Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on creating new samples by linear interpolation between two given data samples, to improve both the generalization and robustness of the trained model. Knowledge distillation (KD), on the other hand, is widely used for model compression and transfer learning, which involves using a larger network's implicit knowledge to guide the learning of a smaller network. At first glance, these two techniques seem very different, however, we found that ``smoothness" is the connecting link between the two and is also a crucial attribute in understanding KD's interplay with mixup. Although many mixup variants and distillation methods have been proposed, much remains to be understood regarding the role of a mixup in knowledge distillation. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study on various important dimensions of compatibility between mixup and knowledge distillation. We also scrutinize the behavior of the networks trained with a mixup in the light of knowledge distillation through extensive analysis, visualizations, and comprehensive experiments on image classification. Finally, based on our findings, we suggest improved strategies to guide the student network to enhance its effectiveness. Additionally, the findings of this study provide insightful suggestions to researchers and practitioners that commonly use techniques from KD. Our code is available at https://github.com/hchoi71/MIX-KD.

深度神经网络是参数化的数千或数百万个参数，并且在许多分类问题中表现出巨大的成功。然而，大量参数使得难以将这些模型集成到智能手机和可穿戴设备的边缘设备中。为了解决这个问题，知识蒸馏（KD）已被广泛采用，它使用预先训练的高容量网络来培训更小的网络，适用于边缘设备。本文首次研究了使用KD用于可穿戴设备的时间序列数据的适用性和挑战。 KD的成功应用需要在培训期间需要具体的数据增强方法。然而，如果在KD期间存在用于选择增强方法的相干策略，则尚不清楚。在本文中，我们报告了详细研究的结果，这些研究比较和对比基于KD的人类活动分析中的各种常见选择和一些混合数据增强策略。该领域的研究通常是有限的，因为公共领域没有可穿戴设备的全面数据库。我们的研究将数据库视为公共规模的数据库，以源于大规模介入研究的人类活动和久坐行为。我们发现，在KD期间的数据增强技术的选择具有对最终性能的可变影响程度，并发现最佳网络选择以及数据增强策略特定于手头的数据集。但是，我们还通过一系列关于数据库提供强大基线表现的一般建议。

Understanding the informative structures of scenes is essential for low-level vision tasks. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain a concrete visual definition of the informative structures because influences of visual features are task-specific. In this paper, we propose a single general neural network architecture for extracting task-specific structure guidance for scenes. To do this, we first analyze traditional spectral clustering methods, which computes a set of eigenvectors to model a segmented graph forming small compact structures on image domains. We then unfold the traditional graph-partitioning problem into a learnable network, named \textit{Scene Structure Guidance Network (SSGNet)}, to represent the task-specific informative structures. The SSGNet yields a set of coefficients of eigenvectors that produces explicit feature representations of image structures. In addition, our SSGNet is light-weight ($\sim$ 55K parameters), and can be used as a plug-and-play module for off-the-shelf architectures. We optimize the SSGNet without any supervision by proposing two novel training losses that enforce task-specific scene structure generation during training. Our main contribution is to show that such a simple network can achieve state-of-the-art results for several low-level vision applications including joint upsampling and image denoising. We also demonstrate that our SSGNet generalizes well on unseen datasets, compared to existing methods which use structural embedding frameworks. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/jsshin98/SSGNet.

For change detection in remote sensing, constructing a training dataset for deep learning models is difficult due to the requirements of bi-temporal supervision. To overcome this issue, single-temporal supervision which treats change labels as the difference of two semantic masks has been proposed. This novel method trains a change detector using two spatially unrelated images with corresponding semantic labels such as building. However, training on unpaired datasets could confuse the change detector in the case of pixels that are labeled unchanged but are visually significantly different. In order to maintain the visual similarity in unchanged area, in this paper, we emphasize that the change originates from the source image and show that manipulating the source image as an after-image is crucial to the performance of change detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the importance of maintaining visual information between pre- and post-event images, and our method outperforms existing methods based on single-temporal supervision. code is available at https://github.com/seominseok0429/Self-Pair-for-Change-Detection.

