Centerness-based Instance-aware Knowledge Distillation with Task-wise Mutual Lifting for Object Detection on Drone Imagery

Developing accurate and efficient detectors for drone imagery is challenging due to the inherent complexity of aerial scenes. While some existing methods aim to achieve high accuracy by utilizing larger models, their computational cost is prohibitive for drones. Recently, Knowledge Distillation (KD) has shown promising potential for maintaining satisfactory accuracy while significantly compressing models in general object detection. Considering the advantages of KD, this paper presents the first attempt to adapt it to object detection on drone imagery and addresses two intrinsic issues: (1) low foreground-background ratio and (2) small instances and complex backgrounds, which lead to inadequate training, resulting insufficient distillation. Therefore, we propose a task-wise Lightweight Mutual Lifting (Light-ML) module with a Centerness-based Instance-aware Distillation (CID) strategy. The Light-ML module mutually harmonizes the classification and localization branches by channel shuffling and convolution, integrating teacher supervision across different tasks during back-propagation, thus facilitating training the student model. The CID strategy extracts valuable regions surrounding instances through the centerness of proposals, enhancing distillation efficacy. Experiments on the VisDrone, UAVDT, and COCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach promotes the accuracies of existing state-of-the-art KD methods with comparable computational requirements. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

Adaptive Learning of Consistency and Inconsistency Information for Fake News Detection

The rapid advancement of social media platforms has significantly reduced the cost of information dissemination, yet it has also led to a proliferation of fake news, posing a threat to societal trust and credibility. Most of fake news detection research focused on integrating text and image information to represent the consistency of multiple modes in news content, while paying less attention to inconsistent information. Besides, existing methods that leveraged inconsistent information often caused one mode overshadowing another, leading to ineffective use of inconsistent clue. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive multi-modal feature fusion network (MFF-Net). Inspired by human judgment processes for determining truth and falsity in news, MFF-Net focuses on inconsistent parts when news content is generally consistent and consistent parts when it is generally inconsistent. Specifically, MFF-Net extracts semantic and global features from images and texts respectively, and learns consistency information between modes through a multiple feature fusion module. To deal with the problem of modal information being easily masked, we design a single modal feature filtering strategy to capture inconsistent information from corresponding modes separately. Finally, similarity scores are calculated based on global features with adaptive adjustments made to achieve weighted fusion of consistent and inconsistent features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MFF-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three public news datasets derived from real social medias.

AdaLog: Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers with Adaptive Logarithm Quantizer

Vision Transformer (ViT) has become one of the most prevailing fundamental backbone networks in the computer vision community. Despite the high accuracy, deploying it in real applications raises critical challenges including the high computational cost and inference latency. Recently, the post-training quantization (PTQ) technique has emerged as a promising way to enhance ViT's efficiency. Nevertheless, existing PTQ approaches for ViT suffer from the inflexible quantization on the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations that obey the power-law-like distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel non-uniform quantizer, dubbed the Adaptive Logarithm AdaLog (AdaLog) quantizer. It optimizes the logarithmic base to accommodate the power-law-like distribution of activations, while simultaneously allowing for hardware-friendly quantization and de-quantization. By employing the bias reparameterization, the AdaLog quantizer is applicable to both the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations. Moreover, we develop an efficient Fast Progressive Combining Search (FPCS) strategy to determine the optimal logarithm base for AdaLog, as well as the scaling factors and zero points for the uniform quantizers. Extensive experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for various ViT-based architectures and vision tasks including classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/GoatWu/AdaLog.

iVPT: Improving Task-relevant Information Sharing in Visual Prompt Tuning by Cross-layer Dynamic Connection

Recent progress has shown great potential of visual prompt tuning (VPT) when adapting pre-trained vision transformers to various downstream tasks. However, most existing solutions independently optimize prompts at each layer, thereby neglecting the usage of task-relevant information encoded in prompt tokens across layers. Additionally, existing prompt structures are prone to interference from task-irrelevant noise in input images, which can do harm to the sharing of task-relevant information. In this paper, we propose a novel VPT approach, \textbf{iVPT}. It innovatively incorporates a cross-layer dynamic connection (CDC) for input prompt tokens from adjacent layers, enabling effective sharing of task-relevant information. Furthermore, we design a dynamic aggregation (DA) module that facilitates selective sharing of information between layers. The combination of CDC and DA enhances the flexibility of the attention process within the VPT framework. Building upon these foundations, iVPT introduces an attentive reinforcement (AR) mechanism, by automatically identifying salient image tokens, which are further enhanced by prompt tokens in an additive manner. Extensive experiments on 24 image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks clearly demonstrate the advantage of the proposed iVPT, compared to the state-of-the-art counterparts.

