Powerful Lossy Compression for Noisy Images

Image compression and denoising represent fundamental challenges in image processing with many real-world applications. To address practical demands, current solutions can be categorized into two main strategies: 1) sequential method; and 2) joint method. However, sequential methods have the disadvantage of error accumulation as there is information loss between multiple individual models. Recently, the academic community began to make some attempts to tackle this problem through end-to-end joint methods. Most of them ignore that different regions of noisy images have different characteristics. To solve these problems, in this paper, our proposed signal-to-noise ratio~(SNR) aware joint solution exploits local and non-local features for image compression and denoising simultaneously. We design an end-to-end trainable network, which includes the main encoder branch, the guidance branch, and the signal-to-noise ratio~(SNR) aware branch. We conducted extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that our joint solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Jointly Optimizing Image Compression with Low-light Image Enhancement

Learning-based image compression methods have made great progress. Most of them are designed for generic natural images. In fact, low-light images frequently occur due to unavoidable environmental influences or technical limitations, such as insufficient lighting or limited exposure time. %When general-purpose image compression algorithms compress low-light images, useful detail information is lost, resulting in a dramatic decrease in image enhancement. Once low-light images are compressed by existing general image compression approaches, useful information(e.g., texture details) would be lost resulting in a dramatic performance decrease in low-light image enhancement. To simultaneously achieve a higher compression rate and better enhancement performance for low-light images, we propose a novel image compression framework with joint optimization of low-light image enhancement. We design an end-to-end trainable two-branch architecture with lower computational cost, which includes the main enhancement branch and the signal-to-noise ratio~(SNR) aware branch. Experimental results show that our proposed joint optimization framework achieves a significant improvement over existing ``Compress before Enhance" or ``Enhance before Compress" sequential solutions for low-light images. Source codes are included in the supplementary material.

Understanding and Constructing Latent Modality Structures in Multi-modal Representation Learning

Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.

High-Fidelity Variable-Rate Image Compression via Invertible Activation Transformation

Learning-based methods have effectively promoted the community of image compression. Meanwhile, variational autoencoder (VAE) based variable-rate approaches have recently gained much attention to avoid the usage of a set of different networks for various compression rates. Despite the remarkable performance that has been achieved, these approaches would be readily corrupted once multiple compression/decompression operations are executed, resulting in the fact that image quality would be tremendously dropped and strong artifacts would appear. Thus, we try to tackle the issue of high-fidelity fine variable-rate image compression and propose the Invertible Activation Transformation (IAT) module. We implement the IAT in a mathematical invertible manner on a single rate Invertible Neural Network (INN) based model and the quality level (QLevel) would be fed into the IAT to generate scaling and bias tensors. IAT and QLevel together give the image compression model the ability of fine variable-rate control while better maintaining the image fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the single rate image compression model equipped with our IAT module has the ability to achieve variable-rate control without any compromise. And our IAT-embedded model obtains comparable rate-distortion performance with recent learning-based image compression methods. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art variable-rate image compression method by a large margin, especially after multiple re-encodings.

Vision-Language Pre-Training with Triple Contrastive Learning

Vision-language representation learning largely benefits from image-text alignment through contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE loss). The success of this alignment strategy is attributed to its capability in maximizing the mutual information (MI) between an image and its matched text. However, simply performing cross-modal alignment (CMA) ignores data potential within each modality, which may result in degraded representations. For instance, although CMA-based models are able to map image-text pairs close together in the embedding space, they fail to ensure that similar inputs from the same modality stay close by. This problem can get even worse when the pre-training data is noisy. In this paper, we propose triple contrastive learning (TCL) for vision-language pre-training by leveraging both cross-modal and intra-modal self-supervision. Besides CMA, TCL introduces an intra-modal contrastive objective to provide complementary benefits in representation learning. To take advantage of localized and structural information from image and text input, TCL further maximizes the average MI between local regions of image/text and their global summary. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that takes into account local structure information for multi-modality representation learning. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is competitive and achieves the new state of the art on various common down-stream vision-language tasks such as image-text retrieval and visual question answering.

