M3D: Dataset Condensation by Minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy

Training state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep models often requires extensive data, resulting in substantial training and storage costs. To address these challenges, dataset condensation has been developed to learn a small synthetic set that preserves essential information from the original large-scale dataset. Nowadays, optimization-oriented methods have been the primary method in the field of dataset condensation for achieving SOTA results. However, the bi-level optimization process hinders the practical application of such methods to realistic and larger datasets. To enhance condensation efficiency, previous works proposed Distribution-Matching (DM) as an alternative, which significantly reduces the condensation cost. Nonetheless, current DM-based methods have yielded less comparable results to optimization-oriented methods due to their focus on aligning only the first moment of the distributions. In this paper, we present a novel DM-based method named M3D for dataset condensation by Minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy between feature representations of the synthetic and real images. By embedding their distributions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, we align all orders of moments of the distributions of real and synthetic images, resulting in a more generalized condensed set. Notably, our method even surpasses the SOTA optimization-oriented method IDC on the high-resolution ImageNet dataset. Extensive analysis is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

ECHO: Efficient Dataset Condensation by Higher-Order Distribution Alignment

In the era of deep learning, training deep neural networks often requires extensive data, leading to substantial costs. Dataset condensation addresses this by learning a small synthetic set that preserves essential information from the original large-scale dataset. Nowadays, optimization-oriented methods dominate dataset condensation for state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, but their computationally intensive bi-level optimization hinders practicality with large datasets. To enhance efficiency, as alternative solutions, Distribution-Matching (DM)-based methods reduce costs by aligning the representation distributions of real and synthetic examples. However, current DM-based methods still yield less comparable results to SOTA optimization-oriented methods. In this paper, we argue that existing DM-based methods overlook the higher-order alignment of the distributions, which may lead to sub-optimal matching results. Inspired by this, we propose a new DM-based method named as Efficient Dataset Condensation by Higher-Order Distribution Alignment (ECHO). Specifically, rather than only aligning the first-order moment of the representation distributions as previous methods, we learn synthetic examples via further aligning the higher-order moments of the representation distributions of real and synthetic examples based on the classical theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Experiments demonstrate the proposed method achieves a significant performance boost while maintaining efficiency across various scenarios.

Coupled Confusion Correction: Learning from Crowds with Sparse Annotations

As the size of the datasets getting larger, accurately annotating such datasets is becoming more impractical due to the expensiveness on both time and economy. Therefore, crowd-sourcing has been widely adopted to alleviate the cost of collecting labels, which also inevitably introduces label noise and eventually degrades the performance of the model. To learn from crowd-sourcing annotations, modeling the expertise of each annotator is a common but challenging paradigm, because the annotations collected by crowd-sourcing are usually highly-sparse. To alleviate this problem, we propose Coupled Confusion Correction (CCC), where two models are simultaneously trained to correct the confusion matrices learned by each other. Via bi-level optimization, the confusion matrices learned by one model can be corrected by the distilled data from the other. Moreover, we cluster the ``annotator groups'' who share similar expertise so that their confusion matrices could be corrected together. In this way, the expertise of the annotators, especially of those who provide seldom labels, could be better captured. Remarkably, we point out that the annotation sparsity not only means the average number of labels is low, but also there are always some annotators who provide very few labels, which is neglected by previous works when constructing synthetic crowd-sourcing annotations. Based on that, we propose to use Beta distribution to control the generation of the crowd-sourcing labels so that the synthetic annotations could be more consistent with the real-world ones. Extensive experiments are conducted on two types of synthetic datasets and three real-world datasets, the results of which demonstrate that CCC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Multi-Label Noise Transition Matrix Estimation with Label Correlations: Theory and Algorithm

Noisy multi-label learning has garnered increasing attention due to the challenges posed by collecting large-scale accurate labels, making noisy labels a more practical alternative. Motivated by noisy multi-class learning, the introduction of transition matrices can help model multi-label noise and enable the development of statistically consistent algorithms for noisy multi-label learning. However, estimating multi-label noise transition matrices remains a challenging task, as most existing estimators in noisy multi-class learning rely on anchor points and accurate fitting of noisy class posteriors, which is hard to satisfy in noisy multi-label learning. In this paper, we address this problem by first investigating the identifiability of class-dependent transition matrices in noisy multi-label learning. Building upon the identifiability results, we propose a novel estimator that leverages label correlations without the need for anchor points or precise fitting of noisy class posteriors. Specifically, we first estimate the occurrence probability of two noisy labels to capture noisy label correlations. Subsequently, we employ sample selection techniques to extract information implying clean label correlations, which are then used to estimate the occurrence probability of one noisy label when a certain clean label appears. By exploiting the mismatches in label correlations implied by these occurrence probabilities, we demonstrate that the transition matrix becomes identifiable and can be acquired by solving a bilinear decomposition problem. Theoretically, we establish an estimation error bound for our multi-label transition matrix estimator and derive a generalization error bound for our statistically consistent algorithm. Empirically, we validate the effectiveness of our estimator in estimating multi-label noise transition matrices, leading to excellent classification performance.

Self-Supervised Transformer with Domain Adaptive Reconstruction for General Face Forgery Video Detection

Face forgery videos have caused severe social public concern, and various detectors have been proposed recently. However, most of them are trained in a supervised manner with limited generalization when detecting videos from different forgery methods or real source videos. To tackle this issue, we explore to take full advantage of the difference between real and forgery videos by only exploring the common representation of real face videos. In this paper, a Self-supervised Transformer cooperating with Contrastive and Reconstruction learning (CoReST) is proposed, which is first pre-trained only on real face videos in a self-supervised manner, and then fine-tuned a linear head on specific face forgery video datasets. Two specific auxiliary tasks incorporated contrastive and reconstruction learning are designed to enhance the representation learning. Furthermore, a Domain Adaptive Reconstruction (DAR) module is introduced to bridge the gap between different forgery domains by reconstructing on unlabeled target videos when fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method performs even better than the state-of-the-art supervised competitors with impressive generalization.

