CountFormer: Multi-View Crowd Counting Transformer

Multi-view counting (MVC) methods have shown their superiority over single-view counterparts, particularly in situations characterized by heavy occlusion and severe perspective distortions. However, hand-crafted heuristic features and identical camera layout requirements in conventional MVC methods limit their applicability and scalability in real-world scenarios.In this work, we propose a concise 3D MVC framework called \textbf{CountFormer}to elevate multi-view image-level features to a scene-level volume representation and estimate the 3D density map based on the volume features. By incorporating a camera encoding strategy, CountFormer successfully embeds camera parameters into the volume query and image-level features, enabling it to handle various camera layouts with significant differences.Furthermore, we introduce a feature lifting module capitalized on the attention mechanism to transform image-level features into a 3D volume representation for each camera view. Subsequently, the multi-view volume aggregation module attentively aggregates various multi-view volumes to create a comprehensive scene-level volume representation, allowing CountFormer to handle images captured by arbitrary dynamic camera layouts. The proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches across various widely used datasets, demonstrating its greater suitability for real-world deployment compared to conventional MVC frameworks.

USDC: Unified Static and Dynamic Compression for Visual Transformer

Visual Transformers have achieved great success in almost all vision tasks, such as classification, detection, and so on. However, the model complexity and the inference speed of the visual transformers hinder their deployments in industrial products. Various model compression techniques focus on directly compressing the visual transformers into a smaller one while maintaining the model performance, however, the performance drops dramatically when the compression ratio is large. Furthermore, several dynamic network techniques have also been applied to dynamically compress the visual transformers to obtain input-adaptive efficient sub-structures during the inference stage, which can achieve a better trade-off between the compression ratio and the model performance. The upper bound of memory of dynamic models is not reduced in the practical deployment since the whole original visual transformer model and the additional control gating modules should be loaded onto devices together for inference. To alleviate two disadvantages of two categories of methods, we propose to unify the static compression and dynamic compression techniques jointly to obtain an input-adaptive compressed model, which can further better balance the total compression ratios and the model performances. Moreover, in practical deployment, the batch sizes of the training and inference stage are usually different, which will cause the model inference performance to be worse than the model training performance, which is not touched by all previous dynamic network papers. We propose a sub-group gates augmentation technique to solve this performance drop problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method on various baseline visual transformers such as DeiT, T2T-ViT, and so on.

ASP: Automatic Selection of Proxy dataset for efficient AutoML

Deep neural networks have gained great success due to the increasing amounts of data, and diverse effective neural network designs. However, it also brings a heavy computing burden as the amount of training data is proportional to the training time. In addition, a well-behaved model requires repeated trials of different structure designs and hyper-parameters, which may take a large amount of time even with state-of-the-art (SOTA) hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) algorithms and neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms. In this paper, we propose an Automatic Selection of Proxy dataset framework (ASP) aimed to dynamically find the informative proxy subsets of training data at each epoch, reducing the training data size as well as saving the AutoML processing time. We verify the effectiveness and generalization of ASP on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, ImageNet16-120, and ImageNet-1k, across various public model benchmarks. The experiment results show that ASP can obtain better results than other data selection methods at all selection ratios. ASP can also enable much more efficient AutoML processing with a speedup of 2x-20x while obtaining better architectures and better hyper-parameters compared to utilizing the entire dataset.

Unified Language-Vision Pretraining in LLM with Dynamic Discrete Visual Tokenization

Recently, the remarkable advance of the Large Language Model (LLM) has inspired researchers to transfer its extraordinary reasoning capability to both vision and language data. However, the prevailing approaches primarily regard the visual input as a prompt and focus exclusively on optimizing the text generation process conditioned upon vision content by a frozen LLM. Such an inequitable treatment of vision and language heavily constrains the model's potential. In this paper, we break through this limitation by representing both vision and language in a unified form. Specifically, we introduce a well-designed visual tokenizer to translate the non-linguistic image into a sequence of discrete tokens like a foreign language that LLM can read. The resulting visual tokens encompass high-level semantics worthy of a word and also support dynamic sequence length varying from the image. Coped with this tokenizer, the presented foundation model called LaVIT can handle both image and text indiscriminately under the same generative learning paradigm. This unification empowers LaVIT to serve as an impressive generalist interface to understand and generate multi-modal content simultaneously. Extensive experiments further showcase that it outperforms the existing models by a large margin on massive vision-language tasks. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/jy0205/LaVIT.

SHARK: A Lightweight Model Compression Approach for Large-scale Recommender Systems

Increasing the size of embedding layers has shown to be effective in improving the performance of recommendation models, yet gradually causing their sizes to exceed terabytes in industrial recommender systems, and hence the increase of computing and storage costs. To save resources while maintaining model performances, we propose SHARK, the model compression practice we have summarized in the recommender system of industrial scenarios. SHARK consists of two main components. First, we use the novel first-order component of Taylor expansion as importance scores to prune the number of embedding tables (feature fields). Second, we introduce a new row-wise quantization method to apply different quantization strategies to each embedding. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, demonstrating that each component of our proposed SHARK framework outperforms previous approaches. We conduct A/B tests in multiple models on Kuaishou, such as short video, e-commerce, and advertising recommendation models. The results of the online A/B test showed SHARK can effectively reduce the memory footprint of the embedded layer. For the short-video scenarios, the compressed model without any performance drop significantly saves 70% storage and thousands of machines, improves 30\% queries per second (QPS), and has been deployed to serve hundreds of millions of users and process tens of billions of requests every day.

