Jing Wang

Jing Wang, Jinagyun Li, Chen Chen et al.

The Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) aims to accomplish the novel class segmentation task with a few annotated images. Current FSS research based on meta-learning focus on designing a complex interaction mechanism between the query and support feature. However, unlike humans who can rapidly learn new things from limited samples, the existing approach relies solely on fixed feature matching to tackle new tasks, lacking adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on the adapter mechanism, namely Adaptive FSS, which can efficiently adapt the existing FSS model to the novel classes. In detail, we design the Prototype Adaptive Module (PAM), which utilizes accurate category information provided by the support set to derive class prototypes, enhancing class-specific information in the multi-stage representation. In addition, our approach is compatible with diverse FSS methods with different backbones by simply inserting PAM between the layers of the encoder. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of the FSS models (e.g., MSANet, HDMNet, FPTrans, and DCAMA) and achieve new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results (i.e., 72.4\% and 79.1\% mIoU on PASCAL-5$^i$ 1-shot and 5-shot settings, 52.7\% and 60.0\% mIoU on COCO-20$^i$ 1-shot and 5-shot settings). Our code can be available at https://github.com/jingw193/AdaptiveFSS.

Jing Wang, Wonho Bae, Jiahong Chen et al.

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) involves adapting a model originally trained using a labeled dataset ({\em source domain}) to perform effectively on an unlabeled dataset ({\em target domain}) without relying on any source data during adaptation. This adaptation is especially crucial when significant disparities in data distributions exist between the two domains and when there are privacy concerns regarding the source model's training data. The absence of access to source data during adaptation makes it challenging to analytically estimate the domain gap. To tackle this issue, various techniques have been proposed, such as unsupervised clustering, contrastive learning, and continual learning. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive theoretical analysis of SFDA based on contrastive learning, primarily because it has demonstrated superior performance compared to other techniques. Motivated by the obtained insights, we then introduce a straightforward yet highly effective latent augmentation method tailored for contrastive SFDA. This augmentation method leverages the dispersion of latent features within the neighborhood of the query sample, guided by the source pre-trained model, to enhance the informativeness of positive keys. Our approach, based on a single InfoNCE-based contrastive loss, outperforms state-of-the-art SFDA methods on widely recognized benchmark datasets.

Yushuo Chen, Tianyi Tang, Erge Xiang et al.

In real world, large language models (LLMs) can serve as the assistant to help users accomplish their jobs, and also support the development of advanced applications. For the wide application of LLMs, the inference efficiency is an essential concern, which has been widely studied in existing work, and numerous optimization algorithms and code libraries have been proposed to improve it. Nonetheless, users still find it challenging to compare the effectiveness of all the above methods and understand the underlying mechanisms. In this work, we perform a detailed coarse-to-fine analysis of the inference performance of various code libraries. To evaluate the overall effectiveness, we examine four usage scenarios within two practical applications. We further provide both theoretical and empirical fine-grained analyses of each module in the Transformer architecture. Our experiments yield comprehensive results that are invaluable for researchers to evaluate code libraries and improve inference strategies.

Fu Feng, Jing Wang, Xin Geng

The pre-training paradigm fine-tunes the models trained on large-scale datasets to downstream tasks with enhanced performance. It transfers all knowledge to downstream tasks without discriminating which part is necessary or unnecessary, which may lead to negative transfer. In comparison, knowledge transfer in nature is much more efficient. When passing genetic information to descendants, ancestors encode only the essential knowledge into genes, which act as the medium. Inspired by that, we adopt a recent concept called ``learngene'' and refine its structures by mimicking the structures of natural genes. We propose the Genetic Transfer Learning (GTL) -- a framework to copy the evolutionary process of organisms into neural networks. GTL trains a population of networks, selects superior learngenes by tournaments, performs learngene mutations, and passes the learngenes to next generations. Finally, we successfully extract the learngenes of VGG11 and ResNet12. We show that the learngenes bring the descendant networks instincts and strong learning ability: with 20% parameters, the learngenes bring 12% and 16% improvements of accuracy on CIFAR-FS and miniImageNet. Besides, the learngenes have the scalability and adaptability on the downstream structure of networks and datasets. Overall, we offer a novel insight that transferring core knowledge via learngenes may be sufficient and efficient for neural networks.

Jiahong Chen, Jing Wang, Weipeng Lin et al.

Recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation have shown that mitigating the domain divergence by extracting the domain-invariant representation could significantly improve the generalization of a model to an unlabeled data domain. Nevertheless, the existing methods fail to effectively preserve the representation that is private to the label-missing domain, which could adversely affect the generalization. In this paper, we propose an approach to preserve such representation so that the latent distribution of the unlabeled domain could represent both the domain-invariant features and the individual characteristics that are private to the unlabeled domain. In particular, we demonstrate that maximizing the mutual information between the unlabeled domain and its latent space while mitigating the domain divergence can achieve such preservation. We also theoretically and empirically validate that preserving the representation that is private to the unlabeled domain is important and of necessity for the cross-domain generalization. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several public datasets.

Jing Wang, Anna Choromanska

This paper addresses the problem of optimizing partition functions in a stochastic learning setting. We propose a stochastic variant of the bound majorization algorithm that relies on upper-bounding the partition function with a quadratic surrogate. The update of the proposed method, that we refer to as Stochastic Partition Function Bound (SPFB), resembles scaled stochastic gradient descent where the scaling factor relies on a second order term that is however different from the Hessian. Similarly to quasi-Newton schemes, this term is constructed using the stochastic approximation of the value of the function and its gradient. We prove sub-linear convergence rate of the proposed method and show the construction of its low-rank variant (LSPFB). Experiments on logistic regression demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly outperform SGD. We also discuss how to use quadratic partition function bound for efficient training of deep learning models and in non-convex optimization.