Transferring Annotator- and Instance-dependent Transition Matrix for Learning from Crowds

Learning from crowds describes that the annotations of training data are obtained with crowd-sourcing services. Multiple annotators each complete their own small part of the annotations, where labeling mistakes that depend on annotators occur frequently. Modeling the label-noise generation process by the noise transition matrix is a power tool to tackle the label noise. In real-world crowd-sourcing scenarios, noise transition matrices are both annotator- and instance-dependent. However, due to the high complexity of annotator- and instance-dependent transition matrices (AIDTM), \textit{annotation sparsity}, which means each annotator only labels a little part of instances, makes modeling AIDTM very challenging. Prior works simplify the problem by assuming the transition matrix is instance-independent or using simple parametric way, while lose modeling generality. Motivated by this, we target a more realistic problem, estimating general AIDTM in practice. Without losing modeling generality, we parameterize AIDTM with deep neural networks. To alleviate the modeling challenge, we suppose every annotator shares its noise pattern with similar annotators, and estimate AIDTM via \textit{knowledge transfer}. We hence first model the mixture of noise patterns by all annotators, and then transfer this modeling to individual annotators. Furthermore, considering that the transfer from the mixture of noise patterns to individuals may cause two annotators with highly different noise generations to perturb each other, we employ the knowledge transfer between identified neighboring annotators to calibrate the modeling. Experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed approach on synthetic and real-world crowd-sourcing data. Source codes will be released.

Learning Differentially Private Probabilistic Models for Privacy-Preserving Image Generation

A number of deep models trained on high-quality and valuable images have been deployed in practical applications, which may pose a leakage risk of data privacy. Learning differentially private generative models can sidestep this challenge through indirect data access. However, such differentially private generative models learned by existing approaches can only generate images with a low-resolution of less than 128x128, hindering the widespread usage of generated images in downstream training. In this work, we propose learning differentially private probabilistic models (DPPM) to generate high-resolution images with differential privacy guarantee. In particular, we first train a model to fit the distribution of the training data and make it satisfy differential privacy by performing a randomized response mechanism during training process. Then we perform Hamiltonian dynamics sampling along with the differentially private movement direction predicted by the trained probabilistic model to obtain the privacy-preserving images. In this way, it is possible to apply these images to different downstream tasks while protecting private information. Notably, compared to other state-of-the-art differentially private generative approaches, our approach can generate images up to 256x256 with remarkable visual quality and data utility. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.

Deepfake Video Detection with Spatiotemporal Dropout Transformer

While the abuse of deepfake technology has caused serious concerns recently, how to detect deepfake videos is still a challenge due to the high photo-realistic synthesis of each frame. Existing image-level approaches often focus on single frame and ignore the spatiotemporal cues hidden in deepfake videos, resulting in poor generalization and robustness. The key of a video-level detector is to fully exploit the spatiotemporal inconsistency distributed in local facial regions across different frames in deepfake videos. Inspired by that, this paper proposes a simple yet effective patch-level approach to facilitate deepfake video detection via spatiotemporal dropout transformer. The approach reorganizes each input video into bag of patches that is then fed into a vision transformer to achieve robust representation. Specifically, a spatiotemporal dropout operation is proposed to fully explore patch-level spatiotemporal cues and serve as effective data augmentation to further enhance model's robustness and generalization ability. The operation is flexible and can be easily plugged into existing vision transformers. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach against 25 state-of-the-arts with impressive robustness, generalizability, and representation ability.

Multimodal Fake News Detection with Adaptive Unimodal Representation Aggregation

The development of Internet technology has continuously intensified the spread and destructive power of rumors and fake news. Previous researches on multimedia fake news detection include a series of complex feature extraction and fusion networks to achieve feature alignment between images and texts. However, what the multimodal features are composed of and how features from different modalities affect the decision-making process are still open questions. We present AURA, a multimodal fake news detection network with Adaptive Unimodal Representation Aggregation. We first extract representations respectively from image pattern, image semantics and text, and multimodal representations are generated by sending the semantic and linguistic representations into an expert network. Then, we perform coarse-level fake news detection and cross-modal cosistency learning according to the unimodal and multimodal representations. The classification and consistency scores are mapped into modality-aware attention scores that readjust the features. Finally, we aggregation and classify the weighted features for refined fake news detection. Comprehensive experiments on Weibo and Gossipcop prove that AURA can successfully beat several state-of-the-art FND schemes, where the overall prediction accuracy and the recall of fake news is steadily improved.

Robust Weight Perturbation for Adversarial Training

Overfitting widely exists in adversarial robust training of deep networks. An effective remedy is adversarial weight perturbation, which injects the worst-case weight perturbation during network training by maximizing the classification loss on adversarial examples. Adversarial weight perturbation helps reduce the robust generalization gap; however, it also undermines the robustness improvement. A criterion that regulates the weight perturbation is therefore crucial for adversarial training. In this paper, we propose such a criterion, namely Loss Stationary Condition (LSC) for constrained perturbation. With LSC, we find that it is essential to conduct weight perturbation on adversarial data with small classification loss to eliminate robust overfitting. Weight perturbation on adversarial data with large classification loss is not necessary and may even lead to poor robustness. Based on these observations, we propose a robust perturbation strategy to constrain the extent of weight perturbation. The perturbation strategy prevents deep networks from overfitting while avoiding the side effect of excessive weight perturbation, significantly improving the robustness of adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art adversarial training methods.