Hang Su

Hao Zhang, Feng Li, Shilong Liu et al. · tsinghua

We present DINO (\textbf{D}ETR with \textbf{I}mproved de\textbf{N}oising anch\textbf{O}r boxes), a state-of-the-art end-to-end object detector. % in this paper. DINO improves over previous DETR-like models in performance and efficiency by using a contrastive way for denoising training, a mixed query selection method for anchor initialization, and a look forward twice scheme for box prediction. DINO achieves $49.4$AP in $12$ epochs and $51.3$AP in $24$ epochs on COCO with a ResNet-50 backbone and multi-scale features, yielding a significant improvement of $\textbf{+6.0}$\textbf{AP} and $\textbf{+2.7}$\textbf{AP}, respectively, compared to DN-DETR, the previous best DETR-like model. DINO scales well in both model size and data size. Without bells and whistles, after pre-training on the Objects365 dataset with a SwinL backbone, DINO obtains the best results on both COCO \texttt{val2017} ($\textbf{63.2}$\textbf{AP}) and \texttt{test-dev} (\textbf{$\textbf{63.3}$AP}). Compared to other models on the leaderboard, DINO significantly reduces its model size and pre-training data size while achieving better results. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/IDEACVR/DINO}.

Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren et al. · tsinghua

In this paper, we present an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for cross-modality fusion. While previous works mainly evaluate open-set object detection on novel categories, we propose to also perform evaluations on referring expression comprehension for objects specified with attributes. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a $52.5$ AP on the COCO detection zero-shot transfer benchmark, i.e., without any training data from COCO. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean $26.1$ AP. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO}.

Liyuan Wang, Xingxing Zhang, Hang Su et al. · microsoft-research

To cope with real-world dynamics, an intelligent system needs to incrementally acquire, update, accumulate, and exploit knowledge throughout its lifetime. This ability, known as continual learning, provides a foundation for AI systems to develop themselves adaptively. In a general sense, continual learning is explicitly limited by catastrophic forgetting, where learning a new task usually results in a dramatic performance degradation of the old tasks. Beyond this, increasingly numerous advances have emerged in recent years that largely extend the understanding and application of continual learning. The growing and widespread interest in this direction demonstrates its realistic significance as well as complexity. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of continual learning, seeking to bridge the basic settings, theoretical foundations, representative methods, and practical applications. Based on existing theoretical and empirical results, we summarize the general objectives of continual learning as ensuring a proper stability-plasticity trade-off and an adequate intra/inter-task generalizability in the context of resource efficiency. Then we provide a state-of-the-art and elaborated taxonomy, extensively analyzing how representative methods address continual learning, and how they are adapted to particular challenges in realistic applications. Through an in-depth discussion of promising directions, we believe that such a holistic perspective can greatly facilitate subsequent exploration in this field and beyond.

Changjian Chen, Yukai Guo, Fengyuan Tian et al. · tsinghua

Existing model evaluation tools mainly focus on evaluating classification models, leaving a gap in evaluating more complex models, such as object detection. In this paper, we develop an open-source visual analysis tool, Uni-Evaluator, to support a unified model evaluation for classification, object detection, and instance segmentation in computer vision. The key idea behind our method is to formulate both discrete and continuous predictions in different tasks as unified probability distributions. Based on these distributions, we develop 1) a matrix-based visualization to provide an overview of model performance; 2) a table visualization to identify the problematic data subsets where the model performs poorly; 3) a grid visualization to display the samples of interest. These visualizations work together to facilitate the model evaluation from a global overview to individual samples. Two case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Uni-Evaluator in evaluating model performance and making informed improvements.

Yinpeng Dong, Caixin Kang, Jinlai Zhang et al.

3D object detection is an important task in autonomous driving to perceive the surroundings. Despite the excellent performance, the existing 3D detectors lack the robustness to real-world corruptions caused by adverse weathers, sensor noises, etc., provoking concerns about the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. To comprehensively and rigorously benchmark the corruption robustness of 3D detectors, in this paper we design 27 types of common corruptions for both LiDAR and camera inputs considering real-world driving scenarios. By synthesizing these corruptions on public datasets, we establish three corruption robustness benchmarks -- KITTI-C, nuScenes-C, and Waymo-C. Then, we conduct large-scale experiments on 24 diverse 3D object detection models to evaluate their corruption robustness. Based on the evaluation results, we draw several important findings, including: 1) motion-level corruptions are the most threatening ones that lead to significant performance drop of all models; 2) LiDAR-camera fusion models demonstrate better robustness; 3) camera-only models are extremely vulnerable to image corruptions, showing the indispensability of LiDAR point clouds. We release the benchmarks and codes at https://github.com/kkkcx/3D_Corruptions_AD. We hope that our benchmarks and findings can provide insights for future research on developing robust 3D object detection models.

Shilong Liu, Hao Cheng, Haotian Liu et al. · microsoft-research

LLaVA-Plus is a general-purpose multimodal assistant that expands the capabilities of large multimodal models. It maintains a skill repository of pre-trained vision and vision-language models and can activate relevant tools based on users' inputs to fulfill real-world tasks. LLaVA-Plus is trained on multimodal instruction-following data to acquire the ability to use tools, covering visual understanding, generation, external knowledge retrieval, and compositions. Empirical results show that LLaVA-Plus outperforms LLaVA in existing capabilities and exhibits new ones. It is distinct in that the image query is directly grounded and actively engaged throughout the entire human-AI interaction sessions, significantly improving tool use performance and enabling new scenarios.

