Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers

In this paper, we present Co-scale conv-attentional image Transformers (CoaT), a Transformer-based image classifier equipped with co-scale and conv-attentional mechanisms. First, the co-scale mechanism maintains the integrity of Transformers' encoder branches at individual scales, while allowing representations learned at different scales to effectively communicate with each other; we design a series of serial and parallel blocks to realize the co-scale attention mechanism. Second, we devise a conv-attentional mechanism by realizing a relative position embedding formulation in the factorized attention module with an efficient convolution-like implementation. CoaT empowers image Transformers with enriched multi-scale and contextual modeling capabilities. On ImageNet, relatively small CoaT models attain superior classification results compared with the similar-sized convolutional neural networks and image/vision Transformers. The effectiveness of CoaT's backbone is also illustrated on object detection and instance segmentation, demonstrating its applicability to the downstream computer vision tasks.

Super-resolution of multiphase materials by combining complementary 2D and 3D image data using generative adversarial networks

Modelling the impact of a material's mesostructure on device level performance typically requires access to 3D image data containing all the relevant information to define the geometry of the simulation domain. This image data must include sufficient contrast between phases to distinguish each material, be of high enough resolution to capture the key details, but also have a large enough field-of-view to be representative of the material in general. It is rarely possible to obtain data with all of these properties from a single imaging technique. In this paper, we present a method for combining information from pairs of distinct but complementary imaging techniques in order to accurately reconstruct the desired multi-phase, high resolution, representative, 3D images. Specifically, we use deep convolutional generative adversarial networks to implement super-resolution, style transfer and dimensionality expansion. To demonstrate the widespread applicability of this tool, two pairs of datasets are used to validate the quality of the volumes generated by fusing the information from paired imaging techniques. Three key mesostructural metrics are calculated in each case to show the accuracy of this method. Having confidence in the accuracy of our method, we then demonstrate its power by applying to a real data pair from a lithium ion battery electrode, where the required 3D high resolution image data is not available anywhere in the literature. We believe this approach is superior to previously reported statistical material reconstruction methods both in terms of its fidelity and ease of use. Furthermore, much of the data required to train this algorithm already exists in the literature, waiting to be combined. As such, our open-access code could precipitate a step change by generating the hard to obtain high quality image volumes necessary to simulate behaviour at the mesoscale.

Privacy Enhancement for Cloud-Based Few-Shot Learning

Requiring less data for accurate models, few-shot learning has shown robustness and generality in many application domains. However, deploying few-shot models in untrusted environments may inflict privacy concerns, e.g., attacks or adversaries that may breach the privacy of user-supplied data. This paper studies the privacy enhancement for the few-shot learning in an untrusted environment, e.g., the cloud, by establishing a novel privacy-preserved embedding space that preserves the privacy of data and maintains the accuracy of the model. We examine the impact of various image privacy methods such as blurring, pixelization, Gaussian noise, and differentially private pixelization (DP-Pix) on few-shot image classification and propose a method that learns privacy-preserved representation through the joint loss. The empirical results show how privacy-performance trade-off can be negotiated for privacy-enhanced few-shot learning.

Cycle Label-Consistent Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation aims to leverage a labeled source domain to learn a classifier for the unlabeled target domain with a different distribution. Previous methods mostly match the distribution between two domains by global or class alignment. However, global alignment methods cannot achieve a fine-grained class-to-class overlap; class alignment methods supervised by pseudo-labels cannot guarantee their reliability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient domain adaptation method, i.e. Cycle Label-Consistent Network (CLCN), by exploiting the cycle consistency of classification label, which applies dual cross-domain nearest centroid classification procedures to generate a reliable self-supervised signal for the discrimination in the target domain. The cycle label-consistent loss reinforces the consistency between ground-truth labels and pseudo-labels of source samples leading to statistically similar latent representations between source and target domains. This new loss can easily be added to any existing classification network with almost no computational overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on MNIST-USPS-SVHN, Office-31, Office-Home and Image CLEF-DA benchmarks. Results validate that the proposed method can alleviate the negative influence of falsely-labeled samples and learn more discriminative features, leading to the absolute improvement over source-only model by 9.4% on Office-31 and 6.3% on Image CLEF-DA.

Perceptual Image Quality Assessment with Transformers

In this paper, we propose an image quality transformer (IQT) that successfully applies a transformer architecture to a perceptual full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) task. Perceptual representation becomes more important in image quality assessment. In this context, we extract the perceptual feature representations from each of input images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone. The extracted feature maps are fed into the transformer encoder and decoder in order to compare a reference and distorted images. Following an approach of the transformer-based vision models, we use extra learnable quality embedding and position embedding. The output of the transformer is passed to a prediction head in order to predict a final quality score. The experimental results show that our proposed model has an outstanding performance for the standard IQA datasets. For a large-scale IQA dataset containing output images of generative model, our model also shows the promising results. The proposed IQT was ranked first among 13 participants in the NTIRE 2021 perceptual image quality assessment challenge. Our work will be an opportunity to further expand the approach for the perceptual IQA task.

