Author: Wei Wang;
Dynamically Instance-Guided Adaptation: A Backward-free Approach for Test-Time Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
In this paper, we study the application of Test-time domain adaptation in semantic segmentation (TTDA-Seg) where both efficiency and effectiveness are crucial. Existing methods either have low efficiency (e.g., backward optimization) or ignore semantic adaptation (e.g., distribution alignment). Besides, they would suffer from the accumulated errors caused by unstable optimization and abnormal distributions. To solve these problems, we propose a novel backward-free approach for TTDA-Seg, called Dynamically Instance-Guided Adaptation (DIGA). Our principle is utilizing each instance to dynamically guide its own adaptation in a non-parametric way, which avoids the error accumulation issue and expensive optimizing cost. Specifically, DIGA is composed of a distribution adaptation module (DAM) and a semantic adaptation module (SAM), enabling us to jointly adapt the model in two indispensable aspects. DAM mixes the instance and source BN statistics to encourage the model to capture robust representation. SAM combines the historical prototypes with instance-level prototypes to adjust semantic predictions, which can be associated with the parametric classifier to mutually benefit the final results. Extensive experiments evaluated on five target domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our DIGA establishes new state-of-theart performance in TTDA-Seg. Source code is available at: https://github.com/Waybaba/DIGA.
Masked Jigsaw Puzzle: A Versatile Position Embedding for Vision Transformers
Position Embeddings (PEs), an arguably indispensable component in Vision Transformers (ViTs), have been shown to improve the performance of ViTs on many vision tasks. However, PEs have a potentially high risk of privacy leakage since the spatial information of the input patches is exposed. This caveat naturally raises a series of interesting questions about the impact of PEs on accuracy, privacy, prediction consistency, etc. To tackle these issues, we propose a Masked Jigsaw Puzzle (MJP) position embedding method. In particular, MJP first shuffles the selected patches via our block-wise random jigsaw puzzle shuffle algorithm, and their corresponding PEs are occluded. Meanwhile, for the nonoccluded patches, the PEs remain the original ones but their spatial relation is strengthened via our dense absolute localization regressor. The experimental results reveal that 1) PEs explicitly encode the 2D spatial relationship and lead to severe privacy leakage problems under gradient inversion attack; 2) Training ViTs with the naively shuffled patches can alleviate the problem, but it harms the accuracy; 3) Under a certain shuffle ratio, the proposed MJP not only boosts the performance and robustness on large-scale datasets (i.e.,
ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-C, -A/O) but also improves the privacy preservation ability under typical gradient attacks by a large margin. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/yhlleo/MJP.
Orthogonal SVD Covariance Conditioning and Latent Disentanglement
Inserting an SVD meta-layer into neural networks is prone to make the covariance ill-conditioned, which could harm the model in the training stability and generalization abilities. In this article, we systematically study how to improve the covariance conditioning by enforcing orthogonality to the Pre-SVD layer. Existing orthogonal treatments on the weights are first investigated. However, these techniques can improve the conditioning but would hurt the performance. To avoid such a side effect, we propose the Nearest Orthogonal Gradient (NOG) and Optimal Learning Rate (OLR). The effectiveness of our methods is validated in two applications: decorrelated Batch Normalization (BN) and Global Covariance Pooling (GCP). Extensive experiments on visual recognition demonstrate that our methods can simultaneously improve covariance conditioning and generalization. The combinations with orthogonal weight can further boost the performance. Moreover, we show that our orthogonality techniques can benefit generative models for better latent disentanglement through a series of experiments on various benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/KingJamesSong/OrthoImproveCond.