Recent works have shown that the computational efficiency of video recognition can be significantly improved by reducing the spatial redundancy. As a representative work, the adaptive focus method (AdaFocus) has achieved a favorable trade-off between accuracy and inference speed by dynamically identifying and attending to the informative regions in each video frame. However, AdaFocus requires a complicated three-stage training pipeline (involving reinforcement learning), leading to slow convergence and is unfriendly to practitioners. This work reformulates the training of AdaFocus as a simple one-stage algorithm by introducing a differentiable interpolation-based patch selection operation, enabling efficient end-to-end optimization. We further present an improved training scheme to address the issues introduced by the one-stage formulation, including the lack of supervision, input diversity and training stability. Moreover, a conditional-exit technique is proposed to perform temporal adaptive computation on top of AdaFocus without additional training. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets (i.e., ActivityNet, FCVID, Mini-Kinetics, Something-Something V1&V2, and Jester) demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the original AdaFocus and other competitive baselines, while being considerably more simple and efficient to train. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/AdaFocusV2.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA approaches enable knowledge transfer via learning domain-invariant representation and sharing one classifier across two domains. However, ignoring the domain-specific information that are related to the task, and forcing a unified classifier to fit both domains will limit the feature expressiveness in each domain. In this paper, by observing that the Transformer architecture with comparable parameters can generate more transferable representations than CNN counterparts, we propose a Win-Win TRansformer framework (WinTR) that separately explores the domain-specific knowledge for each domain and meanwhile interchanges cross-domain knowledge. Specifically, we learn two different mappings using two individual classification tokens in the Transformer, and design for each one a domain-specific classifier. The cross-domain knowledge is transferred via source guided label refinement and single-sided feature alignment with respect to source or target, which keeps the integrity of domain-specific information. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art UDA methods, validating the effectiveness of exploiting both domain-specific and invariant
Vision Transformers (ViT) have achieved remarkable success in large-scale image recognition. They split every 2D image into a fixed number of patches, each of which is treated as a token. Generally, representing an image with more tokens would lead to higher prediction accuracy, while it also results in drastically increased computational cost. To achieve a decent trade-off between accuracy and speed, the number of tokens is empirically set to 16x16. In this paper, we argue that every image has its own characteristics, and ideally the token number should be conditioned on each individual input. In fact, we have observed that there exist a considerable number of "easy" images which can be accurately predicted with a mere number of 4x4 tokens, while only a small fraction of "hard" ones need a finer representation. Inspired by this phenomenon, we propose a Dynamic Transformer to automatically configure a proper number of tokens for each input image. This is achieved by cascading multiple Transformers with increasing numbers of tokens, which are sequentially activated in an adaptive fashion at test time, i.e., the inference is terminated once a sufficiently confident prediction is produced. We further design efficient feature reuse and relationship reuse mechanisms across different components of the Dynamic Transformer to reduce redundant computations. Extensive empirical results on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the competitive baselines in terms of both theoretical computational efficiency and practical inference speed.
In this paper, we explore the spatial redundancy in video recognition with the aim to improve the computational efficiency. It is observed that the most informative region in each frame of a video is usually a small image patch, which shifts smoothly across frames. Therefore, we model the patch localization problem as a sequential decision task, and propose a reinforcement learning based approach for efficient spatially adaptive video recognition (AdaFocus). In specific, a light-weighted ConvNet is first adopted to quickly process the full video sequence, whose features are used by a recurrent policy network to localize the most task-relevant regions. Then the selected patches are inferred by a high-capacity network for the final prediction. During offline inference, once the informative patch sequence has been generated, the bulk of computation can be done in parallel, and is efficient on modern GPU devices. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed method can be easily extended by further considering the temporal redundancy, e.g., dynamically skipping less valuable frames. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, i.e., ActivityNet, FCVID, Mini-Kinetics, Something-Something V1&V2, demonstrate that our method is significantly more efficient than the competitive baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/blackfeather-wang/AdaFocus.
