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The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report
Apr 16, 2024
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.
Convergence Analysis of Flow Matching in Latent Space with Transformers
Apr 03, 2024We present theoretical convergence guarantees for ODE-based generative models, specifically flow matching. We use a pre-trained autoencoder network to map high-dimensional original inputs to a low-dimensional latent space, where a transformer network is trained to predict the velocity field of the transformation from a standard normal distribution to the target latent distribution. Our error analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach, showing that the distribution of samples generated via estimated ODE flow converges to the target distribution in the Wasserstein-2 distance under mild and practical assumptions. Furthermore, we show that arbitrary smooth functions can be effectively approximated by transformer networks with Lipschitz continuity, which may be of independent interest.
Boosting Visual Recognition for Autonomous Driving in Real-world Degradations with Deep Channel Prior
Apr 02, 2024The environmental perception of autonomous vehicles in normal conditions have achieved considerable success in the past decade. However, various unfavourable conditions such as fog, low-light, and motion blur will degrade image quality and pose tremendous threats to the safety of autonomous driving. That is, when applied to degraded images, state-of-the-art visual models often suffer performance decline due to the feature content loss and artifact interference caused by statistical and structural properties disruption of captured images. To address this problem, this work proposes a novel Deep Channel Prior (DCP) for degraded visual recognition. Specifically, we observe that, in the deep representation space of pre-trained models, the channel correlations of degraded features with the same degradation type have uniform distribution even if they have different content and semantics, which can facilitate the mapping relationship learning between degraded and clear representations in high-sparsity feature space. Based on this, a novel plug-and-play Unsupervised Feature Enhancement Module (UFEM) is proposed to achieve unsupervised feature correction, where the multi-adversarial mechanism is introduced in the first stage of UFEM to achieve the latent content restoration and artifact removal in high-sparsity feature space. Then, the generated features are transferred to the second stage for global correlation modulation under the guidance of DCP to obtain high-quality and recognition-friendly features. Evaluations of three tasks and eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can comprehensively improve the performance of pre-trained models in real degradation conditions. The source code is available at https://github.com/liyuhang166/Deep_Channel_Prior
Meta Episodic learning with Dynamic Task Sampling for CLIP-based Point Cloud Classification
Apr 01, 2024Point cloud classification refers to the process of assigning semantic labels or categories to individual points within a point cloud data structure. Recent works have explored the extension of pre-trained CLIP to 3D recognition. In this direction, CLIP-based point cloud models like PointCLIP, CLIP2Point have become state-of-the-art methods in the few-shot setup. Although these methods show promising performance for some classes like airplanes, desks, guitars, etc, the performance for some classes like the cup, flower pot, sink, nightstand, etc is still far from satisfactory. This is due to the fact that the adapter of CLIP-based models is trained using randomly sampled N-way K-shot data in the standard supervised learning setup. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-episodic learning framework for CLIP-based point cloud classification, addressing the challenges of limited training examples and sampling unknown classes. Additionally, we introduce dynamic task sampling within the episode based on performance memory. This sampling strategy effectively addresses the challenge of sampling unknown classes, ensuring that the model learns from a diverse range of classes and promotes the exploration of underrepresented categories. By dynamically updating the performance memory, we adaptively prioritize the sampling of classes based on their performance, enhancing the model's ability to handle challenging and real-world scenarios. Experiments show an average performance gain of 3-6\% on ModelNet40 and ScanobjectNN datasets in a few-shot setup.
