MonoWAD: Weather-Adaptive Diffusion Model for Robust Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is an important challenging task in autonomous driving. Existing methods mainly focus on performing 3D detection in ideal weather conditions, characterized by scenarios with clear and optimal visibility. However, the challenge of autonomous driving requires the ability to handle changes in weather conditions, such as foggy weather, not just clear weather. We introduce MonoWAD, a novel weather-robust monocular 3D object detector with a weather-adaptive diffusion model. It contains two components: (1) the weather codebook to memorize the knowledge of the clear weather and generate a weather-reference feature for any input, and (2) the weather-adaptive diffusion model to enhance the feature representation of the input feature by incorporating a weather-reference feature. This serves an attention role in indicating how much improvement is needed for the input feature according to the weather conditions. To achieve this goal, we introduce a weather-adaptive enhancement loss to enhance the feature representation under both clear and foggy weather conditions. Extensive experiments under various weather conditions demonstrate that MonoWAD achieves weather-robust monocular 3D object detection. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/MonoWAD.

FYI: Flip Your Images for Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation synthesizes a small set of images from a large-scale real dataset such that synthetic and real images share similar behavioral properties (e.g, distributions of gradients or features) during a training process. Through extensive analyses on current methods and real datasets, together with empirical observations, we provide in this paper two important things to share for dataset distillation. First, object parts that appear on one side of a real image are highly likely to appear on the opposite side of another image within a dataset, which we call the bilateral equivalence. Second, the bilateral equivalence enforces synthetic images to duplicate discriminative parts of objects on both the left and right sides of the images, limiting the recognition of subtle differences between objects. To address this problem, we introduce a surprisingly simple yet effective technique for dataset distillation, dubbed FYI, that enables distilling rich semantics of real images into synthetic ones. To this end, FYI embeds a horizontal flipping technique into distillation processes, mitigating the influence of the bilateral equivalence, while capturing more details of objects. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet demonstrate that FYI can be seamlessly integrated into several state-of-the-art methods, without modifying training objectives and network architectures, and it improves the performance remarkably.

INSIGHT: Universal Neural Simulator for Analog Circuits Harnessing Autoregressive Transformers

Analog front-end design heavily relies on specialized human expertise and costly trial-and-error simulations, which motivated many prior works on analog design automation. However, efficient and effective exploration of the vast and complex design space remains constrained by the time-consuming nature of CPU-based SPICE simulations, making effective design automation a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we introduce INSIGHT, a GPU-powered, technology-independent, effective universal neural simulator in the analog front-end design automation loop. INSIGHT accurately predicts the performance metrics of analog circuits across various technology nodes, significantly reducing inference time. Notably, its autoregressive capabilities enable INSIGHT to accurately predict simulation-costly critical transient specifications leveraging less expensive performance metric information. The low cost and high fidelity feature make INSIGHT a good substitute for standard simulators in analog front-end optimization frameworks. INSIGHT is compatible with any optimization framework, facilitating enhanced design space exploration for sample efficiency through sophisticated offline learning and adaptation techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that INSIGHT-M, a model-based batch reinforcement learning framework that leverages INSIGHT for analog sizing, achieves at least 50X improvement in sample efficiency across circuits. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first use of autoregressive transformers in analog front-end design.

Reset & Distill: A Recipe for Overcoming Negative Transfer in Continual Reinforcement Learning

We argue that one of the main obstacles for developing effective Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) algorithms is the negative transfer issue occurring when the new task to learn arrives. Through comprehensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that such issue frequently exists in CRL and cannot be effectively addressed by several recent work on mitigating plasticity loss of RL agents. To that end, we develop Reset & Distill (R&D), a simple yet highly effective method, to overcome the negative transfer problem in CRL. R&D combines a strategy of resetting the agent's online actor and critic networks to learn a new task and an offline learning step for distilling the knowledge from the online actor and previous expert's action probabilities. We carried out extensive experiments on long sequence of Meta-World tasks and show that our method consistently outperforms recent baselines, achieving significantly higher success rates across a range of tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of considering negative transfer in CRL and emphasize the need for robust strategies like R&D to mitigate its detrimental effects.

ACLS: Adaptive and Conditional Label Smoothing for Network Calibration

We address the problem of network calibration adjusting miscalibrated confidences of deep neural networks. Many approaches to network calibration adopt a regularization-based method that exploits a regularization term to smooth the miscalibrated confidences. Although these approaches have shown the effectiveness on calibrating the networks, there is still a lack of understanding on the underlying principles of regularization in terms of network calibration. We present in this paper an in-depth analysis of existing regularization-based methods, providing a better understanding on how they affect to network calibration. Specifically, we have observed that 1) the regularization-based methods can be interpreted as variants of label smoothing, and 2) they do not always behave desirably. Based on the analysis, we introduce a novel loss function, dubbed ACLS, that unifies the merits of existing regularization methods, while avoiding the limitations. We show extensive experimental results for image classification and semantic segmentation on standard benchmarks, including CIFAR10, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet, and PASCAL VOC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our loss function.

