On the Surprising Effectiveness of Attention Transfer for Vision Transformers

Conventional wisdom suggests that pre-training Vision Transformers (ViT) improves downstream performance by learning useful representations. Is this actually true? We investigate this question and find that the features and representations learned during pre-training are not essential. Surprisingly, using only the attention patterns from pre-training (i.e., guiding how information flows between tokens) is sufficient for models to learn high quality features from scratch and achieve comparable downstream performance. We show this by introducing a simple method called attention transfer, where only the attention patterns from a pre-trained teacher ViT are transferred to a student, either by copying or distilling the attention maps. Since attention transfer lets the student learn its own features, ensembling it with a fine-tuned teacher also further improves accuracy on ImageNet. We systematically study various aspects of our findings on the sufficiency of attention maps, including distribution shift settings where they underperform fine-tuning. We hope our exploration provides a better understanding of what pre-training accomplishes and leads to a useful alternative to the standard practice of fine-tuning

An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling

Following the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), several attempts have been made to extend them to the visual domain. From having a visual assistant that could guide us through unfamiliar environments to generative models that produce images using only a high-level text description, the vision-language model (VLM) applications will significantly impact our relationship with technology. However, there are many challenges that need to be addressed to improve the reliability of those models. While language is discrete, vision evolves in a much higher dimensional space in which concepts cannot always be easily discretized. To better understand the mechanics behind mapping vision to language, we present this introduction to VLMs which we hope will help anyone who would like to enter the field. First, we introduce what VLMs are, how they work, and how to train them. Then, we present and discuss approaches to evaluate VLMs. Although this work primarily focuses on mapping images to language, we also discuss extending VLMs to videos.

Diffusion-TTA: Test-time Adaptation of Discriminative Models via Generative Feedback

The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can be great test-time adapters for discriminative models. Our method, Diffusion-TTA, adapts pre-trained discriminative models such as image classifiers, segmenters and depth predictors, to each unlabelled example in the test set using generative feedback from a diffusion model. We achieve this by modulating the conditioning of the diffusion model using the output of the discriminative model. We then maximize the image likelihood objective by backpropagating the gradients to discriminative model's parameters. We show Diffusion-TTA significantly enhances the accuracy of various large-scale pre-trained discriminative models, such as, ImageNet classifiers, CLIP models, image pixel labellers and image depth predictors. Diffusion-TTA outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods, including TTT-MAE and TENT, and particularly shines in online adaptation setups, where the discriminative model is continually adapted to each example in the test set. We provide access to code, results, and visualizations on our website: https://diffusion-tta.github.io/.

Your Diffusion Model is Secretly a Zero-Shot Classifier

The recent wave of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has dramatically increased our text-based image generation abilities. These models can generate realistic images for a staggering variety of prompts and exhibit impressive compositional generalization abilities. Almost all use cases thus far have solely focused on sampling; however, diffusion models can also provide conditional density estimates, which are useful for tasks beyond image generation. In this paper, we show that the density estimates from large-scale text-to-image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion can be leveraged to perform zero-shot classification without any additional training. Our generative approach to classification, which we call Diffusion Classifier, attains strong results on a variety of benchmarks and outperforms alternative methods of extracting knowledge from diffusion models. Although a gap remains between generative and discriminative approaches on zero-shot recognition tasks, we find that our diffusion-based approach has stronger multimodal relational reasoning abilities than competing discriminative approaches. Finally, we use Diffusion Classifier to extract standard classifiers from class-conditional diffusion models trained on ImageNet. Even though these models are trained with weak augmentations and no regularization, they approach the performance of SOTA discriminative classifiers. Overall, our results are a step toward using generative over discriminative models for downstream tasks. Results and visualizations at https://diffusion-classifier.github.io/

Internet Explorer: Targeted Representation Learning on the Open Web

Modern vision models typically rely on fine-tuning general-purpose models pre-trained on large, static datasets. These general-purpose models only capture the knowledge within their pre-training datasets, which are tiny, out-of-date snapshots of the Internet -- where billions of images are uploaded each day. We suggest an alternate approach: rather than hoping our static datasets transfer to our desired tasks after large-scale pre-training, we propose dynamically utilizing the Internet to quickly train a small-scale model that does extremely well on the task at hand. Our approach, called Internet Explorer, explores the web in a self-supervised manner to progressively find relevant examples that improve performance on a desired target dataset. It cycles between searching for images on the Internet with text queries, self-supervised training on downloaded images, determining which images were useful, and prioritizing what to search for next. We evaluate Internet Explorer across several datasets and show that it outperforms or matches CLIP oracle performance by using just a single GPU desktop to actively query the Internet for 30--40 hours. Results, visualizations, and videos at https://internet-explorer-ssl.github.io/

