When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning with similar old and new task datasets for improved new task performance.

Learning without Forgetting

This work investigates a simple yet powerful dense prediction task adapter for Vision Transformer (ViT). Unlike recently advanced variants that incorporate vision-specific inductive biases into their architectures, the plain ViT suffers inferior performance on dense predictions due to weak prior assumptions. To address this issue, we propose the ViT-Adapter, which allows plain ViT to achieve comparable performance to vision-specific transformers. Specifically, the backbone in our framework is a plain ViT that can learn powerful representations from large-scale multi-modal data. When transferring to downstream tasks, a pre-training-free adapter is used to introduce the image-related inductive biases into the model, making it suitable for these tasks. We verify ViT-Adapter on multiple dense prediction tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, without using extra detection data, our ViT-Adapter-L yields state-of-the-art 60.9 box AP and 53.0 mask AP on COCO test-dev. We hope that the ViT-Adapter could serve as an alternative for vision-specific transformers and facilitate future research. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/czczup/ViT-Adapter.

Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions

Knowledge distillation (KD) achieves promising results on the challenging problem of unsupervised anomaly detection (AD). The representation discrepancy of anomalies in the teacher-student (T-S) model provides essential evidence for AD. However, using similar or identical architectures to build the teacher and student models in previous studies hinders the diversity of anomalous representations. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel T-S model consisting of a teacher encoder and a student decoder and introduce a simple yet effective “reverse distillation” paradigm accordingly. Instead of receiving raw images directly, the student network takes teacher model's one-class embedding as input and targets to restore the teacher's multi-scale representations. Inherently, knowledge distillation in this study starts from abstract, high-level presentations to low-level features. In addition, we introduce a trainable one-class bottleneck embedding (OCBE) module in our T-S model. The obtained compact embedding effectively preserves essential information on normal patterns, but aban-dons anomaly perturbations. Extensive experimentation on AD and one-class novelty detection benchmarks shows that our method surpasses SOTA performance, demonstrating our proposed approach's effectiveness and generalizability.

Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding

Microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of copper oxide-based gas-sensitive nanostructures

Metal-Oxide Nanomaterials Synthesis and Applications in Flexible and Wearable Sensors

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art and sometimes super-human performance across various domains. However, when learning tasks sequentially, the networks easily forget the knowledge of previous tasks, known as "catastrophic forgetting". To achieve the consistencies between the old tasks and the new task, one effective solution is to modify the gradient for update. Previous methods enforce independent gradient constraints for different tasks, while we consider these gradients contain complex information, and propose to leverage inter-task information by gradient decomposition. In particular, the gradient of an old task is decomposed into a part shared by all old tasks and a part specific to that task. The gradient for update should be close to the gradient of the new task, consistent with the gradients shared by all old tasks, and orthogonal to the space spanned by the gradients specific to the old tasks. In this way, our approach encourages common knowledge consolidation without impairing the task-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the optimization is performed for the gradients of each layer separately rather than the concatenation of all gradients as in previous works. This effectively avoids the influence of the magnitude variation of the gradients in different layers. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of both gradient-decomposed optimization and layer-wise updates. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks of continual learning.

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Layerwise Optimization by Gradient Decomposition for Continual Learning

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer representation ability from a teacher model to a student model. Previous approaches focus on either individual representation distillation or inter-sample similarity preservation. While we argue that the inter-sample relation conveys abundant information and needs to be distilled in a more effective way. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method, namely Complementary Relation Contrastive Distillation (CRCD), to transfer the structural knowledge from the teacher to the student. Specifically, we estimate the mutual relation in an anchor-based way and distill the anchor-student relation under the supervision of its corresponding anchor-teacher relation. To make it more robust, mutual relations are modeled by two complementary elements: the feature and its gradient. Furthermore, the low bound of mutual information between the anchor-teacher relation distribution and the anchor-student relation distribution is maximized via relation contrastive loss, which can distill both the sample representation and the inter-sample relations. Experiments on different benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CRCD.

Complementary Relation Contrastive Distillation

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Image online monitoring technology has been widely used in transmission lines inspection, but the intelligent and efficient foreign object detection still has a gap with the ideal. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to detect invading foreign objects for power transmission line inspection. Specifically, we design our network based on the regression strategy with oriented bounding boxes to accurately predict spatial location and orientation angle of foreign objects, as well as their categories in cluttered backgrounds. Moreover, an easy yet effective Scale Histogram Matching method is proposed to be applied to the publicly available dataset, allowing useful patterns to be exploited to detect tiny foreign objects during the pretraining procedure and boosting detection performance even with limited annotated samples. Besides, we construct an image dataset that contains common foreign objects in transmission line scenarios to evaluate proposed methods, on which experiment results show our full model achieves accuracy with 88.1% mean Average Precision (mAP). Additionally, the efficient and compact network structure allows our network to run in real-time, which provides possibilities for practical use.

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A Deep Learning Method to Detect Foreign Objects for Inspecting Power Transmission Lines

To build an artificial neural network like the biological intelligence system, recent works have unified numerous tasks into a generalist model, which can process various tasks with shared parameters and do not have any task-specific modules. While generalist models achieve promising results on various benchmarks, they have performance degradation on some tasks compared with task-specialized models. In this work, we find that interference among different tasks and modalities is the main factor to this phenomenon. To mitigate such interference, we introduce the Conditional Mixture-of-Experts (Conditional MoEs) to generalist models. Routing strategies under different levels of conditions are proposed to take both the training/inference cost and generalization ability into account. By incorporating the proposed Conditional MoEs, the recently proposed generalist model Uni-Perceiver can effectively mitigate the interference across tasks and modalities, and achieves state-of-the-art results on a series of downstream tasks via prompt tuning on 1% of downstream data. Moreover, the introduction of Conditional MoEs still holds the generalization ability of generalist models to conduct zero-shot inference on new tasks, e.g., video-text retrieval and video caption. Code and pre-trained generalist models shall be released.

Jinguo Zhu

Papers

Layerwise Optimization by Gradient Decomposition for Continual Learning

Complementary Relation Contrastive Distillation

Complementary Relation Contrastive Distillation

A Deep Learning Method to Detect Foreign Objects for Inspecting Power Transmission Lines

Uni-Perceiver-MoE: Learning Sparse Generalist Models with Conditional MoEs