Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) suffers from the non-stationarity problem, which is the ever-changing targets at every iteration when multiple agents update their policies at the same time. Starting from first principle, in this paper, we manage to solve the non-stationarity problem by proposing bidirectional action-dependent Q-learning (ACE). Central to the development of ACE is the sequential decision-making process wherein only one agent is allowed to take action at one time. Within this process, each agent maximizes its value function given the actions taken by the preceding agents at the inference stage. In the learning phase, each agent minimizes the TD error that is dependent on how the subsequent agents have reacted to their chosen action. Given the design of bidirectional dependency, ACE effectively turns a multiagent MDP into a single-agent MDP. We implement the ACE framework by identifying the proper network representation to formulate the action dependency, so that the sequential decision process is computed implicitly in one forward pass. To validate ACE, we compare it with strong baselines on two MARL benchmarks. Empirical experiments demonstrate that ACE outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on Google Research Football and StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge by a large margin. In particular, on SMAC tasks, ACE achieves 100% success rate on almost all the hard and super-hard maps. We further study extensive research problems regarding ACE, including extension, generalization, and practicability. Code is made available to facilitate further research.

基于图像的3D检测是自主驾驶感知系统的必不可少的组成部分。但是，它仍然受到不满意的表现，这是有限的培训数据的主要原因之一。不幸的是，在3D空间中注释对象是极度时间/资源消耗的，这使得很难任意扩展训练集。在这项工作中，我们专注于半监督的方式，并探索更便宜的替代方案（即伪标记）的可行性，以利用未标记的数据。为此，我们进行了广泛的实验，以研究伪标签是否可以在不同环境下为基线模型提供有效的监督。实验结果不仅证明了基于图像的3D检测的伪标记机制的有效性（例如，在单眼设置下，我们在没有铃铛和哨声的Kitti-3D测试集上实现了20.23 AP，用于中等水平，从6.03 AP），但还显示了几个有趣且值得注意的发现（例如，经过伪标签训练的模型的性能要比基于相同培训数据的地面真相注释训练的表现更好）。我们希望这项工作可以在半监督环境下为基于图像的3D检测社区提供见解。代码，伪标签和预培训模型将公开可用。

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

In this paper, we propose a robust 3D detector, named Cross Modal Transformer (CMT), for end-to-end 3D multi-modal detection. Without explicit view transformation, CMT takes the image and point clouds tokens as inputs and directly outputs accurate 3D bounding boxes. The spatial alignment of multi-modal tokens is performed implicitly, by encoding the 3D points into multi-modal features. The core design of CMT is quite simple while its performance is impressive. CMT obtains 73.0% NDS on nuScenes benchmark. Moreover, CMT has a strong robustness even if the LiDAR is missing. Code will be released at https://github.com/junjie18/CMT.

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains challenging due to the diversity of distortion and image content variation, which complicate the distortion patterns crossing different scales and aggravate the difficulty of the regression problem for BIQA. However, existing BIQA methods often fail to consider multi-scale distortion patterns and image content, and little research has been done on learning strategies to make the regression model produce better performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Progressive Multi-Task Image Quality Assessment (PMT-IQA) model, which contains a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS) and a progressive multi-task learning module (PMT), to help the model learn complex distortion patterns and better optimize the regression issue to align with the law of human learning process from easy to hard. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PMT-IQA model, we conduct experiments on four widely used public datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the performance of PMT-IQA is superior to the comparison approaches, and both MS and PMT modules improve the model's performance.

Automatic music generation with artificial intelligence typically requires a large amount of data which is hard to obtain for many less common genres and musical instruments. To tackle this issue, we present ongoing work and preliminary findings on the possibility for deep models to transfer knowledge from language to music, by finetuning large language models pre-trained on a massive text corpus on only hundreds of MIDI files of drum performances. We show that by doing so, one of the largest, state-of-the-art models (GPT3) is capable of generating reasonable drum grooves, while models that are not pre-trained (Transformer) shows no such ability beyond naive repetition. Evaluating generated music is a challenging task, more so is evaluating drum grooves with little precedence in literature. Hence, we propose a tailored structural evaluation method and analyze drum grooves produced by GPT3 compared to those played by human professionals, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of such generation by language-to-music transfer. Our findings suggest that language-to-music transfer learning with large language models is viable and promising.

Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.

This paper focuses on designing efficient models with low parameters and FLOPs for dense predictions. Even though CNN-based lightweight methods have achieved stunning results after years of research, trading-off model accuracy and constrained resources still need further improvements. This work rethinks the essential unity of efficient Inverted Residual Block in MobileNetv2 and effective Transformer in ViT, inductively abstracting a general concept of Meta-Mobile Block, and we argue that the specific instantiation is very important to model performance though sharing the same framework. Motivated by this phenomenon, we deduce a simple yet efficient modern \textbf{I}nverted \textbf{R}esidual \textbf{M}obile \textbf{B}lock (iRMB) for mobile applications, which absorbs CNN-like efficiency to model short-distance dependency and Transformer-like dynamic modeling capability to learn long-distance interactions. Furthermore, we design a ResNet-like 4-phase \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{MO}del (EMO) based only on a series of iRMBs for dense applications. Massive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, our EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass \textbf{SoTA} CNN-/Transformer-based models, while trading-off the model accuracy and efficiency well.