Kai Han

Ding Jia, Jianyuan Guo, Kai Han et al.

Cross-modal transformers have demonstrated superiority in various vision tasks by effectively integrating different modalities. This paper first critiques prior token exchange methods which replace less informative tokens with inter-modal features, and demonstrate exchange based methods underperform cross-attention mechanisms, while the computational demand of the latter inevitably restricts its use with longer sequences. To surmount the computational challenges, we propose GeminiFusion, a pixel-wise fusion approach that capitalizes on aligned cross-modal representations. GeminiFusion elegantly combines intra-modal and inter-modal attentions, dynamically integrating complementary information across modalities. We employ a layer-adaptive noise to adaptively control their interplay on a per-layer basis, thereby achieving a harmonized fusion process. Notably, GeminiFusion maintains linear complexity with respect to the number of input tokens, ensuring this multimodal framework operates with efficiency comparable to unimodal networks. Comprehensive evaluations across multimodal image-to-image translation, 3D object detection and arbitrary-modal semantic segmentation tasks, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, event data, etc. demonstrate the superior performance of our GeminiFusion against leading-edge techniques. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/JiaDingCN/GeminiFusion

Kai Han, Jianyuan Guo, Yehui Tang et al.

Transformer networks have achieved great progress for computer vision tasks. Transformer-in-Transformer (TNT) architecture utilizes inner transformer and outer transformer to extract both local and global representations. In this work, we present new TNT baselines by introducing two advanced designs: 1) pyramid architecture, and 2) convolutional stem. The new "PyramidTNT" significantly improves the original TNT by establishing hierarchical representations. PyramidTNT achieves better performances than the previous state-of-the-art vision transformers such as Swin Transformer. We hope this new baseline will be helpful to the further research and application of vision transformer. Code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/CV-Backbones/tree/master/tnt_pytorch.

Jonathan Roberts, Kai Han, Neil Houlsby et al. · cambridge

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have proven flexible and generalisable across many tasks and fields. Although they have strong potential to aid scientific research, their capabilities in this domain are not well characterised. A key aspect of scientific research is the ability to understand and interpret figures, which serve as a rich, compressed source of complex information. In this work, we present SciFIBench, a scientific figure interpretation benchmark consisting of 2000 questions split between two tasks across 8 categories. The questions are curated from arXiv paper figures and captions, using adversarial filtering to find hard negatives and human verification for quality control. We evaluate 28 LMMs on SciFIBench, finding it to be a challenging benchmark. Finally, we investigate the alignment and reasoning faithfulness of the LMMs on augmented question sets from our benchmark. We release SciFIBench to encourage progress in this domain.

Zhiwei Hao, Jianyuan Guo, Li Shen et al.

Recent advancements in vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated that larger models often achieve superior performance. However, training these models remains computationally intensive and costly. To address this challenge, we introduce ScaleNet, an efficient approach for scaling ViT models. Unlike conventional training from scratch, ScaleNet facilitates rapid model expansion with negligible increases in parameters, building on existing pretrained models. This offers a cost-effective solution for scaling up ViTs. Specifically, ScaleNet achieves model expansion by inserting additional layers into pretrained ViTs, utilizing layer-wise weight sharing to maintain parameters efficiency. Each added layer shares its parameter tensor with a corresponding layer from the pretrained model. To mitigate potential performance degradation due to shared weights, ScaleNet introduces a small set of adjustment parameters for each layer. These adjustment parameters are implemented through parallel adapter modules, ensuring that each instance of the shared parameter tensor remains distinct and optimized for its specific function. Experiments on the ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that ScaleNet enables efficient expansion of ViT models. With a 2$\times$ depth-scaled DeiT-Base model, ScaleNet achieves a 7.42% accuracy improvement over training from scratch while requiring only one-third of the training epochs, highlighting its efficiency in scaling ViTs. Beyond image classification, our method shows significant potential for application in downstream vision areas, as evidenced by the validation in object detection task.

Yunhe Wang, Mingqiang Huang, Kai Han et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been widely used for boosting the performance of many machine intelligence tasks. However, the CNN models are usually computationally intensive and energy consuming, since they are often designed with numerous multiply-operations and considerable parameters for the accuracy reason. Thus, it is difficult to directly apply them in the resource-constrained environments such as 'Internet of Things' (IoT) devices and smart phones. To reduce the computational complexity and energy burden, here we present a novel minimalist hardware architecture using adder convolutional neural network (AdderNet), in which the original convolution is replaced by adder kernel using only additions. To maximally excavate the potential energy consumption, we explore the low-bit quantization algorithm for AdderNet with shared-scaling-factor method, and we design both specific and general-purpose hardware accelerators for AdderNet. Experimental results show that the adder kernel with int8/int16 quantization also exhibits high performance, meanwhile consuming much less resources (theoretically ~81% off). In addition, we deploy the quantized AdderNet on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) platform. The whole AdderNet can practically achieve 16% enhancement in speed, 67.6%-71.4% decrease in logic resource utilization and 47.85%-77.9% decrease in power consumption compared to CNN under the same circuit architecture. With a comprehensive comparison on the performance, power consumption, hardware resource consumption and network generalization capability, we conclude the AdderNet is able to surpass all the other competitors including the classical CNN, novel memristor-network, XNOR-Net and the shift-kernel based network, indicating its great potential in future high performance and energy-efficient artificial intelligence applications.