Swiss DINO: Efficient and Versatile Vision Framework for On-device Personal Object Search

In this paper, we address a recent trend in robotic home appliances to include vision systems on personal devices, capable of personalizing the appliances on the fly. In particular, we formulate and address an important technical task of personal object search, which involves localization and identification of personal items of interest on images captured by robotic appliances, with each item referenced only by a few annotated images. The task is crucial for robotic home appliances and mobile systems, which need to process personal visual scenes or to operate with particular personal objects (e.g., for grasping or navigation). In practice, personal object search presents two main technical challenges. First, a robot vision system needs to be able to distinguish between many fine-grained classes, in the presence of occlusions and clutter. Second, the strict resource requirements for the on-device system restrict the usage of most state-of-the-art methods for few-shot learning and often prevent on-device adaptation. In this work, we propose Swiss DINO: a simple yet effective framework for one-shot personal object search based on the recent DINOv2 transformer model, which was shown to have strong zero-shot generalization properties. Swiss DINO handles challenging on-device personalized scene understanding requirements and does not require any adaptation training. We show significant improvement (up to 55%) in segmentation and recognition accuracy compared to the common lightweight solutions, and significant footprint reduction of backbone inference time (up to 100x) and GPU consumption (up to 10x) compared to the heavy transformer-based solutions.

Enhanced Model Robustness to Input Corruptions by Per-corruption Adaptation of Normalization Statistics

Developing a reliable vision system is a fundamental challenge for robotic technologies (e.g., indoor service robots and outdoor autonomous robots) which can ensure reliable navigation even in challenging environments such as adverse weather conditions (e.g., fog, rain), poor lighting conditions (e.g., over/under exposure), or sensor degradation (e.g., blurring, noise), and can guarantee high performance in safety-critical functions. Current solutions proposed to improve model robustness usually rely on generic data augmentation techniques or employ costly test-time adaptation methods. In addition, most approaches focus on addressing a single vision task (typically, image recognition) utilising synthetic data. In this paper, we introduce Per-corruption Adaptation of Normalization statistics (PAN) to enhance the model robustness of vision systems. Our approach entails three key components: (i) a corruption type identification module, (ii) dynamic adjustment of normalization layer statistics based on identified corruption type, and (iii) real-time update of these statistics according to input data. PAN can integrate seamlessly with any convolutional model for enhanced accuracy in several robot vision tasks. In our experiments, PAN obtains robust performance improvement on challenging real-world corrupted image datasets (e.g., OpenLoris, ExDark, ACDC), where most of the current solutions tend to fail. Moreover, PAN outperforms the baseline models by 20-30% on synthetic benchmarks in object recognition tasks.

Cross-Architecture Auxiliary Feature Space Translation for Efficient Few-Shot Personalized Object Detection

Recent years have seen object detection robotic systems deployed in several personal devices (e.g., home robots and appliances). This has highlighted a challenge in their design, i.e., they cannot efficiently update their knowledge to distinguish between general classes and user-specific instances (e.g., a dog vs. user's dog). We refer to this challenging task as Instance-level Personalized Object Detection (IPOD). The personalization task requires many samples for model tuning and optimization in a centralized server, raising privacy concerns. An alternative is provided by approaches based on recent large-scale Foundation Models, but their compute costs preclude on-device applications. In our work we tackle both problems at the same time, designing a Few-Shot IPOD strategy called AuXFT. We introduce a conditional coarse-to-fine few-shot learner to refine the coarse predictions made by an efficient object detector, showing that using an off-the-shelf model leads to poor personalization due to neural collapse. Therefore, we introduce a Translator block that generates an auxiliary feature space where features generated by a self-supervised model (e.g., DINOv2) are distilled without impacting the performance of the detector. We validate AuXFT on three publicly available datasets and one in-house benchmark designed for the IPOD task, achieving remarkable gains in all considered scenarios with excellent time-complexity trade-off: AuXFT reaches a performance of 80% its upper bound at just 32% of the inference time, 13% of VRAM and 19% of the model size.

Model Merging and Safety Alignment: One Bad Model Spoils the Bunch

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of safety alignment during merging, leading to highly misaligned models. This work investigates the effects of model merging on alignment. We evaluate several popular model merging techniques, demonstrating that existing methods do not only transfer domain expertise but also propagate misalignment. We propose a simple two-step approach to address this problem: (i) generating synthetic safety and domain-specific data, and (ii) incorporating these generated data into the optimization process of existing data-aware model merging techniques. This allows us to treat alignment as a skill that can be maximized in the resulting merged LLM. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of integrating alignment-related data during merging, resulting in models that excel in both domain expertise and alignment.

Object-conditioned Bag of Instances for Few-Shot Personalized Instance Recognition

Nowadays, users demand for increased personalization of vision systems to localize and identify personal instances of objects (e.g., my dog rather than dog) from a few-shot dataset only. Despite outstanding results of deep networks on classical label-abundant benchmarks (e.g., those of the latest YOLOv8 model for standard object detection), they struggle to maintain within-class variability to represent different instances rather than object categories only. We construct an Object-conditioned Bag of Instances (OBoI) based on multi-order statistics of extracted features, where generic object detection models are extended to search and identify personal instances from the OBoI's metric space, without need for backpropagation. By relying on multi-order statistics, OBoI achieves consistent superior accuracy in distinguishing different instances. In the results, we achieve 77.1% personal object recognition accuracy in case of 18 personal instances, showing about 12% relative gain over the state of the art.