Structure Matters: Tackling the Semantic Discrepancy in Diffusion Models for Image Inpainting
Apr 01, 2024
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models for image inpainting aim to add the noise to the texture of image during the forward process and recover masked regions with unmasked ones of the texture via the reverse denoising process.Despite the meaningful semantics generation,the existing arts suffer from the semantic discrepancy between masked and unmasked regions, since the semantically dense unmasked texture fails to be completely degraded while the masked regions turn to the pure noise in diffusion process,leading to the large discrepancy between them. In this paper,we aim to answer how unmasked semantics guide texture denoising process;together with how to tackle the semantic discrepancy,to facilitate the consistent and meaningful semantics generation. To this end,we propose a novel structure-guided diffusion model named StrDiffusion,to reformulate the conventional texture denoising process under structure guidance to derive a simplified denoising objective for image inpainting,while revealing:1)the semantically sparse structure is beneficial to tackle semantic discrepancy in early stage, while dense texture generates reasonable semantics in late stage;2)the semantics from unmasked regions essentially offer the time-dependent structure guidance for the texture denoising process,benefiting from the time-dependent sparsity of the structure semantics.For the denoising process,a structure-guided neural network is trained to estimate the simplified denoising objective by exploiting the consistency of the denoised structure between masked and unmasked regions.Besides,we devise an adaptive resampling strategy as a formal criterion as whether structure is competent to guide the texture denoising process,while regulate their semantic correlations.Extensive experiments validate the merits of StrDiffusion over the state-of-the-arts.Our code is available at https://github.com/htyjers/StrDiffusion.
Lightweight Embeddings for Graph Collaborative Filtering
Mar 28, 2024Graph neural networks (GNNs) are currently one of the most performant collaborative filtering methods. Meanwhile, owing to the use of an embedding table to represent each user/item as a distinct vector, GNN-based recommenders have inherited the long-standing defect of parameter inefficiency. As a common practice for scalable embeddings, parameter sharing enables the use of fewer embedding vectors (i.e., meta-embeddings). When assigning meta-embeddings, most existing methods are a heuristically designed, predefined mapping from each user's/item's ID to the corresponding meta-embedding indexes, thus simplifying the optimization problem into learning only the meta-embeddings. However, in the context of GNN-based collaborative filtering, such a fixed mapping omits the semantic correlations between entities that are evident in the user-item interaction graph, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. To this end, we propose Lightweight Embeddings for Graph Collaborative Filtering (LEGCF), a parameter-efficient embedding framework dedicated to GNN-based recommenders. LEGCF innovatively introduces an assignment matrix as an extra learnable component on top of meta-embeddings. To jointly optimize these two heavily entangled components, aside from learning the meta-embeddings by minimizing the recommendation loss, LEGCF further performs efficient assignment update by enforcing a novel semantic similarity constraint and finding its closed-form solution based on matrix pseudo-inverse. The meta-embeddings and assignment matrix are alternately updated, where the latter is sparsified on the fly to ensure negligible storage overhead. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have verified LEGCF's smallest trade-off between size and performance, with consistent accuracy gain over state-of-the-art baselines. The codebase of LEGCF is available in https://github.com/xurong-liang/LEGCF.
RL in Markov Games with Independent Function Approximation: Improved Sample Complexity Bound under the Local Access Model
Mar 20, 2024
Efficiently learning equilibria with large state and action spaces in general-sum Markov games while overcoming the curse of multi-agency is a challenging problem. Recent works have attempted to solve this problem by employing independent linear function classes to approximate the marginal $Q$-value for each agent. However, existing sample complexity bounds under such a framework have a suboptimal dependency on the desired accuracy $\varepsilon$ or the action space. In this work, we introduce a new algorithm, Lin-Confident-FTRL, for learning coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) with local access to the simulator, i.e., one can interact with the underlying environment on the visited states. Up to a logarithmic dependence on the size of the state space, Lin-Confident-FTRL learns $\epsilon$-CCE with a provable optimal accuracy bound $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ and gets rids of the linear dependency on the action space, while scaling polynomially with relevant problem parameters (such as the number of agents and time horizon). Moreover, our analysis of Linear-Confident-FTRL generalizes the virtual policy iteration technique in the single-agent local planning literature, which yields a new computationally efficient algorithm with a tighter sample complexity bound when assuming random access to the simulator.
