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Cees G. M. Snoek

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24 papers
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24

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

GateRA: Token-aware Modulation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

  • Jie Ou
  • Shuaihong Jiang
  • Yingjun Du
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, DoRA, and HiRA, enable lightweight adaptation of large pre-trained models via low-rank updates. However, existing PEFT approaches apply static, input-agnostic updates to all tokens, disregarding the varying importance and difficulty of different inputs. This uniform treatment can lead to overfitting on trivial content or under-adaptation on more informative regions, especially in autoregressive settings with distinct prefill and decoding dynamics. In this paper, we propose GateRA, a unified framework that introduces token-aware modulation to dynamically adjust the strength of PEFT updates. By incorporating adaptive gating into standard PEFT branches, GateRA enables selective, token-level adaptation—preserving pre-trained knowledge for well-modeled inputs while focusing capacity on challenging cases. Empirical visualizations reveal phase-sensitive behaviors, where GateRA automatically suppresses updates for redundant prefill tokens while emphasizing adaptation during decoding. To promote confident and efficient modulation, we further introduce an entropy-based regularization that encourages near-binary gating decisions. This regularization prevents diffuse update patterns and leads to interpretable, sparse adaptation without hard thresholding. Finally, we present a theoretical analysis showing that GateRA induces a soft gradient-masking effect over the PEFT path, enabling continuous and differentiable control over adaptation. Experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GateRA consistently outperforms or matches prior PEFT methods.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

An Image is Worth More Than 16x16 Patches: Exploring Transformers on Individual Pixels

  • Duy-Kien Nguyen
  • Mahmoud Assran
  • Unnat Jain
  • Martin R. Oswald
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Xinlei Chen

This work does not introduce a new method. Instead, we present an interesting finding that questions the necessity of the inductive bias of locality in modern computer vision architectures. Concretely, we find that vanilla Transformers can operate by directly treating each individual pixel as a token and achieve highly performant results. This is substantially different from the popular design in Vision Transformer, which maintains the inductive bias from ConvNets towards local neighborhoods (e.g., by treating each 16x16 patch as a token). We showcase the effectiveness of pixels-as-tokens across three well-studied computer vision tasks: supervised learning for classification and regression, self-supervised learning via masked autoencoding, and image generation with diffusion models. Although it's computationally less practical to directly operate on individual pixels, we believe the community must be made aware of this surprising piece of knowledge when devising the next generation of neural network architectures for computer vision.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CaPo: Cooperative Plan Optimization for Efficient Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation

  • Jie Liu 0043
  • Pan Zhou 0002
  • Yingjun Du
  • Ah-Hwee Tan
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Jan-Jakob Sonke
  • Efstratios Gavves

In this work, we address the cooperation problem among large language model (LLM) based embodied agents, where agents must cooperate to achieve a common goal. Previous methods often execute actions extemporaneously and incoherently, without long-term strategic and cooperative planning, leading to redundant steps, failures, and even serious repercussions in complex tasks like search-and-rescue missions where discussion and cooperative plan are crucial. To solve this issue, we propose Cooperative Plan Optimization (CaPo) to enhance the cooperation efficiency of LLM-based embodied agents. Inspired by human cooperation schemes, CaPo improves cooperation efficiency with two phases: 1) meta plan generation, and 2) progress-adaptive meta plan and execution. In the first phase, all agents analyze the task, discuss, and cooperatively create a meta-plan that decomposes the task into subtasks with detailed steps, ensuring a long-term strategic and coherent plan for efficient coordination. In the second phase, agents execute tasks according to the meta-plan and dynamically adjust it based on their latest progress (e.g., discovering a target object) through multi-turn discussions. This progress-based adaptation eliminates redundant actions, improving the overall cooperation efficiency of agents. Experimental results on the ThreeDworld Multi-Agent Transport and Communicative Watch-And-Help tasks demonstrate CaPo's much higher task completion rate and efficiency compared with state-of-the-arts. The code is released at https://github.com/jliu4ai/CaPo.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DynaPrompt: Dynamic Test-Time Prompt Tuning

