The emergence of foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), has sparked interest in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods that tailor these large models to application domains outside their training data. However, different PEFT techniques modify the representation of a model differently, making it a non-trivial task to select the most appropriate method for the domain of interest. We propose a new framework, Mixture-of-PEFTs methods (MoPEFT), that is inspired by traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methodologies and is utilized for fine-tuning SAM. Our MoPEFT framework incorporates three different PEFT techniques as submodules and dynamically learns to activate the ones that are best suited for a given data-task setup. We test our method on the Segment Anything Model and show that MoPEFT consistently outperforms other fine-tuning methods on the MESS benchmark.
Vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various visual tasks. However, ViT models suffer from substantial computational and memory requirements, making it challenging to deploy them on resource-constrained platforms. Quantization is a popular approach for reducing model size, but most studies mainly focus on equal bit-width quantization for the entire network, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. While there are few works on mixed precision quantization (MPQ) for ViTs, they typically rely on search space-based methods or employ mixed precision arbitrarily. In this paper, we introduce LRP-QViT, an explainability-based method for assigning mixed-precision bit allocations to different layers based on their importance during classification. Specifically, to measure the contribution score of each layer in predicting the target class, we employ the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) method. LRP assigns local relevance at the output layer and propagates it through all layers, distributing the relevance until it reaches the input layers. These relevance scores serve as indicators for computing the layer contribution score. Additionally, we have introduced a clipped channel-wise quantization aimed at eliminating outliers from post-LayerNorm activations to alleviate severe inter-channel variations. To validate and assess our approach, we employ LRP-QViT across ViT, DeiT, and Swin transformer models on various datasets. Our experimental findings demonstrate that both our fixed-bit and mixed-bit post-training quantization methods surpass existing models in the context of 4-bit and 6-bit quantization.
Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to adapt a model trained on a source domain to a target domain that undergoes distribution shift and contains samples from novel classes outside the source domain. Source-free OSDA (SF-OSDA) techniques eliminate the need to access source domain samples, but current SF-OSDA methods utilize only the known classes in the target domain for adaptation, and require access to the entire target domain even during inference after adaptation, to make the distinction between known and unknown samples. In this paper, we introduce Unknown Sample Discovery (USD) as an SF-OSDA method that utilizes a temporally ensembled teacher model to conduct known-unknown target sample separation and adapts the student model to the target domain over all classes using co-training and temporal consistency between the teacher and the student. USD promotes Jensen-Shannon distance (JSD) as an effective measure for known-unknown sample separation. Our teacher-student framework significantly reduces error accumulation resulting from imperfect known-unknown sample separation, while curriculum guidance helps to reliably learn the distinction between target known and target unknown subspaces. USD appends the target model with an unknown class node, thus readily classifying a target sample into any of the known or unknown classes in subsequent post-adaptation inference stages. Empirical results show that USD is superior to existing SF-OSDA methods and is competitive with current OSDA models that utilize both source and target domains during adaptation.
Domain adaptation (DA) strives to mitigate the domain gap between the source domain where a model is trained, and the target domain where the model is deployed. When a deep learning model is deployed on an aerial platform, it may face gradually degrading weather conditions during operation, leading to widening domain gaps between the training data and the encountered evaluation data. We synthesize two such gradually worsening weather conditions on real images from two existing aerial imagery datasets, generating a total of four benchmark datasets. Under the continual, or test-time adaptation setting, we evaluate three DA models on our datasets: a baseline standard DA model and two continual DA models. In such setting, the models can access only one small portion, or one batch of the target data at a time, and adaptation takes place continually, and over only one epoch of the data. The combination of the constraints of continual adaptation, and gradually deteriorating weather conditions provide the practical DA scenario for aerial deployment. Among the evaluated models, we consider both convolutional and transformer architectures for comparison. We discover stability issues during adaptation for existing buffer-fed continual DA methods, and offer gradient normalization as a simple solution to curb training instability.