Understanding Collapse in Non-Contrastive Learning

Contrastive methods have led a recent surge in the performance of self-supervised representation learning (SSL). Recent methods like BYOL or SimSiam purportedly distill these contrastive methods down to their essence, removing bells and whistles, including the negative examples, that do not contribute to downstream performance. These "non-contrastive" methods work surprisingly well without using negatives even though the global minimum lies at trivial collapse. We empirically analyze these non-contrastive methods and find that SimSiam is extraordinarily sensitive to dataset and model size. In particular, SimSiam representations undergo partial dimensional collapse if the model is too small relative to the dataset size. We propose a metric to measure the degree of this collapse and show that it can be used to forecast the downstream task performance without any fine-tuning or labels. We further analyze architectural design choices and their effect on the downstream performance. Finally, we demonstrate that shifting to a continual learning setting acts as a regularizer and prevents collapse, and a hybrid between continual and multi-epoch training can improve linear probe accuracy by as many as 18 percentage points using ResNet-18 on ImageNet.

Functional Regularization for Reinforcement Learning via Learned Fourier Features

We propose a simple architecture for deep reinforcement learning by embedding inputs into a learned Fourier basis and show that it improves the sample efficiency of both state-based and image-based RL. We perform infinite-width analysis of our architecture using the Neural Tangent Kernel and theoretically show that tuning the initial variance of the Fourier basis is equivalent to functional regularization of the learned deep network. That is, these learned Fourier features allow for adjusting the degree to which networks underfit or overfit different frequencies in the training data, and hence provide a controlled mechanism to improve the stability and performance of RL optimization. Empirically, this allows us to prioritize learning low-frequency functions and speed up learning by reducing networks' susceptibility to noise in the optimization process, such as during Bellman updates. Experiments on standard state-based and image-based RL benchmarks show clear benefits of our architecture over the baselines. Website at https://alexanderli.com/learned-fourier-features

Generalized Hindsight for Reinforcement Learning

One of the key reasons for the high sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) is the inability to transfer knowledge from one task to another. In standard multi-task RL settings, low-reward data collected while trying to solve one task provides little to no signal for solving that particular task and is hence effectively wasted. However, we argue that this data, which is uninformative for one task, is likely a rich source of information for other tasks. To leverage this insight and efficiently reuse data, we present Generalized Hindsight: an approximate inverse reinforcement learning technique for relabeling behaviors with the right tasks. Intuitively, given a behavior generated under one task, Generalized Hindsight returns a different task that the behavior is better suited for. Then, the behavior is relabeled with this new task before being used by an off-policy RL optimizer. Compared to standard relabeling techniques, Generalized Hindsight provides a substantially more efficient reuse of samples, which we empirically demonstrate on a suite of multi-task navigation and manipulation tasks. Videos and code can be accessed here: https://sites.google.com/view/generalized-hindsight.

Autoregressive Models: What Are They Good For?

Autoregressive (AR) models have become a popular tool for unsupervised learning, achieving state-of-the-art log likelihood estimates. We investigate the use of AR models as density estimators in two settings -- as a learning signal for image translation, and as an outlier detector -- and find that these density estimates are much less reliable than previously thought. We examine the underlying optimization issues from both an empirical and theoretical perspective, and provide a toy example that illustrates the problem. Overwhelmingly, we find that density estimates do not correlate with perceptual quality and are unhelpful for downstream tasks.

Sub-policy Adaptation for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning is a promising approach to long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a higher level that controls the skills in a new task. Treating the skills as fixed can lead to significant sub-optimality in the transfer setting. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm to discover a set of skills, and continuously adapt them along with the higher level even when training on a new task. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, we derive a new hierarchical policy gradient, as well as an unbiased latent-dependent baseline. We introduce Hierarchical Proximal Policy Optimization (HiPPO), an on-policy method to efficiently train all levels of the hierarchy simultaneously. Second, we propose a method of training time-abstractions that improves the robustness of the obtained skills to environment changes. Code and results are available at sites.google.com/view/hippo-rl .