Energy-Based Pseudo-Label Refining for Source-free Domain Adaptation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA), which involves adapting models without access to source data, is both demanding and challenging. Existing SFDA techniques typically rely on pseudo-labels generated from confidence levels, leading to negative transfer due to significant noise. To tackle this problem, Energy-Based Pseudo-Label Refining (EBPR) is proposed for SFDA. Pseudo-labels are created for all sample clusters according to their energy scores. Global and class energy thresholds are computed to selectively filter pseudo-labels. Furthermore, a contrastive learning strategy is introduced to filter difficult samples, aligning them with their augmented versions to learn more discriminative features. Our method is validated on the Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA-C datasets, consistently finding that our model outperformed state-of-the-art methods.

On the Practice of Deep Hierarchical Ensemble Network for Ad Conversion Rate Prediction

The predictions of click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR) play a crucial role in the success of ad-recommendation systems. A Deep Hierarchical Ensemble Network (DHEN) has been proposed to integrate multiple feature crossing modules and has achieved great success in CTR prediction. However, its performance for CVR prediction is unclear in the conversion ads setting, where an ad bids for the probability of a user's off-site actions on a third party website or app, including purchase, add to cart, sign up, etc. A few challenges in DHEN: 1) What feature-crossing modules (MLP, DCN, Transformer, to name a few) should be included in DHEN? 2) How deep and wide should DHEN be to achieve the best trade-off between efficiency and efficacy? 3) What hyper-parameters to choose in each feature-crossing module? Orthogonal to the model architecture, the input personalization features also significantly impact model performance with a high degree of freedom. In this paper, we attack this problem and present our contributions biased to the applied data science side, including: First, we propose a multitask learning framework with DHEN as the single backbone model architecture to predict all CVR tasks, with a detailed study on how to make DHEN work effectively in practice; Second, we build both on-site real-time user behavior sequences and off-site conversion event sequences for CVR prediction purposes, and conduct ablation study on its importance; Last but not least, we propose a self-supervised auxiliary loss to predict future actions in the input sequence, to help resolve the label sparseness issue in CVR prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous single feature crossing modules with pre-trained user personalization features.

DynAlign: Unsupervised Dynamic Taxonomy Alignment for Cross-Domain Segmentation

Current unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for semantic segmentation typically assume identical class labels between the source and target domains. This assumption ignores the label-level domain gap, which is common in real-world scenarios, thus limiting their ability to identify finer-grained or novel categories without requiring extensive manual annotation. A promising direction to address this limitation lies in recent advancements in foundation models, which exhibit strong generalization abilities due to their rich prior knowledge. However, these models often struggle with domain-specific nuances and underrepresented fine-grained categories. To address these challenges, we introduce DynAlign, a framework that integrates UDA with foundation models to bridge both the image-level and label-level domain gaps. Our approach leverages prior semantic knowledge to align source categories with target categories that can be novel, more fine-grained, or named differently (e.g., vehicle to {car, truck, bus}). Foundation models are then employed for precise segmentation and category reassignment. To further enhance accuracy, we propose a knowledge fusion approach that dynamically adapts to varying scene contexts. DynAlign generates accurate predictions in a new target label space without requiring any manual annotations, allowing seamless adaptation to new taxonomies through either model retraining or direct inference. Experiments on the street scene semantic segmentation benchmarks GTA to Mapillary Vistas and GTA to IDD validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a significant improvement over existing methods. Our code will be publicly available.

SPARNet: Continual Test-Time Adaptation via Sample Partitioning Strategy and Anti-Forgetting Regularization

Test-time Adaptation (TTA) aims to improve model performance when the model encounters domain changes after deployment. The standard TTA mainly considers the case where the target domain is static, while the continual TTA needs to undergo a sequence of domain changes. This encounters a significant challenge as the model needs to adapt for the long-term and is unaware of when the domain changes occur. The quality of pseudo-labels is hard to guarantee. Noisy pseudo-labels produced by simple self-training methods can cause error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose a new framework named SPARNet which consists of two parts, sample partitioning strategy and anti-forgetting regularization. The sample partition strategy divides samples into two groups, namely reliable samples and unreliable samples. According to the characteristics of each group of samples, we choose different strategies to deal with different groups of samples. This ensures that reliable samples contribute more to the model. At the same time, the negative impacts of unreliable samples are eliminated by the mean teacher's consistency learning. Finally, we introduce a regularization term to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem, which can limit important parameters from excessive changes. This term enables long-term adaptation of parameters in the network. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in continual TTA scenario by conducting a large number of experiments on CIFAR10-C, CIFAR100-C and ImageNet-C.

B2Net: Camouflaged Object Detection via Boundary Aware and Boundary Fusion

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify objects in images that are well hidden in the environment due to their high similarity to the background in terms of texture and color. However, existing most boundary-guided camouflage object detection algorithms tend to generate object boundaries early in the network, and inaccurate edge priors often introduce noises in object detection. Address on this issue, we propose a novel network named B2Net aiming to enhance the accuracy of obtained boundaries by reusing boundary-aware modules at different stages of the network. Specifically, we present a Residual Feature Enhanced Module (RFEM) with the goal of integrating more discriminative feature representations to enhance detection accuracy and reliability. After that, the Boundary Aware Module (BAM) is introduced to explore edge cues twice by integrating spatial information from low-level features and semantic information from high-level features. Finally, we design the Cross-scale Boundary Fusion Module(CBFM) that integrate information across different scales in a top-down manner, merging boundary features with object features to obtain a comprehensive feature representation incorporating boundary information. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method B2Net outperforms 15 state-of-art methods under widely used evaluation metrics. Code will be made publicly available.

