Haoyu He

Haoyu He, Zizheng Pan, Jing Liu et al.

The paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning has laid the foundation for deploying deep learning models. However, most fine-tuning methods are designed to meet a specific resource budget. Recently, considering diverse deployment scenarios with various resource budgets, SN-Net is introduced to quickly obtain numerous new networks (stitches) from the pre-trained models (anchors) in a model family via model stitching. Although promising, SN-Net confronts new challenges when adapting it to new target domains, including huge memory and storage requirements and a long and sub-optimal multistage adaptation process. In this work, we present a novel framework, Efficient Stitchable Task Adaptation (ESTA), to efficiently produce a palette of fine-tuned models that adhere to diverse resource constraints. Specifically, we first tailor parameter-efficient fine-tuning to share low-rank updates among the stitches while maintaining independent bias terms. In this way, we largely reduce fine-tuning memory burdens and mitigate the interference among stitches that arises in task adaptation. Furthermore, we streamline a simple yet effective one-stage deployment pipeline, which estimates the important stitches to deploy with training-time gradient statistics. By assigning higher sampling probabilities to important stitches, we also get a boosted Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments on 25 downstream visual recognition tasks demonstrate that our ESTA is capable of generating stitches with smooth accuracy-efficiency trade-offs and surpasses the direct SN-Net adaptation by remarkable margins with significantly lower training time and fewer trainable parameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of our ESTA framework by stitching LLMs from LLaMA family, obtaining chatbot stitches of assorted sizes. Source code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/Stitched_LLaMA

Zizheng Pan, Jing Liu, Haoyu He et al.

Large pretrained plain vision Transformers (ViTs) have been the workhorse for many downstream tasks. However, existing works utilizing off-the-shelf ViTs are inefficient in terms of training and deployment, because adopting ViTs with individual sizes requires separate trainings and is restricted by fixed performance-efficiency trade-offs. In this paper, we are inspired by stitchable neural networks (SN-Net), which is a new framework that cheaply produces a single model that covers rich subnetworks by stitching pretrained model families, supporting diverse performance-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. Building upon this foundation, we introduce SN-Netv2, a systematically improved model stitching framework to facilitate downstream task adaptation. Specifically, we first propose a two-way stitching scheme to enlarge the stitching space. We then design a resource-constrained sampling strategy that takes into account the underlying FLOPs distributions in the space for better sampling. Finally, we observe that learning stitching layers as a low-rank update plays an essential role on downstream tasks to stabilize training and ensure a good Pareto frontier. With extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, ADE20K, COCO-Stuff-10K and NYUv2, SN-Netv2 demonstrates superior performance over SN-Netv1 on downstream dense predictions and shows strong ability as a flexible vision backbone, achieving great advantages in both training efficiency and deployment flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/SN-Netv2.

Yuelin Guo, Haoyu He, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we first design a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then present a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We achieve mAP/mCorLoc scores of 58.5%/81.8% on VOC 2007 and 55.6%/80.5% on VOC 2012, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art WSOD methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DTH-CP.

Haoyu He, Jianfei Cai, Jing Liu et al.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive performance over various computer vision tasks. However, modeling global correlations with multi-head self-attention (MSA) layers leads to two widely recognized issues: the massive computational resource consumption and the lack of intrinsic inductive bias for modeling local visual patterns. To solve both issues, we devise a simple yet effective method named Single-Path Vision Transformer pruning (SPViT), to efficiently and automatically compress the pre-trained ViTs into compact models with proper locality added. Specifically, we first propose a novel weight-sharing scheme between MSA and convolutional operations, delivering a single-path space to encode all candidate operations. In this way, we cast the operation search problem as finding which subset of parameters to use in each MSA layer, which significantly reduces the computational cost and optimization difficulty, and the convolution kernels can be well initialized using pre-trained MSA parameters. Relying on the single-path space, we introduce learnable binary gates to encode the operation choices in MSA layers. Similarly, we further employ learnable gates to encode the fine-grained MLP expansion ratios of FFN layers. In this way, our SPViT optimizes the learnable gates to automatically explore from a vast and unified search space and flexibly adjust the MSA-FFN pruning proportions for each individual dense model. We conduct extensive experiments on two representative ViTs showing that our SPViT achieves a new SOTA for pruning on ImageNet-1k. For example, our SPViT can trim 52.0% FLOPs for DeiT-B and get an impressive 0.6% top-1 accuracy gain simultaneously. The source code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/SPViT.