Zero-shot quantization is a promising approach for developing lightweight deep neural networks when data is inaccessible owing to various reasons, including cost and issues related to privacy. By utilizing the learned parameters (statistics) of FP32-pre-trained models, zero-shot quantization schemes focus on generating synthetic data by minimizing the distance between the learned parameters ($\mu$ and $\sigma$) and distributions of intermediate activations. Subsequently, they distill knowledge from the pre-trained model (\textit{teacher}) to the quantized model (\textit{student}) such that the quantized model can be optimized with the synthetic dataset. In general, zero-shot quantization comprises two major elements: synthesizing datasets and quantizing models. However, thus far, zero-shot quantization has primarily been discussed in the context of quantization-aware training methods, which require task-specific losses and long-term optimization as much as retraining. We thus introduce a post-training quantization scheme for zero-shot quantization that produces high-quality quantized networks within a few hours on even half an hour. Furthermore, we propose a framework called \genie~that generates data suited for post-training quantization. With the data synthesized by \genie, we can produce high-quality quantized models without real datasets, which is comparable to few-shot quantization. We also propose a post-training quantization algorithm to enhance the performance of quantized models. By combining them, we can bridge the gap between zero-shot and few-shot quantization while significantly improving the quantization performance compared to that of existing approaches. In other words, we can obtain a unique state-of-the-art zero-shot quantization approach.

We study the compute-optimal trade-off between model and training data set sizes for large neural networks. Our result suggests a linear relation similar to that supported by the empirical analysis of Chinchilla. While that work studies transformer-based large language models trained on the MassiveText corpus (gopher), as a starting point for development of a mathematical theory, we focus on a simpler learning model and data generating process, each based on a neural network with a sigmoidal output unit and single hidden layer of ReLU activation units. We establish an upper bound on the minimal information-theoretically achievable expected error as a function of model and data set sizes. We then derive allocations of computation that minimize this bound. We present empirical results which suggest that this approximation correctly identifies an asymptotic linear compute-optimal scaling. This approximation can also generate new insights. Among other things, it suggests that, as the input space dimension or latent space complexity grows, as might be the case for example if a longer history of tokens is taken as input to a language model, a larger fraction of the compute budget should be allocated to growing the learning model rather than training data set.

We propose a domain adaptation method, MoDA, which adapts a pretrained embodied agent to a new, noisy environment without ground-truth supervision. Map-based memory provides important contextual information for visual navigation, and exhibits unique spatial structure mainly composed of flat walls and rectangular obstacles. Our adaptation approach encourages the inherent regularities on the estimated maps to guide the agent to overcome the prevalent domain discrepancy in a novel environment. Specifically, we propose an efficient learning curriculum to handle the visual and dynamics corruptions in an online manner, self-supervised with pseudo clean maps generated by style transfer networks. Because the map-based representation provides spatial knowledge for the agent's policy, our formulation can deploy the pretrained policy networks from simulators in a new setting. We evaluate MoDA in various practical scenarios and show that our proposed method quickly enhances the agent's performance in downstream tasks including localization, mapping, exploration, and point-goal navigation.

The 1$^{\text{st}}$ Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

Traversability estimation for mobile robots in off-road environments requires more than conventional semantic segmentation used in constrained environments like on-road conditions. Recently, approaches to learning a traversability estimation from past driving experiences in a self-supervised manner are arising as they can significantly reduce human labeling costs and labeling errors. However, the self-supervised data only provide supervision for the actually traversed regions, inducing epistemic uncertainty according to the scarcity of negative information. Negative data are rarely harvested as the system can be severely damaged while logging the data. To mitigate the uncertainty, we introduce a deep metric learning-based method to incorporate unlabeled data with a few positive and negative prototypes in order to leverage the uncertainty, which jointly learns using semantic segmentation and traversability regression. To firmly evaluate the proposed framework, we introduce a new evaluation metric that comprehensively evaluates the segmentation and regression. Additionally, we construct a driving dataset `Dtrail' in off-road environments with a mobile robot platform, which is composed of a wide variety of negative data. We examine our method on Dtrail as well as the publicly available SemanticKITTI dataset.

We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be deterministic due to domain requirements, such as prescription of treatment dosage and duration in medicine. Although importance sampling (IS) provides a basic principle for OPE, it is ill-posed for the deterministic target policy with continuous actions. Our main idea is to relax the target policy and pose the problem as kernel-based estimation, where we learn the kernel metric in order to minimize the overall mean squared error (MSE). We present an analytic solution for the optimal metric, based on the analysis of bias and variance. Whereas prior work has been limited to scalar action spaces or kernel bandwidth selection, our work takes a step further being capable of vector action spaces and metric optimization. We show that our estimator is consistent, and significantly reduces the MSE compared to baseline OPE methods through experiments on various domains.