AsCAN: Asymmetric Convolution-Attention Networks for Efficient Recognition and Generation

Neural network architecture design requires making many crucial decisions. The common desiderata is that similar decisions, with little modifications, can be reused in a variety of tasks and applications. To satisfy that, architectures must provide promising latency and performance trade-offs, support a variety of tasks, scale efficiently with respect to the amounts of data and compute, leverage available data from other tasks, and efficiently support various hardware. To this end, we introduce AsCAN -- a hybrid architecture, combining both convolutional and transformer blocks. We revisit the key design principles of hybrid architectures and propose a simple and effective \emph{asymmetric} architecture, where the distribution of convolutional and transformer blocks is \emph{asymmetric}, containing more convolutional blocks in the earlier stages, followed by more transformer blocks in later stages. AsCAN supports a variety of tasks: recognition, segmentation, class-conditional image generation, and features a superior trade-off between performance and latency. We then scale the same architecture to solve a large-scale text-to-image task and show state-of-the-art performance compared to the most recent public and commercial models. Notably, even without any computation optimization for transformer blocks, our models still yield faster inference speed than existing works featuring efficient attention mechanisms, highlighting the advantages and the value of our approach.

Scalable Ranked Preference Optimization for Text-to-Image Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a powerful approach to align text-to-image (T2I) models with human feedback. Unfortunately, successful application of DPO to T2I models requires a huge amount of resources to collect and label large-scale datasets, e.g., millions of generated paired images annotated with human preferences. In addition, these human preference datasets can get outdated quickly as the rapid improvements of T2I models lead to higher quality images. In this work, we investigate a scalable approach for collecting large-scale and fully synthetic datasets for DPO training. Specifically, the preferences for paired images are generated using a pre-trained reward function, eliminating the need for involving humans in the annotation process, greatly improving the dataset collection efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that such datasets allow averaging predictions across multiple models and collecting ranked preferences as opposed to pairwise preferences. Furthermore, we introduce RankDPO to enhance DPO-based methods using the ranking feedback. Applying RankDPO on SDXL and SD3-Medium models with our synthetically generated preference dataset ``Syn-Pic'' improves both prompt-following (on benchmarks like T2I-Compbench, GenEval, and DPG-Bench) and visual quality (through user studies). This pipeline presents a practical and scalable solution to develop better preference datasets to enhance the performance of text-to-image models.

GOCA: Guided Online Cluster Assignment for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Clustering is a ubiquitous tool in unsupervised learning. Most of the existing self-supervised representation learning methods typically cluster samples based on visually dominant features. While this works well for image-based self-supervision, it often fails for videos, which require understanding motion rather than focusing on background. Using optical flow as complementary information to RGB can alleviate this problem. However, we observe that a naive combination of the two views does not provide meaningful gains. In this paper, we propose a principled way to combine two views. Specifically, we propose a novel clustering strategy where we use the initial cluster assignment of each view as prior to guide the final cluster assignment of the other view. This idea will enforce similar cluster structures for both views, and the formed clusters will be semantically abstract and robust to noisy inputs coming from each individual view. Additionally, we propose a novel regularization strategy to address the feature collapse problem, which is common in cluster-based self-supervised learning methods. Our extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of our learned representations on downstream tasks, e.g., video retrieval and action recognition. Specifically, we outperform the state of the art by 7% on UCF and 4% on HMDB for video retrieval, and 5% on UCF and 6% on HMDB for video classification

Transformers in Action: Weakly Supervised Action Segmentation

The video action segmentation task is regularly explored under weaker forms of supervision, such as transcript supervision, where a list of actions is easier to obtain than dense frame-wise labels. In this formulation, the task presents various challenges for sequence modeling approaches due to the emphasis on action transition points, long sequence lengths, and frame contextualization, making the task well-posed for transformers. Given developments enabling transformers to scale linearly, we demonstrate through our architecture how they can be applied to improve action alignment accuracy over the equivalent RNN-based models with the attention mechanism focusing around salient action transition regions. Additionally, given the recent focus on inference-time transcript selection, we propose a supplemental transcript embedding approach to select transcripts more quickly at inference-time. Furthermore, we subsequently demonstrate how this approach can also improve the overall segmentation performance. Finally, we evaluate our proposed methods across the benchmark datasets to better understand the applicability of transformers and the importance of transcript selection on this video-driven weakly-supervised task.

Learning to Align Sequential Actions in the Wild

State-of-the-art methods for self-supervised sequential action alignment rely on deep networks that find correspondences across videos in time. They either learn frame-to-frame mapping across sequences, which does not leverage temporal information, or assume monotonic alignment between each video pair, which ignores variations in the order of actions. As such, these methods are not able to deal with common real-world scenarios that involve background frames or videos that contain non-monotonic sequence of actions. In this paper, we propose an approach to align sequential actions in the wild that involve diverse temporal variations. To this end, we propose an approach to enforce temporal priors on the optimal transport matrix, which leverages temporal consistency, while allowing for variations in the order of actions. Our model accounts for both monotonic and non-monotonic sequences and handles background frames that should not be aligned. We demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in self-supervised sequential action representation learning on four different benchmark datasets.