Resource Constrained Model Compression via Minimax Optimization for Spiking Neural Networks

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have the characteristics of event-driven and high energy-efficient, which are different from traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) when deployed on edge devices such as neuromorphic chips. Most previous work focuses on SNNs training strategies to improve model performance and brings larger and deeper network architectures. It is difficult to deploy these complex networks on resource-limited edge devices directly. To meet such demand, people compress SNNs very cautiously to balance the performance and the computation efficiency. Existing compression methods either iteratively pruned SNNs using weights norm magnitude or formulated the problem as a sparse learning optimization. We propose an improved end-to-end Minimax optimization method for this sparse learning problem to better balance the model performance and the computation efficiency. We also demonstrate that jointly applying compression and finetuning on SNNs is better than sequentially, especially for extreme compression ratios. The compressed SNN models achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various benchmark datasets and architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenjallen/Resource-Constrained-Compression-on-SNN.

PA&DA: Jointly Sampling PAth and DAta for Consistent NAS

Based on the weight-sharing mechanism, one-shot NAS methods train a supernet and then inherit the pre-trained weights to evaluate sub-models, largely reducing the search cost. However, several works have pointed out that the shared weights suffer from different gradient descent directions during training. And we further find that large gradient variance occurs during supernet training, which degrades the supernet ranking consistency. To mitigate this issue, we propose to explicitly minimize the gradient variance of the supernet training by jointly optimizing the sampling distributions of PAth and DAta (PA&DA). We theoretically derive the relationship between the gradient variance and the sampling distributions, and reveal that the optimal sampling probability is proportional to the normalized gradient norm of path and training data. Hence, we use the normalized gradient norm as the importance indicator for path and training data, and adopt an importance sampling strategy for the supernet training. Our method only requires negligible computation cost for optimizing the sampling distributions of path and data, but achieves lower gradient variance during supernet training and better generalization performance for the supernet, resulting in a more consistent NAS. We conduct comprehensive comparisons with other improved approaches in various search spaces. Results show that our method surpasses others with more reliable ranking performance and higher accuracy of searched architectures, showing the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/ShunLu91/PA-DA.

PaletteNeRF: Palette-based Color Editing for NeRFs

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a powerful tool to faithfully generate novel views for scenes with only sparse captured images. Despite its strong capability for representing 3D scenes and their appearance, its editing ability is very limited. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective extension of vanilla NeRF, named PaletteNeRF, to enable efficient color editing on NeRF-represented scenes. Motivated by recent palette-based image decomposition works, we approximate each pixel color as a sum of palette colors modulated by additive weights. Instead of predicting pixel colors as in vanilla NeRFs, our method predicts additive weights. The underlying NeRF backbone could also be replaced with more recent NeRF models such as KiloNeRF to achieve real-time editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves efficient, view-consistent, and artifact-free color editing on a wide range of NeRF-represented scenes.

E^2VTS: Energy-Efficient Video Text Spotting from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based video text spotting has been extensively used in civil and military domains. UAV's limited battery capacity motivates us to develop an energy-efficient video text spotting solution. In this paper, we first revisit RCNN's crop & resize training strategy and empirically find that it outperforms aligned RoI sampling on a real-world video text dataset captured by UAV. To reduce energy consumption, we further propose a multi-stage image processor that takes videos' redundancy, continuity, and mixed degradation into account. Lastly, the model is pruned and quantized before deployed on Raspberry Pi. Our proposed energy-efficient video text spotting solution, dubbed as E^2VTS, outperforms all previous methods by achieving a competitive tradeoff between energy efficiency and performance. All our codes and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/wuzhenyusjtu/LPCVC20-VideoTextSpotting.

LPFS: Learnable Polarizing Feature Selection for Click-Through Rate Prediction

In industry, feature selection is a standard but necessary step to search for an optimal set of informative feature fields for efficient and effective training of deep Click-Through Rate (CTR) models. Most previous works measure the importance of feature fields by using their corresponding continuous weights from the model, then remove the feature fields with small weight values. However, removing many features that correspond to small but not exact zero weights will inevitably hurt model performance and not be friendly to hot-start model training. There is also no theoretical guarantee that the magnitude of weights can represent the importance, thus possibly leading to sub-optimal results if using these methods. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Learnable Polarizing Feature Selection (LPFS) method using a smoothed-$\ell^0$ function in literature. Furthermore, we extend LPFS to LPFS++ by our newly designed smoothed-$\ell^0$-liked function to select a more informative subset of features. LPFS and LPFS++ can be used as gates inserted at the input of the deep network to control the active and inactive state of each feature. When training is finished, some gates are exact zero, while others are around one, which is particularly favored by the practical hot-start training in the industry, due to no damage to the model performance before and after removing the features corresponding to exact-zero gates. Experiments show that our methods outperform others by a clear margin, and have achieved great A/B test results in KuaiShou Technology.