CLIP meets Model Zoo Experts: Pseudo-Supervision for Visual Enhancement

Contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) is a standard method for training vision-language models. While CLIP is scalable, promptable, and robust to distribution shifts on image classification tasks, it lacks object localization capabilities. This paper studies the following question: Can we augment CLIP training with task-specific vision models from model zoos to improve its visual representations? Towards this end, we leverage open-source task-specific vision models to generate pseudo-labels for an uncurated and noisy image-text dataset. Subsequently, we train CLIP models on these pseudo-labels in addition to the contrastive training on image and text pairs. This simple setup shows substantial improvements of up to 16.3% across different vision tasks, including segmentation, detection, depth estimation, and surface normal estimation. Importantly, these enhancements are achieved without compromising CLIP's existing capabilities, including its proficiency in promptable zero-shot classification.

SHARCS: Efficient Transformers through Routing with Dynamic Width Sub-networks

We introduce SHARCS for adaptive inference that takes into account the hardness of input samples. SHARCS can train a router on any transformer network, enabling the model to direct different samples to sub-networks with varying widths. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) SHARCS outperforms or complements existing per-sample adaptive inference methods across various classification tasks in terms of accuracy vs. FLOPs; (2) SHARCS generalizes across different architectures and can be even applied to compressed and efficient transformer encoders to further improve their efficiency; (3) SHARCS can provide a 2 times inference speed up at an insignificant drop in accuracy.

Time Does Tell: Self-Supervised Time-Tuning of Dense Image Representations

Spatially dense self-supervised learning is a rapidly growing problem domain with promising applications for unsupervised segmentation and pretraining for dense downstream tasks. Despite the abundance of temporal data in the form of videos, this information-rich source has been largely overlooked. Our paper aims to address this gap by proposing a novel approach that incorporates temporal consistency in dense self-supervised learning. While methods designed solely for images face difficulties in achieving even the same performance on videos, our method improves not only the representation quality for videos-but also images. Our approach, which we call time-tuning, starts from image-pretrained models and fine-tunes them with a novel self-supervised temporal-alignment clustering loss on unlabeled videos. This effectively facilitates the transfer of high-level information from videos to image representations. Time-tuning improves the state-of-the-art by 8-10% for unsupervised semantic segmentation on videos and matches it for images. We believe this method paves the way for further self-supervised scaling by leveraging the abundant availability of videos. The implementation can be found here : https://github.com/SMSD75/Timetuning

InForecaster: Forecasting Influenza Hemagglutinin Mutations Through the Lens of Anomaly Detection

The influenza virus hemagglutinin is an important part of the virus attachment to the host cells. The hemagglutinin proteins are one of the genetic regions of the virus with a high potential for mutations. Due to the importance of predicting mutations in producing effective and low-cost vaccines, solutions that attempt to approach this problem have recently gained a significant attention. A historical record of mutations have been used to train predictive models in such solutions. However, the imbalance between mutations and the preserved proteins is a big challenge for the development of such models that needs to be addressed. Here, we propose to tackle this challenge through anomaly detection (AD). AD is a well-established field in Machine Learning (ML) that tries to distinguish unseen anomalies from the normal patterns using only normal training samples. By considering mutations as the anomalous behavior, we could benefit existing rich solutions in this field that have emerged recently. Such methods also fit the problem setup of extreme imbalance between the number of unmutated vs. mutated training samples. Motivated by this formulation, our method tries to find a compact representation for unmutated samples while forcing anomalies to be separated from the normal ones. This helps the model to learn a shared unique representation between normal training samples as much as possible, which improves the discernibility and detectability of mutated samples from the unmutated ones at the test time. We conduct a large number of experiments on four publicly available datasets, consisting of 3 different hemagglutinin protein datasets, and one SARS-CoV-2 dataset, and show the effectiveness of our method through different standard criteria.

SwinCheX: Multi-label classification on chest X-ray images with transformers

According to the considerable growth in the avail of chest X-ray images in diagnosing various diseases, as well as gathering extensive datasets, having an automated diagnosis procedure using deep neural networks has occupied the minds of experts. Most of the available methods in computer vision use a CNN backbone to acquire high accuracy on the classification problems. Nevertheless, recent researches show that transformers, established as the de facto method in NLP, can also outperform many CNN-based models in vision. This paper proposes a multi-label classification deep model based on the Swin Transformer as the backbone to achieve state-of-the-art diagnosis classification. It leverages Multi-Layer Perceptron, also known as MLP, for the head architecture. We evaluate our model on one of the most widely-used and largest x-ray datasets called "Chest X-ray14," which comprises more than 100,000 frontal/back-view images from over 30,000 patients with 14 famous chest diseases. Our model has been tested with several number of MLP layers for the head setting, each achieves a competitive AUC score on all classes. Comprehensive experiments on Chest X-ray14 have shown that a 3-layer head attains state-of-the-art performance with an average AUC score of 0.810, compared to the former SOTA average AUC of 0.799. We propose an experimental setup for the fair benchmarking of existing methods, which could be used as a basis for the future studies. Finally, we followed up our results by confirming that the proposed method attends to the pathologically relevant areas of the chest.

