Improving Post-Training Quantization on Object Detection with Task Loss-Guided Lp Metric

Efficient inference for object detection networks is a major challenge on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), which transforms a full-precision model into low bit-width directly, is an effective and convenient approach to reduce model inference complexity. But it suffers severe accuracy drop when applied to complex tasks such as object detection. PTQ optimizes the quantization parameters by different metrics to minimize the perturbation of quantization. The p-norm distance of feature maps before and after quantization, Lp, is widely used as the metric to evaluate perturbation. For the specialty of object detection network, we observe that the parameter p in Lp metric will significantly influence its quantization performance. We indicate that using a fixed hyper-parameter p does not achieve optimal quantization performance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a framework, DetPTQ, to assign different p values for quantizing different layers using an Object Detection Output Loss (ODOL), which represents the task loss of object detection. DetPTQ employs the ODOL-based adaptive Lp metric to select the optimal quantization parameters. Experiments show that our DetPTQ outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ methods by a significant margin on both 2D and 3D object detectors. For example, we achieve 31.1/31.7(quantization/full-precision) mAP on RetinaNet-ResNet18 with 4-bit weight and 4-bit activation.

RPTQ: Reorder-based Post-training Quantization for Large Language Models

Large-scale language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance on various tasks, but their deployment poses challenges due to their enormous model size. In this paper, we identify that the main challenge in quantizing LLMs stems from the different activation ranges between the channels, rather than just the issue of outliers.We propose a novel reorder-based quantization approach, RPTQ, that addresses the issue of quantizing the activations of LLMs. RPTQ rearranges the channels in the activations and then quantizing them in clusters, thereby reducing the impact of range difference of channels. In addition, we reduce the storage and computation overhead by avoiding explicit reordering. By implementing this approach, we achieved a significant breakthrough by pushing LLM models to 3 bit activation for the first time.

VMA: Divide-and-Conquer Vectorized Map Annotation System for Large-Scale Driving Scene

High-definition (HD) map serves as the essential infrastructure of autonomous driving. In this work, we build up a systematic vectorized map annotation framework (termed VMA) for efficiently generating HD map of large-scale driving scene. We design a divide-and-conquer annotation scheme to solve the spatial extensibility problem of HD map generation, and abstract map elements with a variety of geometric patterns as unified point sequence representation, which can be extended to most map elements in the driving scene. VMA is highly efficient and extensible, requiring negligible human effort, and flexible in terms of spatial scale and element type. We quantitatively and qualitatively validate the annotation performance on real-world urban and highway scenes, as well as NYC Planimetric Database. VMA can significantly improve map generation efficiency and require little human effort. On average VMA takes 160min for annotating a scene with a range of hundreds of meters, and reduces 52.3% of the human cost, showing great application value.

Post-Training Quantization for Object Detection

Efficient inference for object detection networks is a major challenge on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), which transforms a full-precision model into low bit-width directly, is an effective and convenient approach to reduce model inference complexity. But it suffers severe accuracy drop when applied to complex tasks such as object detection. PTQ optimizes the quantization parameters by different metrics to minimize the perturbation of quantization. The p-norm distance of feature maps before and after quantization, Lp, is widely used as the metric to evaluate perturbation. For the specialty of object detection network, we observe that the parameter p in Lp metric will significantly influence its quantization performance. We indicate that using a fixed hyper-parameter p does not achieve optimal quantization performance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a framework, DetPTQ, to assign different p values for quantizing different layers using an Object Detection Output Loss (ODOL), which represents the task loss of object detection. DetPTQ employs the ODOL-based adaptive Lp metric to select the optimal quantization parameters. Experiments show that our DetPTQ outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ methods by a significant margin on both 2D and 3D object detectors. For example, we achieve 31.1/31.7(quantization/full-precision) mAP on RetinaNet-ResNet18 with 4-bit weight and 4-bit activation.

