human assessment and when rated by a deep model trained for assessing image quality.