Zizheng Pan, Peng Chen, Haoyu He et al.

There has been an explosion of interest in designing high-performance Transformers. While Transformers have delivered significant performance improvements, training such networks is extremely memory intensive owing to storing all intermediate activations that are needed for gradient computation during backpropagation, especially for long sequences. To this end, we present Mesa, a memory-saving training framework for Transformers. Specifically, Mesa uses exact activations during forward pass while storing a low-precision version of activations to reduce memory consumption during training. The low-precision activations are then dequantized during back-propagation to compute gradients. Besides, to address the heterogeneous activation distributions in the multi-head self-attention layers, we propose a head-wise activation quantization strategy, which quantizes activations based on the statistics of each head to minimize the approximation error. To further boost training efficiency, we learn quantization parameters by running estimates. More importantly, by re-investing the saved memory in employing a larger batch size or scaling up model size, we may further improve the performance under constrained computational resources. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-100 and ADE20K demonstrate that Mesa can achieve flexible memory-savings (up to 50%) during training while achieving comparable or even better performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ziplab/Mesa.

Haoyu He, Bohan Zhuang, Jing Zhang et al.

Previous human parsing methods are limited to parsing humans into pre-defined classes, which is inflexible for practical fashion applications that often have new fashion item classes. In this paper, we define a novel one-shot human parsing (OSHP) task that requires parsing humans into an open set of classes defined by any test example. During training, only base classes are exposed, which only overlap with part of the test-time classes. To address three main challenges in OSHP, i.e., small sizes, testing bias, and similar parts, we devise an End-to-end One-shot human Parsing Network (EOP-Net). Firstly, an end-to-end human parsing framework is proposed to parse the query image into both coarse-grained and fine-grained human classes, which embeds rich semantic information that is shared across different granularities to identify the small-sized human classes. Then, we gradually smooth the training-time static prototypes to get robust class representations. Moreover, we employ a dynamic objective to encourage the network's enhancing features' representational capability in the early training phase while improving features' transferability in the late training phase. Therefore, our method can quickly adapt to the novel classes and mitigate the testing bias issue. In addition, we add a contrastive loss at the prototype level to enforce inter-class distances, thereby discriminating the similar parts. For comprehensive evaluations on the new task, we tailor three existing popular human parsing benchmarks to the OSHP task. Experiments demonstrate that EOP-Net outperforms representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins and serves as a strong baseline for further research. The source code is available at https://github.com/Charleshhy/One-shot-Human-Parsing.

Haoyu He, Jing Zhang, Bhavani Thuraisingham et al.

Prior human parsing models are limited to parsing humans into classes pre-defined in the training data, which is not flexible to generalize to unseen classes, e.g., new clothing in fashion analysis. In this paper, we propose a new problem named one-shot human parsing (OSHP) that requires to parse human into an open set of reference classes defined by any single reference example. During training, only base classes defined in the training set are exposed, which can overlap with part of reference classes. In this paper, we devise a novel Progressive One-shot Parsing network (POPNet) to address two critical challenges , i.e., testing bias and small sizes. POPNet consists of two collaborative metric learning modules named Attention Guidance Module and Nearest Centroid Module, which can learn representative prototypes for base classes and quickly transfer the ability to unseen classes during testing, thereby reducing testing bias. Moreover, POPNet adopts a progressive human parsing framework that can incorporate the learned knowledge of parent classes at the coarse granularity to help recognize the descendant classes at the fine granularity, thereby handling the small sizes issue. Experiments on the ATR-OS benchmark tailored for OSHP demonstrate POPNet outperforms other representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins and establishes a strong baseline. Source code can be found at https://github.com/Charleshhy/One-shot-Human-Parsing.

Zhiyuan Chen, Yuelin Guo, Zitong Huang et al.

