Domain generalizable (DG) person re-identification (ReID) aims to test across unseen domains without access to the target domain data at training time, which is a realistic but challenging problem. In contrast to methods assuming an identical model for different domains, Mixture of Experts (MoE) exploits multiple domain-specific networks for leveraging complementary information between domains, obtaining impressive results. However, prior MoE-based DG ReID methods suffer from a large model size with the increase of the number of source domains, and most of them overlook the exploitation of domain-invariant characteristics. To handle the two issues above, this paper presents a new approach called Mimicking Embedding via oThers' Aggregation (META) for DG ReID. To avoid the large model size, experts in META do not add a branch network for each source domain but share all the parameters except for the batch normalization layers. Besides multiple experts, META leverages Instance Normalization (IN) and introduces it into a global branch to pursue invariant features across domains. Meanwhile, META considers the relevance of an unseen target sample and source domains via normalization statistics and develops an aggregation network to adaptively integrate multiple experts for mimicking unseen target domain. Benefiting from a proposed consistency loss and an episodic training algorithm, we can expect META to mimic embedding for a truly unseen target domain. Extensive experiments verify that META surpasses state-of-the-art DG ReID methods by a large margin.
Learning to reject unknown samples (not present in the source classes) in the target domain is fairly important for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). There exist two typical UDA scenarios, i.e., open-set, and open-partial-set, and the latter assumes that not all source classes appear in the target domain. However, most prior methods are designed for one UDA scenario and always perform badly on the other UDA scenario. Moreover, they also require the labeled source data during adaptation, limiting their usability in data privacy-sensitive applications. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Universal Model ADaptation (UMAD) framework which handles both UDA scenarios without access to the source data nor prior knowledge about the category shift between domains. Specifically, we aim to learn a source model with an elegantly designed two-head classifier and provide it to the target domain. During adaptation, we develop an informative consistency score to help distinguish unknown samples from known samples. To achieve bilateral adaptation in the target domain, we further maximize localized mutual information to align known samples with the source classifier and employ an entropic loss to push unknown samples far away from the source classification boundary, respectively. Experiments on open-set and open-partial-set UDA scenarios demonstrate that UMAD, as a unified approach without access to source data, exhibits comparable, if not superior, performance to state-of-the-art data-dependent methods.
Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims at learning a multi-class classifier in a phase-by-phase manner, in which only data of a subset of the classes are provided at each phase. Previous works mainly focus on mitigating forgetting in phases after the initial one. However, we find that improving CIL at its initial phase is also a promising direction. Specifically, we experimentally show that directly encouraging CIL Learner at the initial phase to output similar representations as the model jointly trained on all classes can greatly boost the CIL performance. Motivated by this, we study the difference between a na\"ively-trained initial-phase model and the oracle model. Specifically, since one major difference between these two models is the number of training classes, we investigate how such difference affects the model representations. We find that, with fewer training classes, the data representations of each class lie in a long and narrow region; with more training classes, the representations of each class scatter more uniformly. Inspired by this observation, we propose Class-wise Decorrelation (CwD) that effectively regularizes representations of each class to scatter more uniformly, thus mimicking the model jointly trained with all classes (i.e., the oracle model). Our CwD is simple to implement and easy to plug into existing methods. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets show that CwD consistently and significantly improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods by around 1\% to 3\%. Code will be released.
Domain adaptation (DA) attempts to transfer the knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain that follows different distribution from the source. To achieve this, DA methods include a source classification objective to extract the source knowledge and a domain alignment objective to diminish the domain shift, ensuring knowledge transfer. Typically, former DA methods adopt some weight hyper-parameters to linearly combine the training objectives to form an overall objective. However, the gradient directions of these objectives may conflict with each other due to domain shift. Under such circumstances, the linear optimization scheme might decrease the overall objective value at the expense of damaging one of the training objectives, leading to restricted solutions. In this paper, we rethink the optimization scheme for DA from a gradient-based perspective. We propose a Pareto Domain Adaptation (ParetoDA) approach to control the overall optimization direction, aiming to cooperatively optimize all training objectives. Specifically, to reach a desirable solution on the target domain, we design a surrogate loss mimicking target classification. To improve target-prediction accuracy to support the mimicking, we propose a target-prediction refining mechanism which exploits domain labels via Bayes' theorem. On the other hand, since prior knowledge of weighting schemes for objectives is often unavailable to guide optimization to approach the optimal solution on the target domain, we propose a dynamic preference mechanism to dynamically guide our cooperative optimization by the gradient of the surrogate loss on a held-out unlabeled target dataset. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ParetoDA
In this paper, we focus on learning effective entity matching models over multi-source large-scale data. For real applications, we relax typical assumptions that data distributions/spaces, or entity identities are shared between sources, and propose a Relaxed Multi-source Large-scale Entity-matching (RMLE) problem. Challenges of the problem include 1) how to align large-scale entities between sources to share information and 2) how to mitigate negative transfer from joint learning multi-source data. What's worse, one practical issue is the entanglement between both challenges. Specifically, incorrect alignments may increase negative transfer; while mitigating negative transfer for one source may result in poorly learned representations for other sources and then decrease alignment accuracy. To handle the entangled challenges, we point out that the key is to optimize information sharing first based on Pareto front optimization, by showing that information sharing significantly influences the Pareto front which depicts lower bounds of negative transfer. Consequently, we proposed an Incentive Compatible Pareto Alignment (ICPA) method to first optimize cross-source alignments based on Pareto front optimization, then mitigate negative transfer constrained on the optimized alignments. This mechanism renders each source can learn based on its true preference without worrying about deteriorating representations of other sources. Specifically, the Pareto front optimization encourages minimizing lower bounds of negative transfer, which optimizes whether and which to align. Comprehensive empirical evaluation results on four large-scale datasets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ICPA. Online A/B test results at a search advertising platform also demonstrate the effectiveness of ICPA in production environments.
