Asymmetric Duos: Sidekicks Improve Uncertainty

The go-to strategy to apply deep networks in settings where uncertainty informs decisions--ensembling multiple training runs with random initializations--is ill-suited for the extremely large-scale models and practical fine-tuning workflows of today. We introduce a new cost-effective strategy for improving the uncertainty quantification and downstream decisions of a large model (e.g. a fine-tuned ViT-B): coupling it with a less accurate but much smaller "sidekick" (e.g. a fine-tuned ResNet-34) with a fraction of the computational cost. We propose aggregating the predictions of this \emph{Asymmetric Duo} by simple learned weighted averaging. Surprisingly, despite their inherent asymmetry, the sidekick model almost never harms the performance of the larger model. In fact, across five image classification benchmarks and a variety of model architectures and training schemes (including soups), Asymmetric Duos significantly improve accuracy, uncertainty quantification, and selective classification metrics with only ${\sim}10-20\%$ more computation.

LookWhere? Efficient Visual Recognition by Learning Where to Look and What to See from Self-Supervision

Vision transformers are ever larger, more accurate, and more expensive to compute. The expense is even more extreme at high resolution as the number of tokens grows quadratically with the image size. We turn to adaptive computation to cope with this cost by learning to predict where to compute. Our LookWhere method divides the computation between a low-resolution selector and a high-resolution extractor without ever processing the full high-resolution input. We jointly pretrain the selector and extractor without task supervision by distillation from a self-supervised teacher, in effect, learning where and what to compute simultaneously. Unlike prior token reduction methods, which pay to save by pruning already-computed tokens, and prior token selection methods, which require complex and expensive per-task optimization, LookWhere economically and accurately selects and extracts transferrable representations of images. We show that LookWhere excels at sparse recognition on high-resolution inputs (Traffic Signs), maintaining accuracy while reducing FLOPs by up to 34x and time by 6x. It also excels at standard recognition tasks that are global (ImageNet classification) or local (ADE20K segmentation), improving accuracy while reducing time by 1.36x.

ReservoirTTA: Prolonged Test-time Adaptation for Evolving and Recurring Domains

This paper introduces ReservoirTTA, a novel plug-in framework designed for prolonged test-time adaptation (TTA) in scenarios where the test domain continuously shifts over time, including cases where domains recur or evolve gradually. At its core, ReservoirTTA maintains a reservoir of domain-specialized models -- an adaptive test-time model ensemble -- that both detects new domains via online clustering over style features of incoming samples and routes each sample to the appropriate specialized model, and thereby enables domain-specific adaptation. This multi-model strategy overcomes key limitations of single model adaptation, such as catastrophic forgetting, inter-domain interference, and error accumulation, ensuring robust and stable performance on sustained non-stationary test distributions. Our theoretical analysis reveals key components that bound parameter variance and prevent model collapse, while our plug-in TTA module mitigates catastrophic forgetting of previously encountered domains. Extensive experiments on the classification corruption benchmarks, including ImageNet-C and CIFAR-10/100-C, as well as the Cityscapes$\rightarrow$ACDC semantic segmentation task, covering recurring and continuously evolving domain shifts, demonstrate that ReservoirTTA significantly improves adaptation accuracy and maintains stable performance across prolonged, recurring shifts, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Simpler Fast Vision Transformers with a Jumbo CLS Token

We introduce a simple enhancement to the global processing of vision transformers (ViTs) to improve accuracy while maintaining throughput. Our approach, Jumbo, creates a wider CLS token, which is split to match the patch token width before attention, processed with self-attention, and reassembled. After attention, Jumbo applies a dedicated, wider FFN to this token. Jumbo significantly improves over ViT+Registers on ImageNet-1K at high speeds (by 3.2% for ViT-tiny and 13.5% for ViT-nano); these Jumbo models even outperform specialized compute-efficient models while preserving the architectural advantages of plain ViTs. Although Jumbo sees no gains for ViT-small on ImageNet-1K, it gains 3.4% on ImageNet-21K over ViT+Registers. Both findings indicate that Jumbo is most helpful when the ViT is otherwise too narrow for the task. Finally, we show that Jumbo can be easily adapted to excel on data beyond images, e.g., time series.

Galileo: Learning Global and Local Features in Pretrained Remote Sensing Models

From crop mapping to flood detection, machine learning in remote sensing has a wide range of societally beneficial applications. The commonalities between remote sensing data in these applications present an opportunity for pretrained machine learning models tailored to remote sensing to reduce the labeled data and effort required to solve individual tasks. However, such models must be: (i) flexible enough to ingest input data of varying sensor modalities and shapes (i.e., of varying spatial and temporal dimensions), and (ii) able to model Earth surface phenomena of varying scales and types. To solve this gap, we present Galileo, a family of pretrained remote sensing models designed to flexibly process multimodal remote sensing data. We also introduce a novel and highly effective self-supervised learning approach to learn both large- and small-scale features, a challenge not addressed by previous models. Our Galileo models obtain state-of-the-art results across diverse remote sensing tasks.