Xiao Yang, Chang Liu, Longlong Xu et al. · microsoft-research, tsinghua

Face recognition is a prevailing authentication solution in numerous biometric applications. Physical adversarial attacks, as an important surrogate, can identify the weaknesses of face recognition systems and evaluate their robustness before deployed. However, most existing physical attacks are either detectable readily or ineffective against commercial recognition systems. The goal of this work is to develop a more reliable technique that can carry out an end-to-end evaluation of adversarial robustness for commercial systems. It requires that this technique can simultaneously deceive black-box recognition models and evade defensive mechanisms. To fulfill this, we design adversarial textured 3D meshes (AT3D) with an elaborate topology on a human face, which can be 3D-printed and pasted on the attacker's face to evade the defenses. However, the mesh-based optimization regime calculates gradients in high-dimensional mesh space, and can be trapped into local optima with unsatisfactory transferability. To deviate from the mesh-based space, we propose to perturb the low-dimensional coefficient space based on 3D Morphable Model, which significantly improves black-box transferability meanwhile enjoying faster search efficiency and better visual quality. Extensive experiments in digital and physical scenarios show that our method effectively explores the security vulnerabilities of multiple popular commercial services, including three recognition APIs, four anti-spoofing APIs, two prevailing mobile phones and two automated access control systems.

Shilong Liu, Tianhe Ren, Jiayu Chen et al.

This paper is concerned with the matching stability problem across different decoder layers in DEtection TRansformers (DETR). We point out that the unstable matching in DETR is caused by a multi-optimization path problem, which is highlighted by the one-to-one matching design in DETR. To address this problem, we show that the most important design is to use and only use positional metrics (like IOU) to supervise classification scores of positive examples. Under the principle, we propose two simple yet effective modifications by integrating positional metrics to DETR's classification loss and matching cost, named position-supervised loss and position-modulated cost. We verify our methods on several DETR variants. Our methods show consistent improvements over baselines. By integrating our methods with DINO, we achieve 50.4 and 51.5 AP on the COCO detection benchmark using ResNet-50 backbones under 12 epochs and 24 epochs training settings, achieving a new record under the same setting. We achieve 63.8 AP on COCO detection test-dev with a Swin-Large backbone. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Stable-DINO.

Xiaofeng Mao, Yuefeng Chen, Yao Zhu et al. · nvidia

Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.

Shilong Liu, Yaoyuan Liang, Feng Li et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of visual grounding by considering both phrase extraction and grounding (PEG). In contrast to the previous phrase-known-at-test setting, PEG requires a model to extract phrases from text and locate objects from images simultaneously, which is a more practical setting in real applications. As phrase extraction can be regarded as a $1$D text segmentation problem, we formulate PEG as a dual detection problem and propose a novel DQ-DETR model, which introduces dual queries to probe different features from image and text for object prediction and phrase mask prediction. Each pair of dual queries is designed to have shared positional parts but different content parts. Such a design effectively alleviates the difficulty of modality alignment between image and text (in contrast to a single query design) and empowers Transformer decoder to leverage phrase mask-guided attention to improve performance. To evaluate the performance of PEG, we also propose a new metric CMAP (cross-modal average precision), analogous to the AP metric in object detection. The new metric overcomes the ambiguity of Recall@1 in many-box-to-one-phrase cases in phrase grounding. As a result, our PEG pre-trained DQ-DETR establishes new state-of-the-art results on all visual grounding benchmarks with a ResNet-101 backbone. For example, it achieves $91.04\%$ and $83.51\%$ in terms of recall rate on RefCOCO testA and testB with a ResNet-101 backbone. Code will be availabl at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DQ-DETR}.

Zhongkai Hao, Songming Liu, Yichi Zhang et al. · tsinghua

Recent advances of data-driven machine learning have revolutionized fields like computer vision, reinforcement learning, and many scientific and engineering domains. In many real-world and scientific problems, systems that generate data are governed by physical laws. Recent work shows that it provides potential benefits for machine learning models by incorporating the physical prior and collected data, which makes the intersection of machine learning and physics become a prevailing paradigm. By integrating the data and mathematical physics models seamlessly, it can guide the machine learning model towards solutions that are physically plausible, improving accuracy and efficiency even in uncertain and high-dimensional contexts. In this survey, we present this learning paradigm called Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) which is to build a model that leverages empirical data and available physical prior knowledge to improve performance on a set of tasks that involve a physical mechanism. We systematically review the recent development of physics-informed machine learning from three perspectives of machine learning tasks, representation of physical prior, and methods for incorporating physical prior. We also propose several important open research problems based on the current trends in the field. We argue that encoding different forms of physical prior into model architectures, optimizers, inference algorithms, and significant domain-specific applications like inverse engineering design and robotic control is far from being fully explored in the field of physics-informed machine learning. We believe that the interdisciplinary research of physics-informed machine learning will significantly propel research progress, foster the creation of more effective machine learning models, and also offer invaluable assistance in addressing long-standing problems in related disciplines.

Songming Liu, Zhongkai Hao, Chengyang Ying et al. · tsinghua

We present a unified hard-constraint framework for solving geometrically complex PDEs with neural networks, where the most commonly used Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin boundary conditions (BCs) are considered. Specifically, we first introduce the "extra fields" from the mixed finite element method to reformulate the PDEs so as to equivalently transform the three types of BCs into linear equations. Based on the reformulation, we derive the general solutions of the BCs analytically, which are employed to construct an ansatz that automatically satisfies the BCs. With such a framework, we can train the neural networks without adding extra loss terms and thus efficiently handle geometrically complex PDEs, alleviating the unbalanced competition between the loss terms corresponding to the BCs and PDEs. We theoretically demonstrate that the "extra fields" can stabilize the training process. Experimental results on real-world geometrically complex PDEs showcase the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Chengyang Ying, Xinning Zhou, Hang Su et al. · tsinghua

Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement learning can only handle transition disturbance or observation disturbance since these two kinds of disturbance affect different parts of the agent; besides, the popular worst-case return may lead to overly pessimistic policies. To address these issues, we first theoretically prove that the performance degradation under transition disturbance and observation disturbance depends on a novel metric of Value Function Range (VFR), which corresponds to the gap in the value function between the best state and the worst state. Based on the analysis, we adopt conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as an assessment of risk and propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm of CVaR-Proximal-Policy-Optimization (CPPO) which formalizes the risk-sensitive constrained optimization problem by keeping its CVaR under a given threshold. Experimental results show that CPPO achieves a higher cumulative reward and is more robust against both observation and transition disturbances on a series of continuous control tasks in MuJoCo.