Conditional Deformable Image Registration with Convolutional Neural Network

Recent deep learning-based methods have shown promising results and runtime advantages in deformable image registration. However, analyzing the effects of hyperparameters and searching for optimal regularization parameters prove to be too prohibitive in deep learning-based methods. This is because it involves training a substantial number of separate models with distinct hyperparameter values. In this paper, we propose a conditional image registration method and a new self-supervised learning paradigm for deep deformable image registration. By learning the conditional features that correlated with the regularization hyperparameter, we demonstrate that optimal solutions with arbitrary hyperparameters can be captured by a single deep convolutional neural network. In addition, the smoothness of the resulting deformation field can be manipulated with arbitrary strength of smoothness regularization during inference. Extensive experiments on a large-scale brain MRI dataset show that our proposed method enables the precise control of the smoothness of the deformation field without sacrificing the runtime advantage or registration accuracy.

Enhanced Prototypical Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Despite its importance, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on LiDAR semantic segmentation is a task that has not received much attention from the research community. Only recently, a completion-based 3D method has been proposed to tackle the problem and formally set up the adaptive scenarios. However, the proposed pipeline is complex, voxel-based and requires multi-stage inference, which inhibits it for real-time inference. We propose a range image-based, effective and efficient method for solving UDA on LiDAR segmentation. The method exploits class prototypes from the source domain to pseudo label target domain pixels, which is a research direction showing good performance in UDA for natural image semantic segmentation. Applying such approaches to LiDAR scans has not been considered because of the severe domain shift and lack of pre-trained feature extractor that is unavailable in the LiDAR segmentation setup. However, we show that proper strategies, including reconstruction-based pre-training, enhanced prototypes, and selective pseudo labeling based on distance to prototypes, is sufficient enough to enable the use of prototypical approaches. We evaluate the performance of our method on the recently proposed LiDAR segmentation UDA scenarios. Our method achieves remarkable performance among contemporary methods.

NP-Match: When Neural Processes meet Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been widely explored in recent years, and it is an effective way of leveraging unlabeled data to reduce the reliance on labeled data. In this work, we adjust neural processes (NPs) to the semi-supervised image classification task, resulting in a new method named NP-Match. NP-Match is suited to this task for two reasons. Firstly, NP-Match implicitly compares data points when making predictions, and as a result, the prediction of each unlabeled data point is affected by the labeled data points that are similar to it, which improves the quality of pseudo-labels. Secondly, NP-Match is able to estimate uncertainty that can be used as a tool for selecting unlabeled samples with reliable pseudo-labels. Compared with uncertainty-based SSL methods implemented with Monte Carlo (MC) dropout, NP-Match estimates uncertainty with much less computational overhead, which can save time at both the training and the testing phases. We conducted extensive experiments on four public datasets, and NP-Match outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) results or achieves competitive results on them, which shows the effectiveness of NP-Match and its potential for SSL.

Pre-training helps Bayesian optimization too

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become a popular strategy for global optimization of many expensive real-world functions. Contrary to a common belief that BO is suited to optimizing black-box functions, it actually requires domain knowledge on characteristics of those functions to deploy BO successfully. Such domain knowledge often manifests in Gaussian process priors that specify initial beliefs on functions. However, even with expert knowledge, it is not an easy task to select a prior. This is especially true for hyperparameter tuning problems on complex machine learning models, where landscapes of tuning objectives are often difficult to comprehend. We seek an alternative practice for setting these functional priors. In particular, we consider the scenario where we have data from similar functions that allow us to pre-train a tighter distribution a priori. To verify our approach in realistic model training setups, we collected a large multi-task hyperparameter tuning dataset by training tens of thousands of configurations of near-state-of-the-art models on popular image and text datasets, as well as a protein sequence dataset. Our results show that on average, our method is able to locate good hyperparameters at least 3 times more efficiently than the best competing methods.

Arbitrary Reduction of MRI Slice Spacing Based on Local-Aware Implicit Representation

Magnetic resonance (MR) images are often acquired in 2D settings for real clinical applications. The 3D volumes reconstructed by stacking multiple 2D slices have large inter-slice spacing, resulting in lower inter-slice resolution than intra-slice resolution. Super-resolution is a powerful tool to reduce the inter-slice spacing of 3D images to facilitate subsequent visualization and computation tasks. However, most existing works train the super-resolution network at a fixed ratio, which is inconvenient in clinical scenes due to the heterogeneous parameters in MR scanning. In this paper, we propose a single super-resolution network to reduce the inter-slice spacing of MR images at an arbitrarily adjustable ratio. Specifically, we view the input image as a continuous implicit function of coordinates. The intermediate slices of different spacing ratios could be constructed according to the implicit representation up-sampled in the continuous domain. We particularly propose a novel local-aware spatial attention mechanism and long-range residual learning to boost the quality of the output image. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, even compared to the models trained at a fixed ratio.