Addressing the rising concerns of privacy and security, domain adaptation in the dark aims to adapt a black-box source trained model to an unlabeled target domain without access to any source data or source model parameters. The need for domain adaptation of black-box predictors becomes even more pronounced to protect intellectual property as deep learning based solutions are becoming increasingly commercialized. Current methods distill noisy predictions on the target data obtained from the source model to the target model, and/or separate clean/noisy target samples before adapting using traditional noisy label learning algorithms. However, these methods do not utilize the easy-to-hard learning nature of the clean/noisy data splits. Also, none of the existing methods are end-to-end, and require a separate fine-tuning stage and an initial warmup stage. In this work, we present Curriculum Adaptation for Black-Box (CABB) which provides a curriculum guided adaptation approach to gradually train the target model, first on target data with high confidence (clean) labels, and later on target data with noisy labels. CABB utilizes Jensen-Shannon divergence as a better criterion for clean-noisy sample separation, compared to the traditional criterion of cross entropy loss. Our method utilizes co-training of a dual-branch network to suppress error accumulation resulting from confirmation bias. The proposed approach is end-to-end trainable and does not require any extra finetuning stage, unlike existing methods. Empirical results on standard domain adaptation datasets show that CABB outperforms existing state-of-the-art black-box DA models and is comparable to white-box domain adaptation models.
Precise 6D pose estimation of rigid objects from RGB images is a critical but challenging task in robotics and augmented reality. To address this problem, we propose DeepRM, a novel recurrent network architecture for 6D pose refinement. DeepRM leverages initial coarse pose estimates to render synthetic images of target objects. The rendered images are then matched with the observed images to predict a rigid transform for updating the previous pose estimate. This process is repeated to incrementally refine the estimate at each iteration. LSTM units are used to propagate information through each refinement step, significantly improving overall performance. In contrast to many 2-stage Perspective-n-Point based solutions, DeepRM is trained end-to-end, and uses a scalable backbone that can be tuned via a single parameter for accuracy and efficiency. During training, a multi-scale optical flow head is added to predict the optical flow between the observed and synthetic images. Optical flow prediction stabilizes the training process, and enforces the learning of features that are relevant to the task of pose estimation. Our results demonstrate that DeepRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely accepted challenging datasets.
We propose BAPose, a novel bottom-up approach that achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-person pose estimation. Our end-to-end trainable framework leverages a disentangled multi-scale waterfall architecture and incorporates adaptive convolutions to infer keypoints more precisely in crowded scenes with occlusions. The multi-scale representations, obtained by the disentangled waterfall module in BAPose, leverage the efficiency of progressive filtering in the cascade architecture, while maintaining multi-scale fields-of-view comparable to spatial pyramid configurations. Our results on the challenging COCO and CrowdPose datasets demonstrate that BAPose is an efficient and robust framework for multi-person pose estimation, achieving significant improvements on state-of-the-art accuracy.
Recovering badly damaged face images is a useful yet challenging task, especially in extreme cases where the masked or damaged region is very large. One of the major challenges is the ability of the system to generalize on faces outside the training dataset. We propose to tackle this extreme inpainting task with a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that utilizes structural information, such as edges, as a prior condition. Edge information can be obtained from the partially masked image and a structurally similar image or a hand drawing. In our proposed conditional GAN, we pass the conditional input in every layer of the encoder while maintaining consistency in the distributions between the learned weights and the incoming conditional input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with badly damaged face examples.
Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is commonly used for dimensionality reduction in pattern recognition and statistics. It is a supervised method that aims to find the most discriminant space of reduced dimension that can be further used for classification. In this work, we present a Grassmann Iterative LDA method (GILDA) that is based on Proxy Matrix Optimization (PMO). PMO makes use of automatic differentiation and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on the Grassmann manifold to arrive at the optimal projection matrix. Our results show that GILDAoutperforms the prevailing manifold optimization method.
Siamese deep-network trackers have received significant attention in recent years due to their real-time speed and state-of-the-art performance. However, Siamese trackers suffer from similar looking confusers, that are prevalent in aerial imagery and create challenging conditions due to prolonged occlusions where the tracker object re-appears under different pose and illumination. Our work proposes SiamReID, a novel re-identification framework for Siamese trackers, that incorporates confuser rejection during prolonged occlusions and is well-suited for aerial tracking. The re-identification feature is trained using both triplet loss and a class balanced loss. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in the UAVDT single object tracking benchmark.