Tong Zhang

Shizhe Diao, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong et al.

Foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. As the technique keeps attracting attention from the AI community, an increasing number of foundation models are becoming publicly accessible. However, a significant shortcoming of most of these models lies in their performance in specialized-domain and task-specific applications, necessitating domain- and task-aware fine-tuning to develop effective scientific language models. As the number of available foundation models and specialized tasks keeps growing, the job of training scientific language models becomes highly nontrivial. In this paper, we initiate steps to tackle this issue. We introduce an extensible and lightweight toolkit, LMFlow, which aims to simplify the domain- and task-aware finetuning of general foundation models. LMFlow offers a complete finetuning workflow for a foundation model to support specialized training with limited computing resources. Furthermore, it supports continuous pretraining, instruction tuning, parameter-efficient finetuning, alignment tuning, inference acceleration, long context generalization, model customization, and even multimodal finetuning, along with carefully designed and extensible APIs. This toolkit has been thoroughly tested and is available at https://github.com/OptimalScale/LMFlow.

Helbert Paat, Qing Lian, Weilong Yao et al.

Advancements in deep learning-based 3D object detection necessitate the availability of large-scale datasets. However, this requirement introduces the challenge of manual annotation, which is often both burdensome and time-consuming. To tackle this issue, the literature has seen the emergence of several weakly supervised frameworks for 3D object detection which can automatically generate pseudo labels for unlabeled data. Nevertheless, these generated pseudo labels contain noise and are not as accurate as those labeled by humans. In this paper, we present the first approach that addresses the inherent ambiguities present in pseudo labels by introducing an Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) based uncertainty estimation framework. Specifically, we propose MEDL-U, an EDL framework based on MTrans, which not only generates pseudo labels but also quantifies the associated uncertainties. However, applying EDL to 3D object detection presents three primary challenges: (1) relatively lower pseudolabel quality in comparison to other autolabelers; (2) excessively high evidential uncertainty estimates; and (3) lack of clear interpretability and effective utilization of uncertainties for downstream tasks. We tackle these issues through the introduction of an uncertainty-aware IoU-based loss, an evidence-aware multi-task loss function, and the implementation of a post-processing stage for uncertainty refinement. Our experimental results demonstrate that probabilistic detectors trained using the outputs of MEDL-U surpass deterministic detectors trained using outputs from previous 3D annotators on the KITTI val set for all difficulty levels. Moreover, MEDL-U achieves state-of-the-art results on the KITTI official test set compared to existing 3D automatic annotators.

Wei Zhang, Miaoxin Cai, Tong Zhang et al.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in vision and visual-language tasks within the natural image domain. Owing to the significant diversities between the natural and remote sensing (RS) images, the development of MLLMs in the RS domain is still in the infant stage. To fill the gap, a pioneer MLLM named EarthGPT integrating various multi-sensor RS interpretation tasks uniformly is proposed in this paper for universal RS image comprehension. In EarthGPT, three key techniques are developed including a visual-enhanced perception mechanism, a cross-modal mutual comprehension approach, and a unified instruction tuning method for multi-sensor multi-task in the RS domain. More importantly, a dataset named MMRS-1M featuring large-scale multi-sensor multi-modal RS instruction-following is constructed, comprising over 1M image-text pairs based on 34 existing diverse RS datasets and including multi-sensor images such as optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and infrared. The MMRS-1M dataset addresses the drawback of MLLMs on RS expert knowledge and stimulates the development of MLLMs in the RS domain. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the EarthGPT's superior performance in various RS visual interpretation tasks compared with the other specialist models and MLLMs, proving the effectiveness of the proposed EarthGPT and offering a versatile paradigm for open-set reasoning tasks.

Duo Li, Jie Hu, Changhu Wang et al.

Convolution has been the core ingredient of modern neural networks, triggering the surge of deep learning in vision. In this work, we rethink the inherent principles of standard convolution for vision tasks, specifically spatial-agnostic and channel-specific. Instead, we present a novel atomic operation for deep neural networks by inverting the aforementioned design principles of convolution, coined as involution. We additionally demystify the recent popular self-attention operator and subsume it into our involution family as an over-complicated instantiation. The proposed involution operator could be leveraged as fundamental bricks to build the new generation of neural networks for visual recognition, powering different deep learning models on several prevalent benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection and segmentation, together with Cityscapes segmentation. Our involution-based models improve the performance of convolutional baselines using ResNet-50 by up to 1.6% top-1 accuracy, 2.5% and 2.4% bounding box AP, and 4.7% mean IoU absolutely while compressing the computational cost to 66%, 65%, 72%, and 57% on the above benchmarks, respectively. Code and pre-trained models for all the tasks are available at https://github.com/d-li14/involution.