  • Zehao Xiao
  • Shilin Yan
  • Jack Hong
  • Jiayin Cai
  • Xiaolong Jiang
  • Yao Hu 0002
  • Jiayi Shen
  • Cheems Wang

Test-time prompt tuning enhances zero-shot generalization of vision-language models but tends to ignore the relatedness among test samples during inference. Online test-time prompt tuning provides a simple way to leverage the information in previous test samples, albeit with the risk of prompt collapse due to error accumulation. To enhance test-time prompt tuning, we propose DynaPrompt, short for dynamic test-time prompt tuning, exploiting relevant data distribution information while reducing error accumulation. Built on an online prompt buffer, DynaPrompt adaptively selects and optimizes the relevant prompts for each test sample during tuning. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic prompt selection strategy based on two metrics: prediction entropy and probability difference. For unseen test data information, we develop dynamic prompt appending, which allows the buffer to append new prompts and delete the inactive ones. By doing so, the prompts are optimized to exploit beneficial information on specific test data, while alleviating error accumulation. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic test-time prompt tuning.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

One Hundred Neural Networks and Brains Watching Videos: Lessons from Alignment

  • Christina Sartzetaki
  • Gemma Roig
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Iris I. A. Groen

What can we learn from comparing video models to human brains, arguably the most efficient and effective video processing systems in existence? Our work takes a step towards answering this question by performing the first large-scale benchmarking of deep video models on representational alignment to the human brain, using publicly available models and a recently released video brain imaging (fMRI) dataset. We disentangle four factors of variation in the models (temporal modeling, classification task, architecture, and training dataset) that affect alignment to the brain, which we measure by conducting Representational Similarity Analysis across multiple brain regions and model layers. We show that temporal modeling is key for alignment to brain regions involved in early visual processing, while a relevant classification task is key for alignment to higher-level regions. Moreover, we identify clear differences between the brain scoring patterns across layers of CNNs and Transformers, and reveal how training dataset biases transfer to alignment with functionally selective brain areas. Additionally, we uncover a negative correlation of computational complexity to brain alignment. Measuring a total of 99 neural networks and 10 human brains watching videos, we aim to forge a path that widens our understanding of temporal and semantic video representations in brains and machines, ideally leading towards more efficient video models and more mechanistic explanations of processing in the human brain.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

SimPLR: A Simple and Plain Transformer for Efficient Object Detection and Segmentation

  • Duy Kien Nguyen
  • Martin R. Oswald
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

The ability to detect objects in images at varying scales has played a pivotal role in the design of modern object detectors. Despite considerable progress in removing hand-crafted components and simplifying the architecture with transformers, multi-scale feature maps and pyramid designs remain a key factor for their empirical success. In this paper, we show that shifting the multiscale inductive bias into the attention mechanism can work well, resulting in a plain detector ‘SimPLR’ whose backbone and detection head are both non-hierarchical and operate on single-scale features. We find through our experiments that SimPLR with scale-aware attention is plain and simple architecture, yet competitive with multi-scale vision transformer alternatives. Compared to the multi-scale and single-scale state-of-the-art, our model scales better with bigger capacity (self-supervised) models and more pre-training data, allowing us to report a consistently better accuracy and faster runtime for object detection, instance segmentation, as well as panoptic segmentation. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/kienduynguyen/SimPLR}.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

TULIP: Token-length Upgraded CLIP

  • Ivona Najdenkoska
  • Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani
  • Yuki M. Asano
  • Nanne van Noord
  • Marcel Worring
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

We address the challenge of representing long captions in vision-language models, such as CLIP. By design these models are limited by fixed, absolute positional encodings, restricting inputs to a maximum of 77 tokens and hindering performance on tasks requiring longer descriptions. Although recent work has attempted to overcome this limit, their proposed approaches struggle to model token relationships over longer distances and simply extend to a fixed new token length. Instead, we propose a generalizable method, named TULIP, able to upgrade the token length to any length for CLIP-like models. We do so by improving the architecture with relative position encodings, followed by a training procedure that (i) distills the original CLIP text encoder into an encoder with relative position encodings and (ii) enhances the model for aligning longer captions with images. By effectively encoding captions longer than the default 77 tokens, our model outperforms baselines on cross-modal tasks such as retrieval and text-to-image generation. The code repository is available at https://github.com/ivonajdenkoska/tulip.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Union-over-Intersections: Object Detection beyond Winner-Takes-All