Fan Bao, Shen Nie, Kaiwen Xue et al.

This paper proposes a unified diffusion framework (dubbed UniDiffuser) to fit all distributions relevant to a set of multi-modal data in one model. Our key insight is -- learning diffusion models for marginal, conditional, and joint distributions can be unified as predicting the noise in the perturbed data, where the perturbation levels (i.e. timesteps) can be different for different modalities. Inspired by the unified view, UniDiffuser learns all distributions simultaneously with a minimal modification to the original diffusion model -- perturbs data in all modalities instead of a single modality, inputs individual timesteps in different modalities, and predicts the noise of all modalities instead of a single modality. UniDiffuser is parameterized by a transformer for diffusion models to handle input types of different modalities. Implemented on large-scale paired image-text data, UniDiffuser is able to perform image, text, text-to-image, image-to-text, and image-text pair generation by setting proper timesteps without additional overhead. In particular, UniDiffuser is able to produce perceptually realistic samples in all tasks and its quantitative results (e.g., the FID and CLIP score) are not only superior to existing general-purpose models but also comparable to the bespoken models (e.g., Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2) in representative tasks (e.g., text-to-image generation).

Cheng Lu, Huayu Chen, Jianfei Chen et al.

Guided sampling is a vital approach for applying diffusion models in real-world tasks that embeds human-defined guidance during the sampling procedure. This paper considers a general setting where the guidance is defined by an (unnormalized) energy function. The main challenge for this setting is that the intermediate guidance during the diffusion sampling procedure, which is jointly defined by the sampling distribution and the energy function, is unknown and is hard to estimate. To address this challenge, we propose an exact formulation of the intermediate guidance as well as a novel training objective named contrastive energy prediction (CEP) to learn the exact guidance. Our method is guaranteed to converge to the exact guidance under unlimited model capacity and data samples, while previous methods can not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to offline reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms. We also provide some examples of applying CEP for image synthesis to demonstrate the scalability of CEP on high-dimensional data.

Jiachen Yao, Chang Su, Zhongkai Hao et al.

Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) in various fields by minimizing a weighted sum of PDE loss and boundary loss. However, there are several critical challenges in the training of PINNs, including the lack of theoretical frameworks and the imbalance between PDE loss and boundary loss. In this paper, we present an analysis of second-order non-homogeneous PDEs, which are classified into three categories and applicable to various common problems. We also characterize the connections between the training loss and actual error, guaranteeing convergence under mild conditions. The theoretical analysis inspires us to further propose MultiAdam, a scale-invariant optimizer that leverages gradient momentum to parameter-wisely balance the loss terms. Extensive experiment results on multiple problems from different physical domains demonstrate that our MultiAdam solver can improve the predictive accuracy by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared with strong baselines.

Yao Feng, Yuhong Jiang, Hang Su et al. · tsinghua

Model-based reinforcement learning usually suffers from a high sample complexity in training the world model, especially for the environments with complex dynamics. To make the training for general physical environments more efficient, we introduce Hamiltonian canonical ordinary differential equations into the learning process, which inspires a novel model of neural ordinary differential auto-encoder (NODA). NODA can model the physical world by nature and is flexible to impose Hamiltonian mechanics (e.g., the dimension of the physical equations) which can further accelerate training of the environment models. It can consequentially empower an RL agent with the robust extrapolation using a small amount of samples as well as the guarantee on the physical plausibility. Theoretically, we prove that NODA has uniform bounds for multi-step transition errors and value errors under certain conditions. Extensive experiments show that NODA can learn the environment dynamics effectively with a high sample efficiency, making it possible to facilitate reinforcement learning agents at the early stage.

Mingyang Wang, Zhenshan Bing, Xiangtong Yao et al.

Meta-reinforcement learning enables artificial agents to learn from related training tasks and adapt to new tasks efficiently with minimal interaction data. However, most existing research is still limited to narrow task distributions that are parametric and stationary, and does not consider out-of-distribution tasks during the evaluation, thus, restricting its application. In this paper, we propose MoSS, a context-based Meta-reinforcement learning algorithm based on Self-Supervised task representation learning to address this challenge. We extend meta-RL to broad non-parametric task distributions which have never been explored before, and also achieve state-of-the-art results in non-stationary and out-of-distribution tasks. Specifically, MoSS consists of a task inference module and a policy module. We utilize the Gaussian mixture model for task representation to imitate the parametric and non-parametric task variations. Additionally, our online adaptation strategy enables the agent to react at the first sight of a task change, thus being applicable in non-stationary tasks. MoSS also exhibits strong generalization robustness in out-of-distributions tasks which benefits from the reliable and robust task representation. The policy is built on top of an off-policy RL algorithm and the entire network is trained completely off-policy to ensure high sample efficiency. On MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks, MoSS outperforms prior works in terms of asymptotic performance, sample efficiency (3-50x faster), adaptation efficiency, and generalization robustness on broad and diverse task distributions.

Zipeng Xiao, Zhongkai Hao, Bokai Lin et al.

Neural operators, as an efficient surrogate model for learning the solutions of PDEs, have received extensive attention in the field of scientific machine learning. Among them, attention-based neural operators have become one of the mainstreams in related research. However, existing approaches overfit the limited training data due to the considerable number of parameters in the attention mechanism. To address this, we develop an orthogonal attention based on the eigendecomposition of the kernel integral operator and the neural approximation of eigenfunctions. The orthogonalization naturally poses a proper regularization effect on the resulting neural operator, which aids in resisting overfitting and boosting generalization. Experiments on six standard neural operator benchmark datasets comprising both regular and irregular geometries show that our method can outperform competing baselines with decent margins.

Hwanjun Song, Igor Shalyminov, Hang Su et al.

