Distilling Efficient Vision Transformers from CNNs for Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we tackle a new problem: how to transfer knowledge from the pre-trained cumbersome yet well-performed CNN-based model to learn a compact Vision Transformer (ViT)-based model while maintaining its learning capacity? Due to the completely different characteristics of ViT and CNN and the long-existing capacity gap between teacher and student models in Knowledge Distillation (KD), directly transferring the cross-model knowledge is non-trivial. To this end, we subtly leverage the visual and linguistic-compatible feature character of ViT (i.e., student), and its capacity gap with the CNN (i.e., teacher) and propose a novel CNN-to-ViT KD framework, dubbed C2VKD. Importantly, as the teacher's features are heterogeneous to those of the student, we first propose a novel visual-linguistic feature distillation (VLFD) module that explores efficient KD among the aligned visual and linguistic-compatible representations. Moreover, due to the large capacity gap between the teacher and student and the inevitable prediction errors of the teacher, we then propose a pixel-wise decoupled distillation (PDD) module to supervise the student under the combination of labels and teacher's predictions from the decoupled target and non-target classes. Experiments on three semantic segmentation benchmark datasets consistently show that the increment of mIoU of our method is over 200% of the SoTA KD methods

ISAC 4D Imaging System Based on 5G Downlink Millimeter Wave Signal

Integrated Sensing and Communication(ISAC) has become a key technology for the 5th generation (5G) and 6th generation (6G) wireless communications due to its high spectrum utilization efficiency. Utilizing infrastructure such as 5G Base Stations (BS) to realize environmental imaging and reconstruction is important for promoting the construction of smart cities. Current 4D imaging methods utilizing Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) based Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) are not suitable for ISAC scenarios due to the higher bandwidth occupation and lower resolution. We propose a 4D (3D-Coordinates, Velocity) imaging method with higher sensing accuracy based on 2D-FFT with 2D-MUSIC utilizing standard 5G Downlink (DL) millimeter wave (mmWave) signals. To improve the sensing precision we also design a transceiver antenna array element arrangement scheme based on MIMO virtual aperture technique. We further propose a target detection algorithm based on multi-dimensional Constant False Alarm (CFAR) detection, which optimizes the ISAC imaging signal processing flow and reduces the computational pressure of signal processing. Simulation results show that our proposed method has better imaging results. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MrHaobolu/ISAC\_4D\_IMaging.git.

Waveform Design for MIMO-OFDM Integrated Sensing and Communication System: An Information Theoretical Approach

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is regarded as the enabling technology in the future 5th-Generation-Advanced (5G-A) and 6th-Generation (6G) mobile communication system. ISAC waveform design is critical in ISAC system. However, the difference of the performance metrics between sensing and communication brings challenges for the ISAC waveform design. This paper applies the unified performance metrics in information theory, namely mutual information (MI), to measure the communication and sensing performance in multicarrier ISAC system. In multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) ISAC system, we first derive the sensing and communication MI with subcarrier correlation and spatial correlation. Then, we propose optimal waveform designs for maximizing the sensing MI, communication MI and the weighted sum of sensing and communication MI, respectively. The optimization results are validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Our work provides effective closed-form expressions for waveform design, enabling the realization of MIMO-OFDM ISAC system with balanced performance in communication and sensing.

Towards Dynamic and Small Objects Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptative Nighttime Semantic Segmentation

Nighttime semantic segmentation is essential for various applications, e.g., autonomous driving, which often faces challenges due to poor illumination and the lack of well-annotated datasets. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has shown potential for addressing the challenges and achieved remarkable results for nighttime semantic segmentation. However, existing methods still face limitations in 1) their reliance on style transfer or relighting models, which struggle to generalize to complex nighttime environments, and 2) their ignorance of dynamic and small objects like vehicles and traffic signs, which are difficult to be directly learned from other domains. This paper proposes a novel UDA method that refines both label and feature levels for dynamic and small objects for nighttime semantic segmentation. First, we propose a dynamic and small object refinement module to complement the knowledge of dynamic and small objects from the source domain to target nighttime domain. These dynamic and small objects are normally context-inconsistent in under-exposed conditions. Then, we design a feature prototype alignment module to reduce the domain gap by deploying contrastive learning between features and prototypes of the same class from different domains, while re-weighting the categories of dynamic and small objects. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior arts by a large margin for nighttime segmentation. Project page: https://rorisis.github.io/DSRNSS/.

