Generating Enhanced Negatives for Training Language-Based Object Detectors

The recent progress in language-based open-vocabulary object detection can be largely attributed to finding better ways of leveraging large-scale data with free-form text annotations. Training such models with a discriminative objective function has proven successful, but requires good positive and negative samples. However, the free-form nature and the open vocabulary of object descriptions make the space of negatives extremely large. Prior works randomly sample negatives or use rule-based techniques to build them. In contrast, we propose to leverage the vast knowledge built into modern generative models to automatically build negatives that are more relevant to the original data. Specifically, we use large-language-models to generate negative text descriptions, and text-to-image diffusion models to also generate corresponding negative images. Our experimental analysis confirms the relevance of the generated negative data, and its use in language-based detectors improves performance on two complex benchmarks.

Efficient Controllable Multi-Task Architectures

We aim to train a multi-task model such that users can adjust the desired compute budget and relative importance of task performances after deployment, without retraining. This enables optimizing performance for dynamically varying user needs, without heavy computational overhead to train and save models for various scenarios. To this end, we propose a multi-task model consisting of a shared encoder and task-specific decoders where both encoder and decoder channel widths are slimmable. Our key idea is to control the task importance by varying the capacities of task-specific decoders, while controlling the total computational cost by jointly adjusting the encoder capacity. This improves overall accuracy by allowing a stronger encoder for a given budget, increases control over computational cost, and delivers high-quality slimmed sub-architectures based on user's constraints. Our training strategy involves a novel 'Configuration-Invariant Knowledge Distillation' loss that enforces backbone representations to be invariant under different runtime width configurations to enhance accuracy. Further, we present a simple but effective search algorithm that translates user constraints to runtime width configurations of both the shared encoder and task decoders, for sampling the sub-architectures. The key rule for the search algorithm is to provide a larger computational budget to the higher preferred task decoder, while searching a shared encoder configuration that enhances the overall MTL performance. Various experiments on three multi-task benchmarks (PASCALContext, NYUDv2, and CIFAR100-MTL) with diverse backbone architectures demonstrate the advantage of our approach. For example, our method shows a higher controllability by ~33.5% in the NYUD-v2 dataset over prior methods, while incurring much less compute cost.

Improving Pseudo Labels for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Recent studies show promising performance in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) using pseudo labels (PLs) from pretrained vision and language models (VLMs). However, PLs generated by VLMs are extremely noisy due to the gap between the pretraining objective of VLMs and OVD, which blocks further advances on PLs. In this paper, we aim to reduce the noise in PLs and propose a method called online Self-training And a Split-and-fusion head for OVD (SAS-Det). First, the self-training finetunes VLMs to generate high quality PLs while prevents forgetting the knowledge learned in the pretraining. Second, a split-and-fusion (SAF) head is designed to remove the noise in localization of PLs, which is usually ignored in existing methods. It also fuses complementary knowledge learned from both precise ground truth and noisy pseudo labels to boost the performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAS-Det is both efficient and effective. Our pseudo labeling is 3 times faster than prior methods. SAS-Det outperforms prior state-of-the-art models of the same scale by a clear margin and achieves 37.4 AP$_{50}$ and 27.3 AP$_r$ on novel categories of the COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively.

OmniLabel: A Challenging Benchmark for Language-Based Object Detection

Language-based object detection is a promising direction towards building a natural interface to describe objects in images that goes far beyond plain category names. While recent methods show great progress in that direction, proper evaluation is lacking. With OmniLabel, we propose a novel task definition, dataset, and evaluation metric. The task subsumes standard- and open-vocabulary detection as well as referring expressions. With more than 28K unique object descriptions on over 25K images, OmniLabel provides a challenging benchmark with diverse and complex object descriptions in a naturally open-vocabulary setting. Moreover, a key differentiation to existing benchmarks is that our object descriptions can refer to one, multiple or even no object, hence, providing negative examples in free-form text. The proposed evaluation handles the large label space and judges performance via a modified average precision metric, which we validate by evaluating strong language-based baselines. OmniLabel indeed provides a challenging test bed for future research on language-based detection.

Confidence and Dispersity Speak: Characterising Prediction Matrix for Unsupervised Accuracy Estimation

This work aims to assess how well a model performs under distribution shifts without using labels. While recent methods study prediction confidence, this work reports prediction dispersity is another informative cue. Confidence reflects whether the individual prediction is certain; dispersity indicates how the overall predictions are distributed across all categories. Our key insight is that a well-performing model should give predictions with high confidence and high dispersity. That is, we need to consider both properties so as to make more accurate estimates. To this end, we use the nuclear norm that has been shown to be effective in characterizing both properties. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of nuclear norm for various models (e.g., ViT and ConvNeXt), different datasets (e.g., ImageNet and CUB-200), and diverse types of distribution shifts (e.g., style shift and reproduction shift). We show that the nuclear norm is more accurate and robust in accuracy estimation than existing methods. Furthermore, we validate the feasibility of other measurements (e.g., mutual information maximization) for characterizing dispersity and confidence. Lastly, we investigate the limitation of the nuclear norm, study its improved variant under severe class imbalance, and discuss potential directions.

