Shuai Yuan

Shuai Yuan, Xian Sun, Hannah Kim et al.

Supervised training of optical flow predictors generally yields better accuracy than unsupervised training. However, the improved performance comes at an often high annotation cost. Semi-supervised training trades off accuracy against annotation cost. We use a simple yet effective semi-supervised training method to show that even a small fraction of labels can improve flow accuracy by a significant margin over unsupervised training. In addition, we propose active learning methods based on simple heuristics to further reduce the number of labels required to achieve the same target accuracy. Our experiments on both synthetic and real optical flow datasets show that our semi-supervised networks generally need around 50% of the labels to achieve close to full-label accuracy, and only around 20% with active learning on Sintel. We also analyze and show insights on the factors that may influence active learning performance. Code is available at https://github.com/duke-vision/optical-flow-active-learning-release.

Shuai Yuan, Shuzhi Yu, Hannah Kim et al.

Unsupervised optical flow estimation is especially hard near occlusions and motion boundaries and in low-texture regions. We show that additional information such as semantics and domain knowledge can help better constrain this problem. We introduce SemARFlow, an unsupervised optical flow network designed for autonomous driving data that takes estimated semantic segmentation masks as additional inputs. This additional information is injected into the encoder and into a learned upsampler that refines the flow output. In addition, a simple yet effective semantic augmentation module provides self-supervision when learning flow and its boundaries for vehicles, poles, and sky. Together, these injections of semantic information improve the KITTI-2015 optical flow test error rate from 11.80% to 8.38%. We also show visible improvements around object boundaries as well as a greater ability to generalize across datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/duke-vision/semantic-unsup-flow-release.

Hannah Halin Kim, Shuzhi Yu, Shuai Yuan et al.

We propose TAIN (Transformers and Attention for video INterpolation), a residual neural network for video interpolation, which aims to interpolate an intermediate frame given two consecutive image frames around it. We first present a novel vision transformer module, named Cross Similarity (CS), to globally aggregate input image features with similar appearance as those of the predicted interpolated frame. These CS features are then used to refine the interpolated prediction. To account for occlusions in the CS features, we propose an Image Attention (IA) module to allow the network to focus on CS features from one frame over those of the other. TAIN outperforms existing methods that do not require flow estimation and performs comparably to flow-based methods while being computationally efficient in terms of inference time on Vimeo90k, UCF101, and SNU-FILM benchmarks.

Fangzhi Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Qiushi Sun et al.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability in processing and generating human-like text, they do have limitations when it comes to comprehending and expressing world knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of natural language(e.g., chemical molecular formula). Injecting a collection of symbolic data directly into the training of LLMs can be problematic, as it disregards the synergies among different symbolic families and overlooks the need for a balanced mixture of natural and symbolic data. In this work, we tackle these challenges from both a data and framework perspective and introduce Symbol-LLM series models. First, we curated a data collection consisting of 34 tasks and incorporating approximately 20 distinct symbolic families, intending to capture the interrelations and foster synergies between symbols. Then, a two-stage tuning framework succeeds in injecting symbolic knowledge without loss of the generality ability. Extensive experiments on both symbol- and NL-centric tasks demonstrate the balanced and superior performances of Symbol-LLM series models. The project page is https://xufangzhi.github.io/symbol-llm-page/.

Shuzhi Yu, Hannah Halin Kim, Shuai Yuan et al.

Unsupervised optical flow estimators based on deep learning have attracted increasing attention due to the cost and difficulty of annotating for ground truth. Although performance measured by average End-Point Error (EPE) has improved over the years, flow estimates are still poorer along motion boundaries (MBs), where the flow is not smooth, as is typically assumed, and where features computed by neural networks are contaminated by multiple motions. To improve flow in the unsupervised settings, we design a framework that detects MBs by analyzing visual changes along boundary candidates and replaces motions close to detections with motions farther away. Our proposed algorithm detects boundaries more accurately than a baseline method with the same inputs and can improve estimates from any flow predictor without additional training.

Shuai Yuan, Hanlin Qin, Xiang Yan et al.

In a real-world infrared imaging system, effectively learning a consistent stripe noise removal model is essential. Most existing destriping methods cannot precisely reconstruct images due to cross-level semantic gaps and insufficient characterization of the global column features. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel infrared image destriping method, called Asymmetric Sampling Correction Network (ASCNet), that can effectively capture global column relationships and embed them into a U-shaped framework, providing comprehensive discriminative representation and seamless semantic connectivity. Our ASCNet consists of three core elements: Residual Haar Discrete Wavelet Transform (RHDWT), Pixel Shuffle (PS), and Column Non-uniformity Correction Module (CNCM). Specifically, RHDWT is a novel downsampler that employs double-branch modeling to effectively integrate stripe-directional prior knowledge and data-driven semantic interaction to enrich the feature representation. Observing the semantic patterns crosstalk of stripe noise, PS is introduced as an upsampler to prevent excessive apriori decoding and performing semantic-bias-free image reconstruction. After each sampling, CNCM captures the column relationships in long-range dependencies. By incorporating column, spatial, and self-dependence information, CNCM well establishes a global context to distinguish stripes from the scene's vertical structures. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, real data, and infrared small target detection tasks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single-image destriping methods both visually and quantitatively. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xdFai/ASCNet.

