Yanwen Fang

Yanwen Fang, Yuxi Cai, Jintai Chen et al.

More and more evidence has shown that strengthening layer interactions can enhance the representation power of a deep neural network, while self-attention excels at learning interdependencies by retrieving query-activated information. Motivated by this, we devise a cross-layer attention mechanism, called multi-head recurrent layer attention (MRLA), that sends a query representation of the current layer to all previous layers to retrieve query-related information from different levels of receptive fields. A light-weighted version of MRLA is also proposed to reduce the quadratic computation cost. The proposed layer attention mechanism can enrich the representation power of many state-of-the-art vision networks, including CNNs and vision transformers. Its effectiveness has been extensively evaluated in image classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks, where improvements can be consistently observed. For example, our MRLA can improve 1.6% Top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50, while only introducing 0.16M parameters and 0.07B FLOPs. Surprisingly, it can boost the performances by a large margin of 3-4% box AP and mask AP in dense prediction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/joyfang1106/MRLA.

Yanwen Fang, Jintai Chen, Peng-Tao Jiang et al.

Multi-person motion prediction is a challenging task, especially for real-world scenarios of highly interacted persons. Most previous works have been devoted to studying the case of weak interactions (e.g., walking together), in which typically forecasting each human pose in isolation can still achieve good performances. This paper focuses on collaborative motion prediction for multiple persons with extreme motions and attempts to explore the relationships between the highly interactive persons' pose trajectories. Specifically, a novel cross-query attention (XQA) module is proposed to bilaterally learn the cross-dependencies between the two pose sequences tailored for this situation. A proxy unit is additionally introduced to bridge the involved persons, which cooperates with our proposed XQA module and subtly controls the bidirectional spatial information flows. These designs are then integrated into a Transformer-based architecture and the resulting model is called Proxy-bridged Game Transformer (PGformer) for multi-person interactive motion prediction. Its effectiveness has been evaluated on the challenging ExPI dataset, which involves highly interactive actions. Our PGformer consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both short- and long-term predictions by a large margin. Besides, our approach can also be compatible with the weakly interacted CMU-Mocap and MuPoTS-3D datasets and extended to the case of more than 2 individuals with encouraging results.

Qinshuo Liu, Yanwen Fang, Pengtao Jiang et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting tasks are usually conducted in a channel-dependent (CD) way since it can incorporate more variable-relevant information. However, it may also involve a lot of irrelevant variables, and this even leads to worse performance than the channel-independent (CI) strategy. This paper combines the strengths of both strategies and proposes the Deep Graph Clustering Transformer (DGCformer) for multivariate time series forecasting. Specifically, it first groups these relevant variables by a graph convolutional network integrated with an autoencoder, and a former-latter masked self-attention mechanism is then considered with the CD strategy being applied to each group of variables while the CI one for different groups. Extensive experimental results on eight datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art models, and our code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

Qinshuo Liu, Weiqin Zhao, Wei Huang et al.

The depth of neural networks is a critical factor for their capability, with deeper models often demonstrating superior performance. Motivated by this, significant efforts have been made to enhance layer aggregation - reusing information from previous layers to better extract features at the current layer, to improve the representational power of deep neural networks. However, previous works have primarily addressed this problem from a discrete-state perspective which is not suitable as the number of network layers grows. This paper novelly treats the outputs from layers as states of a continuous process and considers leveraging the state space model (SSM) to design the aggregation of layers in very deep neural networks. Moreover, inspired by its advancements in modeling long sequences, the Selective State Space Models (S6) is employed to design a new module called Selective State Space Model Layer Aggregation (S6LA). This module aims to combine traditional CNN or transformer architectures within a sequential framework, enhancing the representational capabilities of state-of-the-art vision networks. Extensive experiments show that S6LA delivers substantial improvements in both image classification and detection tasks, highlighting the potential of integrating SSMs with contemporary deep learning techniques.