NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

Communication-Efficient Gradient Descent-Accent Methods for Distributed Variational Inequalities: Unified Analysis and Local Updates

Distributed and federated learning algorithms and techniques associated primarily with minimization problems. However, with the increase of minimax optimization and variational inequality problems in machine learning, the necessity of designing efficient distributed/federated learning approaches for these problems is becoming more apparent. In this paper, we provide a unified convergence analysis of communication-efficient local training methods for distributed variational inequality problems (VIPs). Our approach is based on a general key assumption on the stochastic estimates that allows us to propose and analyze several novel local training algorithms under a single framework for solving a class of structured non-monotone VIPs. We present the first local gradient descent-accent algorithms with provable improved communication complexity for solving distributed variational inequalities on heterogeneous data. The general algorithmic framework recovers state-of-the-art algorithms and their sharp convergence guarantees when the setting is specialized to minimization or minimax optimization problems. Finally, we demonstrate the strong performance of the proposed algorithms compared to state-of-the-art methods when solving federated minimax optimization problems.

FIT: Frequency-based Image Translation for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to adapt the detector from a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. In recent years, DAOD has attracted massive attention since it can alleviate performance degradation due to the large shift of data distributions in the wild. To align distributions between domains, adversarial learning is widely used in existing DAOD methods. However, the decision boundary for the adversarial domain discriminator may be inaccurate, causing the model biased towards the source domain. To alleviate this bias, we propose a novel Frequency-based Image Translation (FIT) framework for DAOD. First, by keeping domain-invariant frequency components and swapping domain-specific ones, we conduct image translation to reduce domain shift at the input level. Second, hierarchical adversarial feature learning is utilized to further mitigate the domain gap at the feature level. Finally, we design a joint loss to train the entire network in an end-to-end manner without extra training to obtain translated images. Extensive experiments on three challenging DAOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Refined Pseudo labeling for Source-free Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) assumes that both labeled source data and unlabeled target data are available for training, but this assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios. Thus, source-free DAOD is proposed to adapt the source-trained detectors to target domains with only unlabeled target data. Existing source-free DAOD methods typically utilize pseudo labeling, where the performance heavily relies on the selection of confidence threshold. However, most prior works adopt a single fixed threshold for all classes to generate pseudo labels, which ignore the imbalanced class distribution, resulting in biased pseudo labels. In this work, we propose a refined pseudo labeling framework for source-free DAOD. First, to generate unbiased pseudo labels, we present a category-aware adaptive threshold estimation module, which adaptively provides the appropriate threshold for each category. Second, to alleviate incorrect box regression, a localization-aware pseudo label assignment strategy is introduced to divide labels into certain and uncertain ones and optimize them separately. Finally, extensive experiments on four adaptation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Reconstruction of compressed spectral imaging based on global structure and spectral correlation

In this paper, a convolution sparse coding method based on global structure characteristics and spectral correlation is proposed for the reconstruction of compressive spectral images. The proposed method uses the convolution kernel to operate the global image, which can better preserve image structure information in the spatial dimension. To take full exploration of the constraints between spectra, the coefficients corresponding to the convolution kernel are constrained by the norm to improve spectral accuracy. And, to solve the problem that convolutional sparse coding is insensitive to low frequency, the global total-variation (TV) constraint is added to estimate the low-frequency components. It not only ensures the effective estimation of the low-frequency but also transforms the convolutional sparse coding into a de-noising process, which makes the reconstructing process simpler. Simulations show that compared with the current mainstream optimization methods (DeSCI and Gap-TV), the proposed method improves the reconstruction quality by up to 7 dB in PSNR and 10% in SSIM, and has a great improvement in the details of the reconstructed image.

Uniform Convergence and Generalization for Nonconvex Stochastic Minimax Problems

This paper studies the uniform convergence and generalization bounds for nonconvex-(strongly)-concave (NC-SC/NC-C) stochastic minimax optimization. We first establish the uniform convergence between the empirical minimax problem and the population minimax problem and show the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\kappa^2\epsilon^{-2})$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\epsilon^{-4})$ sample complexities respectively for the NC-SC and NC-C settings, where $d$ is the dimension number and $\kappa$ is the condition number. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first uniform convergence measured by the first-order stationarity in stochastic minimax optimization. Based on the uniform convergence, we shed light on the sample and gradient complexities required for finding an approximate stationary point for stochastic minimax optimization in the NC-SC and NC-C settings.

Unseen Object Instance Segmentation with Fully Test-time RGB-D Embeddings Adaptation

Segmenting unseen objects is a crucial ability for the robot since it may encounter new environments during the operation. Recently, a popular solution is leveraging RGB-D features of large-scale synthetic data and directly applying the model to unseen real-world scenarios. However, even though depth data have fair generalization ability, the domain shift due to the Sim2Real gap is inevitable, which presents a key challenge to the unseen object instance segmentation (UOIS) model. To tackle this problem, we re-emphasize the adaptation process across Sim2Real domains in this paper. Specifically, we propose a framework to conduct the Fully Test-time RGB-D Embeddings Adaptation (FTEA) based on parameters of the BatchNorm layer. To construct the learning objective for test-time back-propagation, we propose a novel non-parametric entropy objective that can be implemented without explicit classification layers. Moreover, we design a cross-modality knowledge distillation module to encourage the information transfer during test time. The proposed method can be efficiently conducted with test-time images, without requiring annotations or revisiting the large-scale synthetic training data. Besides significant time savings, the proposed method consistently improves segmentation results on both overlap and boundary metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performances on two real-world RGB-D image datasets. We hope our work could draw attention to the test-time adaptation and reveal a promising direction for robot perception in unseen environments.

The Complexity of Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Optimization

This paper studies the complexity for finding approximate stationary points of nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) smooth minimax problems, in both general and averaged smooth finite-sum settings. We establish nontrivial lower complexity bounds of $\Omega(\sqrt{\kappa}\Delta L\epsilon^{-2})$ and $\Omega(n+\sqrt{n\kappa}\Delta L\epsilon^{-2})$ for the two settings, respectively, where $\kappa$ is the condition number, $L$ is the smoothness constant, and $\Delta$ is the initial gap. Our result reveals substantial gaps between these limits and best-known upper bounds in the literature. To close these gaps, we introduce a generic acceleration scheme that deploys existing gradient-based methods to solve a sequence of crafted strongly-convex-strongly-concave subproblems. In the general setting, the complexity of our proposed algorithm nearly matches the lower bound; in particular, it removes an additional poly-logarithmic dependence on accuracy present in previous works. In the averaged smooth finite-sum setting, our proposed algorithm improves over previous algorithms by providing a nearly-tight dependence on the condition number.

Biased Stochastic Gradient Descent for Conditional Stochastic Optimization

Conditional Stochastic Optimization (CSO) covers a variety of applications ranging from meta-learning and causal inference to invariant learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimates in CSO is challenging due to the composition structure. As an alternative, we propose a biased stochastic gradient descent (BSGD) algorithm and study the bias-variance tradeoff under different structural assumptions. We establish the sample complexities of BSGD for strongly convex, convex, and weakly convex objectives, under smooth and non-smooth conditions. We also provide matching lower bounds of BSGD for convex CSO objectives. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the performance of BSGD on robust logistic regression, model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), and instrumental variable regression (IV).