One of the practical choices for making a lightweight semantic segmentation model is to combine a depth-wise separable convolution with a dilated convolution. However, the simple combination of these two methods results in an over-simplified operation which causes severe performance degradation due to loss of information contained in the feature map. To resolve this problem, we propose a new block called Concentrated-Comprehensive Convolution (C3) which applies the asymmetric convolutions before the depth-wise separable dilated convolution to compensate for the information loss due to dilated convolution. The C3 block consists of a concentration stage and a comprehensive convolution stage. The first stage uses two depth-wise asymmetric convolutions for compressed information from the neighboring pixels to alleviate the information loss. The second stage increases the receptive field by using a depth-wise separable dilated convolution from the feature map of the first stage. We applied the C3 block to various segmentation frameworks (ESPNet, DRN, ERFNet, ENet) for proving the beneficial properties of our proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method preserves the original accuracies on Cityscapes dataset while reducing the complexity. Furthermore, we modified ESPNet to achieve about 2% better performance while reducing the number of parameters by half and the number of FLOPs by 35% compared with the original ESPNet. Finally, experiments on ImageNet classification task show that C3 block can successfully replace dilated convolutions.
In this work, we introduce a new algorithm for analyzing a diagram, which contains visual and textual information in an Abstract and integrated way. Whereas diagrams contain richer information compared with individual image-based or language-based data, proper solutions for automatically understanding them have not been proposed due to their innate characteristics of multi-modality and arbitrariness of layouts. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified diagram-parsing network for generating knowledge from diagrams based on an object detector and a recurrent neural network designed for a graphical structure. Specifically, we propose a dynamic graph-generation network that is based on dynamic memory and graph theory. We explore the dynamics of information in a diagram with activation of gates in gated recurrent unit (GRU) cells. On publicly available diagram datasets, our model demonstrates a state-of-the-art result that outperforms other baselines. Moreover, further experiments on question answering shows potentials of the proposed method for various applications.
We propose a novel and effective purification based adversarial defense method against pre-processor blind white- and black-box attacks. Our method is computationally efficient and trained only with self-supervised learning on general images, without requiring any adversarial training or retraining of the classification model. We first show an empirical analysis on the adversarial noise, defined to be the residual between an original image and its adversarial example, has almost zero mean, symmetric distribution. Based on this observation, we propose a very simple iterative Gaussian Smoothing (GS) which can effectively smooth out adversarial noise and achieve substantially high robust accuracy. To further improve it, we propose Neural Contextual Iterative Smoothing (NCIS), which trains a blind-spot network (BSN) in a self-supervised manner to reconstruct the discriminative features of the original image that is also smoothed out by GS. From our extensive experiments on the large-scale ImageNet using four classification models, we show that our method achieves both competitive standard accuracy and state-of-the-art robust accuracy against most strong purifier-blind white- and black-box attacks. Also, we propose a new benchmark for evaluating a purification method based on commercial image classification APIs, such as AWS, Azure, Clarifai and Google. We generate adversarial examples by ensemble transfer-based black-box attack, which can induce complete misclassification of APIs, and demonstrate that our method can be used to increase adversarial robustness of APIs.
In this paper, a new method of training pipeline is discussed to achieve significant performance on the task of anti-spoofing with RGB image. We explore and highlight the impact of using pseudo-depth to pre-train a network that will be used as the backbone to the final classifier. While the usage of pseudo-depth for anti-spoofing task is not a new idea on its own, previous endeavours utilize pseudo-depth simply as another medium to extract features for performing prediction, or as part of many auxiliary losses in aiding the training of the main classifier, normalizing the importance of pseudo-depth as just another semantic information. Through this work, we argue that there exists a significant advantage in training the final classifier can be gained by the pre-trained generator learning to predict the corresponding pseudo-depth of a given facial image, from a Generative Adversarial Network framework. Our experimental results indicate that our method results in a much more adaptable system that can generalize beyond intra-dataset samples, but to inter-dataset samples, which it has never seen before during training. Quantitatively, our method approaches the baseline performance of the current state of the art anti-spoofing models with 15.8x less parameters used. Moreover, experiments showed that the introduced methodology performs well only using basic binary label without additional semantic information which indicates potential benefits of this work in industrial and application based environment where trade-off between additional labelling and resources are considered.
In this paper, we propose an efficient visual tracker, which directly captures a bounding box containing the target object in a video by means of sequential actions learned using deep neural networks. The proposed deep neural network to control tracking actions is pretrained using various training video sequences and fine-tuned during actual tracking for online adaptation to a change of target and background. The pretraining is done by utilizing deep reinforcement learning (RL) as well as supervised learning. The use of RL enables even partially labeled data to be successfully utilized for semisupervised learning. Through the evaluation of the object tracking benchmark data set, the proposed tracker is validated to achieve a competitive performance at three times the speed of existing deep network-based trackers. The fast version of the proposed method, which operates in real time on graphics processing unit, outperforms the state-of-the-art real-time trackers with an accuracy improvement of more than 8%.
Continual learning is a realistic learning scenario for AI models. Prevalent scenario of continual learning, however, assumes disjoint sets of classes as tasks and is less realistic rather artificial. Instead, we focus on 'blurry' task boundary; where tasks shares classes and is more realistic and practical. To address such task, we argue the importance of diversity of samples in an episodic memory. To enhance the sample diversity in the memory, we propose a novel memory management strategy based on per-sample classification uncertainty and data augmentation, named Rainbow Memory (RM). With extensive empirical validations on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet datasets, we show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy in blurry continual learning setups, outperforming state of the arts by large margins despite its simplicity. Code and data splits will be available in https://github.com/clovaai/rainbow-memory.
Image-mixing augmentations (e.g., Mixup and CutMix), which typically involve mixing two images, have become the de-facto training techniques for image classification. Despite their huge success in image classification, the number of images to be mixed has not been elucidated in the literature: only the naive K-image expansion has been shown to lead to performance degradation. This study derives a new K-image mixing augmentation based on the stick-breaking process under Dirichlet prior distribution. We demonstrate the superiority of our K-image expansion augmentation over conventional two-image mixing augmentation methods through extensive experiments and analyses: (1) more robust and generalized classifiers; (2) a more desirable loss landscape shape; (3) better adversarial robustness. Moreover, we show that our probabilistic model can measure the sample-wise uncertainty and boost the efficiency for network architecture search by achieving a 7-fold reduction in the search time. Code will be available at https://github.com/yjyoo3312/DCutMix-PyTorch.git.
We introduce a novel method to train agents of reinforcement learning (RL) by sharing knowledge in a way similar to the concept of using a book. The recorded information in the form of a book is the main means by which humans learn knowledge. Nevertheless, the conventional deep RL methods have mainly focused either on experiential learning where the agent learns through interactions with the environment from the start or on imitation learning that tries to mimic the teacher. Contrary to these, our proposed book learning shares key information among different agents in a book-like manner by delving into the following two characteristic features: (1) By defining the linguistic function, input states can be clustered semantically into a relatively small number of core clusters, which are forwarded to other RL agents in a prescribed manner. (2) By defining state priorities and the contents for recording, core experiences can be selected and stored in a small container. We call this container as ‘BOOK’. Our method learns hundreds to thousand times faster than the conventional methods by learning only a handful of core cluster information, which shows that deep RL agents can effectively learn through the shared knowledge from other agents.