DecoratingFusion: A LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network with the Combination of Point-level and Feature-level Fusion

Lidars and cameras play essential roles in autonomous driving, offering complementary information for 3D detection. The state-of-the-art fusion methods integrate them at the feature level, but they mostly rely on the learned soft association between point clouds and images, which lacks interpretability and neglects the hard association between them. In this paper, we combine feature-level fusion with point-level fusion, using hard association established by the calibration matrices to guide the generation of object queries. Specifically, in the early fusion stage, we use the 2D CNN features of images to decorate the point cloud data, and employ two independent sparse convolutions to extract the decorated point cloud features. In the mid-level fusion stage, we initialize the queries with a center heatmap and embed the predicted class labels as auxiliary information into the queries, making the initial positions closer to the actual centers of the targets. Extensive experiments conducted on two popular datasets, i.e. KITTI, Waymo, demonstrate the superiority of DecoratingFusion.

GeoTexDensifier: Geometry-Texture-Aware Densification for High-Quality Photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently attracted wide attentions in various areas such as 3D navigation, Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D simulation, due to its photorealistic and efficient rendering performance. High-quality reconstrution of 3DGS relies on sufficient splats and a reasonable distribution of these splats to fit real geometric surface and texture details, which turns out to be a challenging problem. We present GeoTexDensifier, a novel geometry-texture-aware densification strategy to reconstruct high-quality Gaussian splats which better comply with the geometric structure and texture richness of the scene. Specifically, our GeoTexDensifier framework carries out an auxiliary texture-aware densification method to produce a denser distribution of splats in fully textured areas, while keeping sparsity in low-texture regions to maintain the quality of Gaussian point cloud. Meanwhile, a geometry-aware splitting strategy takes depth and normal priors to guide the splitting sampling and filter out the noisy splats whose initial positions are far from the actual geometric surfaces they aim to fit, under a Validation of Depth Ratio Change checking. With the help of relative monocular depth prior, such geometry-aware validation can effectively reduce the influence of scattered Gaussians to the final rendering quality, especially in regions with weak textures or without sufficient training views. The texture-aware densification and geometry-aware splitting strategies are fully combined to obtain a set of high-quality Gaussian splats. We experiment our GeoTexDensifier framework on various datasets and compare our Novel View Synthesis results to other state-of-the-art 3DGS approaches, with detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in producing more photorealistic 3DGS models.

Continuous Test-time Domain Adaptation for Efficient Fault Detection under Evolving Operating Conditions

Fault detection is crucial in industrial systems to prevent failures and optimize performance by distinguishing abnormal from normal operating conditions. Data-driven methods have been gaining popularity for fault detection tasks as the amount of condition monitoring data from complex industrial systems increases. Despite these advances, early fault detection remains a challenge under real-world scenarios. The high variability of operating conditions and environments makes it difficult to collect comprehensive training datasets that can represent all possible operating conditions, especially in the early stages of system operation. Furthermore, these variations often evolve over time, potentially leading to entirely new data distributions in the future that were previously unseen. These challenges prevent direct knowledge transfer across different units and over time, leading to the distribution gap between training and testing data and inducing performance degradation of those methods in real-world scenarios. To overcome this, our work introduces a novel approach for continuous test-time domain adaptation. This enables early-stage robust anomaly detection by addressing domain shifts and limited data representativeness issues. We propose a Test-time domain Adaptation Anomaly Detection (TAAD) framework that separates input variables into system parameters and measurements, employing two domain adaptation modules to independently adapt to each input category. This method allows for effective adaptation to evolving operating conditions and is particularly beneficial in systems with scarce data. Our approach, tested on a real-world pump monitoring dataset, shows significant improvements over existing domain adaptation methods in fault detection, demonstrating enhanced accuracy and reliability.

CUT: A Controllable, Universal, and Training-Free Visual Anomaly Generation Framework

Visual anomaly detection (AD) inherently faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of anomalous data. Although numerous works have been proposed to synthesize anomalous samples, the generated samples often lack authenticity or can only reflect the distribution of the available training data samples. In this work, we propose CUT: a Controllable, Universal and Training-free visual anomaly generation framework, which leverages the capability of Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation to generate diverse and realistic anomalies. With CUT, we achieve controllable and realistic anomaly generation universally across both unseen data and novel anomaly types, using a single model without acquiring additional training effort. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose a Vision-Language-based Anomaly Detection framework (VLAD). By training the VLAD model with our generated anomalous samples, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark anomaly detection tasks, highlighting the significant improvements enabled by our synthetic data.

Analytic Federated Learning

In this paper, we introduce analytic federated learning (AFL), a new training paradigm that brings analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions to the federated learning (FL) community. Our AFL draws inspiration from analytic learning -- a gradient-free technique that trains neural networks with analytical solutions in one epoch. In the local client training stage, the AFL facilitates a one-epoch training, eliminating the necessity for multi-epoch updates. In the aggregation stage, we derive an absolute aggregation (AA) law. This AA law allows a single-round aggregation, removing the need for multiple aggregation rounds. More importantly, the AFL exhibits a \textit{weight-invariant} property, meaning that regardless of how the full dataset is distributed among clients, the aggregated result remains identical. This could spawn various potentials, such as data heterogeneity invariance, client-number invariance, absolute convergence, and being hyperparameter-free (our AFL is the first hyperparameter-free method in FL history). We conduct experiments across various FL settings including extremely non-IID ones, and scenarios with a large number of clients (e.g., $\ge 1000$). In all these settings, our AFL constantly performs competitively while existing FL techniques encounter various obstacles. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZHUANGHP/Analytic-federated-learning}