FFT-based Selection and Optimization of Statistics for Robust Recognition of Severely Corrupted Images

Improving model robustness in case of corrupted images is among the key challenges to enable robust vision systems on smart devices, such as robotic agents. Particularly, robust test-time performance is imperative for most of the applications. This paper presents a novel approach to improve robustness of any classification model, especially on severely corrupted images. Our method (FROST) employs high-frequency features to detect input image corruption type, and select layer-wise feature normalization statistics. FROST provides the state-of-the-art results for different models and datasets, outperforming competitors on ImageNet-C by up to 37.1% relative gain, improving baseline of 40.9% mCE on severe corruptions.

A Modular System for Enhanced Robustness of Multimedia Understanding Networks via Deep Parametric Estimation

In multimedia understanding tasks, corrupted samples pose a critical challenge, because when fed to machine learning models they lead to performance degradation. In the past, three groups of approaches have been proposed to handle noisy data: i) enhancer and denoiser modules to improve the quality of the noisy data, ii) data augmentation approaches, and iii) domain adaptation strategies. All the aforementioned approaches come with drawbacks that limit their applicability; the first has high computational costs and requires pairs of clean-corrupted data for training, while the others only allow deployment of the same task/network they were trained on (\ie, when upstream and downstream task/network are the same). In this paper, we propose SyMPIE to solve these shortcomings. To this end, we design a small, modular, and efficient (just 2GFLOPs to process a Full HD image) system to enhance input data for robust downstream multimedia understanding with minimal computational cost. Our SyMPIE is pre-trained on an upstream task/network that should not match the downstream ones and does not need paired clean-corrupted samples. Our key insight is that most input corruptions found in real-world tasks can be modeled through global operations on color channels of images or spatial filters with small kernels. We validate our approach on multiple datasets and tasks, such as image classification (on ImageNetC, ImageNetC-Bar, VizWiz, and a newly proposed mixed corruption benchmark named ImageNetC-mixed) and semantic segmentation (on Cityscapes, ACDC, and DarkZurich) with consistent improvements of about 5\% relative accuracy gain across the board. The code of our approach and the new ImageNetC-mixed benchmark will be made available upon publication.

HOP to the Next Tasks and Domains for Continual Learning in NLP

Continual Learning (CL) aims to learn a sequence of problems (i.e., tasks and domains) by transferring knowledge acquired on previous problems, whilst avoiding forgetting of past ones. Different from previous approaches which focused on CL for one NLP task or domain in a specific use-case, in this paper, we address a more general CL setting to learn from a sequence of problems in a unique framework. Our method, HOP, permits to hop across tasks and domains by addressing the CL problem along three directions: (i) we employ a set of adapters to generalize a large pre-trained model to unseen problems, (ii) we compute high-order moments over the distribution of embedded representations to distinguish independent and correlated statistics across different tasks and domains, (iii) we process this enriched information with auxiliary heads specialized for each end problem. Extensive experimental campaign on 4 NLP applications, 5 benchmarks and 2 CL setups demonstrates the effectiveness of our HOP.

Deep Neural Network Models Trained With A Fixed Random Classifier Transfer Better Across Domains

The recently discovered Neural collapse (NC) phenomenon states that the last-layer weights of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), converge to the so-called Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) simplex, at the terminal phase of their training. This ETF geometry is equivalent to vanishing within-class variability of the last layer activations. Inspired by NC properties, we explore in this paper the transferability of DNN models trained with their last layer weight fixed according to ETF. This enforces class separation by eliminating class covariance information, effectively providing implicit regularization. We show that DNN models trained with such a fixed classifier significantly improve transfer performance, particularly on out-of-domain datasets. On a broad range of fine-grained image classification datasets, our approach outperforms i) baseline methods that do not perform any covariance regularization (up to 22%), as well as ii) methods that explicitly whiten covariance of activations throughout training (up to 19%). Our findings suggest that DNNs trained with fixed ETF classifiers offer a powerful mechanism for improving transfer learning across domains.

RECALL+: Adversarial Web-based Replay for Continual Learning in Semantic Segmentation

Catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge is a critical issue in continual learning typically handled through various regularization strategies. However, existing methods struggle especially when several incremental steps are performed. In this paper, we extend our previous approach (RECALL) and tackle forgetting by exploiting unsupervised web-crawled data to retrieve examples of old classes from online databases. Differently from the original approach that did not perform any evaluation of the web data, here we introduce two novel approaches based on adversarial learning and adaptive thresholding to select from web data only samples strongly resembling the statistics of the no longer available training ones. Furthermore, we improved the pseudo-labeling scheme to achieve a more accurate labeling of web data that also consider classes being learned in the current step. Experimental results show that this enhanced approach achieves remarkable results, especially when multiple incremental learning steps are performed.