Kai Han, Yunhe Wang, Qiulin Zhang et al.

To obtain excellent deep neural architectures, a series of techniques are carefully designed in EfficientNets. The giant formula for simultaneously enlarging the resolution, depth and width provides us a Rubik's cube for neural networks. So that we can find networks with high efficiency and excellent performance by twisting the three dimensions. This paper aims to explore the twisting rules for obtaining deep neural networks with minimum model sizes and computational costs. Different from the network enlarging, we observe that resolution and depth are more important than width for tiny networks. Therefore, the original method, i.e., the compound scaling in EfficientNet is no longer suitable. To this end, we summarize a tiny formula for downsizing neural architectures through a series of smaller models derived from the EfficientNet-B0 with the FLOPs constraint. Experimental results on the ImageNet benchmark illustrate that our TinyNet performs much better than the smaller version of EfficientNets using the inversed giant formula. For instance, our TinyNet-E achieves a 59.9% Top-1 accuracy with only 24M FLOPs, which is about 1.9% higher than that of the previous best MobileNetV3 with similar computational cost. Code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/ghostnet/tree/master/tinynet_pytorch, and https://gitee.com/mindspore/mindspore/tree/master/model_zoo/research/cv/tinynet.

Guilin Li, Xing Zhang, Zitong Wang et al.

Recently, the efficiency of automatic neural architecture design has been significantly improved by gradient-based search methods such as DARTS. However, recent literature has brought doubt to the generalization ability of DARTS, arguing that DARTS performs poorly when the search space is changed, i.e, when different set of candidate operators are used. Regularization techniques such as early stopping have been proposed to partially solve this problem. In this paper, we tackle this problem from a different perspective by identifying two contributing factors to the collapse of DARTS when the search space changes: (1) the correlation of similar operators incurs unfavorable competition among them and makes their relative importance score unreliable and (2) the optimization complexity gap between the proxy search stage and the final training. Based on these findings, we propose a new hierarchical search algorithm. With its operator clustering and optimization complexity match, the algorithm can consistently find high-performance architecture across various search spaces. For all the five variants of the popular cell-based search spaces, the proposed algorithm always obtains state-of-the-art architecture with best accuracy on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet over other well-established DARTS-alike algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/susan0199/StacNAS.

Yifan Hao, Yanxin Lu, Hanning Zhang et al.

As overparameterized models become increasingly prevalent, training loss alone offers limited insight into generalization performance. While smoothness has been linked to improved generalization across various settings, directly enforcing smoothness in neural networks remains challenging. To address this, we introduce Distributional Input Projection Networks (DIPNet), a novel framework that projects inputs into learnable distributions at each layer. This distributional representation induces a smoother loss landscape with respect to the input, promoting better generalization. We provide theoretical analysis showing that DIPNet reduces both local smoothness measures and the Lipschitz constant of the network, contributing to improved generalization performance. Empirically, we validate DIPNet across a wide range of architectures and tasks, including Vision Transformers (ViTs), Large Language Models (LLMs), ResNet and MLPs. Our method consistently enhances test performance under standard settings, adversarial attacks, out-of-distribution inputs, and reasoning benchmarks. We demonstrate that the proposed input projection strategy can be seamlessly integrated into existing models, providing a general and effective approach for boosting generalization performance in modern deep learning.

Cheng Niu, Yang Guan, Yuanhao Wu et al.

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources' credibility is leveraged for information verification. Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.

Tong Zhang, Haohan Weng, Ke Yi et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have exhibited their great power in a variety of vision tasks. However, the lack of transform-invariant property limits their further applications in complicated real-world scenarios. In this work, we proposed a novel generalized one dimension convolutional operator (OneDConv), which dynamically transforms the convolution kernels based on the input features in a computationally and parametrically efficient manner. The proposed operator can extract the transform-invariant features naturally. It improves the robustness and generalization of convolution without sacrificing the performance on common images. The proposed OneDConv operator can substitute the vanilla convolution, thus it can be incorporated into current popular convolutional architectures and trained end-to-end readily. On several popular benchmarks, OneDConv outperforms the original convolution operation and other proposed models both in canonical and distorted images.

