Kirill Paramonov

Kirill Paramonov, Jia-Xing Zhong, Umberto Michieli et al.

In this paper, we address a recent trend in robotic home appliances to include vision systems on personal devices, capable of personalizing the appliances on the fly. In particular, we formulate and address an important technical task of personal object search, which involves localization and identification of personal items of interest on images captured by robotic appliances, with each item referenced only by a few annotated images. The task is crucial for robotic home appliances and mobile systems, which need to process personal visual scenes or to operate with particular personal objects (e.g., for grasping or navigation). In practice, personal object search presents two main technical challenges. First, a robot vision system needs to be able to distinguish between many fine-grained classes, in the presence of occlusions and clutter. Second, the strict resource requirements for the on-device system restrict the usage of most state-of-the-art methods for few-shot learning and often prevent on-device adaptation. In this work, we propose Swiss DINO: a simple yet effective framework for one-shot personal object search based on the recent DINOv2 transformer model, which was shown to have strong zero-shot generalization properties. Swiss DINO handles challenging on-device personalized scene understanding requirements and does not require any adaptation training. We show significant improvement (up to 55%) in segmentation and recognition accuracy compared to the common lightweight solutions, and significant footprint reduction of backbone inference time (up to 100x) and GPU consumption (up to 10x) compared to the heavy transformer-based solutions.

Kirill Paramonov, Mete Ozay, Eunju Yang et al.

Class-incremental learning in the context of limited personal labeled samples (few-shot) is critical for numerous real-world applications, such as smart home devices. A key challenge in these scenarios is balancing the trade-off between adapting to new, personalized classes and maintaining the performance of the model on the original, base classes. Fine-tuning the model on novel classes often leads to the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting, where the accuracy of base classes declines unpredictably and significantly. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective mechanism to address this challenge by controlling the trade-off between novel and base class accuracy. We specifically target the ultra-low-shot scenario, where only a single example is available per novel class. Our approach introduces a Novel Class Detection (NCD) rule, which adjusts the degree of forgetting a priori while simultaneously enhancing performance on novel classes. We demonstrate the versatility of our solution by applying it to state-of-the-art Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) methods, showing consistent improvements across different settings. To better quantify the trade-off between novel and base class performance, we introduce new metrics: NCR@2FOR and NCR@5FOR. Our approach achieves up to a 30% improvement in novel class accuracy on the CIFAR100 dataset (1-shot, 1 novel class) while maintaining a controlled base class forgetting rate of 2%.