Kai Xu

Kai Xu, Rongyu Chen, Gianni Franchi et al.

The capacity of a modern deep learning system to determine if a sample falls within its realm of knowledge is fundamental and important. In this paper, we offer insights and analyses of recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods - extremely simple activation shaping (ASH). We demonstrate that activation pruning has a detrimental effect on OOD detection, while activation scaling enhances it. Moreover, we propose SCALE, a simple yet effective post-hoc network enhancement method for OOD detection, which attains state-of-the-art OOD detection performance without compromising in-distribution (ID) accuracy. By integrating scaling concepts into the training process to capture a sample's ID characteristics, we propose Intermediate Tensor SHaping (ISH), a lightweight method for training time OOD detection enhancement. We achieve AUROC scores of +1.85\% for near-OOD and +0.74\% for far-OOD datasets on the OpenOOD v1.5 ImageNet-1K benchmark. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/kai422/SCALE.

Yuhang Huang, Zheng Qin, Xinwang Liu et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the forward diffusion process is crucial for the effectiveness of diffusion models in terms of generative quality and sampling efficiency. We propose incorporating an analytical image attenuation process into the forward diffusion process for high-quality (un)conditioned image generation with significantly fewer denoising steps compared to the vanilla diffusion model requiring thousands of steps. In a nutshell, our method represents the forward image-to-noise mapping as simultaneous \textit{image-to-zero} mapping and \textit{zero-to-noise} mapping. Under this framework, we mathematically derive 1) the training objectives and 2) for the reverse time the sampling formula based on an analytical attenuation function which models image to zero mapping. The former enables our method to learn noise and image components simultaneously which simplifies learning. Importantly, because of the latter's analyticity in the \textit{zero-to-image} sampling function, we can avoid the ordinary differential equation-based accelerators and instead naturally perform sampling with an arbitrary step size. We have conducted extensive experiments on unconditioned image generation, \textit{e.g.}, CIFAR-10 and CelebA-HQ-256, and image-conditioned downstream tasks such as super-resolution, saliency detection, edge detection, and image inpainting. The proposed diffusion models achieve competitive generative quality with much fewer denoising steps compared to the state of the art, thus greatly accelerating the generation speed. In particular, to generate images of comparable quality, our models require only one-twentieth of the denoising steps compared to the baseline denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Moreover, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on the image-conditioned tasks using only no more than 10 steps.

Yunfan Ye, Kai Xu, Yuhang Huang et al.

Limited by the encoder-decoder architecture, learning-based edge detectors usually have difficulty predicting edge maps that satisfy both correctness and crispness. With the recent success of the diffusion probabilistic model (DPM), we found it is especially suitable for accurate and crisp edge detection since the denoising process is directly applied to the original image size. Therefore, we propose the first diffusion model for the task of general edge detection, which we call DiffusionEdge. To avoid expensive computational resources while retaining the final performance, we apply DPM in the latent space and enable the classic cross-entropy loss which is uncertainty-aware in pixel level to directly optimize the parameters in latent space in a distillation manner. We also adopt a decoupled architecture to speed up the denoising process and propose a corresponding adaptive Fourier filter to adjust the latent features of specific frequencies. With all the technical designs, DiffusionEdge can be stably trained with limited resources, predicting crisp and accurate edge maps with much fewer augmentation strategies. Extensive experiments on four edge detection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DiffusionEdge both in correctness and crispness. On the NYUDv2 dataset, compared to the second best, we increase the ODS, OIS (without post-processing) and AC by 30.2%, 28.1% and 65.1%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/GuHuangAI/DiffusionEdge.

Jun-Peng Zhu, Boyan Niu, Peng Cai et al.

Exploratory data analysis (EDA), coupled with SQL, is essential for data analysts involved in data exploration and analysis. However, data analysts often encounter two primary challenges: (1) the need to craft SQL queries skillfully, and (2) the requirement to generate suitable visualization types that enhance the interpretation of query results. Due to its significance, substantial research efforts have been made to explore different approaches to address these challenges, including leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods fail to meet real-world data exploration requirements primarily due to (1) complex database schema; (2) unclear user intent; (3) limited cross-domain generalization capability; and (4) insufficient end-to-end text-to-visualization capability. This paper presents TiInsight, an automated SQL-based cross-domain exploratory data analysis system. First, we propose hierarchical data context (i.e., HDC), which leverages LLMs to summarize the contexts related to the database schema, which is crucial for open-world EDA systems to generalize across data domains. Second, the EDA system is divided into four components (i.e., stages): HDC generation, question clarification and decomposition, text-to-SQL generation (i.e., TiSQL), and data visualization (i.e., TiChart). Finally, we implemented an end-to-end EDA system with a user-friendly GUI interface in the production environment at PingCAP. We have also open-sourced all APIs of TiInsight to facilitate research within the EDA community. Through extensive evaluations by a real-world user study, we demonstrate that TiInsight offers remarkable performance compared to human experts. Specifically, TiSQL achieves an execution accuracy of 86.3% on the Spider dataset using GPT-4. It also demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the Bird dataset.

