Towards Realistic Unsupervised Fine-tuning with CLIP

The emergence of vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, has spurred a significant research effort towards their application for downstream supervised learning tasks. Although some previous studies have explored the unsupervised fine-tuning of CLIP, they often rely on prior knowledge in the form of class names associated with ground truth labels. In this paper, we delve into a realistic unsupervised fine-tuning scenario by assuming that the unlabeled data might contain out-of-distribution samples from unknown classes. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of simultaneously enhancing out-of-distribution detection capabilities alongside the recognition of instances associated with predefined class labels. To tackle this problem, we present a simple, efficient, and effective fine-tuning approach called Universal Entropy Optimization (UEO). UEO leverages sample-level confidence to approximately minimize the conditional entropy of confident instances and maximize the marginal entropy of less confident instances. Apart from optimizing the textual prompts, UEO also incorporates optimization of channel-wise affine transformations within the visual branch of CLIP. Through extensive experiments conducted across 15 domains and 4 different types of prior knowledge, we demonstrate that UEO surpasses baseline methods in terms of both generalization and out-of-distribution detection.

TALL: Thumbnail Layout for Deepfake Video Detection

The growing threats of deepfakes to society and cybersecurity have raised enormous public concerns, and increasing efforts have been devoted to this critical topic of deepfake video detection. Existing video methods achieve good performance but are computationally intensive. This paper introduces a simple yet effective strategy named Thumbnail Layout (TALL), which transforms a video clip into a pre-defined layout to realize the preservation of spatial and temporal dependencies. Specifically, consecutive frames are masked in a fixed position in each frame to improve generalization, then resized to sub-images and rearranged into a pre-defined layout as the thumbnail. TALL is model-agnostic and extremely simple by only modifying a few lines of code. Inspired by the success of vision transformers, we incorporate TALL into Swin Transformer, forming an efficient and effective method TALL-Swin. Extensive experiments on intra-dataset and cross-dataset validate the validity and superiority of TALL and SOTA TALL-Swin. TALL-Swin achieves 90.79$\%$ AUC on the challenging cross-dataset task, FaceForensics++ $\to$ Celeb-DF. The code is available at https://github.com/rainy-xu/TALL4Deepfake.

Improving Zero-Shot Generalization for CLIP with Synthesized Prompts

With the growing interest in pretrained vision-language models like CLIP, recent research has focused on adapting these models to downstream tasks. Despite achieving promising results, most existing methods require labeled data for all classes, which may not hold in real-world applications due to the long tail and Zipf's law. For example, some classes may lack labeled data entirely, such as emerging concepts. To address this problem, we propose a plug-and-play generative approach called \textbf{S}ynt\textbf{H}es\textbf{I}zed \textbf{P}rompts~(\textbf{SHIP}) to improve existing fine-tuning methods. Specifically, we follow variational autoencoders to introduce a generator that reconstructs the visual features by inputting the synthesized prompts and the corresponding class names to the textual encoder of CLIP. In this manner, we easily obtain the synthesized features for the remaining label-only classes. Thereafter, we fine-tune CLIP with off-the-shelf methods by combining labeled and synthesized features. Extensive experiments on base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset transfer learning, and generalized zero-shot learning demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/mrflogs/SHIP}.

Benchmarking Test-Time Adaptation against Distribution Shifts in Image Classification

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a technique aimed at enhancing the generalization performance of models by leveraging unlabeled samples solely during prediction. Given the need for robustness in neural network systems when faced with distribution shifts, numerous TTA methods have recently been proposed. However, evaluating these methods is often done under different settings, such as varying distribution shifts, backbones, and designing scenarios, leading to a lack of consistent and fair benchmarks to validate their effectiveness. To address this issue, we present a benchmark that systematically evaluates 13 prominent TTA methods and their variants on five widely used image classification datasets: CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, ImageNet-C, DomainNet, and Office-Home. These methods encompass a wide range of adaptation scenarios (e.g. online adaptation v.s. offline adaptation, instance adaptation v.s. batch adaptation v.s. domain adaptation). Furthermore, we explore the compatibility of different TTA methods with diverse network backbones. To implement this benchmark, we have developed a unified framework in PyTorch, which allows for consistent evaluation and comparison of the TTA methods across the different datasets and network architectures. By establishing this benchmark, we aim to provide researchers and practitioners with a reliable means of assessing and comparing the effectiveness of TTA methods in improving model robustness and generalization performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyongcan/Benchmark-TTA.

Learning-to-Rank Meets Language: Boosting Language-Driven Ordering Alignment for Ordinal Classification

We present a novel language-driven ordering alignment method for ordinal classification. The labels in ordinal classification contain additional ordering relations, making them prone to overfitting when relying solely on training data. Recent developments in pre-trained vision-language models inspire us to leverage the rich ordinal priors in human language by converting the original task into a vision-language alignment task. Consequently, we propose L2RCLIP, which fully utilizes the language priors from two perspectives. First, we introduce a complementary prompt tuning technique called RankFormer, designed to enhance the ordering relation of original rank prompts. It employs token-level attention with residual-style prompt blending in the word embedding space. Second, to further incorporate language priors, we revisit the approximate bound optimization of vanilla cross-entropy loss and restructure it within the cross-modal embedding space. Consequently, we propose a cross-modal ordinal pairwise loss to refine the CLIP feature space, where texts and images maintain both semantic alignment and ordering alignment. Extensive experiments on three ordinal classification tasks, including facial age estimation, historical color image (HCI) classification, and aesthetic assessment demonstrate its promising performance.