TinyDet: Accurate Small Object Detection in Lightweight Generic Detectors

Small object detection requires the detection head to scan a large number of positions on image feature maps, which is extremely hard for computation- and energy-efficient lightweight generic detectors. To accurately detect small objects with limited computation, we propose a two-stage lightweight detection framework with extremely low computation complexity, termed as TinyDet. It enables high-resolution feature maps for dense anchoring to better cover small objects, proposes a sparsely-connected convolution for computation reduction, enhances the early stage features in the backbone, and addresses the feature misalignment problem for accurate small object detection. On the COCO benchmark, our TinyDet-M achieves 30.3 AP and 13.5 AP^s with only 991 MFLOPs, which is the first detector that has an AP over 30 with less than 1 GFLOPs; besides, TinyDet-S and TinyDet-L achieve promising performance under different computation limitation.

WeakTr: Exploring Plain Vision Transformer for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation

This paper explores the properties of the plain Vision Transformer (ViT) for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS). The class activation map (CAM) is of critical importance for understanding a classification network and launching WSSS. We observe that different attention heads of ViT focus on different image areas. Thus a novel weight-based method is proposed to end-to-end estimate the importance of attention heads, while the self-attention maps are adaptively fused for high-quality CAM results that tend to have more complete objects. Besides, we propose a ViT-based gradient clipping decoder for online retraining with the CAM results to complete the WSSS task. We name this plain Transformer-based Weakly-supervised learning framework WeakTr. It achieves the state-of-the-art WSSS performance on standard benchmarks, i.e., 78.4% mIoU on the val set of PASCAL VOC 2012 and 50.3% mIoU on the val set of COCO 2014. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/WeakTr.

MobileInst: Video Instance Segmentation on the Mobile

Although recent approaches aiming for video instance segmentation have achieved promising results, it is still difficult to employ those approaches for real-world applications on mobile devices, which mainly suffer from (1) heavy computation and memory cost and (2) complicated heuristics for tracking objects. To address those issues, we present MobileInst, a lightweight and mobile-friendly framework for video instance segmentation on mobile devices. Firstly, MobileInst adopts a mobile vision transformer to extract multi-level semantic features and presents an efficient query-based dual-transformer instance decoder for mask kernels and a semantic-enhanced mask decoder to generate instance segmentation per frame. Secondly, MobileInst exploits simple yet effective kernel reuse and kernel association to track objects for video instance segmentation. Further, we propose temporal query passing to enhance the tracking ability for kernels. We conduct experiments on COCO and YouTube-VIS datasets to demonstrate the superiority of MobileInst and evaluate the inference latency on a mobile CPU core of Qualcomm Snapdragon-778G, without other methods of acceleration. On the COCO dataset, MobileInst achieves 30.5 mask AP and 176 ms on the mobile CPU, which reduces the latency by 50% compared to the previous SOTA. For video instance segmentation, MobileInst achieves 35.0 AP on YouTube-VIS 2019 and 30.1 AP on YouTube-VIS 2021. Code will be available to facilitate real-world applications and future research.

OpenInst: A Simple Query-Based Method for Open-World Instance Segmentation

Open-world instance segmentation has recently gained significant popularitydue to its importance in many real-world applications, such as autonomous driving, robot perception, and remote sensing. However, previous methods have either produced unsatisfactory results or relied on complex systems and paradigms. We wonder if there is a simple way to obtain state-of-the-art results. Fortunately, we have identified two observations that help us achieve the best of both worlds: 1) query-based methods demonstrate superiority over dense proposal-based methods in open-world instance segmentation, and 2) learning localization cues is sufficient for open world instance segmentation. Based on these observations, we propose a simple query-based method named OpenInst for open world instance segmentation. OpenInst leverages advanced query-based methods like QueryInst and focuses on learning localization cues. Notably, OpenInst is an extremely simple and straightforward framework without any auxiliary modules or post-processing, yet achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks. Specifically, in the COCO$\to$UVO scenario, OpenInst achieves a mask AR of 53.3, outperforming the previous best methods by 2.0 AR with a simpler structure. We hope that OpenInst can serve as a solid baselines for future research in this area.