Recent studies have shown that introducing communication between agents can significantly improve overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In many real-world scenarios, communication can be expensive and the bandwidth of the multi-agent system is subject to certain constraints. Redundant messages who occupy the communication resources can block the transmission of informative messages and thus jeopardize the performance. In this paper, we aim to learn the minimal sufficient communication messages. First, we initiate the communication between agents by a complete graph. Then we introduce the graph information bottleneck (GIB) principle into this complete graph and derive the optimization over graph structures. Based on the optimization, a novel multi-agent communication module, called CommGIB, is proposed, which effectively compresses the structure information and node information in the communication graph to deal with bandwidth-constrained settings. Extensive experiments in Traffic Control and StanCraft II are conducted. The results indicate that the proposed methods can achieve better performance in bandwidth-restricted settings compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, with especially large margins in large-scale multi-agent tasks.
Neural networks often make predictions relying on the spurious correlations from the datasets rather than the intrinsic properties of the task of interest, facing sharp degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Existing de-bias learning frameworks try to capture specific dataset bias by bias annotations, they fail to handle complicated OOD scenarios. Others implicitly identify the dataset bias by the special design on the low capability biased model or the loss, but they degrade when the training and testing data are from the same distribution. In this paper, we propose a General Greedy De-bias learning framework (GGD), which greedily trains the biased models and the base model like gradient descent in functional space. It encourages the base model to focus on examples that are hard to solve with biased models, thus remaining robust against spurious correlations in the test stage. GGD largely improves models' OOD generalization ability on various tasks, but sometimes over-estimates the bias level and degrades on the in-distribution test. We further re-analyze the ensemble process of GGD and introduce the Curriculum Regularization into GGD inspired by curriculum learning, which achieves a good trade-off between in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance. Extensive experiments on image classification, adversarial question answering, and visual question answering demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. GGD can learn a more robust base model under the settings of both task-specific biased models with prior knowledge and self-ensemble biased model without prior knowledge.
Recent studies have shown that introducing communication between agents can significantly improve overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In many real-world scenarios, communication can be expensive and the bandwidth of the multi-agent system is subject to certain constraints. Redundant messages who occupy the communication resources can block the transmission of informative messages and thus jeopardize the performance. In this paper, we aim to learn the minimal sufficient communication messages. First, we initiate the communication between agents by a complete graph. Then we introduce the graph information bottleneck (GIB) principle into this complete graph and derive the optimization over graph structures. Based on the optimization, a novel multi-agent communication module, called CommGIB, is proposed, which effectively compresses the structure information and node information in the communication graph to deal with bandwidth-constrained settings. Extensive experiments in Traffic Control and StanCraft II are conducted. The results indicate that the proposed methods can achieve better performance in bandwidth-restricted settings compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, with especially large margins in large-scale multi-agent tasks.
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.
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to improve the generalization ability of detectors when the training and test data are from different domains. Considering the significant domain gap, some typical methods, e.g., CycleGAN-based methods, adopt the intermediate domain to bridge the source and target domains progressively. However, the CycleGAN-based intermediate domain lacks the pix- or instance-level supervision for object detection, which leads to semantic differences. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce a Frequency Spectrum Augmentation Consistency (FSAC) framework with four different low-frequency filter operations. In this way, we can obtain a series of augmented data as the intermediate domain. Concretely, we propose a two-stage optimization framework. In the first stage, we utilize all the original and augmented source data to train an object detector. In the second stage, augmented source and target data with pseudo labels are adopted to perform the self-training for prediction consistency. And a teacher model optimized using Mean Teacher is used to further revise the pseudo labels. In the experiment, we evaluate our method on the single- and compound- target DAOD separately, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
In the real world, the frequency of occurrence of objects is naturally skewed forming long-tail class distributions, which results in poor performance on the statistically rare classes. A promising solution is to mine tail-class examples to balance the training dataset. However, mining tail-class examples is a very challenging task. For instance, most of the otherwise successful uncertainty-based mining approaches struggle due to distortion of class probabilities resulting from skewness in data. In this work, we propose an effective, yet simple, approach to overcome these challenges. Our framework enhances the subdued tail-class activations and, thereafter, uses a one-class data-centric approach to effectively identify tail-class examples. We carry out an exhaustive evaluation of our framework on three datasets spanning over two computer vision tasks. Substantial improvements in the minority-class mining and fine-tuned model's performance strongly corroborate the value of our proposed solution.
The existing neural architecture search algorithms are mostly working on search spaces with short-distance connections. We argue that such designs, though safe and stable, obstacles the search algorithms from exploring more complicated scenarios. In this paper, we build the search algorithm upon a complicated search space with long-distance connections, and show that existing weight-sharing search algorithms mostly fail due to the existence of \textbf{interleaved connections}. Based on the observation, we present a simple yet effective algorithm named \textbf{IF-NAS}, where we perform a periodic sampling strategy to construct different sub-networks during the search procedure, avoiding the interleaved connections to emerge in any of them. In the proposed search space, IF-NAS outperform both random sampling and previous weight-sharing search algorithms by a significant margin. IF-NAS also generalizes to the micro cell-based spaces which are much easier. Our research emphasizes the importance of macro structure and we look forward to further efforts along this direction.
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great potentials in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views, but the computational overhead of NeRF at the inference stage is still heavy. To alleviate the burden, we delve into the coarse-to-fine, hierarchical sampling procedure of NeRF and point out that the coarse stage can be replaced by a lightweight module which we name a neural sample field. The proposed sample field maps rays into sample distributions, which can be transformed into point coordinates and fed into radiance fields for volume rendering. The overall framework is named as NeuSample. We perform experiments on Realistic Synthetic 360$^{\circ}$ and Real Forward-Facing, two popular 3D scene sets, and show that NeuSample achieves better rendering quality than NeRF while enjoying a faster inference speed. NeuSample is further compressed with a proposed sample field extraction method towards a better trade-off between quality and speed.
In this paper, we propose a self-supervised visual representation learning approach which involves both generative and discriminative proxies, where we focus on the former part by requiring the target network to recover the original image based on the mid-level features. Different from prior work that mostly focuses on pixel-level similarity between the original and generated images, we advocate for Semantic-aware Generation (SaGe) to facilitate richer semantics rather than details to be preserved in the generated image. The core idea of implementing SaGe is to use an evaluator, a deep network that is pre-trained without labels, for extracting semantic-aware features. SaGe complements the target network with view-specific features and thus alleviates the semantic degradation brought by intensive data augmentations. We execute SaGe on ImageNet-1K and evaluate the pre-trained models on five downstream tasks including nearest neighbor test, linear classification, and fine-scaled image recognition, demonstrating its ability to learn stronger visual representations.
Anomaly segmentation is a crucial task for safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving in urban scenes, where the goal is to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) objects with categories which are unseen during training. The core challenge of this task is how to distinguish hard in-distribution samples from OOD samples, which has not been explicitly discussed yet. In this paper, we propose a novel and simple approach named Consensus Synergizes with Memory (CosMe) to address this challenge, inspired by the psychology finding that groups perform better than individuals on memory tasks. The main idea is 1) building a memory bank which consists of seen prototypes extracted from multiple layers of the pre-trained segmentation model and 2) training an auxiliary model that mimics the behavior of the pre-trained model, and then measuring the consensus of their mid-level features as complementary cues that synergize with the memory bank. CosMe is good at distinguishing between hard in-distribution examples and OOD samples. Experimental results on several urban scene anomaly segmentation datasets show that CosMe outperforms previous approaches by large margins.