Jiancong Chen, Yingying Zhang, Jingyi Wang et al.

As an important scan plane, four chamber view is routinely performed in both second trimester perinatal screening and fetal echocardiographic examinations. The biometrics in this plane including cardio-thoracic ratio (CTR) and cardiac axis are usually measured by sonographers for diagnosing congenital heart disease. However, due to the commonly existing artifacts like acoustic shadowing, the traditional manual measurements not only suffer from the low efficiency, but also with the inconsistent results depending on the operators' skills. In this paper, we present an anchor-free ellipse detection network, namely EllipseNet, which detects the cardiac and thoracic regions in ellipse and automatically calculates the CTR and cardiac axis for fetal cardiac biometrics in 4-chamber view. In particular, we formulate the network that detects the center of each object as points and regresses the ellipses' parameters simultaneously. We define an intersection-over-union loss to further regulate the regression procedure. We evaluate EllipseNet on clinical echocardiogram dataset with more than 2000 subjects. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Source code will be available at https://git.openi.org.cn/capepoint/EllipseNet .

Lewei Yao, Renjie Pi, Hang Xu et al.

We propose Joint-DetNAS, a unified NAS framework for object detection, which integrates 3 key components: Neural Architecture Search, pruning, and Knowledge Distillation. Instead of naively pipelining these techniques, our Joint-DetNAS optimizes them jointly. The algorithm consists of two core processes: student morphism optimizes the student's architecture and removes the redundant parameters, while dynamic distillation aims to find the optimal matching teacher. For student morphism, weight inheritance strategy is adopted, allowing the student to flexibly update its architecture while fully utilize the predecessor's weights, which considerably accelerates the search; To facilitate dynamic distillation, an elastic teacher pool is trained via integrated progressive shrinking strategy, from which teacher detectors can be sampled without additional cost in subsequent searches. Given a base detector as the input, our algorithm directly outputs the derived student detector with high performance without additional training. Experiments demonstrate that our Joint-DetNAS outperforms the naive pipelining approach by a great margin. Given a classic R101-FPN as the base detector, Joint-DetNAS is able to boost its mAP from 41.4 to 43.9 on MS COCO and reduce the latency by 47%, which is on par with the SOTA EfficientDet while requiring less search cost. We hope our proposed method can provide the community with a new way of jointly optimizing NAS, KD and pruning.

Yawen Duan, Xin Chen, Hang Xu et al.

Recent breakthroughs of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) extend the field's research scope towards a broader range of vision tasks and more diversified search spaces. While existing NAS methods mostly design architectures on a single task, algorithms that look beyond single-task search are surging to pursue a more efficient and universal solution across various tasks. Many of them leverage transfer learning and seek to preserve, reuse, and refine network design knowledge to achieve higher efficiency in future tasks. However, the enormous computational cost and experiment complexity of cross-task NAS are imposing barriers for valuable research in this direction. Existing NAS benchmarks all focus on one type of vision task, i.e., classification. In this work, we propose TransNAS-Bench-101, a benchmark dataset containing network performance across seven tasks, covering classification, regression, pixel-level prediction, and self-supervised tasks. This diversity provides opportunities to transfer NAS methods among tasks and allows for more complex transfer schemes to evolve. We explore two fundamentally different types of search space: cell-level search space and macro-level search space. With 7,352 backbones evaluated on seven tasks, 51,464 trained models with detailed training information are provided. With TransNAS-Bench-101, we hope to encourage the advent of exceptional NAS algorithms that raise cross-task search efficiency and generalizability to the next level. Our dataset file will be available at Mindspore, VEGA.

Xiao Zhou, Weizhong Zhang, Hang Xu et al.

Weight pruning is an effective technique to reduce the model size and inference time for deep neural networks in real-world deployments. However, since magnitudes and relative importance of weights are very different for different layers of a neural network, existing methods rely on either manual tuning or handcrafted heuristic rules to find appropriate pruning rates individually for each layer. This approach generally leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, by directly working on the probability space, we propose an effective network sparsification method called {\it probabilistic masking} (ProbMask), which solves a natural sparsification formulation under global sparsity constraint. The key idea is to use probability as a global criterion for all layers to measure the weight importance. An appealing feature of ProbMask is that the amounts of weight redundancy can be learned automatically via our constraint and thus we avoid the problem of tuning pruning rates individually for different layers in a network. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet demonstrate that our method is highly effective, and can outperform previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin, especially in the high pruning rate situation. Notably, the gap of Top-1 accuracy between our ProbMask and existing methods can be up to 10\%. As a by-product, we show ProbMask is also highly effective in identifying supermasks, which are subnetworks with high performance in a randomly weighted dense neural network.