Object detection models demand large-scale annotated datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to create. This motivated Imaginary Supervised Object Detection (ISOD), where models train on synthetic images and test on real images. However, existing methods face three limitations: (1) synthetic datasets suffer from simplistic prompts, poor image quality, and weak supervision; (2) DETR-based detectors, due to their random query initialization, struggle with slow convergence and overfitting to synthetic patterns, hindering real-world generalization; (3) uniform denoising pressure promotes model overfitting to pseudo-label noise. We propose Cascade HQP-DETR to address these limitations. First, we introduce a high-quality data pipeline using LLaMA-3, Flux, and Grounding DINO to generate the FluxVOC and FluxCOCO datasets, advancing ISOD from weak to full supervision. Second, our High-Quality Proposal guided query encoding initializes object queries with image-specific priors from SAM-generated proposals and RoI-pooled features, accelerating convergence while steering the model to learn transferable features instead of overfitting to synthetic patterns. Third, our cascade denoising algorithm dynamically adjusts training weights through progressively increasing IoU thresholds across decoder layers, guiding the model to learn robust boundaries from reliable visual cues rather than overfitting to noisy labels. Trained for just 12 epochs solely on FluxVOC, Cascade HQP-DETR achieves a SOTA 61.04\% mAP@0.5 on PASCAL VOC 2007, outperforming strong baselines, with its competitive real-data performance confirming the architecture's universal applicability.

Markus Flicke, Glenn Angrabeit, Madhav Iyengar et al.

Scholar Inbox is a new open-access platform designed to address the challenges researchers face in staying current with the rapidly expanding volume of scientific literature. We provide personalized recommendations, continuous updates from open-access archives (arXiv, bioRxiv, etc.), visual paper summaries, semantic search, and a range of tools to streamline research workflows and promote open research access. The platform's personalized recommendation system is trained on user ratings, ensuring that recommendations are tailored to individual researchers' interests. To further enhance the user experience, Scholar Inbox also offers a map of science that provides an overview of research across domains, enabling users to easily explore specific topics. We use this map to address the cold start problem common in recommender systems, as well as an active learning strategy that iteratively prompts users to rate a selection of papers, allowing the system to learn user preferences quickly. We evaluate the quality of our recommendation system on a novel dataset of 800k user ratings, which we make publicly available, as well as via an extensive user study. https://www.scholar-inbox.com/

Xurun Wang, Guangrui Liu, Xinjie Li et al.

Machine learning models have been shown to be susceptible to membership inference attack, which can be used to determine whether a given sample appears in the training data. Existing membership inference methods commonly assume that the adversary has full access to the features of the target sample. This assumption, however, does not hold in many real-world scenarios where only partial features information is available, thereby limiting the applicability of these methods. In this work, we study an inference scenario where the adversary observes only partial features of each sample and aims to infer whether this observed subset was present in the training set of the target model. We define this problem as Partial Feature Membership Inference (PFMI). To address this problem, we propose MRAD (Memory-guided Reconstruction and Anomaly Detection), a two-stage attack framework. In the first stage, MRAD optimizes the unknown feature values to minimize the loss of the sample. In the second stage, it measures the deviation between the reconstructed sample and the training distribution using anomaly detection. Empirical results demonstrate that MRAD is effective across a range of datasets, and maintains compatibility with various off-the-shelf anomaly detection techniques. For example, on STL-10, our attack achieves an AUC of around 0.6 even with 40% of the missing features.

Haoyu He, Xingjian Shi, Jonas Mueller et al.

We aim to identify how different components in the KD pipeline affect the resulting performance and how much the optimal KD pipeline varies across different datasets/tasks, such as the data augmentation policy, the loss function, and the intermediate representation for transferring the knowledge between teacher and student. To tease apart their effects, we propose Distiller, a meta KD framework that systematically combines a broad range of techniques across different stages of the KD pipeline, which enables us to quantify each component's contribution. Within Distiller, we unify commonly used objectives for distillation of intermediate representations under a universal mutual information (MI) objective and propose a class of MI-$α$ objective functions with better bias/variance trade-off for estimating the MI between the teacher and the student. On a diverse set of NLP datasets, the best Distiller configurations are identified via large-scale hyperparameter optimization. Our experiments reveal the following: 1) the approach used to distill the intermediate representations is the most important factor in KD performance, 2) among different objectives for intermediate distillation, MI-$α$ performs the best, and 3) data augmentation provides a large boost for small training datasets or small student networks. Moreover, we find that different datasets/tasks prefer different KD algorithms, and thus propose a simple AutoDistiller algorithm that can recommend a good KD pipeline for a new dataset.