Multi-modal Alignment using Representation Codebook

Aligning signals from different modalities is an important step in vision-language representation learning as it affects the performance of later stages such as cross-modality fusion. Since image and text typically reside in different regions of the feature space, directly aligning them at instance level is challenging especially when features are still evolving during training. In this paper, we propose to align at a higher and more stable level using cluster representation. Specifically, we treat image and text as two "views" of the same entity, and encode them into a joint vision-language coding space spanned by a dictionary of cluster centers (codebook). We contrast positive and negative samples via their cluster assignments while simultaneously optimizing the cluster centers. To further smooth out the learning process, we adopt a teacher-student distillation paradigm, where the momentum teacher of one view guides the student learning of the other. We evaluated our approach on common vision language benchmarks and obtain new SoTA on zero-shot cross modality retrieval while being competitive on various other transfer tasks.

Learning Oriented Remote Sensing Object Detection via Naive Geometric Computing

Detecting oriented objects along with estimating their rotation information is one crucial step for analyzing remote sensing images. Despite that many methods proposed recently have achieved remarkable performance, most of them directly learn to predict object directions under the supervision of only one (e.g. the rotation angle) or a few (e.g. several coordinates) groundtruth values individually. Oriented object detection would be more accurate and robust if extra constraints, with respect to proposal and rotation information regression, are adopted for joint supervision during training. To this end, we innovatively propose a mechanism that simultaneously learns the regression of horizontal proposals, oriented proposals, and rotation angles of objects in a consistent manner, via naive geometric computing, as one additional steady constraint (see Figure 1). An oriented center prior guided label assignment strategy is proposed for further enhancing the quality of proposals, yielding better performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the model equipped with our idea significantly outperforms the baseline by a large margin to achieve a new state-of-the-art result without any extra computational burden during inference. Our proposed idea is simple and intuitive that can be readily implemented. Source codes and trained models are involved in supplementary files.

Simpler, Faster, Stronger: Breaking The log-K Curse On Contrastive Learners With FlatNCE

InfoNCE-based contrastive representation learners, such as SimCLR, have been tremendously successful in recent years. However, these contrastive schemes are notoriously resource demanding, as their effectiveness breaks down with small-batch training (i.e., the log-K curse, whereas K is the batch-size). In this work, we reveal mathematically why contrastive learners fail in the small-batch-size regime, and present a novel simple, non-trivial contrastive objective named FlatNCE, which fixes this issue. Unlike InfoNCE, our FlatNCE no longer explicitly appeals to a discriminative classification goal for contrastive learning. Theoretically, we show FlatNCE is the mathematical dual formulation of InfoNCE, thus bridging the classical literature on energy modeling; and empirically, we demonstrate that, with minimal modification of code, FlatNCE enables immediate performance boost independent of the subject-matter engineering efforts. The significance of this work is furthered by the powerful generalization of contrastive learning techniques, and the introduction of new tools to monitor and diagnose contrastive training. We substantiate our claims with empirical evidence on CIFAR10, ImageNet, and other datasets, where FlatNCE consistently outperforms InfoNCE.

Securing emergent behaviour in swarm robotics

Swarm robotics is the study of how a large number of relatively simple robots can be designed so that a desired collective behaviour emerges from the local interactions among robots and between the robots and their environment. While many aspects of a swarm may be modelled as various types of ad hoc networks, and accordingly many aspects of security of the swarm may be achieved by conventional means, here we will focus on swarm emergent behaviour as something that most distinguishes swarm robotics from ad hoc networks. We discuss the challenges emergent behaviour poses on communications security, and by classifying a swarm by types of robots, types of communication channels, and types of adversaries, we examine what classes may be secured by traditional methods and focus on aspects that are most relevant to allowing emergent behaviour. We will examine how this can be secured by ensuring that communication is secure. We propose a simple solution using hash chains, and by modelling swarm communications using a series of random graphs, we show that this allows us to identify rogue robots with a high probability.

Wasserstein Contrastive Representation Distillation

The primary goal of knowledge distillation (KD) is to encapsulate the information of a model learned from a teacher network into a student network, with the latter being more compact than the former. Existing work, e.g., using Kullback-Leibler divergence for distillation, may fail to capture important structural knowledge in the teacher network and often lacks the ability for feature generalization, particularly in situations when teacher and student are built to address different classification tasks. We propose Wasserstein Contrastive Representation Distillation (WCoRD), which leverages both primal and dual forms of Wasserstein distance for KD. The dual form is used for global knowledge transfer, yielding a contrastive learning objective that maximizes the lower bound of mutual information between the teacher and the student networks. The primal form is used for local contrastive knowledge transfer within a mini-batch, effectively matching the distributions of features between the teacher and the student networks. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed WCoRD method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on privileged information distillation, model compression and cross-modal transfer.