Yao Gao

Yao Gao, Qi Jiang, Shaohua Gao et al.

Recently, joint design approaches that simultaneously optimize optical systems and downstream algorithms through data-driven learning have demonstrated superior performance over traditional separate design approaches. However, current joint design approaches heavily rely on the manual identification of initial lenses, posing challenges and limitations, particularly for compound lens systems with multiple potential starting points. In this work, we present Quasi-Global Search Optics (QGSO) to automatically design compound lens based computational imaging systems through two parts: (i) Fused Optimization Method for Automatic Optical Design (OptiFusion), which searches for diverse initial optical systems under certain design specifications; and (ii) Efficient Physic-aware Joint Optimization (EPJO), which conducts parallel joint optimization of initial optical systems and image reconstruction networks with the consideration of physical constraints, culminating in the selection of the optimal solution in all search results. Extensive experimental results illustrate that QGSO serves as a transformative end-to-end lens design paradigm for superior global search ability, which automatically provides compound lens based computational imaging systems with higher imaging quality compared to existing paradigms. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/LiGpy/QGSO.

Pinzhuo Tian, Yao Gao

Meta-learning provides a promising way for learning to efficiently learn and achieves great success in many applications. However, most meta-learning literature focuses on dealing with tasks from a same domain, making it brittle to generalize to tasks from the other unseen domains. In this work, we address this problem by simulating tasks from the other unseen domains to improve the generalization and robustness of meta-learning method. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic shift layer to learn how to simulate the domain shift and generate pseudo tasks, and develop a new adversarial learning-to-learn mechanism to train it. Based on the pseudo tasks, the meta-learning model can learn cross-domain meta-knowledge, which can generalize well on unseen domains. We conduct extensive experiments under the domain generalization setting. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed shift layer is applicable to various meta-learning frameworks. Moreover, our method also leads to state-of-the-art performance on different cross-domain few-shot classification benchmarks and produces good results on cross-domain few-shot regression.

Zhong-Qiu Zhao, Yao Gao, Yuchen Ge et al.

Although deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) have achieved excellent performance in human pose estimation, these networks often have a large number of parameters and computations, leading to the slow inference speed. For this issue, an effective solution is knowledge distillation, which transfers knowledge from a large pre-trained network (teacher) to a small network (student). However, there are some defects in the existing approaches: (I) Only a single teacher is adopted, neglecting the potential that a student can learn from multiple teachers. (II) The human segmentation mask can be regarded as additional prior information to restrict the location of keypoints, which is never utilized. (III) A student with a small number of parameters cannot fully imitate heatmaps provided by datasets and teachers. (IV) There exists noise in heatmaps generated by teachers, which causes model degradation. To overcome these defects, we propose an orderly dual-teacher knowledge distillation (ODKD) framework, which consists of two teachers with different capabilities. Specifically, the weaker one (primary teacher, PT) is used to teach keypoints information, the stronger one (senior teacher, ST) is utilized to transfer segmentation and keypoints information by adding the human segmentation mask. Taking dual-teacher together, an orderly learning strategy is proposed to promote knowledge absorbability. Moreover, we employ a binarization operation which further improves the learning ability of the student and reduces noise in heatmaps. Experimental results on COCO and OCHuman keypoints datasets show that our proposed ODKD can improve the performance of different lightweight models by a large margin, and HRNet-W16 equipped with ODKD achieves state-of-the-art performance for lightweight human pose estimation.