Sequence-level knowledge distillation reduces the size of Seq2Seq models for more efficient abstractive summarization. However, it often leads to a loss of abstractiveness in summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named DisCal to enhance the level of abstractiveness (measured by n-gram overlap) without sacrificing the informativeness (measured by ROUGE) of generated summaries. DisCal exposes diverse pseudo summaries with two supervision to the student model. Firstly, the best pseudo summary is identified in terms of abstractiveness and informativeness and used for sequence-level distillation. Secondly, their ranks are used to ensure the student model to assign higher prediction scores to summaries with higher ranks. Our experiments show that DisCal outperforms prior methods in abstractive summarization distillation, producing highly abstractive and informative summaries.

Zhongkai Hao, Chang Su, Songming Liu et al. · tsinghua

Pre-training has been investigated to improve the efficiency and performance of training neural operators in data-scarce settings. However, it is largely in its infancy due to the inherent complexity and diversity, such as long trajectories, multiple scales and varying dimensions of partial differential equations (PDEs) data. In this paper, we present a new auto-regressive denoising pre-training strategy, which allows for more stable and efficient pre-training on PDE data and generalizes to various downstream tasks. Moreover, by designing a flexible and scalable model architecture based on Fourier attention, we can easily scale up the model for large-scale pre-training. We train our PDE foundation model with up to 0.5B parameters on 10+ PDE datasets with more than 100k trajectories. Extensive experiments show that we achieve SOTA on these benchmarks and validate the strong generalizability of our model to significantly enhance performance on diverse downstream PDE tasks like 3D data. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/thu-ml/DPOT}.

Zhuo Huang, Chang Liu, Yinpeng Dong et al.

Although vision models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) show impressive generalization performance, their zero-shot robustness is still limited under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios without fine-tuning. Instead of undesirably providing human supervision as commonly done, it is possible to take advantage of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that hold powerful visual understanding abilities. However, MLLMs are shown to struggle with vision problems due to the incompatibility of tasks, thus hindering their utilization. In this paper, we propose to effectively leverage MLLMs to conduct Machine Vision Therapy which aims to rectify the noisy predictions from vision models. By fine-tuning with the denoised labels, the learning model performance can be boosted in an unsupervised manner. To solve the incompatibility issue, we propose a novel Denoising In-Context Learning (DICL) strategy to align vision tasks with MLLMs. Concretely, by estimating a transition matrix that captures the probability of one class being confused with another, an instruction containing a correct exemplar and an erroneous one from the most probable noisy class can be constructed. Such an instruction can help any MLLMs with ICL ability to detect and rectify incorrect predictions of vision models. Through extensive experiments on ImageNet, WILDS, DomainBed, and other OOD datasets, we carefully validate the quantitative and qualitative effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmllab/Machine_Vision_Therapy.

Liyuan Wang, Jingyi Xie, Xingxing Zhang et al.

In this work, we present a general framework for continual learning of sequentially arrived tasks with the use of pre-training, which has emerged as a promising direction for artificial intelligence systems to accommodate real-world dynamics. From a theoretical perspective, we decompose its objective into three hierarchical components, including within-task prediction, task-identity inference, and task-adaptive prediction. Then we propose an innovative approach to explicitly optimize these components with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques and representation statistics. We empirically demonstrate the superiority and generality of our approach in downstream continual learning, and further explore the applicability of PEFT techniques in upstream continual learning. We also discuss the biological basis of the proposed framework with recent advances in neuroscience.

Yichi Zhang, Yao Huang, Yifan Wang et al.

The trustworthiness of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains an intense concern despite the significant progress in their capabilities. Existing evaluation and mitigation approaches often focus on narrow aspects and overlook risks introduced by the multimodality. To tackle these challenges, we propose MultiTrust-X, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating, analyzing, and mitigating the trustworthiness issues of MLLMs. We define a three-dimensional framework, encompassing five trustworthiness aspects which include truthfulness, robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy; two novel risk types covering multimodal risks and cross-modal impacts; and various mitigation strategies from the perspectives of data, model architecture, training, and inference algorithms. Based on the taxonomy, MultiTrust-X includes 32 tasks and 28 curated datasets, enabling holistic evaluations over 30 open-source and proprietary MLLMs and in-depth analysis with 8 representative mitigation methods. Our extensive experiments reveal significant vulnerabilities in current models, including a gap between trustworthiness and general capabilities, as well as the amplification of potential risks in base LLMs by both multimodal training and inference. Moreover, our controlled analysis uncovers key limitations in existing mitigation strategies that, while some methods yield improvements in specific aspects, few effectively address overall trustworthiness, and many introduce unexpected trade-offs that compromise model utility. These findings also provide practical insights for future improvements, such as the benefits of reasoning to better balance safety and performance. Based on these insights, we introduce a Reasoning-Enhanced Safety Alignment (RESA) approach that equips the model with chain-of-thought reasoning ability to discover the underlying risks, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Daniel Lichy, Hang Su, Abhishek Badki et al.

We introduce nvTorchCam, an open-source library under the Apache 2.0 license, designed to make deep learning algorithms camera model-independent. nvTorchCam abstracts critical camera operations such as projection and unprojection, allowing developers to implement algorithms once and apply them across diverse camera models--including pinhole, fisheye, and 360 equirectangular panoramas, which are commonly used in automotive and real estate capture applications. Built on PyTorch, nvTorchCam is fully differentiable and supports GPU acceleration and batching for efficient computation. Furthermore, deep learning models trained for one camera type can be directly transferred to other camera types without requiring additional modification. In this paper, we provide an overview of nvTorchCam, its functionality, and present various code examples and diagrams to demonstrate its usage. Source code and installation instructions can be found on the nvTorchCam GitHub page at https://github.com/NVlabs/nvTorchCam.