Learning by Aligning Videos in Time

We present a self-supervised approach for learning video representations using temporal video alignment as a pretext task, while exploiting both frame-level and video-level information. We leverage a novel combination of temporal alignment loss and temporal regularization terms, which can be used as supervision signals for training an encoder network. Specifically, the temporal alignment loss (i.e., Soft-DTW) aims for the minimum cost for temporally aligning videos in the embedding space. However, optimizing solely for this term leads to trivial solutions, particularly, one where all frames get mapped to a small cluster in the embedding space. To overcome this problem, we propose a temporal regularization term (i.e., Contrastive-IDM) which encourages different frames to be mapped to different points in the embedding space. Extensive evaluations on various tasks, including action phase classification, action phase progression, and fine-grained frame retrieval, on three datasets, namely Pouring, Penn Action, and IKEA ASM, show superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art methods for self-supervised representation learning from videos. In addition, our method provides significant performance gain where labeled data is lacking.

Sampling-free Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation Using Approximated Variance Propagation

We present a sampling-free approach for computing the epistemic uncertainty of a neural network. Epistemic uncertainty is an important quantity for the deployment of deep neural networks in safety-critical applications, since it represents how much one can trust predictions on new data. Recently promising works were proposed using noise injection combined with Monte-Carlo sampling at inference time to estimate this quantity (e.g. Monte-Carlo dropout). Our main contribution is an approximation of the epistemic uncertainty estimated by these methods that does not require sampling, thus notably reducing the computational overhead. We apply our approach to large-scale visual tasks (i.e., semantic segmentation and depth regression) to demonstrate the advantages of our method compared to sampling-based approaches in terms of quality of the uncertainty estimates as well as of computational overhead.

Domain-Specific Priors and Meta Learning for Low-shot First-Person Action Recognition

The lack of large-scale real datasets with annotationsmakes transfer learning a necessity for video activity under-standing. Within this scope, we aim at developing an effec-tive method for low-shot transfer learning for first-personaction classification. We leverage independently trained lo-cal visual cues to learn representations that can be trans-ferred from a source domain providing primitive action la-bels to a target domain with only a handful of examples.Such visual cues include object-object interactions, handgrasps and motion within regions that are a function of handlocations. We suggest a framework based on meta-learningto appropriately extract the distinctive and domain invari-ant components of the deployed visual cues, so to be able totransfer action classification models across public datasetscaptured with different scene configurations. We thoroughlyevaluate our methodology and report promising results overstate-of-the-art action classification approaches for bothinter-class and inter-dataset transfer.

Human Motion Analysis with Deep Metric Learning

Effectively measuring the similarity between two human motions is necessary for several computer vision tasks such as gait analysis, person identi- fication and action retrieval. Nevertheless, we believe that traditional approaches such as L2 distance or Dynamic Time Warping based on hand-crafted local pose metrics fail to appropriately capture the semantic relationship across motions and, as such, are not suitable for being employed as metrics within these tasks. This work addresses this limitation by means of a triplet-based deep metric learning specifically tailored to deal with human motion data, in particular with the prob- lem of varying input size and computationally expensive hard negative mining due to motion pair alignment. Specifically, we propose (1) a novel metric learn- ing objective based on a triplet architecture and Maximum Mean Discrepancy; as well as, (2) a novel deep architecture based on attentive recurrent neural networks. One benefit of our objective function is that it enforces a better separation within the learned embedding space of the different motion categories by means of the associated distribution moments. At the same time, our attentive recurrent neural network allows processing varying input sizes to a fixed size of embedding while learning to focus on those motion parts that are semantically distinctive. Our ex- periments on two different datasets demonstrate significant improvements over conventional human motion metrics.

Long Short-Term Memory Kalman Filters:Recurrent Neural Estimators for Pose Regularization

One-shot pose estimation for tasks such as body joint localization, camera pose estimation, and object tracking are generally noisy, and temporal filters have been extensively used for regularization. One of the most widely-used methods is the Kalman filter, which is both extremely simple and general. However, Kalman filters require a motion model and measurement model to be specified a priori, which burdens the modeler and simultaneously demands that we use explicit models that are often only crude approximations of reality. For example, in the pose-estimation tasks mentioned above, it is common to use motion models that assume constant velocity or constant acceleration, and we believe that these simplified representations are severely inhibitive. In this work, we propose to instead learn rich, dynamic representations of the motion and noise models. In particular, we propose learning these models from data using long short term memory, which allows representations that depend on all previous observations and all previous states. We evaluate our method using three of the most popular pose estimation tasks in computer vision, and in all cases we obtain state-of-the-art performance.