Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt the source model to continually changing unlabeled target domains without access to the source data. Existing methods mainly focus on model-based adaptation in a self-training manner, such as predicting pseudo labels for new domain datasets. Since pseudo labels are noisy and unreliable, these methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation when dealing with dynamic data distributions. Motivated by the prompt learning in NLP, in this paper, we propose to learn an image-level visual domain prompt for target domains while having the source model parameters frozen. During testing, the changing target datasets can be adapted to the source model by reformulating the input data with the learned visual prompts. Specifically, we devise two types of prompts, i.e., domains-specific prompts and domains-agnostic prompts, to extract current domain knowledge and maintain the domain-shared knowledge in the continual adaptation. Furthermore, we design a homeostasis-based prompt adaptation strategy to suppress domain-sensitive parameters in domain-invariant prompts to learn domain-shared knowledge more effectively. This transition from the model-dependent paradigm to the model-free one enables us to bypass the catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation problems. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods on four widely-used benchmarks, including CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, ImageNet-C, and VLCS datasets.

Trusted Multi-Scale Classification Framework for Whole Slide Image

Despite remarkable efforts been made, the classification of gigapixels whole-slide image (WSI) is severely restrained from either the constrained computing resources for the whole slides, or limited utilizing of the knowledge from different scales. Moreover, most of the previous attempts lacked of the ability of uncertainty estimation. Generally, the pathologists often jointly analyze WSI from the different magnifications. If the pathologists are uncertain by using single magnification, then they will change the magnification repeatedly to discover various features of the tissues. Motivated by the diagnose process of the pathologists, in this paper, we propose a trusted multi-scale classification framework for the WSI. Leveraging the Vision Transformer as the backbone for multi branches, our framework can jointly classification modeling, estimating the uncertainty of each magnification of a microscope and integrate the evidence from different magnification. Moreover, to exploit discriminative patches from WSIs and reduce the requirement for computation resources, we propose a novel patch selection schema using attention rollout and non-maximum suppression. To empirically investigate the effectiveness of our approach, empirical experiments are conducted on our WSI classification tasks, using two benchmark databases. The obtained results suggest that the trusted framework can significantly improve the WSI classification performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Memory-Based Label-Text Tuning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning(FSCIL) focuses on designing learning algorithms that can continually learn a sequence of new tasks from a few samples without forgetting old ones. The difficulties are that training on a sequence of limited data from new tasks leads to severe overfitting issues and causes the well-known catastrophic forgetting problem. Existing researches mainly utilize the image information, such as storing the image knowledge of previous tasks or limiting classifiers updating. However, they ignore analyzing the informative and less noisy text information of class labels. In this work, we propose leveraging the label-text information by adopting the memory prompt. The memory prompt can learn new data sequentially, and meanwhile store the previous knowledge. Furthermore, to optimize the memory prompt without undermining the stored knowledge, we propose a stimulation-based training strategy. It optimizes the memory prompt depending on the image embedding stimulation, which is the distribution of the image embedding elements. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms all prior state-of-the-art approaches, significantly mitigating the catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems.

Switchable Representation Learning Framework with Self-compatibility

Real-world visual search systems involve deployments on multiple platforms with different computing and storage resources. Deploying a unified model that suits the minimal-constrain platforms leads to limited accuracy. It is expected to deploy models with different capacities adapting to the resource constraints, which requires features extracted by these models to be aligned in the metric space. The method to achieve feature alignments is called "compatible learning". Existing research mainly focuses on the one-to-one compatible paradigm, which is limited in learning compatibility among multiple models. We propose a Switchable representation learning Framework with Self-Compatibility (SFSC). SFSC generates a series of compatible sub-models with different capacities through one training process. The optimization of sub-models faces gradients conflict, and we mitigate it from the perspective of the magnitude and direction. We adjust the priorities of sub-models dynamically through uncertainty estimation to co-optimize sub-models properly. Besides, the gradients with conflicting directions are projected to avoid mutual interference. SFSC achieves state-of-art performance on the evaluated dataset.