Youze Wang, Zijun Chen, Ruoyu Chen et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models for video understanding (videoLLMs) have enhanced their capacity to process complex spatiotemporal data. However, challenges such as factual inaccuracies, harmful content, biases, hallucinations, and privacy risks compromise their reliability. This study introduces Trust-videoLLMs, a first comprehensive benchmark evaluating 23 state-of-the-art videoLLMs (5 commercial, 18 open-source) across five critical dimensions: truthfulness, robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy. Comprising 30 tasks with adapted, synthetic, and annotated videos, the framework assesses spatiotemporal risks, temporal consistency and cross-modal impact. Results reveal significant limitations in dynamic scene comprehension, cross-modal perturbation resilience and real-world risk mitigation. While open-source models occasionally outperform, proprietary models generally exhibit superior credibility, though scaling does not consistently improve performance. These findings underscore the need for enhanced training datat diversity and robust multimodal alignment. Trust-videoLLMs provides a publicly available, extensible toolkit for standardized trustworthiness assessments, addressing the critical gap between accuracy-focused benchmarks and demands for robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy.

Zhenshan Bing, Yuan Meng, Yuqi Yun et al.

Generative model-based deep clustering frameworks excel in classifying complex data, but are limited in handling dynamic and complex features because they require prior knowledge of the number of clusters. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric deep clustering framework that employs an infinite mixture of Gaussians as a prior. Our framework utilizes a memoized online variational inference method that enables the "birth" and "merge" moves of clusters, allowing our framework to cluster data in a "dynamic-adaptive" manner, without requiring prior knowledge of the number of features. We name the framework as DIVA, a Dirichlet Process-based Incremental deep clustering framework via Variational Auto-Encoder. Our framework, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, exhibits superior performance in classifying complex data with dynamically changing features, particularly in the case of incremental features. We released our source code implementation at: https://github.com/Ghiara/diva

Shilong Liu, Feng Li, Hao Zhang et al.

We present in this paper a novel query formulation using dynamic anchor boxes for DETR (DEtection TRansformer) and offer a deeper understanding of the role of queries in DETR. This new formulation directly uses box coordinates as queries in Transformer decoders and dynamically updates them layer-by-layer. Using box coordinates not only helps using explicit positional priors to improve the query-to-feature similarity and eliminate the slow training convergence issue in DETR, but also allows us to modulate the positional attention map using the box width and height information. Such a design makes it clear that queries in DETR can be implemented as performing soft ROI pooling layer-by-layer in a cascade manner. As a result, it leads to the best performance on MS-COCO benchmark among the DETR-like detection models under the same setting, e.g., AP 45.7\% using ResNet50-DC5 as backbone trained in 50 epochs. We also conducted extensive experiments to confirm our analysis and verify the effectiveness of our methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/SlongLiu/DAB-DETR}.

Huanran Chen, Yinpeng Dong, Shitong Shao et al.

Generative learning, recognized for its effective modeling of data distributions, offers inherent advantages in handling out-of-distribution instances, especially for enhancing robustness to adversarial attacks. Among these, diffusion classifiers, utilizing powerful diffusion models, have demonstrated superior empirical robustness. However, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of their robustness is still lacking, raising concerns about their vulnerability to stronger future attacks. In this study, we prove that diffusion classifiers possess $O(1)$ Lipschitzness, and establish their certified robustness, demonstrating their inherent resilience. To achieve non-constant Lipschitzness, thereby obtaining much tighter certified robustness, we generalize diffusion classifiers to classify Gaussian-corrupted data. This involves deriving the evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) for these distributions, approximating the likelihood using the ELBO, and calculating classification probabilities via Bayes' theorem. Experimental results show the superior certified robustness of these Noised Diffusion Classifiers (NDCs). Notably, we achieve over 80% and 70% certified robustness on CIFAR-10 under adversarial perturbations with \(\ell_2\) norms less than 0.25 and 0.5, respectively, using a single off-the-shelf diffusion model without any additional data.

Hossein Aboutalebi, Hwanjun Song, Yusheng Xie et al.

Development of multimodal interactive systems is hindered by the lack of rich, multimodal (text, images) conversational data, which is needed in large quantities for LLMs. Previous approaches augment textual dialogues with retrieved images, posing privacy, diversity, and quality constraints. In this work, we introduce Multimodal Augmented Generative Images Dialogues (MAGID), a framework to augment text-only dialogues with diverse and high-quality images. Subsequently, a diffusion model is applied to craft corresponding images, ensuring alignment with the identified text. Finally, MAGID incorporates an innovative feedback loop between an image description generation module (textual LLM) and image quality modules (addressing aesthetics, image-text matching, and safety), that work in tandem to generate high-quality and multi-modal dialogues. We compare MAGID to other SOTA baselines on three dialogue datasets, using automated and human evaluation. Our results show that MAGID is comparable to or better than baselines, with significant improvements in human evaluation, especially against retrieval baselines where the image database is small.

Hongzhe Bi, Lingxuan Wu, Tianwei Lin et al.

Imitation learning for robotic manipulation faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality robot demonstration data. Recent robotic foundation models often pre-train on cross-embodiment robot datasets to increase data scale, while they face significant limitations as the diverse morphologies and action spaces across different robot embodiments make unified training challenging. In this paper, we present H-RDT (Human to Robotics Diffusion Transformer), a novel approach that leverages human manipulation data to enhance robot manipulation capabilities. Our key insight is that large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos with paired 3D hand pose annotations provide rich behavioral priors that capture natural manipulation strategies and can benefit robotic policy learning. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: (1) pre-training on large-scale egocentric human manipulation data, and (2) cross-embodiment fine-tuning on robot-specific data with modular action encoders and decoders. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture with 2B parameters, H-RDT uses flow matching to model complex action distributions. Extensive evaluations encompassing both simulation and real-world experiments, single-task and multitask scenarios, as well as few-shot learning and robustness assessments, demonstrate that H-RDT outperforms training from scratch and existing state-of-the-art methods, including Pi0 and RDT, achieving significant improvements of 13.9% and 40.5% over training from scratch in simulation and real-world experiments, respectively. The results validate our core hypothesis that human manipulation data can serve as a powerful foundation for learning bimanual robotic manipulation policies.