PU GNN: Chargeback Fraud Detection in P2E MMORPGs via Graph Attention Networks with Imbalanced PU Labels

The recent advent of play-to-earn (P2E) systems in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has made in-game goods interchangeable with real-world values more than ever before. The goods in the P2E MMORPGs can be directly exchanged with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Klaytn via blockchain networks. Unlike traditional in-game goods, once they had been written to the blockchains, P2E goods cannot be restored by the game operation teams even with chargeback fraud such as payment fraud, cancellation, or refund. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel chargeback fraud prediction method, PU GNN, which leverages graph attention networks with PU loss to capture both the players' in-game behavior with P2E token transaction patterns. With the adoption of modified GraphSMOTE, the proposed model handles the imbalanced distribution of labels in chargeback fraud datasets. The conducted experiments on two real-world P2E MMORPG datasets demonstrate that PU GNN achieves superior performances over previously suggested methods.

Controllable Dynamic Multi-Task Architectures

Multi-task learning commonly encounters competition for resources among tasks, specifically when model capacity is limited. This challenge motivates models which allow control over the relative importance of tasks and total compute cost during inference time. In this work, we propose such a controllable multi-task network that dynamically adjusts its architecture and weights to match the desired task preference as well as the resource constraints. In contrast to the existing dynamic multi-task approaches that adjust only the weights within a fixed architecture, our approach affords the flexibility to dynamically control the total computational cost and match the user-preferred task importance better. We propose a disentangled training of two hypernetworks, by exploiting task affinity and a novel branching regularized loss, to take input preferences and accordingly predict tree-structured models with adapted weights. Experiments on three multi-task benchmarks, namely PASCAL-Context, NYU-v2, and CIFAR-100, show the efficacy of our approach. Project page is available at https://www.nec-labs.com/~mas/DYMU.

On Generalizing Beyond Domains in Cross-Domain Continual Learning

Humans have the ability to accumulate knowledge of new tasks in varying conditions, but deep neural networks often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge after learning a new task. Many recent methods focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting under the assumption of train and test data following similar distributions. In this work, we consider a more realistic scenario of continual learning under domain shifts where the model must generalize its inference to an unseen domain. To this end, we encourage learning semantically meaningful features by equipping the classifier with class similarity metrics as learning parameters which are obtained through Mahalanobis similarity computations. Learning of the backbone representation along with these extra parameters is done seamlessly in an end-to-end manner. In addition, we propose an approach based on the exponential moving average of the parameters for better knowledge distillation. We demonstrate that, to a great extent, existing continual learning algorithms fail to handle the forgetting issue under multiple distributions, while our proposed approach learns new tasks under domain shift with accuracy boosts up to 10% on challenging datasets such as DomainNet and OfficeHome.

Learning Semantic Segmentation from Multiple Datasets with Label Shifts

With increasing applications of semantic segmentation, numerous datasets have been proposed in the past few years. Yet labeling remains expensive, thus, it is desirable to jointly train models across aggregations of datasets to enhance data volume and diversity. However, label spaces differ across datasets and may even be in conflict with one another. This paper proposes UniSeg, an effective approach to automatically train models across multiple datasets with differing label spaces, without any manual relabeling efforts. Specifically, we propose two losses that account for conflicting and co-occurring labels to achieve better generalization performance in unseen domains. First, a gradient conflict in training due to mismatched label spaces is identified and a class-independent binary cross-entropy loss is proposed to alleviate such label conflicts. Second, a loss function that considers class-relationships across datasets is proposed for a better multi-dataset training scheme. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on road-scene datasets show that UniSeg improves over multi-dataset baselines, especially on unseen datasets, e.g., achieving more than 8% gain in IoU on KITTI averaged over all the settings.

Cross-Domain Similarity Learning for Face Recognition in Unseen Domains

Face recognition models trained under the assumption of identical training and test distributions often suffer from poor generalization when faced with unknown variations, such as a novel ethnicity or unpredictable individual make-ups during test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-domain metric learning loss, which we dub Cross-Domain Triplet (CDT) loss, to improve face recognition in unseen domains. The CDT loss encourages learning semantically meaningful features by enforcing compact feature clusters of identities from one domain, where the compactness is measured by underlying similarity metrics that belong to another training domain with different statistics. Intuitively, it discriminatively correlates explicit metrics derived from one domain, with triplet samples from another domain in a unified loss function to be minimized within a network, which leads to better alignment of the training domains. The network parameters are further enforced to learn generalized features under domain shift, in a model-agnostic learning pipeline. Unlike the recent work of Meta Face Recognition, our method does not require careful hard-pair sample mining and filtering strategy during training. Extensive experiments on various face recognition benchmarks show the superiority of our method in handling variations, compared to baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.