SiamTrans: Zero-Shot Multi-Frame Image Restoration with Pre-Trained Siamese Transformers

We propose a novel zero-shot multi-frame image restoration method for removing unwanted obstruction elements (such as rains, snow, and moire patterns) that vary in successive frames. It has three stages: transformer pre-training, zero-shot restoration, and hard patch refinement. Using the pre-trained transformers, our model is able to tell the motion difference between the true image information and the obstructing elements. For zero-shot image restoration, we design a novel model, termed SiamTrans, which is constructed by Siamese transformers, encoders, and decoders. Each transformer has a temporal attention layer and several self-attention layers, to capture both temporal and spatial information of multiple frames. Only pre-trained (self-supervised) on the denoising task, SiamTrans is tested on three different low-level vision tasks (deraining, demoireing, and desnowing). Compared with related methods, ours achieves the best performances, even outperforming those with supervised learning.

IntraQ: Learning Synthetic Images with Intra-Class Heterogeneity for Zero-Shot Network Quantization

Learning to synthesize data has emerged as a promising direction in zero-shot quantization (ZSQ), which represents neural networks by low-bit integer without accessing any of the real data. In this paper, we observe an interesting phenomenon of intra-class heterogeneity in real data and show that existing methods fail to retain this property in their synthetic images, which causes a limited performance increase. To address this issue, we propose a novel zero-shot quantization method referred to as IntraQ. First, we propose a local object reinforcement that locates the target objects at different scales and positions of the synthetic images. Second, we introduce a marginal distance constraint to form class-related features distributed in a coarse area. Lastly, we devise a soft inception loss which injects a soft prior label to prevent the synthetic images from being overfitting to a fixed object. Our IntraQ is demonstrated to well retain the intra-class heterogeneity in the synthetic images and also observed to perform state-of-the-art. For example, compared to the advanced ZSQ, our IntraQ obtains 9.17\% increase of the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet when all layers of MobileNetV1 are quantized to 4-bit. Code is at https://github.com/zysxmu/InterQ.

Motion Deblurring with Real Events

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end learning framework for event-based motion deblurring in a self-supervised manner, where real-world events are exploited to alleviate the performance degradation caused by data inconsistency. To achieve this end, optical flows are predicted from events, with which the blurry consistency and photometric consistency are exploited to enable self-supervision on the deblurring network with real-world data. Furthermore, a piece-wise linear motion model is proposed to take into account motion non-linearities and thus leads to an accurate model for the physical formation of motion blurs in the real-world scenario. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real motion blur datasets demonstrates that the proposed algorithm bridges the gap between simulated and real-world motion blurs and shows remarkable performance for event-based motion deblurring in real-world scenarios.

Prioritized Subnet Sampling for Resource-Adaptive Supernet Training

A resource-adaptive supernet adjusts its subnets for inference to fit the dynamically available resources. In this paper, we propose Prioritized Subnet Sampling to train a resource-adaptive supernet, termed PSS-Net. We maintain multiple subnet pools, each of which stores the information of substantial subnets with similar resource consumption. Considering a resource constraint, subnets conditioned on this resource constraint are sampled from a pre-defined subnet structure space and high-quality ones will be inserted into the corresponding subnet pool. Then, the sampling will gradually be prone to sampling subnets from the subnet pools. Moreover, the one with a better performance metric is assigned with higher priority to train our PSS-Net, if sampling is from a subnet pool. At the end of training, our PSS-Net retains the best subnet in each pool to entitle a fast switch of high-quality subnets for inference when the available resources vary. Experiments on ImageNet using MobileNetV1/V2 show that our PSS-Net can well outperform state-of-the-art resource-adaptive supernets. Our project is at https://github.com/chenbong/PSS-Net.

Wavelet-Based Network For High Dynamic Range Imaging

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging from multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images has been suffering from ghosting artifacts caused by scene and objects motion. Existing methods, such as optical flow based and end-to-end deep learning based solutions, are error-prone either in detail restoration or ghosting artifacts removal. Comprehensive empirical evidence shows that ghosting artifacts caused by large foreground motion are mainly low-frequency signals and the details are mainly high-frequency signals. In this work, we propose a novel frequency-guided end-to-end deep neural network (FHDRNet) to conduct HDR fusion in the frequency domain, and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used to decompose inputs into different frequency bands. The low-frequency signals are used to avoid specific ghosting artifacts, while the high-frequency signals are used for preserving details. Using a U-Net as the backbone, we propose two novel modules: merging module and frequency-guided upsampling module. The merging module applies the attention mechanism to the low-frequency components to deal with the ghost caused by large foreground motion. The frequency-guided upsampling module reconstructs details from multiple frequency-specific components with rich details. In addition, a new RAW dataset is created for training and evaluating multi-frame HDR imaging algorithms in the RAW domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on public datasets and our RAW dataset, showing that the proposed FHDRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Training Compact CNNs for Image Classification using Dynamic-coded Filter Fusion

