Unsupervised Representation Learning by InvariancePropagation

Unsupervised learning methods based on contrastive learning have drawn increasing attention and achieved promising results. Most of them aim to learn representations invariant to instance-level variations, which are provided by different views of the same instance. In this paper, we propose Invariance Propagation to focus on learning representations invariant to category-level variations, which are provided by different instances from the same category. Our method recursively discovers semantically consistent samples residing in the same high-density regions in representation space. We demonstrate a hard sampling strategy to concentrate on maximizing the agreement between the anchor sample and its hard positive samples, which provide more intra-class variations to help capture more abstract invariance. As a result, with a ResNet-50 as the backbone, our method achieves 71.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet linear classification and 78.2% top-5 accuracy fine-tuning on only 1% labels, surpassing previous results. We also achieve state-of-the-art performance on other downstream tasks, including linear classification on Places205 and Pascal VOC, and transfer learning on small scale datasets.

Tackling Over-Smoothing for General Graph Convolutional Networks

Increasing the depth of GCN, which is expected to permit more expressivity, is shown to incur performance detriment especially on node classification. The main cause of this lies in over-smoothing. The over-smoothing issue drives the output of GCN towards a space that contains limited distinguished information among nodes, leading to poor expressivity. Several works on refining the architecture of deep GCN have been proposed, but it is still unknown in theory whether or not these refinements are able to relieve over-smoothing. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze how general GCNs act with the increase in depth, including generic GCN, GCN with bias, ResGCN, and APPNP. We find that all these models are characterized by a universal process: all nodes converging to a cuboid. Upon this theorem, we propose DropEdge to alleviate over-smoothing by randomly removing a certain number of edges at each training epoch. Theoretically, DropEdge either reduces the convergence speed of over-smoothing or relieves the information loss caused by dimension collapse. Experimental evaluations on simulated dataset have visualized the difference in over-smoothing between different GCNs. Moreover, extensive experiments on several real benchmarks support that DropEdge consistently improves the performance on a variety of both shallow and deep GCNs.

Rethinking and Relieving Over-Smoothing in Deep GCNs

\emph{Over-fitting} and \emph{over-smoothing} are two main obstacles of developing deep Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for node classification. In particular, over-fitting weakens the generalization ability on small dataset, while over-smoothing impedes model training by isolating output representations from the input features with the increase in network depth. This paper proposes DropEdge, a novel and flexible technique to alleviate both issues. At its core, DropEdge randomly removes a certain number of edges from the input graph at each training epoch, acting like a data augmenter and also a message passing reducer. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate that DropEdge either reduces the convergence speed of over-smoothing or relieves the information loss caused by it. More importantly, our DropEdge is a general skill that can be equipped with many other backbone models (\emph{e.g.} GCN, ResGCN, GraphSAGE, and JKNet) for enhanced performance. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks verify that DropEdge consistently improves the performance on a variety of both shallow and deep GCNs. The effect of DropEdge on preventing over-smoothing is empirically visualized and validated as well. Codes are released on~\url{https://github.com/DropEdge/DropEdge}.

A Boundary Based Out-of-Distribution Classifier for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) is a challenging topic that has promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Using a gating mechanism that discriminates the unseen samples from the seen samples can decompose the GZSL problem to a conventional Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) problem and a supervised classification problem. However, training the gate is usually challenging due to the lack of data in the unseen domain. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a boundary based Out-of-Distribution (OOD) classifier which classifies the unseen and seen domains by only using seen samples for training. First, we learn a shared latent space on a unit hyper-sphere where the latent distributions of visual features and semantic attributes are aligned class-wisely. Then we find the boundary and the center of the manifold for each class. By leveraging the class centers and boundaries, the unseen samples can be separated from the seen samples. After that, we use two experts to classify the seen and unseen samples separately. We extensively validate our approach on five popular benchmark datasets including AWA1, AWA2, CUB, FLO and SUN. The experimental results show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.

Resolution Switchable Networks for Runtime Efficient Image Recognition

We propose a general method to train a single convolutional neural network which is capable of switching image resolutions at inference. Thus the running speed can be selected to meet various computational resource limits. Networks trained with the proposed method are named Resolution Switchable Networks (RS-Nets). The basic training framework shares network parameters for handling images which differ in resolution, yet keeps separate batch normalization layers. Though it is parameter-efficient in design, it leads to inconsistent accuracy variations at different resolutions, for which we provide a detailed analysis from the aspect of the train-test recognition discrepancy. A multi-resolution ensemble distillation is further designed, where a teacher is learnt on the fly as a weighted ensemble over resolutions. Thanks to the ensemble and knowledge distillation, RS-Nets enjoy accuracy improvements at a wide range of resolutions compared with individually trained models. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset are provided, and we additionally consider quantization problems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yikaiw/RS-Nets.

Towards Embodied Scene Description

Embodiment is an important characteristic for all intelligent agents (creatures and robots), while existing scene description tasks mainly focus on analyzing images passively and the semantic understanding of the scenario is separated from the interaction between the agent and the environment. In this work, we propose the Embodied Scene Description, which exploits the embodiment ability of the agent to find an optimal viewpoint in its environment for scene description tasks. A learning framework with the paradigms of imitation learning and reinforcement learning is established to teach the intelligent agent to generate corresponding sensorimotor activities. The proposed framework is tested on both the AI2Thor dataset and a real world robotic platform demonstrating the effectiveness and extendability of the developed method.

Reusing Discriminators for Encoding: Towards Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation is a central task in computer vision. Current translation frameworks will abandon the discriminator once the training process is completed. This paper contends a novel role of the discriminator by reusing it for encoding the images of the target domain. The proposed architecture, termed as NICE-GAN, exhibits two advantageous patterns over previous approaches: First, it is more compact since no independent encoding component is required; Second, this plug-in encoder is directly trained by the adversary loss, making it more informative and trained more effectively if a multi-scale discriminator is applied. The main issue in NICE-GAN is the coupling of translation with discrimination along the encoder, which could incur training inconsistency when we play the min-max game via GAN. To tackle this issue, we develop a decoupled training strategy by which the encoder is only trained when maximizing the adversary loss while keeping frozen otherwise. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of NICE-GAN over state-of-the-art methods in terms of FID, KID, and also human preference. Comprehensive ablation studies are also carried out to isolate the validity of each proposed component. Our codes are available at https://github.com/alpc91/NICE-GAN-pytorch.