Songming Liu, Chang Su, Jiachen Yao et al.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown promise in solving various partial differential equations (PDEs). However, training pathologies have negatively affected the convergence and prediction accuracy of PINNs, which further limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose to use condition number as a metric to diagnose and mitigate the pathologies in PINNs. Inspired by classical numerical analysis, where the condition number measures sensitivity and stability, we highlight its pivotal role in the training dynamics of PINNs. We prove theorems to reveal how condition number is related to both the error control and convergence of PINNs. Subsequently, we present an algorithm that leverages preconditioning to improve the condition number. Evaluations of 18 PDE problems showcase the superior performance of our method. Significantly, in 7 of these problems, our method reduces errors by an order of magnitude. These empirical findings verify the critical role of the condition number in PINNs' training.

Abhishek Badki, Hang Su, Bowen Wen et al.

The spatio-temporal relationship between the pixels of a video carries critical information for low-level 4D perception tasks. A single model that reasons about it should be able to solve several such tasks well. Yet, most state-of-the-art methods rely on architectures specialized for the task at hand. We present L4P, a feedforward, general-purpose architecture that solves low-level 4D perception tasks in a unified framework. L4P leverages a pre-trained ViT-based video encoder and combines it with per-task heads that are lightweight and therefore do not require extensive training. Despite its general and feedforward formulation, our method is competitive with existing specialized methods on both dense tasks, such as depth or optical flow estimation, and sparse tasks, such as 2D/3D tracking. Moreover, it solves all tasks at once in a time comparable to that of single-task methods.

Xiao Yang, Lingxuan Wu, Lizhong Wang et al. · tsinghua

Adversarial attacks in 3D environments have emerged as a critical threat to the reliability of visual perception systems, particularly in safety-sensitive applications such as identity verification and autonomous driving. These attacks employ adversarial patches and 3D objects to manipulate deep neural network (DNN) predictions by exploiting vulnerabilities within complex scenes. Existing defense mechanisms, such as adversarial training and purification, primarily employ passive strategies to enhance robustness. However, these approaches often rely on pre-defined assumptions about adversarial tactics, limiting their adaptability in dynamic 3D settings. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforced Embodied Active Defense (Rein-EAD), a proactive defense framework that leverages adaptive exploration and interaction with the environment to improve perception robustness in 3D adversarial contexts. By implementing a multi-step objective that balances immediate prediction accuracy with predictive entropy minimization, Rein-EAD optimizes defense strategies over a multi-step horizon. Additionally, Rein-EAD involves an uncertainty-oriented reward-shaping mechanism that facilitates efficient policy updates, thereby reducing computational overhead and supporting real-world applicability without the need for differentiable environments. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Rein-EAD, demonstrating a substantial reduction in attack success rates while preserving standard accuracy across diverse tasks. Notably, Rein-EAD exhibits robust generalization to unseen and adaptive attacks, making it suitable for real-world complex tasks, including 3D object classification, face recognition and autonomous driving.

Yinhong Liu, Jianfeng He, Hang Su et al.

Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (MDS) is a critical task with wide-ranging applications. To support the development of effective MDS models, robust automatic evaluation methods are essential for reducing both cost and human effort. However, such methods require a strong meta-evaluation benchmark grounded in human annotations. In this work, we introduce MDSEval, the first meta-evaluation benchmark for MDS, consisting image-sharing dialogues, corresponding summaries, and human judgments across eight well-defined quality aspects. To ensure data quality and richfulness, we propose a novel filtering framework leveraging Mutually Exclusive Key Information (MEKI) across modalities. Our work is the first to identify and formalize key evaluation dimensions specific to MDS. We benchmark state-of-the-art modal evaluation methods, revealing their limitations in distinguishing summaries from advanced MLLMs and their susceptibility to various bias.

Yichi Zhang, Yao Huang, Yitong Sun et al.

Despite the superior capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, they still face significant trustworthiness challenges. Yet, current literature on the assessment of trustworthy MLLMs remains limited, lacking a holistic evaluation to offer thorough insights into future improvements. In this work, we establish MultiTrust, the first comprehensive and unified benchmark on the trustworthiness of MLLMs across five primary aspects: truthfulness, safety, robustness, fairness, and privacy. Our benchmark employs a rigorous evaluation strategy that addresses both multimodal risks and cross-modal impacts, encompassing 32 diverse tasks with self-curated datasets. Extensive experiments with 21 modern MLLMs reveal some previously unexplored trustworthiness issues and risks, highlighting the complexities introduced by the multimodality and underscoring the necessity for advanced methodologies to enhance their reliability. For instance, typical proprietary models still struggle with the perception of visually confusing images and are vulnerable to multimodal jailbreaking and adversarial attacks; MLLMs are more inclined to disclose privacy in text and reveal ideological and cultural biases even when paired with irrelevant images in inference, indicating that the multimodality amplifies the internal risks from base LLMs. Additionally, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research, aiming to facilitate future advancements in this important field. Code and resources are publicly available at: https://multi-trust.github.io/.

Daniel Lichy, Hang Su, Abhishek Badki et al.

Wide field-of-view (FoV) cameras efficiently capture large portions of the scene, which makes them attractive in multiple domains, such as automotive and robotics. For such applications, estimating depth from multiple images is a critical task, and therefore, a large amount of ground truth (GT) data is available. Unfortunately, most of the GT data is for pinhole cameras, making it impossible to properly train depth estimation models for large-FoV cameras. We propose the first method to train a stereo depth estimation model on the widely available pinhole data, and to generalize it to data captured with larger FoVs. Our intuition is simple: We warp the training data to a canonical, large-FoV representation and augment it to allow a single network to reason about diverse types of distortions that otherwise would prevent generalization. We show strong generalization ability of our approach on both indoor and outdoor datasets, which was not possible with previous methods.

Zhengyi Wang, Cheng Lu, Yikai Wang et al.