Qing Lian, Botao Ye, Ruijia Xu et al.

This paper investigates the geometric consistency for monocular 3D object detection, which suffers from the ill-posed depth estimation. We first conduct a thorough analysis to reveal how existing methods fail to consistently localize objects when different geometric shifts occur. In particular, we design a series of geometric manipulations to diagnose existing detectors and then illustrate their vulnerability to consistently associate the depth with object apparent sizes and positions. To alleviate this issue, we propose four geometry-aware data augmentation approaches to enhance the geometric consistency of the detectors. We first modify some commonly used data augmentation methods for 2D images so that they can maintain geometric consistency in 3D spaces. We demonstrate such modifications are important. In addition, we propose a 3D-specific image perturbation method that employs the camera movement. During the augmentation process, the camera system with the corresponding image is manipulated, while the geometric visual cues for depth recovery are preserved. We show that by using the geometric consistency constraints, the proposed augmentation techniques lead to improvements on the KITTI and nuScenes monocular 3D detection benchmarks with state-of-the-art results. In addition, we demonstrate that the augmentation methods are well suited for semi-supervised training and cross-dataset generalization.

Xin Chen, Yawen Duan, Zewei Chen et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieved many breakthroughs in recent years. In spite of its remarkable progress, many algorithms are restricted to particular search spaces. They also lack efficient mechanisms to reuse knowledge when confronting multiple tasks. These challenges preclude their applicability, and motivate our proposal of CATCH, a novel Context-bAsed meTa reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for transferrable arChitecture searcH. The combination of meta-learning and RL allows CATCH to efficiently adapt to new tasks while being agnostic to search spaces. CATCH utilizes a probabilistic encoder to encode task properties into latent context variables, which then guide CATCH's controller to quickly "catch" top-performing networks. The contexts also assist a network evaluator in filtering inferior candidates and speed up learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate CATCH's universality and search efficiency over many other widely-recognized algorithms. It is also capable of handling cross-domain architecture search as competitive networks on ImageNet, COCO, and Cityscapes are identified. This is the first work to our knowledge that proposes an efficient transferrable NAS solution while maintaining robustness across various settings.

Quan Tang, Fagui Liu, Tong Zhang et al.

The way features propagate in Fully Convolutional Networks is of momentous importance to capture multi-scale contexts for obtaining precise segmentation masks. This paper proposes a novel series-parallel hybrid paradigm called the Chained Context Aggregation Module (CAM) to diversify feature propagation. CAM gains features of various spatial scales through chain-connected ladder-style information flows and fuses them in a two-stage process, namely pre-fusion and re-fusion. The serial flow continuously increases receptive fields of output neurons and those in parallel encode different region-based contexts. Each information flow is a shallow encoder-decoder with appropriate down-sampling scales to sufficiently capture contextual information. We further adopt an attention model in CAM to guide feature re-fusion. Based on these developments, we construct the Chained Context Aggregation Network (CANet), which employs an asymmetric decoder to recover precise spatial details of prediction maps. We conduct extensive experiments on six challenging datasets, including Pascal VOC 2012, Pascal Context, Cityscapes, CamVid, SUN-RGBD and GATECH. Results evidence that CANet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Cong Fang, Hanze Dong, Tong Zhang

Recently, over-parameterized neural networks have been extensively analyzed in the literature. However, the previous studies cannot satisfactorily explain why fully trained neural networks are successful in practice. In this paper, we present a new theoretical framework for analyzing over-parameterized neural networks which we call neural feature repopulation. Our analysis can satisfactorily explain the empirical success of two level neural networks that are trained by standard learning algorithms. Our key theoretical result is that in the limit of infinite number of hidden neurons, over-parameterized two-level neural networks trained via the standard (noisy) gradient descent learns a well-defined feature distribution (population), and the limiting feature distribution is nearly optimal for the underlying learning task under certain conditions. Empirical studies confirm that predictions of our theory are consistent with the results observed in real practice.