Kai Xu, Longyin Wen, Guorong Li et al.

In this paper, we present a unified, end-to-end trainable spatiotemporal CNN model for VOS, which consists of two branches, i.e., the temporal coherence branch and the spatial segmentation branch. Specifically, the temporal coherence branch pretrained in an adversarial fashion from unlabeled video data, is designed to capture the dynamic appearance and motion cues of video sequences to guide object segmentation. The spatial segmentation branch focuses on segmenting objects accurately based on the learned appearance and motion cues. To obtain accurate segmentation results, we design a coarse-to-fine process to sequentially apply a designed attention module on multi-scale feature maps, and concatenate them to produce the final prediction. In this way, the spatial segmentation branch is enforced to gradually concentrate on object regions. These two branches are jointly fine-tuned on video segmentation sequences in an end-to-end manner. Several experiments are carried out on three challenging datasets (i.e., DAVIS-2016, DAVIS-2017 and Youtube-Object) to show that our method achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/longyin880815/STCNN.

Mengyao Du, Miao Zhang, Yuwen Pu et al.

To tackle the scarcity and privacy issues associated with domain-specific datasets, the integration of federated learning in conjunction with fine-tuning has emerged as a practical solution. However, our findings reveal that federated learning has the risk of skewing fine-tuning features and compromising the out-of-distribution robustness of the model. By introducing three robustness indicators and conducting experiments across diverse robust datasets, we elucidate these phenomena by scrutinizing the diversity, transferability, and deviation within the model feature space. To mitigate the negative impact of federated learning on model robustness, we introduce GNP, a \underline{G}eneral \underline{N}oisy \underline{P}rojection-based robust algorithm, ensuring no deterioration of accuracy on the target distribution. Specifically, the key strategy for enhancing model robustness entails the transfer of robustness from the pre-trained model to the fine-tuned model, coupled with adding a small amount of Gaussian noise to augment the representative capacity of the model. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach markedly enhances the robustness across diverse scenarios, encompassing various parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and confronting different levels of data heterogeneity.

Mohamed Tarek, Kai Xu, Martin Trapp et al.

We present the preliminary high-level design and features of DynamicPPL.jl, a modular library providing a lightning-fast infrastructure for probabilistic programming. Besides a computational performance that is often close to or better than Stan, DynamicPPL provides an intuitive DSL that allows the rapid development of complex dynamic probabilistic programs. Being entirely written in Julia, a high-level dynamic programming language for numerical computing, DynamicPPL inherits a rich set of features available through the Julia ecosystem. Since DynamicPPL is a modular, stand-alone library, any probabilistic programming system written in Julia, such as Turing.jl, can use DynamicPPL to specify models and trace their model parameters. The main features of DynamicPPL are: 1) a meta-programming based DSL for specifying dynamic models using an intuitive tilde-based notation; 2) a tracing data-structure for tracking RVs in dynamic probabilistic models; 3) a rich contextual dispatch system allowing tailored behaviour during model execution; and 4) a user-friendly syntax for probabilistic queries. Finally, we show in a variety of experiments that DynamicPPL, in combination with Turing.jl, achieves computational performance that is often close to or better than Stan.

Qiaoyun Wu, Kai Xu, Jun Wang et al.

To enhance the cross-target and cross-scene generalization of target-driven visual navigation based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce an information-theoretic regularization term into the RL objective. The regularization maximizes the mutual information between navigation actions and visual observation transforms of an agent, thus promoting more informed navigation decisions. This way, the agent models the action-observation dynamics by learning a variational generative model. Based on the model, the agent generates (imagines) the next observation from its current observation and navigation target. This way, the agent learns to understand the causality between navigation actions and the changes in its observations, which allows the agent to predict the next action for navigation by comparing the current and the imagined next observations. Cross-target and cross-scene evaluations on the AI2-THOR framework show that our method attains at least a $10\%$ improvement of average success rate over some state-of-the-art models. We further evaluate our model in two real-world settings: navigation in unseen indoor scenes from a discrete Active Vision Dataset (AVD) and continuous real-world environments with a TurtleBot.We demonstrate that our navigation model is able to successfully achieve navigation tasks in these scenarios. Videos and models can be found in the supplementary material.