Reusing features in deep networks through dense connectivity is an effective way to achieve high computational efficiency. The recent proposed CondenseNet has shown that this mechanism can be further improved if redundant features are removed. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach named sparse feature reactivation (SFR), aiming at actively increasing the utility of features for reusing. In the proposed network, named CondenseNetV2, each layer can simultaneously learn to 1) selectively reuse a set of most important features from preceding layers; and 2) actively update a set of preceding features to increase their utility for later layers. Our experiments show that the proposed models achieve promising performance on image classification (ImageNet and CIFAR) and object detection (MS COCO) in terms of both theoretical efficiency and practical speed.
Real-world training data usually exhibits long-tailed distribution, where several majority classes have a significantly larger number of samples than the remaining minority classes. This imbalance degrades the performance of typical supervised learning algorithms designed for balanced training sets. In this paper, we address this issue by augmenting minority classes with a recently proposed implicit semantic data augmentation (ISDA) algorithm, which produces diversified augmented samples by translating deep features along many semantically meaningful directions. Importantly, given that ISDA estimates the class-conditional statistics to obtain semantic directions, we find it ineffective to do this on minority classes due to the insufficient training data. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn transformed semantic directions with meta-learning automatically. In specific, the augmentation strategy during training is dynamically optimized, aiming to minimize the loss on a small balanced validation set, which is approximated via a meta update step. Extensive empirical results on CIFAR-LT-10/100, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2017/2018 validate the effectiveness of our method.
Domain adaptation has been widely explored by transferring the knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. Most existing domain adaptation algorithms attend to adapting feature representations across two domains with the guidance of a shared source-supervised classifier. However, such classifier limits the generalization ability towards unlabeled target recognition. To remedy this, we propose a Transferable Semantic Augmentation (TSA) approach to enhance the classifier adaptation ability through implicitly generating source features towards target semantics. Specifically, TSA is inspired by the fact that deep feature transformation towards a certain direction can be represented as meaningful semantic altering in the original input space. Thus, source features can be augmented to effectively equip with target semantics to train a more transferable classifier. To achieve this, for each class, we first use the inter-domain feature mean difference and target intra-class feature covariance to construct a multivariate normal distribution. Then we augment source features with random directions sampled from the distribution class-wisely. Interestingly, such source augmentation is implicitly implemented through an expected transferable cross-entropy loss over the augmented source distribution, where an upper bound of the expected loss is derived and minimized, introducing negligible computational overhead. As a light-weight and general technique, TSA can be easily plugged into various domain adaptation methods, bringing remarkable improvements. Comprehensive experiments on cross-domain benchmarks validate the efficacy of TSA.
Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. Compared to static models which have fixed computational graphs and parameters at the inference stage, dynamic networks can adapt their structures or parameters to different inputs, leading to notable advantages in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency, adaptiveness, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively review this rapidly developing area by dividing dynamic networks into three main categories: 1) instance-wise dynamic models that process each instance with data-dependent architectures or parameters; 2) spatial-wise dynamic networks that conduct adaptive computation with respect to different spatial locations of image data and 3) temporal-wise dynamic models that perform adaptive inference along the temporal dimension for sequential data such as videos and texts. The important research problems of dynamic networks, e.g., architecture design, decision making scheme, optimization technique and applications, are reviewed systematically. Finally, we discuss the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.
Due to the need to store the intermediate activations for back-propagation, end-to-end (E2E) training of deep networks usually suffers from high GPUs memory footprint. This paper aims to address this problem by revisiting the locally supervised learning, where a network is split into gradient-isolated modules and trained with local supervision. We experimentally show that simply training local modules with E2E loss tends to collapse task-relevant information at early layers, and hence hurts the performance of the full model. To avoid this issue, we propose an information propagation (InfoPro) loss, which encourages local modules to preserve as much useful information as possible, while progressively discard task-irrelevant information. As InfoPro loss is difficult to compute in its original form, we derive a feasible upper bound as a surrogate optimization objective, yielding a simple but effective algorithm. In fact, we show that the proposed method boils down to minimizing the combination of a reconstruction loss and a normal cross-entropy/contrastive term. Extensive empirical results on five datasets (i.e., CIFAR, SVHN, STL-10, ImageNet and Cityscapes) validate that InfoPro is capable of achieving competitive performance with less than 40% memory footprint compared to E2E training, while allowing using training data with higher-resolution or larger batch sizes under the same GPU memory constraint. Our method also enables training local modules asynchronously for potential training acceleration. Code is available at: https://github.com/blackfeather-wang/InfoPro-Pytorch.