Boosting Fast and High-Quality Speech Synthesis with Linear Diffusion

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models have shown extraordinary ability on various generative tasks. However, their slow inference speed renders them impractical in speech synthesis. This paper proposes a linear diffusion model (LinDiff) based on an ordinary differential equation to simultaneously reach fast inference and high sample quality. Firstly, we employ linear interpolation between the target and noise to design a diffusion sequence for training, while previously the diffusion path that links the noise and target is a curved segment. When decreasing the number of sampling steps (i.e., the number of line segments used to fit the path), the ease of fitting straight lines compared to curves allows us to generate higher quality samples from a random noise with fewer iterations. Secondly, to reduce computational complexity and achieve effective global modeling of noisy speech, LinDiff employs a patch-based processing approach that partitions the input signal into small patches. The patch-wise token leverages Transformer architecture for effective modeling of global information. Adversarial training is used to further improve the sample quality with decreased sampling steps. We test proposed method with speech synthesis conditioned on acoustic feature (Mel-spectrograms). Experimental results verify that our model can synthesize high-quality speech even with only one diffusion step. Both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that our model can synthesize speech of a quality comparable to that of autoregressive models with faster synthesis speed (3 diffusion steps).

Lightweight Vision Transformer with Bidirectional Interaction

Recent advancements in vision backbones have significantly improved their performance by simultaneously modeling images' local and global contexts. However, the bidirectional interaction between these two contexts has not been well explored and exploited, which is important in the human visual system. This paper proposes a Fully Adaptive Self-Attention (FASA) mechanism for vision transformer to model the local and global information as well as the bidirectional interaction between them in context-aware ways. Specifically, FASA employs self-modulated convolutions to adaptively extract local representation while utilizing self-attention in down-sampled space to extract global representation. Subsequently, it conducts a bidirectional adaptation process between local and global representation to model their interaction. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained downsampling strategy to enhance the down-sampled self-attention mechanism for finer-grained global perception capability. Based on FASA, we develop a family of lightweight vision backbones, Fully Adaptive Transformer (FAT) family. Extensive experiments on multiple vision tasks demonstrate that FAT achieves impressive performance. Notably, FAT accomplishes a 77.6% accuracy on ImageNet-1K using only 4.5M parameters and 0.7G FLOPs, which surpasses the most advanced ConvNets and Transformers with similar model size and computational costs. Moreover, our model exhibits faster speed on modern GPU compared to other models. Code will be available at https://github.com/qhfan/FAT.

Rethinking Local Perception in Lightweight Vision Transformer

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been shown to be effective in various vision tasks. However, resizing them to a mobile-friendly size leads to significant performance degradation. Therefore, developing lightweight vision transformers has become a crucial area of research. This paper introduces CloFormer, a lightweight vision transformer that leverages context-aware local enhancement. CloFormer explores the relationship between globally shared weights often used in vanilla convolutional operators and token-specific context-aware weights appearing in attention, then proposes an effective and straightforward module to capture high-frequency local information. In CloFormer, we introduce AttnConv, a convolution operator in attention's style. The proposed AttnConv uses shared weights to aggregate local information and deploys carefully designed context-aware weights to enhance local features. The combination of the AttnConv and vanilla attention which uses pooling to reduce FLOPs in CloFormer enables the model to perceive high-frequency and low-frequency information. Extensive experiments were conducted in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, demonstrating the superiority of CloFormer.

SOSR: Source-Free Image Super-Resolution with Wavelet Augmentation Transformer

Real-world images taken by different cameras with different degradation kernels often result in a cross-device domain gap in image super-resolution. A prevalent attempt to this issue is unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) that needs to access source data. Considering privacy policies or transmission restrictions of data in many practical applications, we propose a SOurce-free image Super-Resolution framework (SOSR) to address this issue, i.e., adapt a model pre-trained on labeled source data to a target domain with only unlabeled target data. SOSR leverages the source model to generate refined pseudo-labels for teacher-student learning. To better utilize the pseudo-labels, this paper proposes a novel wavelet-based augmentation method, named Wavelet Augmentation Transformer (WAT), which can be flexibly incorporated with existing networks, to implicitly produce useful augmented data. WAT learns low-frequency information of varying levels across diverse samples, which is aggregated efficiently via deformable attention. Furthermore, an uncertainty-aware self-training mechanism is proposed to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels, with inaccurate predictions being rectified by uncertainty estimation. To acquire better SR results and avoid overfitting pseudo-labels, several regularization losses are proposed to constrain the frequency information between target LR and SR images. Experiments show that without accessing source data, SOSR achieves superior results to the state-of-the-art UDA methods.

A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts

Machine learning methods strive to acquire a robust model during training that can generalize well to test samples, even under distribution shifts. However, these methods often suffer from a performance drop due to unknown test distributions. Test-time adaptation (TTA), an emerging paradigm, has the potential to adapt a pre-trained model to unlabeled data during testing, before making predictions. Recent progress in this paradigm highlights the significant benefits of utilizing unlabeled data for training self-adapted models prior to inference. In this survey, we divide TTA into several distinct categories, namely, test-time (source-free) domain adaptation, test-time batch adaptation, online test-time adaptation, and test-time prior adaptation. For each category, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of advanced algorithms, followed by a discussion of different learning scenarios. Furthermore, we analyze relevant applications of TTA and discuss open challenges and promising areas for future research. A comprehensive list of TTA methods can be found at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/awesome-test-time-adaptation}.