Score distillation sampling (SDS) has shown great promise in text-to-3D generation by distilling pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, but suffers from over-saturation, over-smoothing, and low-diversity problems. In this work, we propose to model the 3D parameter as a random variable instead of a constant as in SDS and present variational score distillation (VSD), a principled particle-based variational framework to explain and address the aforementioned issues in text-to-3D generation. We show that SDS is a special case of VSD and leads to poor samples with both small and large CFG weights. In comparison, VSD works well with various CFG weights as ancestral sampling from diffusion models and simultaneously improves the diversity and sample quality with a common CFG weight (i.e., $7.5$). We further present various improvements in the design space for text-to-3D such as distillation time schedule and density initialization, which are orthogonal to the distillation algorithm yet not well explored. Our overall approach, dubbed ProlificDreamer, can generate high rendering resolution (i.e., $512\times512$) and high-fidelity NeRF with rich structure and complex effects (e.g., smoke and drops). Further, initialized from NeRF, meshes fine-tuned by VSD are meticulously detailed and photo-realistic. Project page and codes: https://ml.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/prolificdreamer/

Danni Yu, Luyang Li, Hang Su et al.

Certain forms of linguistic annotation, like part of speech and semantic tagging, can be automated with high accuracy. However, manual annotation is still necessary for complex pragmatic and discursive features that lack a direct mapping to lexical forms. This manual process is time-consuming and error-prone, limiting the scalability of function-to-form approaches in corpus linguistics. To address this, our study explores the possibility of using large language models (LLMs) to automate pragma-discursive corpus annotation. We compare GPT-3.5 (the model behind the free-to-use version of ChatGPT), GPT-4 (the model underpinning the precise mode of Bing chatbot), and a human coder in annotating apology components in English based on the local grammar framework. We find that GPT-4 outperformed GPT-3.5, with accuracy approaching that of a human coder. These results suggest that LLMs can be successfully deployed to aid pragma-discursive corpus annotation, making the process more efficient, scalable and accessible.

Jay Mahadeokar, Yangyang Shi, Yuan Shangguan et al.

Often, the storage and computational constraints of embeddeddevices demand that a single on-device ASR model serve multiple use-cases / domains. In this paper, we propose aFlexibleTransducer(FlexiT) for on-device automatic speech recognition to flexibly deal with multiple use-cases / domains with different accuracy and latency requirements. Specifically, using a single compact model, FlexiT provides a fast response for voice commands, and accurate transcription but with more latency for dictation. In order to achieve flexible and better accuracy and latency trade-offs, the following techniques are used. Firstly, we propose using domain-specific altering of segment size for Emformer encoder that enables FlexiT to achieve flexible de-coding. Secondly, we use Alignment Restricted RNNT loss to achieve flexible fine-grained control on token emission latency for different domains. Finally, we add a domain indicator vector as an additional input to the FlexiT model. Using the combination of techniques, we show that a single model can be used to improve WERs and real time factor for dictation scenarios while maintaining optimal latency for voice commands use-cases

Yuan Shangguan, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Hang Su et al.

As speech-enabled devices such as smartphones and smart speakers become increasingly ubiquitous, there is growing interest in building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that can run directly on-device; end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition models such as recurrent neural network transducers and their variants have recently emerged as prime candidates for this task. Apart from being accurate and compact, such systems need to decode speech with low user-perceived latency (UPL), producing words as soon as they are spoken. This work examines the impact of various techniques - model architectures, training criteria, decoding hyperparameters, and endpointer parameters - on UPL. Our analyses suggest that measures of model size (parameters, input chunk sizes), or measures of computation (e.g., FLOPS, RTF) that reflect the model's ability to process input frames are not always strongly correlated with observed UPL. Thus, conventional algorithmic latency measurements might be inadequate in accurately capturing latency observed when models are deployed on embedded devices. Instead, we find that factors affecting token emission latency, and endpointing behavior have a larger impact on UPL. We achieve the best trade-off between latency and word error rate when performing ASR jointly with endpointing, while utilizing the recently proposed alignment regularization mechanism.

Jay Mahadeokar, Yuan Shangguan, Duc Le et al.

There is a growing interest in the speech community in developing Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T) models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications. RNN-T is trained with a loss function that does not enforce temporal alignment of the training transcripts and audio. As a result, RNN-T models built with uni-directional long short term memory (LSTM) encoders tend to wait for longer spans of input audio, before streaming already decoded ASR tokens. In this work, we propose a modification to the RNN-T loss function and develop Alignment Restricted RNN-T (Ar-RNN-T) models, which utilize audio-text alignment information to guide the loss computation. We compare the proposed method with existing works, such as monotonic RNN-T, on LibriSpeech and in-house datasets. We show that the Ar-RNN-T loss provides a refined control to navigate the trade-offs between the token emission delays and the Word Error Rate (WER). The Ar-RNN-T models also improve downstream applications such as the ASR End-pointing by guaranteeing token emissions within any given range of latency. Moreover, the Ar-RNN-T loss allows for bigger batch sizes and 4 times higher throughput for our LSTM model architecture, enabling faster training and convergence on GPUs.

Fan Bao, Chongxuan Li, Kun Xu et al.

Score matching (SM) provides a compelling approach to learn energy-based models (EBMs) by avoiding the calculation of partition function. However, it remains largely open to learn energy-based latent variable models (EBLVMs), except some special cases. This paper presents a bi-level score matching (BiSM) method to learn EBLVMs with general structures by reformulating SM as a bi-level optimization problem. The higher level introduces a variational posterior of the latent variables and optimizes a modified SM objective, and the lower level optimizes the variational posterior to fit the true posterior. To solve BiSM efficiently, we develop a stochastic optimization algorithm with gradient unrolling. Theoretically, we analyze the consistency of BiSM and the convergence of the stochastic algorithm. Empirically, we show the promise of BiSM in Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machines and highly nonstructural EBLVMs parameterized by deep convolutional neural networks. BiSM is comparable to the widely adopted contrastive divergence and SM methods when they are applicable; and can learn complex EBLVMs with intractable posteriors to generate natural images.

