由于稀疏神经网络通常包含许多零权重，因此可以在不降低网络性能的情况下潜在地消除这些不必要的网络连接。因此，设计良好的稀疏神经网络具有显着降低拖鞋和计算资源的潜力。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的自动修剪方法 - 稀疏连接学习（SCL）。具体地，重量被重新参数化为可培训权重变量和二进制掩模的元素方向乘法。因此，由二进制掩模完全描述网络连接，其由单位步进函数调制。理论上，从理论上证明了使用直通估计器（STE）进行网络修剪的基本原理。这一原则是STE的代理梯度应该是积极的，确保掩模变量在其最小值处收敛。在找到泄漏的Relu后，SoftPlus和Identity Stes可以满足这个原理，我们建议采用SCL的身份STE以进行离散面膜松弛。我们发现不同特征的面具梯度非常不平衡，因此，我们建议将每个特征的掩模梯度标准化以优化掩码变量训练。为了自动训练稀疏掩码，我们将网络连接总数作为我们的客观函数中的正则化术语。由于SCL不需要由网络层设计人员定义的修剪标准或超级参数，因此在更大的假设空间中探讨了网络，以实现最佳性能的优化稀疏连接。 SCL克服了现有自动修剪方法的局限性。实验结果表明，SCL可以自动学习并选择各种基线网络结构的重要网络连接。 SCL培训的深度学习模型以稀疏性，精度和减少脚波特的SOTA人类设计和自动修剪方法训练。

Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional masked autoencoder framework and a new Global Response Normalization (GRN) layer that can be added to the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance inter-channel feature competition. This co-design of self-supervised learning techniques and architectural improvement results in a new model family called ConvNeXt V2, which significantly improves the performance of pure ConvNets on various recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20K segmentation. We also provide pre-trained ConvNeXt V2 models of various sizes, ranging from an efficient 3.7M-parameter Atto model with 76.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, to a 650M Huge model that achieves a state-of-the-art 88.9% accuracy using only public training data.

A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic approximations of the objective function and its associated derivatives can be computed via inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Under reasonable assumptions, a high-probability bound on the iteration complexity of the algorithm to approximate first-order stationarity is derived. Numerical results on standard nonlinear optimization test problems illustrate the advantages and limitations of our proposed method.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

Considering the computation complexity, we propose a Guided Hybrid Quantization with One-to-one Self-Teaching (GHOST}) framework. More concretely, we first design a structure called guided quantization self-distillation (GQSD), which is an innovative idea for realizing lightweight through the synergy of quantization and distillation. The training process of the quantization model is guided by its full-precision model, which is time-saving and cost-saving without preparing a huge pre-trained model in advance. Second, we put forward a hybrid quantization (HQ) module to obtain the optimal bit width automatically under a constrained condition where a threshold for distribution distance between the center and samples is applied in the weight value search space. Third, in order to improve information transformation, we propose a one-to-one self-teaching (OST) module to give the student network a ability of self-judgment. A switch control machine (SCM) builds a bridge between the student network and teacher network in the same location to help the teacher to reduce wrong guidance and impart vital knowledge to the student. This distillation method allows a model to learn from itself and gain substantial improvement without any additional supervision. Extensive experiments on a multimodal dataset (VEDAI) and single-modality datasets (DOTA, NWPU, and DIOR) show that object detection based on GHOST outperforms the existing detectors. The tiny parameters (<9.7 MB) and Bit-Operations (BOPs) (<2158 G) compared with any remote sensing-based, lightweight or distillation-based algorithms demonstrate the superiority in the lightweight design domain. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/GHOST.

Automatic font generation without human experts is a practical and significant problem, especially for some languages that consist of a large number of characters. Existing methods for font generation are often in supervised learning. They require a large number of paired data, which are labor-intensive and expensive to collect. In contrast, common unsupervised image-to-image translation methods are not applicable to font generation, as they often define style as the set of textures and colors. In this work, we propose a robust deformable generative network for unsupervised font generation (abbreviated as DGFont++). We introduce a feature deformation skip connection (FDSC) to learn local patterns and geometric transformations between fonts. The FDSC predicts pairs of displacement maps and employs the predicted maps to apply deformable convolution to the low-level content feature maps. The outputs of FDSC are fed into a mixer to generate final results. Moreover, we introduce contrastive self-supervised learning to learn a robust style representation for fonts by understanding the similarity and dissimilarities of fonts. To distinguish different styles, we train our model with a multi-task discriminator, which ensures that each style can be discriminated independently. In addition to adversarial loss, another two reconstruction losses are adopted to constrain the domain-invariant characteristics between generated images and content images. Taking advantage of FDSC and the adopted loss functions, our model is able to maintain spatial information and generates high-quality character images in an unsupervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to generate character images of higher quality than state-of-the-art methods.

Gaze estimation is the fundamental basis for many visual tasks. Yet, the high cost of acquiring gaze datasets with 3D annotations hinders the optimization and application of gaze estimation models. In this work, we propose a novel Head-Eye redirection parametric model based on Neural Radiance Field, which allows dense gaze data generation with view consistency and accurate gaze direction. Moreover, our head-eye redirection parametric model can decouple the face and eyes for separate neural rendering, so it can achieve the purpose of separately controlling the attributes of the face, identity, illumination, and eye gaze direction. Thus diverse 3D-aware gaze datasets could be obtained by manipulating the latent code belonging to different face attributions in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in domain generalization and domain adaptation for gaze estimation tasks.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in the world, and early DR detection is necessary to prevent vision loss and support an appropriate treatment. In this work, we leverage interactive machine learning and introduce a joint learning framework, termed DRG-Net, to effectively learn both disease grading and multi-lesion segmentation. Our DRG-Net consists of two modules: (i) DRG-AI-System to classify DR Grading, localize lesion areas, and provide visual explanations; (ii) DRG-Expert-Interaction to receive feedback from user-expert and improve the DRG-AI-System. To deal with sparse data, we utilize transfer learning mechanisms to extract invariant feature representations by using Wasserstein distance and adversarial learning-based entropy minimization. Besides, we propose a novel attention strategy at both low- and high-level features to automatically select the most significant lesion information and provide explainable properties. In terms of human interaction, we further develop DRG-Net as a tool that enables expert users to correct the system's predictions, which may then be used to update the system as a whole. Moreover, thanks to the attention mechanism and loss functions constraint between lesion features and classification features, our approach can be robust given a certain level of noise in the feedback of users. We have benchmarked DRG-Net on the two largest DR datasets, i.e., IDRID and FGADR, and compared it to various state-of-the-art deep learning networks. In addition to outperforming other SOTA approaches, DRG-Net is effectively updated using user feedback, even in a weakly-supervised manner.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Normalizing flow is a class of deep generative models for efficient sampling and density estimation. In practice, the flow often appears as a chain of invertible neural network blocks; to facilitate training, existing works have regularized flow trajectories and designed special network architectures. The current paper develops a neural ODE flow network inspired by the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme, which allows efficient block-wise training of the residual blocks and avoids inner loops of score matching or variational learning. As the JKO scheme unfolds the dynamic of gradient flow, the proposed model naturally stacks residual network blocks one-by-one, reducing the memory load and difficulty of performing end-to-end training of deep flow networks. We also develop adaptive time reparameterization of the flow network with a progressive refinement of the trajectory in probability space, which improves the model training efficiency and accuracy in practice. Using numerical experiments with synthetic and real data, we show that the proposed JKO-iFlow model achieves similar or better performance in generating new samples compared with existing flow and diffusion models at a significantly reduced computational and memory cost.