This paper presents a unified multimodal pre-trained model called N\"UWA that can generate new or manipulate existing visual data (i.e., images and videos) for various visual synthesis tasks. To cover language, image, and video at the same time for different scenarios, a 3D transformer encoder-decoder framework is designed, which can not only deal with videos as 3D data but also adapt to texts and images as 1D and 2D data, respectively. A 3D Nearby Attention (3DNA) mechanism is also proposed to consider the nature of the visual data and reduce the computational complexity. We evaluate N\"UWA on 8 downstream tasks. Compared to several strong baselines, N\"UWA achieves state-of-the-art results on text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, video prediction, etc. Furthermore, it also shows surprisingly good zero-shot capabilities on text-guided image and video manipulation tasks. Project repo is https://github.com/microsoft/NUWA.
Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods are stuck when deployed to a new unseen scenario despite the success in cross-camera person matching. Recent efforts have been substantially devoted to domain adaptive person re-id where extensive unlabeled data in the new scenario are utilized in a transductive learning manner. However, for each scenario, it is required to first collect enough data and then train such a domain adaptive re-id model, thus restricting their practical application. Instead, we aim to explore multiple labeled datasets to learn generalized domain-invariant representations for person re-id, which is expected universally effective for each new-coming re-id scenario. To pursue practicability in real-world systems, we collect all the person re-id datasets (20 datasets) in this field and select the three most frequently used datasets (i.e., Market1501, DukeMTMC, and MSMT17) as unseen target domains. In addition, we develop DataHunter that collects over 300K+ weak annotated images named YouTube-Human from YouTube street-view videos, which joins 17 remaining full labeled datasets to form multiple source domains. On such a large and challenging benchmark called FastHuman (~440K+ labeled images), we further propose a simple yet effective Semi-Supervised Knowledge Distillation (SSKD) framework. SSKD effectively exploits the weakly annotated data by assigning soft pseudo labels to YouTube-Human to improve models' generalization ability. Experiments on several protocols verify the effectiveness of the proposed SSKD framework on domain generalizable person re-id, which is even comparable to supervised learning on the target domains. Lastly, but most importantly, we hope the proposed benchmark FastHuman could bring the next development of domain generalizable person re-id algorithms.
In this paper, we focus on effective learning over a collaborative research network involving multiple clients. Each client has its own sample population which may not be shared with other clients due to privacy concerns. The goal is to learn a model for each client, which behaves better than the one learned from its own data, through secure collaborations with other clients in the network. Due to the discrepancies of the sample distributions across different clients, it is not necessarily that collaborating with everyone will lead to the best local models. We propose a learning to collaborate framework, where each client can choose to collaborate with certain members in the network to achieve a "collaboration equilibrium", where smaller collaboration coalitions are formed within the network so that each client can obtain the model with the best utility. We propose the concept of benefit graph which describes how each client can benefit from collaborating with other clients and develop a Pareto optimization approach to obtain it. Finally the collaboration coalitions can be derived from it based on graph operations. Our framework provides a new way of setting up collaborations in a research network. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data sets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Federated learning (FL) has gain growing interests for its capability of learning from distributed data sources collectively without the need of accessing the raw data samples across different sources. So far FL research has mostly focused on improving the performance, how the algorithmic disparity will be impacted for the model learned from FL and the impact of algorithmic disparity on the utility inconsistency are largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an FL framework to jointly consider performance consistency and algorithmic fairness across different local clients (data sources). We derive our framework from a constrained multi-objective optimization perspective, in which we learn a model satisfying fairness constraints on all clients with consistent performance. Specifically, we treat the algorithm prediction loss at each local client as an objective and maximize the worst-performing client with fairness constraints through optimizing a surrogate maximum function with all objectives involved. A gradient-based procedure is employed to achieve the Pareto optimality of this optimization problem. Theoretical analysis is provided to prove that our method can converge to a Pareto solution that achieves the min-max performance with fairness constraints on all clients. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority that our approach over baselines and its effectiveness in achieving both fairness and consistency across all local clients.