Model sparsification in deep learning promotes simpler, more interpretable models with fewer parameters. This not only reduces the model's memory footprint and computational needs but also shortens inference time. This work focuses on creating sparse models optimized for multiple tasks with fewer parameters. These parsimonious models also possess the potential to match or outperform dense models in terms of performance. In this work, we introduce channel-wise l1/l2 group sparsity in the shared convolutional layers parameters (or weights) of the multi-task learning model. This approach facilitates the removal of extraneous groups i.e., channels (due to l1 regularization) and also imposes a penalty on the weights, further enhancing the learning efficiency for all tasks (due to l2 regularization). We analyzed the results of group sparsity in both single-task and multi-task settings on two widely-used Multi-Task Learning (MTL) datasets: NYU-v2 and CelebAMask-HQ. On both datasets, which consist of three different computer vision tasks each, multi-task models with approximately 70% sparsity outperform their dense equivalents. We also investigate how changing the degree of sparsification influences the model's performance, the overall sparsity percentage, the patterns of sparsity, and the inference time.
Self-supervised learning in computer vision aims to leverage the inherent structure and relationships within data to learn meaningful representations without explicit human annotation, enabling a holistic understanding of visual scenes. Robustness in vision machine learning ensures reliable and consistent performance, enhancing generalization, adaptability, and resistance to noise, variations, and adversarial attacks. Self-supervised paradigms, namely contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, mutual information maximization, and clustering, have been considered to have shown advances in invariant learning representations. This work investigates the robustness of learned representations of self-supervised learning approaches focusing on distribution shifts and image corruptions in computer vision. Detailed experiments have been conducted to study the robustness of self-supervised learning methods on distribution shifts and image corruptions. The empirical analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between the performance of learned representations within self-supervised paradigms and the severity of distribution shifts and corruptions. Notably, higher levels of shifts and corruptions are found to significantly diminish the robustness of the learned representations. These findings highlight the critical impact of distribution shifts and image corruptions on the performance and resilience of self-supervised learning methods, emphasizing the need for effective strategies to mitigate their adverse effects. The study strongly advocates for future research in the field of self-supervised representation learning to prioritize the key aspects of safety and robustness in order to ensure practical applicability. The source code and results are available on GitHub.
We replace the multiplication and sigmoid function of the conventional recurrent gate with addition and ReLU activation. This mechanism is designed to maintain long-term memory for sequence processing but at a reduced computational cost, thereby opening up for more efficient execution or larger models on restricted hardware. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with gating mechanisms such as LSTM and GRU have been widely successful in learning from sequential data due to their ability to capture long-term dependencies. Conventionally, the update based on current inputs and the previous state history is each multiplied with dynamic weights and combined to compute the next state. However, multiplication can be computationally expensive, especially for certain hardware architectures or alternative arithmetic systems such as homomorphic encryption. It is demonstrated that the novel gating mechanism can capture long-term dependencies for a standard synthetic sequence learning task while significantly reducing computational costs such that execution time is reduced by half on CPU and by one-third under encryption. Experimental results on handwritten text recognition tasks furthermore show that the proposed architecture can be trained to achieve comparable accuracy to conventional GRU and LSTM baselines. The gating mechanism introduced in this paper may enable privacy-preserving AI applications operating under homomorphic encryption by avoiding the multiplication of encrypted variables. It can also support quantization in (unencrypted) plaintext applications, with the potential for substantial performance gains since the addition-based formulation can avoid the expansion to double precision often required for multiplication.
This paper takes an important step in bridging the performance gap between DETR and R-CNN for graphical object detection. Existing graphical object detection approaches have enjoyed recent enhancements in CNN-based object detection methods, achieving remarkable progress. Recently, Transformer-based detectors have considerably boosted the generic object detection performance, eliminating the need for hand-crafted features or post-processing steps such as Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) using object queries. However, the effectiveness of such enhanced transformer-based detection algorithms has yet to be verified for the problem of graphical object detection. Essentially, inspired by the latest advancements in the DETR, we employ the existing detection transformer with few modifications for graphical object detection. We modify object queries in different ways, using points, anchor boxes and adding positive and negative noise to the anchors to boost performance. These modifications allow for better handling of objects with varying sizes and aspect ratios, more robustness to small variations in object positions and sizes, and improved image discrimination between objects and non-objects. We evaluate our approach on the four graphical datasets: PubTables, TableBank, NTable and PubLaynet. Upon integrating query modifications in the DETR, we outperform prior works and achieve new state-of-the-art results with the mAP of 96.9\%, 95.7\% and 99.3\% on TableBank, PubLaynet, PubTables, respectively. The results from extensive ablations show that transformer-based methods are more effective for document analysis analogous to other applications. We hope this study draws more attention to the research of using detection transformers in document image analysis.
Decoding inner speech from the brain signal via hybridisation of fMRI and EEG data is explored to investigate the performance benefits over unimodal models. Two different bimodal fusion approaches are examined: concatenation of probability vectors output from unimodal fMRI and EEG machine learning models, and data fusion with feature engineering. Same task inner speech data are recorded from four participants, and different processing strategies are compared and contrasted to previously-employed hybridisation methods. Data across participants are discovered to encode different underlying structures, which results in varying decoding performances between subject-dependent fusion models. Decoding performance is demonstrated as improved when pursuing bimodal fMRI-EEG fusion strategies, if the data show underlying structure.
Table detection is the task of classifying and localizing table objects within document images. With the recent development in deep learning methods, we observe remarkable success in table detection. However, a significant amount of labeled data is required to train these models effectively. Many semi-supervised approaches are introduced to mitigate the need for a substantial amount of label data. These approaches use CNN-based detectors that rely on anchor proposals and post-processing stages such as NMS. To tackle these limitations, this paper presents a novel end-to-end semi-supervised table detection method that employs the deformable transformer for detecting table objects. We evaluate our semi-supervised method on PubLayNet, DocBank, ICADR-19 and TableBank datasets, and it achieves superior performance compared to previous methods. It outperforms the fully supervised method (Deformable transformer) by +3.4 points on 10\% labels of TableBank-both dataset and the previous CNN-based semi-supervised approach (Soft Teacher) by +1.8 points on 10\% labels of PubLayNet dataset. We hope this work opens new possibilities towards semi-supervised and unsupervised table detection methods.
Vehicle detection in real-time scenarios is challenging because of the time constraints and the presence of multiple types of vehicles with different speeds, shapes, structures, etc. This paper presents a new method relied on generating a confidence map-for robust and faster vehicle detection. To reduce the adverse effect of different speeds, shapes, structures, and the presence of several vehicles in a single image, we introduce the concept of augmentation which highlights the region of interest containing the vehicles. The augmented map is generated by exploring the combination of multiresolution analysis and maximally stable extremal regions (MR-MSER). The output of MR-MSER is supplied to fast CNN to generate a confidence map, which results in candidate regions. Furthermore, unlike existing models that implement complicated models for vehicle detection, we explore the combination of a rough set and fuzzy-based models for robust vehicle detection. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on our dataset captured by drones and on several vehicle detection benchmark datasets, namely, KITTI and UA-DETRAC. The results on our dataset and the benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of time efficiency and achieves a good detection rate.