Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections&#x2014;one between each layer and its subsequent layer&#x2014;our network has L(L+1)/2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/liuzhuang13/DenseNet.

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Densely Connected Convolutional Networks

The central building block of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the convolution operator, which enables networks to construct informative features by fusing both spatial and channel-wise information within local receptive fields at each layer. A broad range of prior research has investigated the spatial component of this relationship, seeking to strengthen the representational power of a CNN by enhancing the quality of spatial encodings throughout its feature hierarchy. In this work, we focus instead on the channel relationship and propose a novel architectural unit, which we term the “Squeeze-and-Excitation” (SE) block, that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. We show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets. We further demonstrate that SE blocks bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs at slight additional computational cost. Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks formed the foundation of our ILSVRC 2017 classification submission which won first place and reduced the top-5 error to 2.251 percent, surpassing the winning entry of 2016 by a relative improvement of ${\sim }$ ∼ 25 percent. Models and code are available at https://github.com/hujie-frank/SENet .

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Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

L$_2$ regularization and weight decay regularization are equivalent for standard stochastic gradient descent (when rescaled by the learning rate), but as we demonstrate this is \emph{not} the case for adaptive gradient algorithms, such as Adam. While common implementations of these algorithms employ L$_2$ regularization (often calling it "weight decay" in what may be misleading due to the inequivalence we expose), we propose a simple modification to recover the original formulation of weight decay regularization by \emph{decoupling} the weight decay from the optimization steps taken w.r.t. the loss function. We provide empirical evidence that our proposed modification (i) decouples the optimal choice of weight decay factor from the setting of the learning rate for both standard SGD and Adam and (ii) substantially improves Adam's generalization performance, allowing it to compete with SGD with momentum on image classification datasets (on which it was previously typically outperformed by the latter). Our proposed decoupled weight decay has already been adopted by many researchers, and the community has implemented it in TensorFlow and PyTorch; the complete source code for our experiments is available at this https URL

Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in compressed video action recognition due to the rapid growth of online videos. It remarkably reduces the storage by replacing raw videos with sparsely sampled RGB frames and other compressed motion cues (motion vectors and residuals). However, existing compressed video action recognition methods face two main issues: First, the inefficiency caused by the usage of coarse-level information under full resolution, and second, the disturbing due to the noisy dynamics in motion vectors. To address the two issues, this paper proposes a dynamic spatial focus method for efficient compressed video action recognition (CoViFocus). Specifically, we first use a light-weighted two-stream architecture to localize the task-relevant patches for both the RGB frames and motion vectors. Then the selected patch pair will be processed by a high-capacity two-stream deep model for the final prediction. Such a patch selection strategy crops out the irrelevant motion noise in motion vectors, as well as reduces the spatial redundancy of the inputs, leading to the high efficiency of our method in the compressed domain. Moreover, we found that the motion vectors can help our method to address the possibly happened <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">static-issue</i> , which means that the focus patches get stuck at some regions related to static objects rather than target actions, which further improves our method. Extensive results on both the HMDB-51 and UCF-101 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in compressed video action recognition tasks. 

Dynamic Spatial Focus for Efficient Compressed Video Action Recognition

Human trajectory Prediction (HTP) in complex social environments plays a crucial and fundamental role in artificial intelligence systems. Conventional methods make use of both history behaviors and social interactions to forecast future trajectories. However, we demonstrate that the social environment is a confounder that misleads the model to learn spurious correlations between history and future trajectories. To end this, we first formulate the social environment, history and future trajectory variables into a structural causal model to analyze the causalities among them. Based on causal intervention rather than conventional likelihood, we propose a Social Environment ADjustment (SEAD) method, to remove the confounding effect of the social environment. The core of our method is implemented by a Social Cross Attention (SCA) module, which is universal, simple and effective. Our method has consistent improvements on ETH-UCY datasets with three baseline models and achieves competitive performances with existing methods.

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Causal Intervention for Human Trajectory Prediction with Cross Attention Mechanism

Image recognition and generation have long been developed independently of each other. With the recent trend towards general-purpose representation learning, the development of general representations for both recognition and generation tasks is also promoted. However, preliminary attempts mainly focus on generation performance, but are still inferior on recognition tasks. These methods are modeled in the vector-quantized (VQ) space, whereas leading recognition methods use pixels as inputs. Our key insights are twofold: (1) pixels as inputs are crucial for recognition tasks; (2) VQ tokens as reconstruction targets are beneficial for generation tasks. These observations motivate us to propose an Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process (ADDP) that integrates these two spaces within a single representation learning framework. In each denoising step, our method first decodes pixels from previous VQ tokens, then generates new VQ tokens from the decoded pixels. The diffusion process gradually masks out a portion of VQ tokens to construct the training samples. The learned representations can be used to generate diverse high-fidelity images and also demonstrate excellent transfer performance on recognition tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance on unconditional generation, ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20k segmentation. Importantly, our method represents the first successful development of general representations applicable to both generation and dense recognition tasks. Code shall be released.

ADDP: Learning General Representations for Image Recognition and Generation with Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift problem. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated policy constraints between the learned policy and the behavior policy. However, these constraints are applied equally to well-performing and inferior actions through uniform sampling, which might negatively affect the learned policy. To alleviate this issue, we propose Offline Prioritized Experience Replay (OPER), featuring a class of priority functions designed to prioritize highly-rewarding transitions, making them more frequently visited during training. Through theoretical analysis, we show that this class of priority functions induce an improved behavior policy, and when constrained to this improved policy, a policy-constrained offline RL algorithm is likely to yield a better solution. We develop two practical strategies to obtain priority weights by estimating advantages based on a fitted value network (OPER-A) or utilizing trajectory returns (OPER-R) for quick computation. OPER is a plug-and-play component for offline RL algorithms. As case studies, we evaluate OPER on five different algorithms, including BC, TD3+BC, Onestep RL, CQL, and IQL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both OPER-A and OPER-R significantly improve the performance for all baseline methods. Codes and priority weights are availiable at https://github.com/sail-sg/OPER.

Offline Prioritized Experience Replay

In large-scale classification problems, the data set always be faced with frequent updates when a part of the data is added to or removed from the original data set. In this case, conventional incremental learning, which updates an existing classifier by explicitly modeling the data modification, is more efficient than retraining a new classifier from scratch. However, sometimes, we are more interested in determining whether we should update the classifier or performing some sensitivity analysis tasks. To deal with these such tasks, we propose an algorithm to make rational inferences about the updated linear classifier without exactly updating the classifier. Specifically, the proposed algorithm can be used to estimate the upper and lower bounds of the updated classifier's coefficient matrix with a low computational complexity related to the size of the updated dataset. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the proposed approach is superior to existing methods in terms of tightness of coefficients' bounds and computational complexity.

Gao Huang

Papers

Dynamic Spatial Focus for Efficient Compressed Video Action Recognition

Causal Intervention for Human Trajectory Prediction with Cross Attention Mechanism

ADDP: Learning General Representations for Image Recognition and Generation with Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process

Offline Prioritized Experience Replay

Tighter Bound Estimation of Sensitivity Analysis for Incremental and Decremental Data Modification