ALIFE: Adaptive Logit Regularizer and Feature Replay for Incremental Semantic Segmentation

We address the problem of incremental semantic segmentation (ISS) recognizing novel object/stuff categories continually without forgetting previous ones that have been learned. The catastrophic forgetting problem is particularly severe in ISS, since pixel-level ground-truth labels are available only for the novel categories at training time. To address the problem, regularization-based methods exploit probability calibration techniques to learn semantic information from unlabeled pixels. While such techniques are effective, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of them. Replay-based methods propose to memorize a small set of images for previous categories. They achieve state-of-the-art performance at the cost of large memory footprint. We propose in this paper a novel ISS method, dubbed ALIFE, that provides a better compromise between accuracy and efficiency. To this end, we first show an in-depth analysis on the calibration techniques to better understand the effects on ISS. Based on this, we then introduce an adaptive logit regularizer (ALI) that enables our model to better learn new categories, while retaining knowledge for previous ones. We also present a feature replay scheme that memorizes features, instead of images directly, in order to reduce memory requirements significantly. Since a feature extractor is changed continually, memorized features should also be updated at every incremental stage. To handle this, we introduce category-specific rotation matrices updating the features for each category separately. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with extensive experiments on standard ISS benchmarks, and show that our method achieves a better trade-off in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Decomposed Knowledge Distillation for Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) labels each pixel of an image with a corresponding object/stuff class continually. To this end, it is crucial to learn novel classes incrementally without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Current CISS methods typically use a knowledge distillation (KD) technique for preserving classifier logits, or freeze a feature extractor, to avoid the forgetting problem. The strong constraints, however, prevent learning discriminative features for novel classes. We introduce a CISS framework that alleviates the forgetting problem and facilitates learning novel classes effectively. We have found that a logit can be decomposed into two terms. They quantify how likely an input belongs to a particular class or not, providing a clue for a reasoning process of a model. The KD technique, in this context, preserves the sum of two terms (i.e., a class logit), suggesting that each could be changed and thus the KD does not imitate the reasoning process. To impose constraints on each term explicitly, we propose a new decomposed knowledge distillation (DKD) technique, improving the rigidity of a model and addressing the forgetting problem more effectively. We also introduce a novel initialization method to train new classifiers for novel classes. In CISS, the number of negative training samples for novel classes is not sufficient to discriminate old classes. To mitigate this, we propose to transfer knowledge of negatives to the classifiers successively using an auxiliary classifier, boosting the performance significantly. Experimental results on standard CISS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

OIMNet++: Prototypical Normalization and Localization-aware Learning for Person Search

We address the task of person search, that is, localizing and re-identifying query persons from a set of raw scene images. Recent approaches are typically built upon OIMNet, a pioneer work on person search, that learns joint person representations for performing both detection and person re-identification (reID) tasks. To obtain the representations, they extract features from pedestrian proposals, and then project them on a unit hypersphere with L2 normalization. These methods also incorporate all positive proposals, that sufficiently overlap with the ground truth, equally to learn person representations for reID. We have found that 1) the L2 normalization without considering feature distributions degenerates the discriminative power of person representations, and 2) positive proposals often also depict background clutter and person overlaps, which could encode noisy features to person representations. In this paper, we introduce OIMNet++ that addresses the aforementioned limitations. To this end, we introduce a novel normalization layer, dubbed ProtoNorm, that calibrates features from pedestrian proposals, while considering a long-tail distribution of person IDs, enabling L2 normalized person representations to be discriminative. We also propose a localization-aware feature learning scheme that encourages better-aligned proposals to contribute more in learning discriminative representations. Experimental results and analysis on standard person search benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of OIMNet++.

Exploiting a Joint Embedding Space for Generalized Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

We address the problem of generalized zero-shot semantic segmentation (GZS3) predicting pixel-wise semantic labels for seen and unseen classes. Most GZS3 methods adopt a generative approach that synthesizes visual features of unseen classes from corresponding semantic ones (e.g., word2vec) to train novel classifiers for both seen and unseen classes. Although generative methods show decent performance, they have two limitations: (1) the visual features are biased towards seen classes; (2) the classifier should be retrained whenever novel unseen classes appear. We propose a discriminative approach to address these limitations in a unified framework. To this end, we leverage visual and semantic encoders to learn a joint embedding space, where the semantic encoder transforms semantic features to semantic prototypes that act as centers for visual features of corresponding classes. Specifically, we introduce boundary-aware regression (BAR) and semantic consistency (SC) losses to learn discriminative features. Our approach to exploiting the joint embedding space, together with BAR and SC terms, alleviates the seen bias problem. At test time, we avoid the retraining process by exploiting semantic prototypes as a nearest-neighbor (NN) classifier. To further alleviate the bias problem, we also propose an inference technique, dubbed Apollonius calibration (AC), that modulates the decision boundary of the NN classifier to the Apollonius circle adaptively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving a new state of the art on standard benchmarks.

Background-Aware Pooling and Noise-Aware Loss for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

We address the problem of weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using bounding box annotations. Although object bounding boxes are good indicators to segment corresponding objects, they do not specify object boundaries, making it hard to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation. We find that background regions are perceptually consistent in part within an image, and this can be leveraged to discriminate foreground and background regions inside object bounding boxes. To implement this idea, we propose a novel pooling method, dubbed background-aware pooling (BAP), that focuses more on aggregating foreground features inside the bounding boxes using attention maps. This allows to extract high-quality pseudo segmentation labels to train CNNs for semantic segmentation, but the labels still contain noise especially at object boundaries. To address this problem, we also introduce a noise-aware loss (NAL) that makes the networks less susceptible to incorrect labels. Experimental results demonstrate that learning with our pseudo labels already outperforms state-of-the-art weakly- and semi-supervised methods on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and the NAL further boosts the performance.