Multi-modal Relation Distillation for Unified 3D Representation Learning

Recent advancements in multi-modal pre-training for 3D point clouds have demonstrated promising results by aligning heterogeneous features across 3D shapes and their corresponding 2D images and language descriptions. However, current straightforward solutions often overlook intricate structural relations among samples, potentially limiting the full capabilities of multi-modal learning. To address this issue, we introduce Multi-modal Relation Distillation (MRD), a tri-modal pre-training framework, which is designed to effectively distill reputable large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into 3D backbones. MRD aims to capture both intra-relations within each modality as well as cross-relations between different modalities and produce more discriminative 3D shape representations. Notably, MRD achieves significant improvements in downstream zero-shot classification tasks and cross-modality retrieval tasks, delivering new state-of-the-art performance.

EndoFinder: Online Image Retrieval for Explainable Colorectal Polyp Diagnosis

Determining the necessity of resecting malignant polyps during colonoscopy screen is crucial for patient outcomes, yet challenging due to the time-consuming and costly nature of histopathology examination. While deep learning-based classification models have shown promise in achieving optical biopsy with endoscopic images, they often suffer from a lack of explainability. To overcome this limitation, we introduce EndoFinder, a content-based image retrieval framework to find the 'digital twin' polyp in the reference database given a newly detected polyp. The clinical semantics of the new polyp can be inferred referring to the matched ones. EndoFinder pioneers a polyp-aware image encoder that is pre-trained on a large polyp dataset in a self-supervised way, merging masked image modeling with contrastive learning. This results in a generic embedding space ready for different downstream clinical tasks based on image retrieval. We validate the framework on polyp re-identification and optical biopsy tasks, with extensive experiments demonstrating that EndoFinder not only achieves explainable diagnostics but also matches the performance of supervised classification models. EndoFinder's reliance on image retrieval has the potential to support diverse downstream decision-making tasks during real-time colonoscopy procedures.

Leveraging Predicate and Triplet Learning for Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to identify entities and predict the relationship triplets \textit{\textless subject, predicate, object\textgreater } in visual scenes. Given the prevalence of large visual variations of subject-object pairs even in the same predicate, it can be quite challenging to model and refine predicate representations directly across such pairs, which is however a common strategy adopted by most existing SGG methods. We observe that visual variations within the identical triplet are relatively small and certain relation cues are shared in the same type of triplet, which can potentially facilitate the relation learning in SGG. Moreover, for the long-tail problem widely studied in SGG task, it is also crucial to deal with the limited types and quantity of triplets in tail predicates. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a Dual-granularity Relation Modeling (DRM) network to leverage fine-grained triplet cues besides the coarse-grained predicate ones. DRM utilizes contexts and semantics of predicate and triplet with Dual-granularity Constraints, generating compact and balanced representations from two perspectives to facilitate relation recognition. Furthermore, a Dual-granularity Knowledge Transfer (DKT) strategy is introduced to transfer variation from head predicates/triplets to tail ones, aiming to enrich the pattern diversity of tail classes to alleviate the long-tail problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which establishes new state-of-the-art performance on Visual Genome, Open Image, and GQA datasets. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/jkli1998/DRM}

AED-PADA:Improving Generalizability of Adversarial Example Detection via Principal Adversarial Domain Adaptation

Adversarial example detection, which can be conveniently applied in many scenarios, is important in the area of adversarial defense. Unfortunately, existing detection methods suffer from poor generalization performance, because their training process usually relies on the examples generated from a single known adversarial attack and there exists a large discrepancy between the training and unseen testing adversarial examples. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, named Adversarial Example Detection via Principal Adversarial Domain Adaptation (AED-PADA). Specifically, our approach identifies the Principal Adversarial Domains (PADs), i.e., a combination of features of the adversarial examples from different attacks, which possesses large coverage of the entire adversarial feature space. Then, we pioneer to exploit multi-source domain adaptation in adversarial example detection with PADs as source domains. Experiments demonstrate the superior generalization ability of our proposed AED-PADA. Note that this superiority is particularly achieved in challenging scenarios characterized by employing the minimal magnitude constraint for the perturbations.