Fake It Till You Make It: Near-Distribution Novelty Detection by Score-Based Generative Models

We aim for image-based novelty detection. Despite considerable progress, existing models either fail or face a dramatic drop under the so-called ``near-distribution" setting, where the differences between normal and anomalous samples are subtle. We first demonstrate existing methods experience up to 20\% decrease in performance in the near-distribution setting. Next, we propose to exploit a score-based generative model to produce synthetic near-distribution anomalous data. Our model is then fine-tuned to distinguish such data from the normal samples. We provide a quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation of this strategy, and compare the results with a variety of GAN-based models. Effectiveness of our method for both the near-distribution and standard novelty detection is assessed through extensive experiments on datasets in diverse applications such as medical images, object classification, and quality control. This reveals that our method considerably improves over existing models, and consistently decreases the gap between the near-distribution and standard novelty detection performance. Overall, our method improves the near-distribution novelty detection by 6% and passes the state-of-the-art by 1% to 5% across nine novelty detection benchmarks. The code repository is available at https://github.com/rohban-lab/FITYMI

Attentional Mixtures of Soft Prompt Tuning for Parameter-efficient Multi-task Knowledge Sharing

This work introduces ATTEMPT (Attentional Mixture of Prompt Tuning), a new modular, multi-task, and parameter-efficient language model (LM) tuning approach that combines knowledge transferred across different tasks via a mixture of soft prompts while keeping original LM unchanged. ATTEMPT interpolates a set of prompts trained on large-scale source tasks and a newly initialized target task prompt using instance-wise attention computed by a lightweight sub-network trained on multiple target tasks. ATTEMPT is parameter-efficient (e.g., updates 1,600 times fewer parameters than fine-tuning) and enables multi-task learning and flexible extensions; importantly, it is also more interpretable because it demonstrates which source tasks affect the final model decision on target tasks. Experimental results across 17 diverse datasets show that ATTEMPT improves prompt tuning by up to a 22% absolute performance gain and outperforms or matches fully fine-tuned or other parameter-efficient tuning approaches that use over ten times more parameters.

MERLOT Reserve: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Sound

As humans, we navigate the world through all our senses, using perceptual input from each one to correct the others. We introduce MERLOT Reserve, a model that represents videos jointly over time -- through a new training objective that learns from audio, subtitles, and video frames. Given a video, we replace snippets of text and audio with a MASK token; the model learns by choosing the correct masked-out snippet. Our objective learns faster than alternatives, and performs well at scale: we pretrain on 20 million YouTube videos. Empirical results show that MERLOT Reserve learns strong representations about videos through all constituent modalities. When finetuned, it sets a new state-of-the-art on both VCR and TVQA, outperforming prior work by 5% and 7% respectively. Ablations show that both tasks benefit from audio pretraining -- even VCR, a QA task centered around images (without sound). Moreover, our objective enables out-of-the-box prediction, revealing strong multimodal commonsense understanding. In a fully zero-shot setting, our model obtains competitive results on four video understanding tasks, even outperforming supervised approaches on the recently proposed Situated Reasoning (STAR) benchmark. We analyze why incorporating audio leads to better vision-language representations, suggesting significant opportunities for future research. We conclude by discussing ethical and societal implications of multimodal pretraining.

A Unified Survey on Anomaly, Novelty, Open-Set, and Out-of-Distribution Detection: Solutions and Future Challenges

Machine learning models often encounter samples that are diverged from the training distribution. Failure to recognize an out-of-distribution (OOD) sample, and consequently assign that sample to an in-class label significantly compromises the reliability of a model. The problem has gained significant attention due to its importance for safety deploying models in open-world settings. Detecting OOD samples is challenging due to the intractability of modeling all possible unknown distributions. To date, several research domains tackle the problem of detecting unfamiliar samples, including anomaly detection, novelty detection, one-class learning, open set recognition, and out-of-distribution detection. Despite having similar and shared concepts, out-of-distribution, open-set, and anomaly detection have been investigated independently. Accordingly, these research avenues have not cross-pollinated, creating research barriers. While some surveys intend to provide an overview of these approaches, they seem to only focus on a specific domain without examining the relationship between different domains. This survey aims to provide a cross-domain and comprehensive review of numerous eminent works in respective areas while identifying their commonalities. Researchers can benefit from the overview of research advances in different fields and develop future methodology synergistically. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, while there are surveys in anomaly detection or one-class learning, there is no comprehensive or up-to-date survey on out-of-distribution detection, which our survey covers extensively. Finally, having a unified cross-domain perspective, we discuss and shed light on future lines of research, intending to bring these fields closer together.

Ano-Graph: Learning Normal Scene Contextual Graphs to Detect Video Anomalies

Video anomaly detection has proved to be a challenging task owing to its unsupervised training procedure and high spatio-temporal complexity existing in real-world scenarios. In the absence of anomalous training samples, state-of-the-art methods try to extract features that fully grasp normal behaviors in both space and time domains using different approaches such as autoencoders, or generative adversarial networks. However, these approaches completely ignore or, by using the ability of deep networks in the hierarchical modeling, poorly model the spatio-temporal interactions that exist between objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel yet efficient method named Ano-Graph for learning and modeling the interaction of normal objects. Towards this end, a Spatio-Temporal Graph (STG) is made by considering each node as an object's feature extracted from a real-time off-the-shelf object detector, and edges are made based on their interactions. After that, a self-supervised learning method is employed on the STG in such a way that encapsulates interactions in a semantic space. Our method is data-efficient, significantly more robust against common real-world variations such as illumination, and passes SOTA by a large margin on the challenging datasets ADOC and Street Scene while stays competitive on Avenue, ShanghaiTech, and UCSD.