  • Aritra Bhowmik
  • Pascal Mettes
  • Martin R. Oswald
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

This paper revisits the problem of predicting box locations in object detection architectures. Typically, each box proposal or box query aims to directly maximize the intersection-over-union score with the ground truth, followed by a winner-takes-all non-maximum suppression where only the highest scoring box in each region is retained. We observe that both steps are sub-optimal: the first involves regressing proposals to the entire ground truth, which is a difficult task even with large receptive fields, and the second neglects valuable information from boxes other than the top candidate. Instead of regressing proposals to the whole ground truth, we propose a simpler approach—regress only to the area of intersection between the proposal and the ground truth. This avoids the need for proposals to extrapolate beyond their visual scope, improving localization accuracy. Rather than adopting a winner-takes-all strategy, we take the union over the regressed intersections of all boxes in a region to generate the final box outputs. Our plug-and-play method integrates seamlessly into proposal-based, grid-based, and query-based detection architectures with minimal modifications, consistently improving object localization and instance segmentation. We demonstrate its broad applicability and versatility across various detection and segmentation tasks.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Graph Neural Networks for Learning Equivariant Representations of Neural Networks

  • Miltiadis Kofinas
  • Boris Knyazev 0001
  • Yan Zhang
  • Yunlu Chen
  • Gertjan J. Burghouts
  • Efstratios Gavves
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • David W. Zhang

Neural networks that process the parameters of other neural networks find applications in domains as diverse as classifying implicit neural representations, generating neural network weights, and predicting generalization errors. However, existing approaches either overlook the inherent permutation symmetry in the neural network or rely on intricate weight-sharing patterns to achieve equivariance, while ignoring the impact of the network architecture itself. In this work, we propose to represent neural networks as computational graphs of parameters, which allows us to harness powerful graph neural networks and transformers that preserve permutation symmetry. Consequently, our approach enables a single model to encode neural computational graphs with diverse architectures. We showcase the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of tasks, including classification and editing of implicit neural representations, predicting generalization performance, and learning to optimize, while consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code is open-sourced at https://github.com/mkofinas/neural-graphs.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

R-MAE: Regions Meet Masked Autoencoders

  • Duy-Kien Nguyen
  • Yanghao Li
  • Vaibhav Aggarwal
  • Martin R. Oswald
  • Alexander Kirillov
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Xinlei Chen

In this work, we explore regions as a potential visual analogue of words for self-supervised image representation learning. Inspired by Masked Autoencoding (MAE), a generative pre-training baseline, we propose masked region autoencoding to learn from groups of pixels or regions. Specifically, we design an architecture which efficiently addresses the one-to-many mapping between images and regions, while being highly effective especially with high-quality regions. When integrated with MAE, our approach (R-MAE) demonstrates consistent improvements across various pre-training datasets and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks, with negligible computational overheads. Beyond the quantitative evaluation, our analysis indicates the models pre-trained with masked region autoencoding unlock the potential for interactive segmentation. The code is provided at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Energy-Based Test Sample Adaptation for Domain Generalization

  • Zehao Xiao
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Shengcai Liao
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

In this paper, we propose energy-based sample adaptation at test time for domain generalization. Where previous works adapt their models to target domains, we adapt the unseen target samples to source-trained models. To this end, we design a discriminative energy-based model, which is trained on source domains to jointly model the conditional distribution for classification and data distribution for sample adaptation. The model is optimized to simultaneously learn a classifier and an energy function. To adapt target samples to source distributions, we iteratively update the samples by energy minimization with stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. Moreover, to preserve the categorical information in the sample during adaptation, we introduce a categorical latent variable into the energy-based model. The latent variable is learned from the original sample before adaptation by variational inference and fixed as a condition to guide the sample update. Experiments on six benchmarks for classification of images and microblog threads demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Fake It Until You Make It: Towards Accurate Near-Distribution Novelty Detection