The mainstream approach for filter pruning is usually either to force a hard-coded importance estimation upon a computation-heavy pretrained model to select "important" filters, or to impose a hyperparameter-sensitive sparse constraint on the loss objective to regularize the network training. In this paper, we present a novel filter pruning method, dubbed dynamic-coded filter fusion (DCFF), to derive compact CNNs in a computation-economical and regularization-free manner for efficient image classification. Each filter in our DCFF is firstly given an inter-similarity distribution with a temperature parameter as a filter proxy, on top of which, a fresh Kullback-Leibler divergence based dynamic-coded criterion is proposed to evaluate the filter importance. In contrast to simply keeping high-score filters in other methods, we propose the concept of filter fusion, i.e., the weighted averages using the assigned proxies, as our preserved filters. We obtain a one-hot inter-similarity distribution as the temperature parameter approaches infinity. Thus, the relative importance of each filter can vary along with the training of the compact CNN, leading to dynamically changeable fused filters without both the dependency on the pretrained model and the introduction of sparse constraints. Extensive experiments on classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our DCFF over the compared counterparts. For example, our DCFF derives a compact VGGNet-16 with only 72.77M FLOPs and 1.06M parameters while reaching top-1 accuracy of 93.47% on CIFAR-10. A compact ResNet-50 is obtained with 63.8% FLOPs and 58.6% parameter reductions, retaining 75.60% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012. Our code, narrower models and training logs are available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/DCFF.

Multi-Target Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Consistency Learning

Recently unsupervised domain adaptation for the semantic segmentation task has become more and more popular due to high-cost of pixel-level annotation on real-world images. However, most domain adaptation methods are only restricted to single-source-single-target pair, and can not be directly extended to multiple target domains. In this work, we propose a collaborative learning framework to achieve unsupervised multi-target domain adaptation. An unsupervised domain adaptation expert model is first trained for each source-target pair and is further encouraged to collaborate with each other through a bridge built between different target domains. These expert models are further improved by adding the regularization of making the consistent pixel-wise prediction for each sample with the same structured context. To obtain a single model that works across multiple target domains, we propose to simultaneously learn a student model which is trained to not only imitate the output of each expert on the corresponding target domain, but also to pull different expert close to each other with regularization on their weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively exploit rich structured information contained in both labeled source domain and multiple unlabeled target domains. Not only does it perform well across multiple target domains but also performs favorably against state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods specially trained on a single source-target pair

Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration

In this paper, we present Uformer, an effective and efficient Transformer-based architecture, in which we build a hierarchical encoder-decoder network using the Transformer block for image restoration. Uformer has two core designs to make it suitable for this task. The first key element is a local-enhanced window Transformer block, where we use non-overlapping window-based self-attention to reduce the computational requirement and employ the depth-wise convolution in the feed-forward network to further improve its potential for capturing local context. The second key element is that we explore three skip-connection schemes to effectively deliver information from the encoder to the decoder. Powered by these two designs, Uformer enjoys a high capability for capturing useful dependencies for image restoration. Extensive experiments on several image restoration tasks demonstrate the superiority of Uformer, including image denoising, deraining, deblurring and demoireing. We expect that our work will encourage further research to explore Transformer-based architectures for low-level vision tasks. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/Uformer.

Towards Compact CNNs via Collaborative Compression

Channel pruning and tensor decomposition have received extensive attention in convolutional neural network compression. However, these two techniques are traditionally deployed in an isolated manner, leading to significant accuracy drop when pursuing high compression rates. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Compression (CC) scheme, which joints channel pruning and tensor decomposition to compress CNN models by simultaneously learning the model sparsity and low-rankness. Specifically, we first investigate the compression sensitivity of each layer in the network, and then propose a Global Compression Rate Optimization that transforms the decision problem of compression rate into an optimization problem. After that, we propose multi-step heuristic compression to remove redundant compression units step-by-step, which fully considers the effect of the remaining compression space (i.e., unremoved compression units). Our method demonstrates superior performance gains over previous ones on various datasets and backbone architectures. For example, we achieve 52.9% FLOPs reduction by removing 48.4% parameters on ResNet-50 with only a Top-1 accuracy drop of 0.56% on ImageNet 2012.