Using Human Feedback to Fine-tune Diffusion Models without Any Reward Model

Using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has shown significant promise in fine-tuning diffusion models. Previous methods start by training a reward model that aligns with human preferences, then leverage RL techniques to fine-tune the underlying models. However, crafting an efficient reward model demands extensive datasets, optimal architecture, and manual hyperparameter tuning, making the process both time and cost-intensive. The direct preference optimization (DPO) method, effective in fine-tuning large language models, eliminates the necessity for a reward model. However, the extensive GPU memory requirement of the diffusion model's denoising process hinders the direct application of the DPO method. To address this issue, we introduce the Direct Preference for Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (D3PO) method to directly fine-tune diffusion models. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that although D3PO omits training a reward model, it effectively functions as the optimal reward model trained using human feedback data to guide the learning process. This approach requires no training of a reward model, proving to be more direct, cost-effective, and minimizing computational overhead. In experiments, our method uses the relative scale of objectives as a proxy for human preference, delivering comparable results to methods using ground-truth rewards. Moreover, D3PO demonstrates the ability to reduce image distortion rates and generate safer images, overcoming challenges lacking robust reward models. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/yk7333/D3PO/tree/main.

The NeurIPS 2022 Neural MMO Challenge: A Massively Multiagent Competition with Specialization and Trade

In this paper, we present the results of the NeurIPS-2022 Neural MMO Challenge, which attracted 500 participants and received over 1,600 submissions. Like the previous IJCAI-2022 Neural MMO Challenge, it involved agents from 16 populations surviving in procedurally generated worlds by collecting resources and defeating opponents. This year's competition runs on the latest v1.6 Neural MMO, which introduces new equipment, combat, trading, and a better scoring system. These elements combine to pose additional robustness and generalization challenges not present in previous competitions. This paper summarizes the design and results of the challenge, explores the potential of this environment as a benchmark for learning methods, and presents some practical reinforcement learning training approaches for complex tasks with sparse rewards. Additionally, we have open-sourced our baselines, including environment wrappers, benchmarks, and visualization tools for future research.

Neural MMO 2.0: A Massively Multi-task Addition to Massively Multi-agent Learning

Neural MMO 2.0 is a massively multi-agent environment for reinforcement learning research. The key feature of this new version is a flexible task system that allows users to define a broad range of objectives and reward signals. We challenge researchers to train agents capable of generalizing to tasks, maps, and opponents never seen during training. Neural MMO features procedurally generated maps with 128 agents in the standard setting and support for up to. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of its predecessor with three-fold improved performance and compatibility with CleanRL. We release the platform as free and open-source software with comprehensive documentation available at neuralmmo.github.io and an active community Discord. To spark initial research on this new platform, we are concurrently running a competition at NeurIPS 2023.

Benchmarking Robustness and Generalization in Multi-Agent Systems: A Case Study on Neural MMO

We present the results of the second Neural MMO challenge, hosted at IJCAI 2022, which received 1600+ submissions. This competition targets robustness and generalization in multi-agent systems: participants train teams of agents to complete a multi-task objective against opponents not seen during training. The competition combines relatively complex environment design with large numbers of agents in the environment. The top submissions demonstrate strong success on this task using mostly standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods combined with domain-specific engineering. We summarize the competition design and results and suggest that, as an academic community, competitions may be a powerful approach to solving hard problems and establishing a solid benchmark for algorithms. We will open-source our benchmark including the environment wrapper, baselines, a visualization tool, and selected policies for further research.

DR-Tune: Improving Fine-tuning of Pretrained Visual Models by Distribution Regularization with Semantic Calibration

The visual models pretrained on large-scale benchmarks encode general knowledge and prove effective in building more powerful representations for downstream tasks. Most existing approaches follow the fine-tuning paradigm, either by initializing or regularizing the downstream model based on the pretrained one. The former fails to retain the knowledge in the successive fine-tuning phase, thereby prone to be over-fitting, and the latter imposes strong constraints to the weights or feature maps of the downstream model without considering semantic drift, often incurring insufficient optimization. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, namely distribution regularization with semantic calibration (DR-Tune). It employs distribution regularization by enforcing the downstream task head to decrease its classification error on the pretrained feature distribution, which prevents it from over-fitting while enabling sufficient training of downstream encoders. Furthermore, to alleviate the interference by semantic drift, we develop the semantic calibration (SC) module to align the global shape and class centers of the pretrained and downstream feature distributions. Extensive experiments on widely used image classification datasets show that DR-Tune consistently improves the performance when combing with various backbones under different pretraining strategies. Code is available at: https://github.com/weeknan/DR-Tune.

CTP-Net: Character Texture Perception Network for Document Image Forgery Localization

Due to the progression of information technology in recent years, document images have been widely disseminated on social networks. With the help of powerful image editing tools, document images are easily forged without leaving visible manipulation traces, which leads to severe issues if significant information is falsified for malicious use. Therefore, the research of document image forensics is worth further exploring. In this paper, we propose a Character Texture Perception Network (CTP-Net) to localize the forged regions in document images. Specifically, considering the characters with semantics in a document image are highly vulnerable, capturing the forgery traces is the key to localize the forged regions. We design a Character Texture Stream (CTS) based on optical character recognition to capture features of text areas that are essential components of a document image. Meanwhile, texture features of the whole document image are exploited by an Image Texture Stream (ITS). Combining the features extracted from the CTS and the ITS, the CTP-Net can reveal more subtle forgery traces from document images. Moreover, to overcome the challenge caused by the lack of fake document images, we design a data generation strategy that is utilized to construct a Fake Chinese Trademark dataset (FCTM). Experimental results on different datasets demonstrate that the proposed CTP-Net is able to localize multi-scale forged areas in document images, and outperform the state-of-the-art forgery localization methods, even though post-processing operations are applied.