Towards Novel Class Discovery: A Study in Novel Skin Lesions Clustering

Existing deep learning models have achieved promising performance in recognizing skin diseases from dermoscopic images. However, these models can only recognize samples from predefined categories, when they are deployed in the clinic, data from new unknown categories are constantly emerging. Therefore, it is crucial to automatically discover and identify new semantic categories from new data. In this paper, we propose a new novel class discovery framework for automatically discovering new semantic classes from dermoscopy image datasets based on the knowledge of known classes. Specifically, we first use contrastive learning to learn a robust and unbiased feature representation based on all data from known and unknown categories. We then propose an uncertainty-aware multi-view cross pseudo-supervision strategy, which is trained jointly on all categories of data using pseudo labels generated by a self-labeling strategy. Finally, we further refine the pseudo label by aggregating neighborhood information through local sample similarity to improve the clustering performance of the model for unknown categories. We conducted extensive experiments on the dermatology dataset ISIC 2019, and the experimental results show that our approach can effectively leverage knowledge from known categories to discover new semantic categories. We also further validated the effectiveness of the different modules through extensive ablation experiments. Our code will be released soon.

SRFNet: Monocular Depth Estimation with Fine-grained Structure via Spatial Reliability-oriented Fusion of Frames and Events

Monocular depth estimation is a crucial task to measure distance relative to a camera, which is important for applications, such as robot navigation and self-driving. Traditional frame-based methods suffer from performance drops due to the limited dynamic range and motion blur. Therefore, recent works leverage novel event cameras to complement or guide the frame modality via frame-event feature fusion. However, event streams exhibit spatial sparsity, leaving some areas unperceived, especially in regions with marginal light changes. Therefore, direct fusion methods, e.g., RAMNet, often ignore the contribution of the most confident regions of each modality. This leads to structural ambiguity in the modality fusion process, thus degrading the depth estimation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial Reliability-oriented Fusion Network (SRFNet), that can estimate depth with fine-grained structure at both daytime and nighttime. Our method consists of two key technical components. Firstly, we propose an attention-based interactive fusion (AIF) module that applies spatial priors of events and frames as the initial masks and learns the consensus regions to guide the inter-modal feature fusion. The fused feature are then fed back to enhance the frame and event feature learning. Meanwhile, it utilizes an output head to generate a fused mask, which is iteratively updated for learning consensual spatial priors. Secondly, we propose the Reliability-oriented Depth Refinement (RDR) module to estimate dense depth with the fine-grained structure based on the fused features and masks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the synthetic and real-world datasets, which shows that, even without pretraining, our method outperforms the prior methods, e.g., RAMNet, especially in night scenes. Our project homepage: https://vlislab22.github.io/SRFNet.

Chasing Day and Night: Towards Robust and Efficient All-Day Object Detection Guided by an Event Camera

The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/

IPA: Inference Pipeline Adaptation to Achieve High Accuracy and Cost-Efficiency

Efficiently optimizing multi-model inference pipelines for fast, accurate, and cost-effective inference is a crucial challenge in ML production systems, given their tight end-to-end latency requirements. To simplify the exploration of the vast and intricate trade-off space of accuracy and cost in inference pipelines, providers frequently opt to consider one of them. However, the challenge lies in reconciling accuracy and cost trade-offs. To address this challenge and propose a solution to efficiently manage model variants in inference pipelines, we present IPA, an online deep-learning Inference Pipeline Adaptation system that efficiently leverages model variants for each deep learning task. Model variants are different versions of pre-trained models for the same deep learning task with variations in resource requirements, latency, and accuracy. IPA dynamically configures batch size, replication, and model variants to optimize accuracy, minimize costs, and meet user-defined latency SLAs using Integer Programming. It supports multi-objective settings for achieving different trade-offs between accuracy and cost objectives while remaining adaptable to varying workloads and dynamic traffic patterns. Extensive experiments on a Kubernetes implementation with five real-world inference pipelines demonstrate that IPA improves normalized accuracy by up to 35% with a minimal cost increase of less than 5%.

OmniZoomer: Learning to Move and Zoom in on Sphere at High-Resolution

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) have become increasingly popular, as their large field-of-view (FoV) can offer viewers the chance to freely choose the view directions in immersive environments such as virtual reality. The M\"obius transformation is typically employed to further provide the opportunity for movement and zoom on ODIs, but applying it to the image level often results in blurry effect and aliasing problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach, called \textbf{OmniZoomer}, to incorporate the M\"obius transformation into the network for movement and zoom on ODIs. By learning various transformed feature maps under different conditions, the network is enhanced to handle the increasing edge curvatures, which alleviates the blurry effect. Moreover, to address the aliasing problem, we propose two key components. Firstly, to compensate for the lack of pixels for describing curves, we enhance the feature maps in the high-resolution (HR) space and calculate the transformed index map with a spatial index generation module. Secondly, considering that ODIs are inherently represented in the spherical space, we propose a spherical resampling module that combines the index map and HR feature maps to transform the feature maps for better spherical correlation. The transformed feature maps are decoded to output a zoomed ODI. Experiments show that our method can produce HR and high-quality ODIs with the flexibility to move and zoom in to the object of interest. Project page is available at http://vlislab22.github.io/OmniZoomer/.