Improving Crowded Object Detection via Copy-Paste

Crowdedness caused by overlapping among similar objects is a ubiquitous challenge in the field of 2D visual object detection. In this paper, we first underline two main effects of the crowdedness issue: 1) IoU-confidence correlation disturbances (ICD) and 2) confused de-duplication (CDD). Then we explore a pathway of cracking these nuts from the perspective of data augmentation. Primarily, a particular copy-paste scheme is proposed towards making crowded scenes. Based on this operation, we first design a "consensus learning" method to further resist the ICD problem and then find out the pasting process naturally reveals a pseudo "depth" of object in the scene, which can be potentially used for alleviating CDD dilemma. Both methods are derived from magical using of the copy-pasting without extra cost for hand-labeling. Experiments show that our approach can easily improve the state-of-the-art detector in typical crowded detection task by more than 2% without any bells and whistles. Moreover, this work can outperform existing data augmentation strategies in crowded scenario.

Information Filter upon Diversity-Improved Decoding for Diversity-Faithfulness Tradeoff in NLG

Some Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks require both faithfulness and diversity. The decoding strategy is intensively related to the quality of the generated text. Strategies such as beam search, greedy search, etc., perform with low diversity and high repetition. On the other hand, guided decoding, the solution towards diversity, may generate unfaithful expressions. To this end, this paper presents Information Filter upon Diversity-Improved Decoding (IFDID) to obtain the tradeoff between diversity and faithfulness. IFDID is a two-stage decoding strategy leveraging the proposed Enhance-Filter framework, which achieves the tradeoff by increasing the probabilities of some typical tokens being selected and subsequently filtering them by their information amount. To verify the effectiveness, we compare our method with other baselines on related CommonGEN, RocStories and AdGen benchmarks, which cover Chinese and English datasets. Our numerical experimental results and human evaluation outcomes verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, as our approach achieves a 1.24 higher ROUGE score describing faithfulness as well as higher diversity represented by 62.5% higher upon Dist-2 than traditional approaches, demonstrating that IFDID is a novel SOTA decoding strategy for the tradeoff between diversity and faithfulness.

Accelerated Linearized Laplace Approximation for Bayesian Deep Learning

Laplace approximation (LA) and its linearized variant (LLA) enable effortless adaptation of pretrained deep neural networks to Bayesian neural networks. The generalized Gauss-Newton (GGN) approximation is typically introduced to improve their tractability. However, LA and LLA are still confronted with non-trivial inefficiency issues and should rely on Kronecker-factored, diagonal, or even last-layer approximate GGN matrices in practical use. These approximations are likely to harm the fidelity of learning outcomes. To tackle this issue, inspired by the connections between LLA and neural tangent kernels (NTKs), we develop a Nystrom approximation to NTKs to accelerate LLA. Our method benefits from the capability of popular deep learning libraries for forward mode automatic differentiation, and enjoys reassuring theoretical guarantees. Extensive studies reflect the merits of the proposed method in aspects of both scalability and performance. Our method can even scale up to architectures like vision transformers. We also offer valuable ablation studies to diagnose our method. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/thudzj/ELLA}.

De-biased Representation Learning for Fairness with Unreliable Labels

Removing bias while keeping all task-relevant information is challenging for fair representation learning methods since they would yield random or degenerate representations w.r.t. labels when the sensitive attributes correlate with labels. Existing works proposed to inject the label information into the learning procedure to overcome such issues. However, the assumption that the observed labels are clean is not always met. In fact, label bias is acknowledged as the primary source inducing discrimination. In other words, the fair pre-processing methods ignore the discrimination encoded in the labels either during the learning procedure or the evaluation stage. This contradiction puts a question mark on the fairness of the learned representations. To circumvent this issue, we explore the following question: \emph{Can we learn fair representations predictable to latent ideal fair labels given only access to unreliable labels?} In this work, we propose a \textbf{D}e-\textbf{B}iased \textbf{R}epresentation Learning for \textbf{F}airness (DBRF) framework which disentangles the sensitive information from non-sensitive attributes whilst keeping the learned representations predictable to ideal fair labels rather than observed biased ones. We formulate the de-biased learning framework through information-theoretic concepts such as mutual information and information bottleneck. The core concept is that DBRF advocates not to use unreliable labels for supervision when sensitive information benefits the prediction of unreliable labels. Experiment results over both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that DBRF effectively learns de-biased representations towards ideal labels.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis of ADAS: A Comparison Study between Literature Review and Complaint Data

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are designed to improve vehicle safety. However, it is difficult to achieve such benefits without understanding the causes and limitations of the current ADAS and their possible solutions. This study 1) investigated the limitations and solutions of ADAS through a literature review, 2) identified the causes and effects of ADAS through consumer complaints using natural language processing models, and 3) compared the major differences between the two. These two lines of research identified similar categories of ADAS causes, including human factors, environmental factors, and vehicle factors. However, academic research focused more on human factors of ADAS issues and proposed advanced algorithms to mitigate such issues while drivers complained more of vehicle factors of ADAS failures, which led to associated top consequences. The findings from these two sources tend to complement each other and provide important implications for the improvement of ADAS in the future.

