KRNet: Towards Efficient Knowledge Replay

The knowledge replay technique has been widely used in many tasks such as continual learning and continuous domain adaptation. The key lies in how to effectively encode the knowledge extracted from previous data and replay them during current training procedure. A simple yet effective model to achieve knowledge replay is autoencoder. However, the number of stored latent codes in autoencoder increases linearly with the scale of data and the trained encoder is redundant for the replaying stage. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient knowledge recording network (KRNet) which directly maps an arbitrary sample identity number to the corresponding datum. Compared with autoencoder, our KRNet requires significantly ($400\times$) less storage cost for the latent codes and can be trained without the encoder sub-network. Extensive experiments validate the efficiency of KRNet, and as a showcase, it is successfully applied in the task of continual learning.

Self-distilled Knowledge Delegator for Exemplar-free Class Incremental Learning

Exemplar-free incremental learning is extremely challenging due to inaccessibility of data from old tasks. In this paper, we attempt to exploit the knowledge encoded in a previously trained classification model to handle the catastrophic forgetting problem in continual learning. Specifically, we introduce a so-called knowledge delegator, which is capable of transferring knowledge from the trained model to a randomly re-initialized new model by generating informative samples. Given the previous model only, the delegator is effectively learned using a self-distillation mechanism in a data-free manner. The knowledge extracted by the delegator is then utilized to maintain the performance of the model on old tasks in incremental learning. This simple incremental learning framework surpasses existing exemplar-free methods by a large margin on four widely used class incremental benchmarks, namely CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, Caltech-101 and Flowers-102. Notably, we achieve comparable performance to some exemplar-based methods without accessing any exemplars.

Topology-aware Convolutional Neural Network for Efficient Skeleton-based Action Recognition

In the context of skeleton-based action recognition, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been rapidly developed, whereas convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have received less attention. One reason is that CNNs are considered poor in modeling the irregular skeleton topology. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a pure CNN architecture named Topology-aware CNN (Ta-CNN) in this paper. In particular, we develop a novel cross-channel feature augmentation module, which is a combo of map-attend-group-map operations. By applying the module to the coordinate level and the joint level subsequently, the topology feature is effectively enhanced. Notably, we theoretically prove that graph convolution is a special case of normal convolution when the joint dimension is treated as channels. This confirms that the topology modeling power of GCNs can also be implemented by using a CNN. Moreover, we creatively design a SkeletonMix strategy which mixes two persons in a unique manner and further boosts the performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four widely used datasets, i.e. N-UCLA, SBU, NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 to verify the effectiveness of Ta-CNN. We surpass existing CNN-based methods significantly. Compared with leading GCN-based methods, we achieve comparable performance with much less complexity in terms of the required GFLOPs and parameters.

Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization in Real World:New Benchmark and Strong Baseline

Conventional domain generalization aims to learn domain invariant representation from multiple domains, which requires accurate annotations. In realistic application scenarios, however, it is too cumbersome or even infeasible to collect and annotate the large mass of data. Yet, web data provides a free lunch to access a huge amount of unlabeled data with rich style information that can be harnessed to augment domain generalization ability. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, termed as semi-supervised domain generalization, to study how to interact the labeled and unlabeled domains, and establish two benchmarks including a web-crawled dataset, which poses a novel yet realistic challenge to push the limits of existing technologies. To tackle this task, a straightforward solution is to propagate the class information from the labeled to the unlabeled domains via pseudo labeling in conjunction with domain confusion training. Considering narrowing domain gap can improve the quality of pseudo labels and further advance domain invariant feature learning for generalization, we propose a cycle learning framework to encourage the positive feedback between label propagation and domain generalization, in favor of an evolving intermediate domain bridging the labeled and unlabeled domains in a curriculum learning manner. Experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our framework. It is worth highlighting that web-crawled data benefits domain generalization as demonstrated in our results. Our code will be available later.

Hindsight Reward Tweaking via Conditional Deep Reinforcement Learning

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny adjustment on them is expensive to evaluate due to the drastically increasing cost of training. To this end, we propose a hindsight reward tweaking approach by designing a novel paradigm for deep reinforcement learning to model the influences of reward functions within a near-optimal space. We simply extend the input observation with a condition vector linearly correlated with the effective environment reward parameters and train the model in a conventional manner except for randomizing reward configurations, obtaining a hyper-policy whose characteristics are sensitively regulated over the condition space. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and study one of its potential application in policy performance boosting with multiple MuJoCo tasks.

TransForensics: Image Forgery Localization with Dense Self-Attention

Nowadays advanced image editing tools and technical skills produce tampered images more realistically, which can easily evade image forensic systems and make authenticity verification of images more difficult. To tackle this challenging problem, we introduce TransForensics, a novel image forgery localization method inspired by Transformers. The two major components in our framework are dense self-attention encoders and dense correction modules. The former is to model global context and all pairwise interactions between local patches at different scales, while the latter is used for improving the transparency of the hidden layers and correcting the outputs from different branches. Compared to previous traditional and deep learning methods, TransForensics not only can capture discriminative representations and obtain high-quality mask predictions but is also not limited by tampering types and patch sequence orders. By conducting experiments on main benchmarks, we show that TransForensics outperforms the stateof-the-art methods by a large margin.

Divide-and-Assemble: Learning Block-wise Memory for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based methods play an important role in unsupervised anomaly detection in images. Ideally, we expect a perfect reconstruction for normal samples and poor reconstruction for abnormal samples. Since the generalizability of deep neural networks is difficult to control, existing models such as autoencoder do not work well. In this work, we interpret the reconstruction of an image as a divide-and-assemble procedure. Surprisingly, by varying the granularity of division on feature maps, we are able to modulate the reconstruction capability of the model for both normal and abnormal samples. That is, finer granularity leads to better reconstruction, while coarser granularity leads to poorer reconstruction. With proper granularity, the gap between the reconstruction error of normal and abnormal samples can be maximized. The divide-and-assemble framework is implemented by embedding a novel multi-scale block-wise memory module into an autoencoder network. Besides, we introduce adversarial learning and explore the semantic latent representation of the discriminator, which improves the detection of subtle anomaly. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the challenging MVTec AD dataset. Remarkably, we improve the vanilla autoencoder model by 10.1% in terms of the AUROC score.

Modulating Localization and Classification for Harmonized Object Detection

Object detection involves two sub-tasks, i.e. localizing objects in an image and classifying them into various categories. For existing CNN-based detectors, we notice the widespread divergence between localization and classification, which leads to degradation in performance. In this work, we propose a mutual learning framework to modulate the two tasks. In particular, the two tasks are forced to learn from each other with a novel mutual labeling strategy. Besides, we introduce a simple yet effective IoU rescoring scheme, which further reduces the divergence. Moreover, we define a Spearman rank correlation-based metric to quantify the divergence, which correlates well with the detection performance. The proposed approach is general-purpose and can be easily injected into existing detectors such as FCOS and RetinaNet. We achieve a significant performance gain over the baseline detectors on the COCO dataset.