  • Hossein Mirzaei
  • Mohammadreza Salehi
  • Sajjad Shahabi
  • Efstratios Gavves
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Mohammad Sabokrou
  • Mohammad Hossein Rohban

We aim for image-based novelty detection. Despite considerable progress, existing models either fail or face dramatic drop under the so-called ``near-distribution" setup, where the differences between normal and anomalous samples are subtle. We first demonstrate existing methods could experience up to 20\% decrease in their AUCs in the near-distribution setting. Next, we propose to exploit a score-based generative model to produce synthetic near-distribution anomalous data. Our model is then fine-tuned to distinguish such data from the normal samples. We make quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation of this strategy, and compare the results with a variety of GAN-based models. Effectiveness of our method for both near-distribution and standard novelty detection is assessed through extensive experiments on datasets in diverse applications such as medical images, object classification, and quality control. This reveals that our method significantly improves upon existing models, and consistently decreases the gap between the near-distribution and standard novelty detection AUCs by a considerable amount.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

MetaModulation: Learning Variational Feature Hierarchies for Few-Shot Learning with Fewer Tasks

  • Wenfang Sun
  • Yingjun Du
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Fan Wang
  • Ling Wang
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Meta-learning algorithms are able to learn a new task using previously learned knowledge, but they often require a large number of meta-training tasks which may not be readily available. To address this issue, we propose a method for few-shot learning with fewer tasks, which we call MetaModulation. The key idea is to use a neural network to increase the density of the meta-training tasks by modulating batch normalization parameters during meta-training. Additionally, we modify parameters at various neural network levels, rather than just a single layer, to increase task diversity. To account for the uncertainty caused by the reduced number of training tasks, we propose a variational MetaModulation where the modulation parameters are treated as latent variables. We also introduce learning variational feature hierarchies by the variational MetaModulation, which modulates features at all layers and can take into account task uncertainty and generate more diverse tasks. The ablation studies illustrate the advantages of utilizing a learnable task modulation at different levels and demonstrate the benefit of incorporating probabilistic variants in few-task meta-learning. Our MetaModulation and its variational variants consistently outperform state-of-the-art alternatives on four few-task meta-learning benchmarks.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Unlocking Slot Attention by Changing Optimal Transport Costs

  • Yan Zhang
  • David W. Zhang
  • Simon Lacoste-Julien
  • Gertjan J. Burghouts
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to handle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose MESH (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Hierarchical Variational Memory for Few-shot Learning Across Domains

  • Yingjun Du
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Neural memory enables fast adaptation to new tasks with just a few training samples. Existing memory models store features only from the single last layer, which does not generalize well in presence of a domain shift between training and test distributions. Rather than relying on a flat memory, we propose a hierarchical alternative that stores features at different semantic levels. We introduce a hierarchical prototype model, where each level of the prototype fetches corresponding information from the hierarchical memory. The model is endowed with the ability to flexibly rely on features at different semantic levels if the domain shift circumstances so demand. We meta-learn the model by a newly derived hierarchical variational inference framework, where hierarchical memory and prototypes are jointly optimized. To explore and exploit the importance of different semantic levels, we further propose to learn the weights associated with the prototype at each level in a data-driven way, which enables the model to adaptively choose the most generalizable features. We conduct thorough ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in our model. The new state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain and competitive performance on traditional few-shot classification further substantiates the benefit of hierarchical variational memory.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Learning to Generalize across Domains on Single Test Samples

  • Zehao Xiao
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

We strive to learn a model from a set of source domains that generalizes well to unseen target domains. The main challenge in such a domain generalization scenario is the unavailability of any target domain data during training, resulting in the learned model not being explicitly adapted to the unseen target domains. We propose learning to generalize across domains on single test samples. We leverage a meta-learning paradigm to learn our model to acquire the ability of adaptation with single samples at training time so as to further adapt itself to each single test sample at test time. We formulate the adaptation to the single test sample as a variational Bayesian inference problem, which incorporates the test sample as a conditional into the generation of model parameters. The adaptation to each test sample requires only one feed-forward computation at test time without any fine-tuning or self-supervised training on additional data from the unseen domains. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our model learns the ability to adapt models to each single sample by mimicking domain shifts during training. Further, our model achieves at least comparable -- and often better -- performance than state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks for domain generalization.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Multiset-Equivariant Set Prediction with Approximate Implicit Differentiation