Shuai Yuan, Carlo Tomasi

Both optical flow and stereo disparities are image matches and can therefore benefit from joint training. Depth and 3D motion provide geometric rather than photometric information and can further improve optical flow. Accordingly, we design a first network that estimates flow and disparity jointly and is trained without supervision. A second network, trained with optical flow from the first as pseudo-labels, takes disparities from the first network, estimates 3D rigid motion at every pixel, and reconstructs optical flow again. A final stage fuses the outputs from the two networks. In contrast with previous methods that only consider camera motion, our method also estimates the rigid motions of dynamic objects, which are of key interest in applications. This leads to better optical flow with visibly more detailed occlusions and object boundaries as a result. Our unsupervised pipeline achieves 7.36% optical flow error on the KITTI-2015 benchmark and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 9.38% by a wide margin. It also achieves slightly better or comparable stereo depth results. Code will be made available.

Fei Yuan, Chang Ma, Shuai Yuan et al. · cmu

The lottery ticket hypothesis posits the existence of ``winning tickets'' within a randomly initialized neural network. Do winning tickets exist for LLMs in fine-tuning scenarios? How can we find such winning tickets? In this paper, we propose KS-Lottery, a method to identify a small subset of LLM parameters highly effective in multilingual fine-tuning. Our key idea is to use Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test to analyze the distribution shift of parameters before and after fine-tuning. We further theoretically prove that KS-Lottery can find the certified winning tickets in the embedding layer, fine-tuning on the found parameters is guaranteed to perform as well as full fine-tuning. Comparing KS-Lottery with other parameter-efficient tuning algorithms on translation tasks, the experimental results show that KS-Lottery finds a much smaller set of parameters for fine-tuning while achieving the comparable performance as full fine-tuning LLM. Surprisingly, we find that fine-tuning 18 tokens' embedding of LLaMA suffices to reach the fine-tuning translation performance~\footnote{https://github.com/CONE-MT/KS-Lottery.}.

Kelsey Lieberman, Shuai Yuan, Swarna Kamlam Ravindran et al.

Although binary classification is a well-studied problem in computer vision, training reliable classifiers under severe class imbalance remains a challenging problem. Recent work has proposed techniques that mitigate the effects of training under imbalance by modifying the loss functions or optimization methods. While this work has led to significant improvements in the overall accuracy in the multi-class case, we observe that slight changes in hyperparameter values of these methods can result in highly variable performance in terms of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves on binary problems with severe imbalance. To reduce the sensitivity to hyperparameter choices and train more general models, we propose training over a family of loss functions, instead of a single loss function. We develop a method for applying Loss Conditional Training (LCT) to an imbalanced classification problem. Extensive experiment results, on both CIFAR and Kaggle competition datasets, show that our method improves model performance and is more robust to hyperparameter choices. Code is available at https://github.com/klieberman/roc_lct.

Yimu Wang, Shuai Yuan, Bo Xue et al.

Recent progress in video-text retrieval has been driven largely by advancements in model architectures and training strategies. However, the representation learning capabilities of videotext retrieval models remain constrained by lowquality and limited training data annotations. To address this issue, we present a novel ViDeoText Retrieval Paradigm with RElevance-based AugMentation, namely DREAM, which enhances video and text data using large foundation models to learn more generalized features. Specifically, we first adopt a simple augmentation method, which generates self-similar data by randomly duplicating or dropping subwords and frames. In addition, inspired by the recent advancement in visual and language generative models, we propose a more robust augmentation method through textual paraphrasing and video stylization using large language models (LLMs) and visual generative models (VGMs). To further enrich video and text information, we propose a relevance-based augmentation method, where LLMs and VGMs generate and integrate new relevant information into the original data. Leveraging this enriched data, extensive experiments on several video-text retrieval benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DREAM over existing methods.

Fanjie Kong, Shuai Yuan, Weituo Hao et al.

We address the challenge of generating fair and unbiased image retrieval results given neutral textual queries (with no explicit gender or race connotations), while maintaining the utility (performance) of the underlying vision-language (VL) model. Previous methods aim to disentangle learned representations of images and text queries from gender and racial characteristics. However, we show these are inadequate at alleviating bias for the desired equal representation result, as there usually exists test-time bias in the target retrieval set. So motivated, we introduce a straightforward technique, Post-hoc Bias Mitigation (PBM), that post-processes the outputs from the pre-trained vision-language model. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world image search datasets, Occupation 1 and 2, as well as two large-scale image-text datasets, MS-COCO and Flickr30k. Our approach achieves the lowest bias, compared with various existing bias-mitigation methods, in text-based image retrieval result while maintaining satisfactory retrieval performance. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Fair_Text_based_Image_Retrieval-D8B2}.