Class Balance Matters to Active Class-Incremental Learning

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning has shown remarkable efficacy in efficient learning new concepts with limited annotations. Nevertheless, the heuristic few-shot annotations may not always cover the most informative samples, which largely restricts the capability of incremental learner. We aim to start from a pool of large-scale unlabeled data and then annotate the most informative samples for incremental learning. Based on this premise, this paper introduces the Active Class-Incremental Learning (ACIL). The objective of ACIL is to select the most informative samples from the unlabeled pool to effectively train an incremental learner, aiming to maximize the performance of the resulting model. Note that vanilla active learning algorithms suffer from class-imbalanced distribution among annotated samples, which restricts the ability of incremental learning. To achieve both class balance and informativeness in chosen samples, we propose Class-Balanced Selection (CBS) strategy. Specifically, we first cluster the features of all unlabeled images into multiple groups. Then for each cluster, we employ greedy selection strategy to ensure that the Gaussian distribution of the sampled features closely matches the Gaussian distribution of all unlabeled features within the cluster. Our CBS can be plugged and played into those CIL methods which are based on pretrained models with prompts tunning technique. Extensive experiments under ACIL protocol across five diverse datasets demonstrate that CBS outperforms both random selection and other SOTA active learning approaches. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/1170300714/CBS.

Myriad: Large Multimodal Model by Applying Vision Experts for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Existing industrial anomaly detection (IAD) methods predict anomaly scores for both anomaly detection and localization. However, they struggle to perform a multi-turn dialog and detailed descriptions for anomaly regions, e.g., color, shape, and categories of industrial anomalies. Recently, large multimodal (i.e., vision and language) models (LMMs) have shown eminent perception abilities on multiple vision tasks such as image captioning, visual understanding, visual reasoning, etc., making it a competitive potential choice for more comprehensible anomaly detection. However, the knowledge about anomaly detection is absent in existing general LMMs, while training a specific LMM for anomaly detection requires a tremendous amount of annotated data and massive computation resources. In this paper, we propose a novel large multi-modal model by applying vision experts for industrial anomaly detection (dubbed Myriad), which leads to definite anomaly detection and high-quality anomaly description. Specifically, we adopt MiniGPT-4 as the base LMM and design an Expert Perception module to embed the prior knowledge from vision experts as tokens which are intelligible to Large Language Models (LLMs). To compensate for the errors and confusions of vision experts, we introduce a domain adapter to bridge the visual representation gaps between generic and industrial images. Furthermore, we propose a Vision Expert Instructor, which enables the Q-Former to generate IAD domain vision-language tokens according to vision expert prior. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method not only performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods under the 1-class and few-shot settings, but also provide definite anomaly prediction along with detailed descriptions in IAD domain.

On Steering Multi-Annotations per Sample for Multi-Task Learning

The study of multi-task learning has drawn great attention from the community. Despite the remarkable progress, the challenge of optimally learning different tasks simultaneously remains to be explored. Previous works attempt to modify the gradients from different tasks. Yet these methods give a subjective assumption of the relationship between tasks, and the modified gradient may be less accurate. In this paper, we introduce Stochastic Task Allocation~(STA), a mechanism that addresses this issue by a task allocation approach, in which each sample is randomly allocated a subset of tasks. For further progress, we propose Interleaved Stochastic Task Allocation~(ISTA) to iteratively allocate all tasks to each example during several consecutive iterations. We evaluate STA and ISTA on various datasets and applications: NYUv2, Cityscapes, and COCO for scene understanding and instance segmentation. Our experiments show both STA and ISTA outperform current state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available.