  • Yan Zhang
  • David W. Zhang
  • Simon Lacoste-Julien
  • Gertjan J. Burghouts
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Most set prediction models in deep learning use set-equivariant operations, but they actually operate on multisets. We show that set-equivariant functions cannot represent certain functions on multisets, so we introduce the more appropriate notion of multiset-equivariance. We identify that the existing Deep Set Prediction Network (DSPN) can be multiset-equivariant without being hindered by set-equivariance and improve it with approximate implicit differentiation, allowing for better optimization while being faster and saving memory. In a range of toy experiments, we show that the perspective of multiset-equivariance is beneficial and that our changes to DSPN achieve better results in most cases. On CLEVR object property prediction, we substantially improve over the state-of-the-art Slot Attention from 8% to 77% in one of the strictest evaluation metrics because of the benefits made possible by implicit differentiation.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

A Bit More Bayesian: Domain-Invariant Learning with Uncertainty

  • Zehao Xiao
  • Jiayi Shen
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Domain generalization is challenging due to the domain shift and the uncertainty caused by the inaccessibility of target domain data. In this paper, we address both challenges with a probabilistic framework based on variational Bayesian inference, by incorporating uncertainty into neural network weights. We couple domain invariance in a probabilistic formula with the variational Bayesian inference. This enables us to explore domain-invariant learning in a principled way. Specifically, we derive domain-invariant representations and classifiers, which are jointly established in a two-layer Bayesian neural network. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal on four widely used cross-domain visual recognition benchmarks. Ablation studies validate the synergistic benefits of our Bayesian treatment when jointly learning domain-invariant representations and classifiers for domain generalization. Further, our method consistently delivers state-of-the-art mean accuracy on all benchmarks.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Kernel Continual Learning

  • Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

This paper introduces kernel continual learning, a simple but effective variant of continual learning that leverages the non-parametric nature of kernel methods to tackle catastrophic forgetting. We deploy an episodic memory unit that stores a subset of samples for each task to learn task-specific classifiers based on kernel ridge regression. This does not require memory replay and systematically avoids task interference in the classifiers. We further introduce variational random features to learn a data-driven kernel for each task. To do so, we formulate kernel continual learning as a variational inference problem, where a random Fourier basis is incorporated as the latent variable. The variational posterior distribution over the random Fourier basis is inferred from the coreset of each task. In this way, we are able to generate more informative kernels specific to each task, and, more importantly, the coreset size can be reduced to achieve more compact memory, resulting in more efficient continual learning based on episodic memory. Extensive evaluation on four benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness and promise of kernels for continual learning.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

LiftPool: Bidirectional ConvNet Pooling

  • Jiaojiao Zhao
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Pooling is a critical operation in convolutional neural networks for increasing receptive fields and improving robustness to input variations. Most existing pooling operations downsample the feature maps, which is a lossy process. Moreover, they are not invertible: upsampling a downscaled feature map can not recover the lost information in the downsampling. By adopting the philosophy of the classical Lifting Scheme from signal processing, we propose LiftPool for bidirectional pooling layers, including LiftDownPool and LiftUpPool. LiftDownPool decomposes a feature map into various downsized sub-bands, each of which contains information with different frequencies. As the pooling function in LiftDownPool is perfectly invertible, by performing LiftDownPool backward, a corresponding up-pooling layer LiftUpPool is able to generate a refined upsampled feature map using the detail subbands, which is useful for image-to-image translation challenges. Experiments show the proposed methods achieve better results on image classification and semantic segmentation, using various backbones. Moreover, LiftDownPool offers better robustness to input corruptions and perturbations.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MetaNorm: Learning to Normalize Few-Shot Batches Across Domains