Common Knowledge Learning for Generating Transferable Adversarial Examples

This paper focuses on an important type of black-box attacks, i.e., transfer-based adversarial attacks, where the adversary generates adversarial examples by a substitute (source) model and utilize them to attack an unseen target model, without knowing its information. Existing methods tend to give unsatisfactory adversarial transferability when the source and target models are from different types of DNN architectures (e.g. ResNet-18 and Swin Transformer). In this paper, we observe that the above phenomenon is induced by the output inconsistency problem. To alleviate this problem while effectively utilizing the existing DNN models, we propose a common knowledge learning (CKL) framework to learn better network weights to generate adversarial examples with better transferability, under fixed network architectures. Specifically, to reduce the model-specific features and obtain better output distributions, we construct a multi-teacher framework, where the knowledge is distilled from different teacher architectures into one student network. By considering that the gradient of input is usually utilized to generated adversarial examples, we impose constraints on the gradients between the student and teacher models, to further alleviate the output inconsistency problem and enhance the adversarial transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed work can significantly improve the adversarial transferability.

Global Contrast Masked Autoencoders Are Powerful Pathological Representation Learners

Based on digital whole slide scanning technique, artificial intelligence algorithms represented by deep learning have achieved remarkable results in the field of computational pathology. Compared with other medical images such as Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), pathological images are more difficult to annotate, thus there is an extreme lack of data sets that can be used for supervised learning. In this study, a self-supervised learning (SSL) model, Global Contrast Masked Autoencoders (GCMAE), is proposed, which has the ability to represent both global and local domain-specific features of whole slide image (WSI), as well as excellent cross-data transfer ability. The Camelyon16 and NCTCRC datasets are used to evaluate the performance of our model. When dealing with transfer learning tasks with different data sets, the experimental results show that GCMAE has better linear classification accuracy than MAE, which can reach 81.10% and 89.22% respectively. Our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art algorithm and even surpass supervised learning (improved by 3.86% on NCTCRC data sets). The source code of this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/StarUniversus/gcmae

iDARTS: Improving DARTS by Node Normalization and Decorrelation Discretization

Differentiable ARchiTecture Search (DARTS) uses a continuous relaxation of network representation and dramatically accelerates Neural Architecture Search (NAS) by almost thousands of times in GPU-day. However, the searching process of DARTS is unstable, which suffers severe degradation when training epochs become large, thus limiting its application. In this paper, we claim that this degradation issue is caused by the imbalanced norms between different nodes and the highly correlated outputs from various operations. We then propose an improved version of DARTS, namely iDARTS, to deal with the two problems. In the training phase, it introduces node normalization to maintain the norm balance. In the discretization phase, the continuous architecture is approximated based on the similarity between the outputs of the node and the decorrelated operations rather than the values of the architecture parameters. Extensive evaluation is conducted on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, and the error rates of 2.25\% and 24.7\% are reported within 0.2 and 1.9 GPU-day for architecture search respectively, which shows its effectiveness. Additional analysis also reveals that iDARTS has the advantage in robustness and generalization over other DARTS-based counterparts.

Exploring Transferable and Robust Adversarial Perturbation Generation from the Perspective of Network Hierarchy

The transferability and robustness of adversarial examples are two practical yet important properties for black-box adversarial attacks. In this paper, we explore effective mechanisms to boost both of them from the perspective of network hierarchy, where a typical network can be hierarchically divided into output stage, intermediate stage and input stage. Since over-specialization of source model, we can hardly improve the transferability and robustness of the adversarial perturbations in the output stage. Therefore, we focus on the intermediate and input stages in this paper and propose a transferable and robust adversarial perturbation generation (TRAP) method. Specifically, we propose the dynamically guided mechanism to continuously calculate accurate directional guidances for perturbation generation in the intermediate stage. In the input stage, instead of the single-form transformation augmentations adopted in the existing methods, we leverage multiform affine transformation augmentations to further enrich the input diversity and boost the robustness and transferability of the adversarial perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TRAP achieves impressive transferability and high robustness against certain interferences.

A Perceptual Distortion Reduction Framework for Adversarial Perturbation Generation

Most of the adversarial attack methods suffer from large perceptual distortions such as visible artifacts, when the attack strength is relatively high. These perceptual distortions contain a certain portion which contributes less to the attack success rate. This portion of distortions, which is induced by unnecessary modifications and lack of proper perceptual distortion constraint, is the target of the proposed framework. In this paper, we propose a perceptual distortion reduction framework to tackle this problem from two perspectives. We guide the perturbation addition process to reduce unnecessary modifications by proposing an activated region transfer attention mask, which intends to transfer the activated regions of the target model from the correct prediction to incorrect ones. Note that an ensemble model is adopted to predict the activated regions of the unseen models in the black-box setting of our framework. Besides, we propose a perceptual distortion constraint and add it into the objective function of adversarial attack to jointly optimize the perceptual distortions and attack success rate. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our framework on several baseline methods.