Neighborhood Consensus Contrastive Learning for Backward-Compatible Representation

In object re-identification (ReID), the development of deep learning techniques often involves model updates and deployment. It is unbearable to re-embedding and re-index with the system suspended when deploying new models. Therefore, backward-compatible representation is proposed to enable "new" features to be compared with "old" features directly, which means that the database is active when there are both "new" and "old" features in it. Thus we can scroll-refresh the database or even do nothing on the database to update. The existing backward-compatible methods either require a strong overlap between old and new training data or simply conduct constraints at the instance level. Thus they are difficult in handling complicated cluster structures and are limited in eliminating the impact of outliers in old embeddings, resulting in a risk of damaging the discriminative capability of new features. In this work, we propose a Neighborhood Consensus Contrastive Learning (NCCL) method. With no assumptions about the new training data, we estimate the sub-cluster structures of old embeddings. A new embedding is constrained with multiple old embeddings in both embedding space and discrimination space at the sub-class level. The effect of outliers diminished, as the multiple samples serve as "mean teachers". Besides, we also propose a scheme to filter the old embeddings with low credibility, further improving the compatibility robustness. Our method ensures backward compatibility without impairing the accuracy of the new model. And it can even improve the new model's accuracy in most scenarios.

Dual-Tuning: Joint Prototype Transfer and Structure Regularization for Compatible Feature Learning

Visual retrieval system faces frequent model update and deployment. It is a heavy workload to re-extract features of the whole database every time.Feature compatibility enables the learned new visual features to be directly compared with the old features stored in the database. In this way, when updating the deployed model, we can bypass the inflexible and time-consuming feature re-extraction process. However, the old feature space that needs to be compatible is not ideal and faces the distribution discrepancy problem with the new space caused by different supervision losses. In this work, we propose a global optimization Dual-Tuning method to obtain feature compatibility against different networks and losses. A feature-level prototype loss is proposed to explicitly align two types of embedding features, by transferring global prototype information. Furthermore, we design a component-level mutual structural regularization to implicitly optimize the feature intrinsic structure. Experimental results on million-scale datasets demonstrate that our Dual-Tuning is able to obtain feature compatibility without sacrificing performance. (Our code will be avaliable at https://github.com/yanbai1993/Dual-Tuning)

Large-Scale Unsupervised Person Re-Identification with Contrastive Learning

Existing public person Re-Identification~(ReID) datasets are small in modern terms because of labeling difficulty. Although unlabeled surveillance video is abundant and relatively easy to obtain, it is unclear how to leverage these footage to learn meaningful ReID representations. In particular, most existing unsupervised and domain adaptation ReID methods utilize only the public datasets in their experiments, with labels removed. In addition, due to small data sizes, these methods usually rely on fine tuning by the unlabeled training data in the testing domain to achieve good performance. Inspired by the recent progress of large-scale self-supervised image classification using contrastive learning, we propose to learn ReID representation from large-scale unlabeled surveillance video alone. Assisted by off-the-shelf pedestrian detection tools, we apply the contrastive loss at both the image and the tracklet levels. Together with a principal component analysis step using camera labels freely available, our evaluation using a large-scale unlabeled dataset shows far superior performance among unsupervised methods that do not use any training data in the testing domain. Furthermore, the accuracy improves with the data size and therefore our method has great potential with even larger and more diversified datasets.

Dual-Refinement: Joint Label and Feature Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging task due to the missing of labels for the target domain data. To handle this problem, some recent works adopt clustering algorithms to off-line generate pseudo labels, which can then be used as the supervision signal for on-line feature learning in the target domain. However, the off-line generated labels often contain lots of noise that significantly hinders the discriminability of the on-line learned features, and thus limits the final UDA re-ID performance. To this end, we propose a novel approach, called Dual-Refinement, that jointly refines pseudo labels at the off-line clustering phase and features at the on-line training phase, to alternatively boost the label purity and feature discriminability in the target domain for more reliable re-ID. Specifically, at the off-line phase, a new hierarchical clustering scheme is proposed, which selects representative prototypes for every coarse cluster. Thus, labels can be effectively refined by using the inherent hierarchical information of person images. Besides, at the on-line phase, we propose an instant memory spread-out (IM-spread-out) regularization, that takes advantage of the proposed instant memory bank to store sample features of the entire dataset and enable spread-out feature learning over the entire training data instantly. Our Dual-Refinement method reduces the influence of noisy labels and refines the learned features within the alternative training process. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Spherical Feature Transform for Deep Metric Learning

Data augmentation in feature space is effective to increase data diversity. Previous methods assume that different classes have the same covariance in their feature distributions. Thus, feature transform between different classes is performed via translation. However, this approach is no longer valid for recent deep metric learning scenarios, where feature normalization is widely adopted and all features lie on a hypersphere. This work proposes a novel spherical feature transform approach. It relaxes the assumption of identical covariance between classes to an assumption of similar covariances of different classes on a hypersphere. Consequently, the feature transform is performed by a rotation that respects the spherical data distributions. We provide a simple and effective training method, and in depth analysis on the relation between the two different transforms. Comprehensive experiments on various deep metric learning benchmarks and different baselines verify that our method achieves consistent performance improvement and state-of-the-art results.