  • Yingjun Du
  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Batch normalization plays a crucial role when training deep neural networks. However, batch statistics become unstable with small batch sizes and are unreliable in the presence of distribution shifts. We propose MetaNorm, a simple yet effective meta-learning normalization. It tackles the aforementioned issues in a unified way by leveraging the meta-learning setting and learns to infer adaptive statistics for batch normalization. MetaNorm is generic, flexible and model-agnostic, making it a simple plug-and-play module that is seamlessly embedded into existing meta-learning approaches. It can be efficiently implemented by lightweight hypernetworks with low computational cost. We verify its effectiveness by extensive evaluation on representative tasks suffering from the small batch and domain shift problems: few-shot learning and domain generalization. We further introduce an even more challenging setting: few-shot domain generalization. Results demonstrate that MetaNorm consistently achieves better, or at least competitive, accuracy compared to existing batch normalization methods.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Set Prediction without Imposing Structure as Conditional Density Estimation

  • David W. Zhang
  • Gertjan J. Burghouts
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Set prediction is about learning to predict a collection of unordered variables with unknown interrelations. Training such models with set losses imposes the structure of a metric space over sets. We focus on stochastic and underdefined cases, where an incorrectly chosen loss function leads to implausible predictions. Example tasks include conditional point-cloud reconstruction and predicting future states of molecules. In this paper we propose an alternative to training via set losses, by viewing learning as conditional density estimation. Our learning framework fits deep energy-based models and approximates the intractable likelihood with gradient-guided sampling. Furthermore, we propose a stochastically augmented prediction algorithm that enables multiple predictions, reflecting the possible variations in the target set. We empirically demonstrate on a variety of datasets the capability to learn multi-modal densities and produce different plausible predictions. Our approach is competitive with previous set prediction models on standard benchmarks. More importantly, it extends the family of addressable tasks beyond those that have unambiguous predictions.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning to Learn Kernels with Variational Random Features

  • Xiantong Zhen
  • Haoliang Sun
  • Yingjun Du
  • Jun Xu 0019
  • Yilong Yin
  • Ling Shao 0001
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

We introduce kernels with random Fourier features in the meta-learning framework for few-shot learning. We propose meta variational random features (MetaVRF) to learn adaptive kernels for the base-learner, which is developed in a latent variable model by treating the random feature basis as the latent variable. We formulate the optimization of MetaVRF as a variational inference problem by deriving an evidence lower bound under the meta-learning framework. To incorporate shared knowledge from related tasks, we propose a context inference of the posterior, which is established by an LSTM architecture. The LSTM-based inference network can effectively integrate the context information of previous tasks with task-specific information, generating informative and adaptive features. The learned MetaVRF can produce kernels of high representational power with a relatively low spectral sampling rate and also enables fast adaptation to new tasks. Experimental results on a variety of few-shot regression and classification tasks demonstrate that MetaVRF delivers much better, or at least competitive, performance compared to existing meta-learning alternatives.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Attention-Based Multi-Context Guiding for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

  • Tao Hu
  • Pengwan Yang
  • Chiliang Zhang
  • Gang Yu
  • Yadong Mu
  • Cees G. M. Snoek

Few-shot learning is a nascent research topic, motivated by the fact that traditional deep learning methods require tremendous amounts of data. The scarcity of annotated data becomes even more challenging in semantic segmentation since pixellevel annotation in segmentation task is more labor-intensive to acquire. To tackle this issue, we propose an Attentionbased Multi-Context Guiding (A-MCG) network, which consists of three branches: the support branch, the query branch, the feature fusion branch. A key differentiator of A-MCG is the integration of multi-scale context features between support and query branches, enforcing a better guidance from the support set. In addition, we also adopt a spatial attention along the fusion branch to highlight context information from several scales, enhancing self-supervision in one-shot learning. To address the fusion problem in multi-shot learning, Conv-LSTM is adopted to collaboratively integrate the sequential support features to elevate the final accuracy. Our architecture obtains state-of-the-art on unseen classes in a variant of PASCAL VOC12 dataset and performs favorably against previous work with large gains of 1. 1%, 1. 4% measured in mIoU in the 1-shot and 5-shot setting.

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