Adaptive Randomized Smoothing: Certifying Multi-Step Defences against Adversarial Examples

We propose Adaptive Randomized Smoothing (ARS) to certify the predictions of our test-time adaptive models against adversarial examples. ARS extends the analysis of randomized smoothing using f-Differential Privacy to certify the adaptive composition of multiple steps. For the first time, our theory covers the sound adaptive composition of general and high-dimensional functions of noisy input. We instantiate ARS on deep image classification to certify predictions against adversarial examples of bounded $L_{\infty}$ norm. In the $L_{\infty}$ threat model, our flexibility enables adaptation through high-dimensional input-dependent masking. We design adaptivity benchmarks, based on CIFAR-10 and CelebA, and show that ARS improves accuracy by $2$ to $5\%$ points. On ImageNet, ARS improves accuracy by $1$ to $3\%$ points over standard RS without adaptivity.

Seasoning Model Soups for Robustness to Adversarial and Natural Distribution Shifts

Adversarial training is widely used to make classifiers robust to a specific threat or adversary, such as $\ell_p$-norm bounded perturbations of a given $p$-norm. However, existing methods for training classifiers robust to multiple threats require knowledge of all attacks during training and remain vulnerable to unseen distribution shifts. In this work, we describe how to obtain adversarially-robust model soups (i.e., linear combinations of parameters) that smoothly trade-off robustness to different $\ell_p$-norm bounded adversaries. We demonstrate that such soups allow us to control the type and level of robustness, and can achieve robustness to all threats without jointly training on all of them. In some cases, the resulting model soups are more robust to a given $\ell_p$-norm adversary than the constituent model specialized against that same adversary. Finally, we show that adversarially-robust model soups can be a viable tool to adapt to distribution shifts from a few examples.

Where Should I Spend My FLOPS? Efficiency Evaluations of Visual Pre-training Methods

Self-supervised methods have achieved remarkable success in transfer learning, often achieving the same or better accuracy than supervised pre-training. Most prior work has done so by increasing pre-training computation by adding complex data augmentation, multiple views, or lengthy training schedules. In this work, we investigate a related, but orthogonal question: given a fixed FLOP budget, what are the best datasets, models, and (self-)supervised training methods for obtaining high accuracy on representative visual tasks? Given the availability of large datasets, this setting is often more relevant for both academic and industry labs alike. We examine five large-scale datasets (JFT-300M, ALIGN, ImageNet-1K, ImageNet-21K, and COCO) and six pre-training methods (CLIP, DINO, SimCLR, BYOL, Masked Autoencoding, and supervised). In a like-for-like fashion, we characterize their FLOP and CO$_2$ footprints, relative to their accuracy when transferred to a canonical image segmentation task. Our analysis reveals strong disparities in the computational efficiency of pre-training methods and their dependence on dataset quality. In particular, our results call into question the commonly-held assumption that self-supervised methods inherently scale to large, uncurated data. We therefore advocate for (1) paying closer attention to dataset curation and (2) reporting of accuracies in context of the total computational cost.

Back to the Source: Diffusion-Driven Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation harnesses test inputs to improve the accuracy of a model trained on source data when tested on shifted target data. Existing methods update the source model by (re-)training on each target domain. While effective, re-training is sensitive to the amount and order of the data and the hyperparameters for optimization. We instead update the target data, by projecting all test inputs toward the source domain with a generative diffusion model. Our diffusion-driven adaptation method, DDA, shares its models for classification and generation across all domains. Both models are trained on the source domain, then fixed during testing. We augment diffusion with image guidance and self-ensembling to automatically decide how much to adapt. Input adaptation by DDA is more robust than prior model adaptation approaches across a variety of corruptions, architectures, and data regimes on the ImageNet-C benchmark. With its input-wise updates, DDA succeeds where model adaptation degrades on too little data in small batches, dependent data in non-uniform order, or mixed data with multiple corruptions.

Object discovery and representation networks

The promise of self-supervised learning (SSL) is to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to solve complex tasks. While there has been excellent progress with simple, image-level learning, recent methods have shown the advantage of including knowledge of image structure. However, by introducing hand-crafted image segmentations to define regions of interest, or specialized augmentation strategies, these methods sacrifice the simplicity and generality that makes SSL so powerful. Instead, we propose a self-supervised learning paradigm that discovers the structure encoded in these priors by itself. Our method, Odin, couples object discovery and representation networks to discover meaningful image segmentations without any supervision. The resulting learning paradigm is simpler, less brittle, and more general, and achieves state-of-the-art transfer learning results for object detection and instance segmentation on COCO, and semantic segmentation on PASCAL and Cityscapes, while strongly surpassing supervised pre-training for video segmentation on DAVIS.