FairSTG: Countering performance heterogeneity via collaborative sample-level optimization
Mar 19, 2024
Spatiotemporal learning plays a crucial role in mobile computing techniques to empower smart cites. While existing research has made great efforts to achieve accurate predictions on the overall dataset, they still neglect the significant performance heterogeneity across samples. In this work, we designate the performance heterogeneity as the reason for unfair spatiotemporal learning, which not only degrades the practical functions of models, but also brings serious potential risks to real-world urban applications. To fix this gap, we propose a model-independent Fairness-aware framework for SpatioTemporal Graph learning (FairSTG), which inherits the idea of exploiting advantages of well-learned samples to challenging ones with collaborative mix-up. Specifically, FairSTG consists of a spatiotemporal feature extractor for model initialization, a collaborative representation enhancement for knowledge transfer between well-learned samples and challenging ones, and fairness objectives for immediately suppressing sample-level performance heterogeneity. Experiments on four spatiotemporal datasets demonstrate that our FairSTG significantly improves the fairness quality while maintaining comparable forecasting accuracy. Case studies show FairSTG can counter both spatial and temporal performance heterogeneity by our sample-level retrieval and compensation, and our work can potentially alleviate the risks on spatiotemporal resource allocation for underrepresented urban regions.
Spatio-Temporal Fluid Dynamics Modeling via Physical-Awareness and Parameter Diffusion Guidance
Mar 18, 2024
This paper proposes a two-stage framework named ST-PAD for spatio-temporal fluid dynamics modeling in the field of earth sciences, aiming to achieve high-precision simulation and prediction of fluid dynamics through spatio-temporal physics awareness and parameter diffusion guidance. In the upstream stage, we design a vector quantization reconstruction module with temporal evolution characteristics, ensuring balanced and resilient parameter distribution by introducing general physical constraints. In the downstream stage, a diffusion probability network involving parameters is utilized to generate high-quality future states of fluids, while enhancing the model's generalization ability by perceiving parameters in various physical setups. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets have verified the effectiveness and robustness of the ST-PAD framework, which showcase that ST-PAD outperforms current mainstream models in fluid dynamics modeling and prediction, especially in effectively capturing local representations and maintaining significant advantages in OOD generations.
LAN: Learning Adaptive Neighbors for Real-Time Insider Threat Detection
Mar 17, 2024
Enterprises and organizations are faced with potential threats from insider employees that may lead to serious consequences. Previous studies on insider threat detection (ITD) mainly focus on detecting abnormal users or abnormal time periods (e.g., a week or a day). However, a user may have hundreds of thousands of activities in the log, and even within a day there may exist thousands of activities for a user, requiring a high investigation budget to verify abnormal users or activities given the detection results. On the other hand, existing works are mainly post-hoc methods rather than real-time detection, which can not report insider threats in time before they cause loss. In this paper, we conduct the first study towards real-time ITD at activity level, and present a fine-grained and efficient framework LAN. Specifically, LAN simultaneously learns the temporal dependencies within an activity sequence and the relationships between activities across sequences with graph structure learning. Moreover, to mitigate the data imbalance problem in ITD, we propose a novel hybrid prediction loss, which integrates self-supervision signals from normal activities and supervision signals from abnormal activities into a unified loss for anomaly detection. We evaluate the performance of LAN on two widely used datasets, i.e., CERT r4.2 and CERT r5.2. Extensive and comparative experiments demonstrate the superiority of LAN, outperforming 9 state-of-the-art baselines by at least 9.92% and 6.35% in AUC for real-time ITD on CERT r4.2 and r5.2, respectively. Moreover, LAN can be also applied to post-hoc ITD, surpassing 8 competitive baselines by at least 7.70% and 4.03% in AUC on two datasets. Finally, the ablation study, parameter analysis, and compatibility analysis evaluate the impact of each module and hyper-parameter in LAN. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/Li1Neo/LAN.