Superpixel Tokenization for Vision Transformers: Preserving Semantic Integrity in Visual Tokens

Transformers, a groundbreaking architecture proposed for Natural Language Processing (NLP), have also achieved remarkable success in Computer Vision. A cornerstone of their success lies in the attention mechanism, which models relationships among tokens. While the tokenization process in NLP inherently ensures that a single token does not contain multiple semantics, the tokenization of Vision Transformer (ViT) utilizes tokens from uniformly partitioned square image patches, which may result in an arbitrary mixing of visual concepts in a token. In this work, we propose to substitute the grid-based tokenization in ViT with superpixel tokenization, which employs superpixels to generate a token that encapsulates a sole visual concept. Unfortunately, the diverse shapes, sizes, and locations of superpixels make integrating superpixels into ViT tokenization rather challenging. Our tokenization pipeline, comprised of pre-aggregate extraction and superpixel-aware aggregation, overcomes the challenges that arise in superpixel tokenization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, which exhibits strong compatibility with existing frameworks, enhances the accuracy and robustness of ViT on various downstream tasks.

Improving Visual Prompt Tuning for Self-supervised Vision Transformers

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) is an effective tuning method for adapting pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) to downstream tasks. It leverages extra learnable tokens, known as prompts, which steer the frozen pretrained ViTs. Although VPT has demonstrated its applicability with supervised vision transformers, it often underperforms with self-supervised ones. Through empirical observations, we deduce that the effectiveness of VPT hinges largely on the ViT blocks with which the prompt tokens interact. Specifically, VPT shows improved performance on image classification tasks for MAE and MoCo v3 when the prompt tokens are inserted into later blocks rather than the first block. These observations suggest that there exists an optimal location of blocks for the insertion of prompt tokens. Unfortunately, identifying the optimal blocks for prompts within each self-supervised ViT for diverse future scenarios is a costly process. To mitigate this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method that learns a gate for each ViT block to adjust its intervention into the prompt tokens. With our method, prompt tokens are selectively influenced by blocks that require steering for task adaptation. Our method outperforms VPT variants in FGVC and VTAB image classification and ADE20K semantic segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/ryongithub/GatedPromptTuning.

A Robotic Dating Coaching System Leveraging Online Communities Posts

Can a robot be a personal dating coach? Even with the increasing amount of conversational data on the internet, the implementation of conversational robots remains a challenge. In particular, a detailed and professional counseling log is expensive and not publicly accessible. In this paper, we develop a robot dating coaching system leveraging corpus from online communities. We examine people's perceptions of the dating coaching robot with a dialogue module. 97 participants joined to have a conversation with the robot, and 30 of them evaluated the robot. The results indicate that participants thought the robot could become a dating coach while considering the robot is entertaining rather than helpful.