Towards Privacy-Preserving, Real-Time and Lossless Feature Matching

Most visual retrieval applications store feature vectors for downstream matching tasks. These vectors, from where user information can be spied out, will cause privacy leakage if not carefully protected. To mitigate privacy risks, current works primarily utilize non-invertible transformations or fully cryptographic algorithms. However, transformation-based methods usually fail to achieve satisfying matching performances while cryptosystems suffer from heavy computational overheads. In addition, secure levels of current methods should be improved to confront potential adversary attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a plug-in module called SecureVector that protects features by random permutations, 4L-DEC converting and existing homomorphic encryption techniques. For the first time, SecureVector achieves real-time and lossless feature matching among sanitized features, along with much higher security levels than current state-of-the-arts. Extensive experiments on face recognition, person re-identification, image retrieval, and privacy analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Given limited public projects in this field, codes of our method and implemented baselines are made open-source in https://github.com/IrvingMeng/SecureVector.

Deep Ensemble as a Gaussian Process Approximate Posterior

Deep Ensemble (DE) is an effective alternative to Bayesian neural networks for uncertainty quantification in deep learning. The uncertainty of DE is usually conveyed by the functional inconsistency among the ensemble members, say, the disagreement among their predictions. Yet, the functional inconsistency stems from unmanageable randomness and may easily collapse in specific cases. To render the uncertainty of DE reliable, we propose a refinement of DE where the functional inconsistency is explicitly characterized, and further tuned w.r.t. the training data and certain priori beliefs. Specifically, we describe the functional inconsistency with the empirical covariance of the functions dictated by ensemble members, which, along with the mean, define a Gaussian process (GP). Then, with specific priori uncertainty imposed, we maximize functional evidence lower bound to make the GP specified by DE approximate the Bayesian posterior. In this way, we relate DE to Bayesian inference to enjoy reliable Bayesian uncertainty. Moreover, we provide strategies to make the training efficient. Our approach consumes only marginally added training cost than the standard DE, but achieves better uncertainty quantification than DE and its variants across diverse scenarios.

Fully-integrated multipurpose microwave frequency identification system on a single chip

We demonstrate a fully-integrated multipurpose microwave frequency identification system on silicon-on-insulator platform. Thanks to its multipurpose features, the chip is able to identify different types of microwave signals, including single-frequency, multiple-frequency, chirped and frequency-hopping microwave signals, as well as discriminate instantaneous frequency variation among the frequency-modulated signals. This demonstration exhibits fully integrated solution and fully functional microwave frequency identification, which can meet the requirements in reduction of size, weight and power for future advanced microwave photonic processor.

Improving Federated Learning Face Recognition via Privacy-Agnostic Clusters

The growing public concerns on data privacy in face recognition can be greatly addressed by the federated learning (FL) paradigm. However, conventional FL methods perform poorly due to the uniqueness of the task: broadcasting class centers among clients is crucial for recognition performances but leads to privacy leakage. To resolve the privacy-utility paradox, this work proposes PrivacyFace, a framework largely improves the federated learning face recognition via communicating auxiliary and privacy-agnostic information among clients. PrivacyFace mainly consists of two components: First, a practical Differentially Private Local Clustering (DPLC) mechanism is proposed to distill sanitized clusters from local class centers. Second, a consensus-aware recognition loss subsequently encourages global consensuses among clients, which ergo results in more discriminative features. The proposed framework is mathematically proved to be differentially private, introducing a lightweight overhead as well as yielding prominent performance boosts (\textit{e.g.}, +9.63\% and +10.26\% for TAR@FAR=1e-4 on IJB-B and IJB-C respectively). Extensive experiments and ablation studies on a large-scale dataset have demonstrated the efficacy and practicability of our method.

Basket-based Softmax

Softmax-based losses have achieved state-of-the-art performances on various tasks such as face recognition and re-identification. However, these methods highly relied on clean datasets with global labels, which limits their usage in many real-world applications. An important reason is that merging and organizing datasets from various temporal and spatial scenarios is usually not realistic, as noisy labels can be introduced and exponential-increasing resources are required. To address this issue, we propose a novel mining-during-training strategy called Basket-based Softmax (BBS) as well as its parallel version to effectively train models on multiple datasets in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, for each training sample, we simultaneously adopt similarity scores as the clue to mining negative classes from other datasets, and dynamically add them to assist the learning of discriminative features. Experimentally, we demonstrate the efficiency and superiority of the BBS on the tasks of face recognition and re-identification, with both simulated and real-world datasets.