Xiao Yang, Yinpeng Dong, Tianyu Pang et al.

As billions of personal data being shared through social media and network, the data privacy and security have drawn an increasing attention. Several attempts have been made to alleviate the leakage of identity information from face photos, with the aid of, e.g., image obfuscation techniques. However, most of the present results are either perceptually unsatisfactory or ineffective against face recognition systems. Our goal in this paper is to develop a technique that can encrypt the personal photos such that they can protect users from unauthorized face recognition systems but remain visually identical to the original version for human beings. To achieve this, we propose a targeted identity-protection iterative method (TIP-IM) to generate adversarial identity masks which can be overlaid on facial images, such that the original identities can be concealed without sacrificing the visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIP-IM provides 95\%+ protection success rate against various state-of-the-art face recognition models under practical test scenarios. Besides, we also show the practical and effective applicability of our method on a commercial API service.

Changjian Chen, Jun Yuan, Yafeng Lu et al.

One major cause of performance degradation in predictive models is that the test samples are not well covered by the training data. Such not well-represented samples are called OoD samples. In this paper, we propose OoDAnalyzer, a visual analysis approach for interactively identifying OoD samples and explaining them in context. Our approach integrates an ensemble OoD detection method and a grid-based visualization. The detection method is improved from deep ensembles by combining more features with algorithms in the same family. To better analyze and understand the OoD samples in context, we have developed a novel kNN-based grid layout algorithm motivated by Hall's theorem. The algorithm approximates the optimal layout and has $O(kN^2)$ time complexity, faster than the grid layout algorithm with overall best performance but $O(N^3)$ time complexity. Quantitative evaluation and case studies were performed on several datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of OoDAnalyzer.

Shervin Minaee, Amirali Abdolrashidi, Hang Su et al.

Deep learning-based models have been very successful in achieving state-of-the-art results in many of the computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing tasks in the last few years. These models seem a natural fit for handling the ever-increasing scale of biometric recognition problems, from cellphone authentication to airport security systems. Deep learning-based models have increasingly been leveraged to improve the accuracy of different biometric recognition systems in recent years. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of more than 120 promising works on biometric recognition (including face, fingerprint, iris, palmprint, ear, voice, signature, and gait recognition), which deploy deep learning models, and show their strengths and potentials in different applications. For each biometric, we first introduce the available datasets that are widely used in the literature and their characteristics. We will then talk about several promising deep learning works developed for that biometric, and show their performance on popular public benchmarks. We will also discuss some of the main challenges while using these models for biometric recognition, and possible future directions to which research in this area is headed.

Dekai Zhu, Jinhu Dong, Zhongcong Xu et al.

The neuromorphic camera is a brand new vision sensor that has emerged in recent years. In contrast to the conventional frame-based camera, the neuromorphic camera only transmits local pixel-level changes at the time of its occurrence and provides an asynchronous event stream with low latency. It has the advantages of extremely low signal delay, low transmission bandwidth requirements, rich information of edges, high dynamic range etc., which make it a promising sensor in the application of in-vehicle visual odometry system. This paper proposes a neuromorphic in-vehicle visual odometry system using feature tracking algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-vehicle visual odometry system that only uses a neuromorphic camera, and its performance test is carried out on actual driving datasets. In addition, an in-depth analysis of the results of the experiment is provided. The work of this paper verifies the feasibility of in-vehicle visual odometry system using neuromorphic cameras.

Hang Su, Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun et al.

Convolutions are the fundamental building block of CNNs. The fact that their weights are spatially shared is one of the main reasons for their widespread use, but it also is a major limitation, as it makes convolutions content agnostic. We propose a pixel-adaptive convolution (PAC) operation, a simple yet effective modification of standard convolutions, in which the filter weights are multiplied with a spatially-varying kernel that depends on learnable, local pixel features. PAC is a generalization of several popular filtering techniques and thus can be used for a wide range of use cases. Specifically, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance when PAC is used for deep joint image upsampling. PAC also offers an effective alternative to fully-connected CRF (Full-CRF), called PAC-CRF, which performs competitively, while being considerably faster. In addition, we also demonstrate that PAC can be used as a drop-in replacement for convolution layers in pre-trained networks, resulting in consistent performance improvements.

Zhigang Chang, Qin Zhou, Heng Fan et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated dominant performance in person re-identification (Re-ID). Existing CNN based methods utilize global average pooling (GAP) to aggregate intermediate convolutional features for Re-ID. However, this strategy only considers the first-order statistics of local features and treats local features at different locations equally important, leading to sub-optimal feature representation. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel weighted bilinear coding (WBC) framework for local feature aggregation in CNN networks to pursue more representative and discriminative feature representations, which can adapt to other state-of-the-art methods and improve their performance. In specific, bilinear coding is used to encode the channel-wise feature correlations to capture richer feature interactions. Meanwhile, a weighting scheme is applied on the bilinear coding to adaptively adjust the weights of local features at different locations based on their importance in recognition, further improving the discriminability of feature aggregation. To handle the spatial misalignment issue, we use a salient part net (spatial attention module) to derive salient body parts, and apply the WBC model on each part. The final representation, formed by concatenating the WBC encoded features of each part, is both discriminative and resistant to spatial misalignment. Experiments on three benchmarks including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03 evidence the favorable performance of our method against other outstanding methods.

Hang Su, Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun et al.

We present a network architecture for processing point clouds that directly operates on a collection of points represented as a sparse set of samples in a high-dimensional lattice. Naively applying convolutions on this lattice scales poorly, both in terms of memory and computational cost, as the size of the lattice increases. Instead, our network uses sparse bilateral convolutional layers as building blocks. These layers maintain efficiency by using indexing structures to apply convolutions only on occupied parts of the lattice, and allow flexible specifications of the lattice structure enabling hierarchical and spatially-aware feature learning, as well as joint 2D-3D reasoning. Both point-based and image-based representations can be easily incorporated in a network with such layers and the resulting model can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We present results on 3D segmentation tasks where our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques.