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Minjing Dong

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25 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Diversifying Counterattacks: Orthogonal Exploration for Robust CLlP Inference

Chengze Jiang
Minjing Dong
Xinli Shi
Jie Gui

Vision-language pre-training models (VLPs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding and zero-shot generalization, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial examples, raising concerns about their reliability. Recent work, Test-Time Counterattack (TTC), improves robustness by generating perturbations that maximize the embedding deviation of adversarial inputs using PGD, pushing them away from their adversarial representations. However, due to the fundamental difference in optimization objectives between adversarial attacks and counterattacks, generating counterattacks solely based on gradients with respect to the adversarial input confines the search to a narrow space. As a result, the counterattacks could overfit limited adversarial patterns and lack the diversity to fully neutralize a broad range of perturbations. In this work, we argue that enhancing the diversity and coverage of counterattacks is crucial to improving adversarial robustness in test-time defense. Accordingly, we propose Directional Orthogonal Counterattack (DOC), which augments counterattack optimization by incorporating orthogonal gradient directions and momentum-based updates. This design expands the exploration of the counterattack space and increases the diversity of perturbations, which facilitates the discovery of more generalizable counterattacks and ultimately improves the ability to neutralize adversarial perturbations. Meanwhile, we present a directional sensitivity score based on averaged cosine similarity to boost DOC by improving example discrimination and adaptively modulating the counterattack strength. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that DOC improves adversarial robustness under various attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Adversarial Robustness via Deformable Convolution with Stochasticity

Yanxiang Ma
Zixuan Huang
Minjing Dong
Shan You
Chang Xu 0002

Random defense represents a promising strategy to protect neural networks from adversarial attacks. Most of these methods enhance robustness by injecting randomness into the data, increasing uncertainty for attackers. However, this randomness could reduce the generalization capacity of defense, as defense performance could be sensitive to the hyperparameters of noise added to the data, making it difficult to generalize across different datasets. Additionally, the involvement of randomness always comes with a reduction of natural accuracy, which leads to a delicate trade-off between them, which is seldom studied in random defense. In this work, we propose incorporating randomness into the network structure instead of data input by designing stochastic deformable convolution, where a random mask replaces the convolutional offset. This process promotes data independence, enhancing generalization across datasets. To study the trade-off, we conduct a theoretical analysis of both robust and clean accuracy, from a perspective of gradient cosine similarity and natural inference. Based on the analysis, we reformulate the adversarial training in our random defense framework. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves SOTA adversarial robustness and clean accuracy compared with other random defense methods.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Beyond One-Hot Labels: Semantic Mixing for Model Calibration

Haoyang Luo
Linwei Tao
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu 0002

Model calibration seeks to ensure that models produce confidence scores that accurately reflect the true likelihood of their predictions being correct. However, existing calibration approaches are fundamentally tied to datasets of one-hot labels implicitly assuming full certainty in all the annotations. Such datasets are effective for classification but provides insufficient knowledge of uncertainty for model calibration, necessitating the curation of datasets with numerically rich ground-truth confidence values. However, due to the scarcity of uncertain visual examples, such samples are not easily available as real datasets. In this paper, we introduce calibration-aware data augmentation to create synthetic datasets of diverse samples and their ground-truth uncertainty. Specifically, we present Calibration-aware Semantic Mixing (CSM), a novel framework that generates training samples with mixed class characteristics and annotates them with distinct confidence scores via diffusion models. Based on this framework, we propose calibrated reannotation to tackle the misalignment between the annotated confidence score and the mixing ratio during the diffusion reverse process. Besides, we explore the loss functions that better fit the new data representation paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that CSM achieves superior calibration compared to the state-of-the-art calibration approaches. Our code is available here.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Diffusion Attribution Score: Evaluating Training Data Influence in Diffusion Models

Jinxu Lin
Linwei Tao
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu 0002

As diffusion models become increasingly popular, the misuse of copyrighted and private images has emerged as a major concern. One promising solution to mitigate this issue is identifying the contribution of specific training samples in generative models, a process known as data attribution. Existing data attribution methods for diffusion models typically quantify the contribution of a training sample by evaluating the change in diffusion loss when the sample is included or excluded from the training process. However, we argue that the direct usage of diffusion loss cannot represent such a contribution accurately due to the calculation of diffusion loss. Specifically, these approaches measure the divergence between predicted and ground truth distributions, which leads to an indirect comparison between the predicted distributions and cannot represent the variances between model behaviors. To address these issues, we aim to measure the direct comparison between predicted distributions with an attribution score to analyse the training sample importance, which is achieved by Diffusion Attribution Score (\textit{DAS}). Underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis, we elucidate the effectiveness of DAS. Additionally, we explore strategies to accelerate DAS calculations, facilitating its application to large-scale diffusion models. Our extensive experiments across various datasets and diffusion models demonstrate that DAS significantly surpasses previous benchmarks in terms of the linear data-modelling score, establishing new state-of-the-art performance.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Efficient Image-to-Image Diffusion Classifier for Adversarial Robustness

Hefei Mei
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu

Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated great potential in the field of adversarial robustness, where DM-based defense methods can achieve superior defense capability without adversarial training. However, they all require huge computational costs due to the usage of large-scale pre-trained DMs, making it difficult to conduct full evaluation under strong attacks and compare with traditional CNN-based methods. Simply reducing the network size and timesteps in DMs could significantly harm the image generation quality, which invalidates previous frameworks. To alleviate this issue, we redesign the diffusion framework from generating high-quality images to predicting distinguishable image labels. Specifically, we employ an image translation framework to learn many-to-one mapping from input samples to designed orthogonal image labels. Based on this framework, we introduce an efficient Image-to-Image diffusion classifier with a pruned U-Net structure and reduced diffusion timesteps. Besides the framework, we redesign the optimization objective of DMs to fit the target of image classification, where a new classification loss is incorporated in the DM-based image translation framework to distinguish the generated label from those of other classes. We conduct sufficient evaluations of the proposed classifier under various attacks on popular benchmarks. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves better adversarial robustness with fewer computational costs than DM-based and CNN-based methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Efficient Rectified Flow for Image Fusion

Zirui Wang
Jiayi Zhang
Tianwei Guan
Yuhan Zhou
Xingyuan Li
Minjing Dong
Jinyuan Liu

Image fusion is a fundamental and important task in computer vision, aiming to combine complementary information from different modalities to fuse images. In recent years, diffusion models have made significant developments in the field of image fusion. However, diffusion models often require complex computations and redundant inference time, which reduces the applicability of these methods. To address this issue, we propose RFfusion, an efficient one-step diffusion model for image fusion based on Rectified Flow. We incorporate Rectified Flow into the image fusion task to straighten the sampling path in the diffusion model, achieving one-step sampling without the need for additional training, while still maintaining high-quality fusion results. Furthermore, we propose a task-specific variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture tailored for image fusion, where the fusion operation is embedded within the latent space to further reduce computational complexity. To address the inherent discrepancy between conventional reconstruction-oriented VAE objectives and the requirements of image fusion, we introduce a two-stage training strategy. This approach facilitates the effective learning and integration of complementary information from multi-modal source images, thereby enabling the model to retain fine-grained structural details while significantly enhancing inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of both inference speed and fusion quality.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Feature Clipping for Uncertainty Calibration

Linwei Tao
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success across various tasks, but ensuring reliable uncertainty estimates, known as model calibration, is crucial for their safe and effective deployment. Modern DNNs often suffer from overconfidence, leading to miscalibration. We propose a novel post-hoc calibration method called feature clipping (FC) to address this issue. FC involves clipping feature values to a specified threshold, effectively increasing entropy in high calibration error samples while maintaining the information in low calibration error samples. This process reduces the overconfidence in predictions, improving the overall calibration of the model. Our extensive experiments on datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, and models including CNNs and transformers, demonstrate that FC consistently enhances calibration performance. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis that validates the effectiveness of our method. As the first calibration technique based on feature modification, feature clipping offers a novel approach to improving model calibration, showing significant improvements over both post-hoc and train-time calibration methods and pioneering a new avenue for feature-based model calibration.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

A Benchmark Study on Calibration

Linwei Tao
Younan Zhu
Haolan Guo
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu 0002

Deep neural networks are increasingly utilized in various machine learning tasks. However, as these models grow in complexity, they often face calibration issues, despite enhanced prediction accuracy. Many studies have endeavored to improve calibration performance through the use of specific loss functions, data preprocessing and training frameworks. Yet, investigations into calibration properties have been somewhat overlooked. Our study leverages the Neural Architecture Search (NAS) search space, offering an exhaustive model architecture space for thorough calibration properties exploration. We specifically create a model calibration dataset. This dataset evaluates 90 bin-based and 12 additional calibration measurements across 117,702 unique neural networks within the widely employed NATS-Bench search space. Our analysis aims to answer several longstanding questions in the field, using our proposed dataset: (i) Can model calibration be generalized across different datasets? (ii) Can robustness be used as a calibration measurement? (iii) How reliable are calibration metrics? (iv) Does a post-hoc calibration method affect all models uniformly? (v) How does calibration interact with accuracy? (vi) What is the impact of bin size on calibration measurement? (vii) Which architectural designs are beneficial for calibration? Additionally, our study bridges an existing gap by exploring calibration within NAS. By providing this dataset, we enable further research into NAS calibration. As far as we are aware, our research represents the first large-scale investigation into calibration properties and the premier study of calibration issues within NAS.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

AMD: Autoregressive Motion Diffusion

Bo Han
Hao Peng
Minjing Dong
Yi Ren
Yixuan Shen
Chang Xu

Human motion generation aims to produce plausible human motion sequences according to various conditional inputs, such as text or audio. Despite the feasibility of existing methods in generating motion based on short prompts and simple motion patterns, they encounter difficulties when dealing with long prompts or complex motions. The challenges are two-fold: 1) the scarcity of human motion-captured data for long prompts and complex motions. 2) the high diversity of human motions in the temporal domain and the substantial divergence of distributions from conditional modalities, leading to a many-to-many mapping problem when generating motion with complex and long texts. In this work, we address these gaps by 1) elaborating the first dataset pairing long textual descriptions and 3D complex motions (HumanLong3D), and 2) proposing an autoregressive motion diffusion model (AMD). Specifically, AMD integrates the text prompt at the current timestep with the text prompt and action sequences at the previous timestep as conditional information to predict the current action sequences in an iterative manner. Furthermore, we present its generalization for X-to-Motion with “No Modality Left Behind”, enabling for the first time the generation of high-definition and high-fidelity human motions based on user-defined modality input.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Imitation Learning from Purified Demonstrations

Yunke Wang
Minjing Dong
Yukun Zhao
Bo Du 0001
Chang Xu 0002

Imitation learning has emerged as a promising approach for addressing sequential decision-making problems, with the assumption that expert demonstrations are optimal. However, in real-world scenarios, most demonstrations are often imperfect, leading to challenges in the effectiveness of imitation learning. While existing research has focused on optimizing with imperfect demonstrations, the training typically requires a certain proportion of optimal demonstrations to guarantee performance. To tackle these problems, we propose to purify the potential noises in imperfect demonstrations first, and subsequently conduct imitation learning from these purified demonstrations. Motivated by the success of diffusion model, we introduce a two-step purification via diffusion process. In the first step, we apply a forward diffusion process to smooth potential noises in imperfect demonstrations by introducing additional noise. Subsequently, a reverse generative process is utilized to recover the optimal demonstration from the diffused ones. We provide theoretical evidence supporting our approach, demonstrating that the distance between the purified and optimal demonstration can be bounded. Empirical results on MuJoCo and RoboSuite demonstrate the effectiveness of our method from different aspects.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Multi-Scale VMamba: Hierarchy in Hierarchy Visual State Space Model

Yuheng Shi
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu

Despite the significant achievements of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in various vision tasks, they are constrained by the quadratic complexity. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their global receptive field and linear complexity with respect to the input length, demonstrating substantial potential across fields including natural language processing and computer vision. To improve the performance of SSMs in vision tasks, a multi-scan strategy is widely adopted, which leads to significant redundancy of SSMs. For a better trade-off between efficiency and performance, we analyze the underlying reasons behind the success of the multi-scan strategy, where long-range dependency plays an important role. Based on the analysis, we introduce Multi-Scale Vision Mamba (MSVMamba) to preserve the superiority of SSMs in vision tasks with limited parameters. It employs a multi-scale 2D scanning technique on both original and downsampled feature maps, which not only benefits long-range dependency learning but also reduces computational costs. Additionally, we integrate a Convolutional Feed-Forward Network (ConvFFN) to address the lack of channel mixing. Our experiments demonstrate that MSVMamba is highly competitive, with the MSVMamba-Tiny model achieving 83. 0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 46. 9% box mAP, and 42. 5% instance mAP with the Mask R-CNN framework, 1x training schedule on COCO, and 47. 9% mIoU with single-scale testing on ADE20K. Code is available at https: //github. com/YuHengsss/MSVMamba.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Neural Architecture Retrieval

Xiaohuan Pei
Yanxi Li 0001
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu 0002

With the increasing number of new neural architecture designs and substantial existing neural architectures, it becomes difficult for the researchers to situate their contributions compared with existing neural architectures or establish the connections between their designs and other relevant ones. To discover similar neural architectures in an efficient and automatic manner, we define a new problem Neural Architecture Retrieval which retrieves a set of existing neural architectures which have similar designs to the query neural architecture. Existing graph pre-training strategies cannot address the computational graph in neural architectures due to the graph size and motifs. To fulfill this potential, we propose to divide the graph into motifs which are used to rebuild the macro graph to tackle these issues, and introduce multi-level contrastive learning to achieve accurate graph representation learning. Extensive evaluations on both human-designed and synthesized neural architectures demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm. Such a dataset which contains 12k real-world network architectures, as well as their embedding, is built for neural architecture retrieval.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Adversarial Robustness through Random Weight Sampling

Yanxiang Ma
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu

Deep neural networks have been found to be vulnerable in a variety of tasks. Adversarial attacks can manipulate network outputs, resulting in incorrect predictions. Adversarial defense methods aim to improve the adversarial robustness of networks by countering potential attacks. In addition to traditional defense approaches, randomized defense mechanisms have recently received increasing attention from researchers. These methods introduce different types of perturbations during the inference phase to destabilize adversarial attacks. Although promising empirical results have been demonstrated by these approaches, the defense performance is quite sensitive to the randomness parameters, which are always manually tuned without further analysis. On the contrary, we propose incorporating random weights into the optimization to fully exploit the potential of randomized defense. To perform better optimization of randomness parameters, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the connections between randomness parameters and gradient similarity as well as natural performance. From these two aspects, we suggest imposing theoretically-guided constraints on random weights during optimizations, as these weights play a critical role in balancing natural performance and adversarial robustness. We derive both the upper and lower bounds of random weight parameters by considering prediction bias and gradient similarity. In this study, we introduce the Constrained Trainable Random Weight (CTRW), which adds random weight parameters to the optimization and includes a constraint guided by the upper and lower bounds to achieve better trade-offs between natural and robust accuracy. We evaluate the effectiveness of CTRW on several datasets and benchmark convolutional neural networks. Our results indicate that our model achieves a robust accuracy approximately 16% to 17% higher than the baseline model under PGD-20 and 22% to 25% higher on Auto Attack.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Boosting Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Probabilistic Representations

Haoyu Xie
Changqi Wang
Mingkai Zheng
Minjing Dong
Shan You
Chong Fu
Chang Xu

Recent breakthroughs in semi-supervised semantic segmentation have been developed through contrastive learning. In prevalent pixel-wise contrastive learning solutions, the model maps pixels to deterministic representations and regularizes them in the latent space. However, there exist inaccurate pseudo-labels which map the ambiguous representations of pixels to the wrong classes due to the limited cognitive ability of the model. In this paper, we define pixel-wise representations from a new perspective of probability theory and propose a Probabilistic Representation Contrastive Learning (PRCL) framework that improves representation quality by taking its probability into consideration. Through modelling the mapping from pixels to representations as the probability via multivariate Gaussian distributions, we can tune the contribution of the ambiguous representations to tolerate the risk of inaccurate pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we define prototypes in the form of distributions, which indicates the confidence of a class, while the point prototype cannot. More- over, we propose to regularize the distribution variance to enhance the reliability of representations. Taking advantage of these benefits, high-quality feature representations can be derived in the latent space, thereby the performance of se- mantic segmentation can be further improved. We conduct sufficient experiment to evaluate PRCL on Pascal VOC and CityScapes to demonstrate its superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Xie/PRCL.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Calibrating a Deep Neural Network with Its Predecessors

Linwei Tao
Minjing Dong
Daochang Liu
Changming Sun
Chang Xu

Confidence calibration - the process to calibrate the output probability distribution of neural networks - is essential for safety-critical applications of such networks. Recent works verify the link between mis-calibration and overfitting. However, early stopping, as a well-known technique to mitigate overfitting, fails to calibrate networks. In this work, we study the limitions of early stopping and comprehensively analyze the overfitting problem of a network considering each individual block. We then propose a novel regularization method, predecessor combination search (PCS), to improve calibration by searching a combination of best-fitting block predecessors, where block predecessors are the corresponding network blocks with weight parameters from earlier training stages. PCS achieves the state-of-the-art calibration performance on multiple datasets and architectures. In addition, PCS improves model robustness under dataset distribution shift. Supplementary material and code are available at https: //github. com/Linwei94/PCS

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Dual Focal Loss for Calibration

Linwei Tao
Minjing Dong
Chang Xu 0002

The use of deep neural networks in real-world applications require well-calibrated networks with confidence scores that accurately reflect the actual probability. However, it has been found that these networks often provide over-confident predictions, which leads to poor calibration. Recent efforts have sought to address this issue by focal loss to reduce over-confidence, but this approach can also lead to under-confident predictions. While different variants of focal loss have been explored, it is difficult to find a balance between over-confidence and under-confidence. In our work, we propose a new loss function by focusing on dual logits. Our method not only considers the ground truth logit, but also take into account the highest logit ranked after the ground truth logit. By maximizing the gap between these two logits, our proposed dual focal loss can achieve a better balance between over-confidence and under-confidence. We provide theoretical evidence to support our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness through evaluations on multiple models and datasets, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https: //github. com/Linwei94/DualFocalLoss

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Neural Architecture Search for Wide Spectrum Adversarial Robustness

Zhi Cheng
Yanxi Li
Minjing Dong
Xiu Su
Shan You
Chang Xu

One major limitation of CNNs is that they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Currently, adversarial robustness in neural networks is commonly optimized with respect to a small pre-selected adversarial noise strength, causing them to have potentially limited performance when under attack by larger adversarial noises in real-world scenarios. In this research, we aim to find Neural Architectures that have improved robustness on a wide range of adversarial noise strengths through Neural Architecture Search. In detail, we propose a lightweight Adversarial Noise Estimator to reduce the high cost of generating adversarial noise with respect to different strengths. Besides, we construct an Efficient Wide Spectrum Searcher to reduce the cost of adjusting network architecture with the large adversarial validation set during the search. With the two components proposed, the number of adversarial noise strengths searched can be increased significantly while having a limited increase in search time. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR and ImageNet demonstrate that with a significantly richer search signal in robustness, our method can find architectures with improved overall robustness while having a limited impact on natural accuracy and around 40% reduction in search time compared with the naive approach of searching. Codes available at: https://github.com/zhicheng2T0/Wsr-NAS.git

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Random Normalization Aggregation for Adversarial Defense

Minjing Dong
Xinghao Chen
Yunhe Wang
Chang Xu

The vulnerability of deep neural networks has been widely found in various models as well as tasks where slight perturbations on the inputs could lead to incorrect predictions. These perturbed inputs are known as adversarial examples and one of the intriguing properties of them is Adversarial Transfersability, i. e. the capability of adversarial examples to fool other models. Traditionally, this transferability is always regarded as a critical threat to the defense against adversarial attacks, however, we argue that the network robustness can be significantly boosted by utilizing adversarial transferability from a new perspective. In this work, we first discuss the influence of different popular normalization layers on the adversarial transferability, and then provide both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to shed light on the relationship between normalization types and transferability. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose a simple yet effective module named Random Normalization Aggregation (RNA) which replaces the batch normalization layers in the networks and aggregates different selected normalization types to form a huge random space. Specifically, a random path is sampled during each inference procedure so that the network itself can be treated as an ensemble of a wide range of different models. Since the entire random space is designed with low adversarial transferability, it is difficult to perform effective attacks even when the network parameters are accessible. We conduct extensive experiments on various models and datasets, and demonstrate the strong superiority of proposed algorithm. The PyTorch code is available at https: //github. com/UniSerj/Random-Norm-Aggregation and the MindSpore code is available at https: //gitee. com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/RNA.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Spatial-Channel Token Distillation for Vision MLPs

Yanxi Li 0001
Xinghao Chen 0001
Minjing Dong
Yehui Tang 0001
Yunhe Wang 0001
Chang Xu 0002

Recently, neural architectures with all Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) have attracted great research interest from the computer vision community. However, the inefficient mixing of spatial-channel information causes MLP-like vision models to demand tremendous pre-training on large-scale datasets. This work solves the problem from a novel knowledge distillation perspective. We propose a novel Spatial-channel Token Distillation (STD) method, which improves the information mixing in the two dimensions by introducing distillation tokens to each of them. A mutual information regularization is further introduced to let distillation tokens focus on their specific dimensions and maximize the performance gain. Extensive experiments on ImageNet for several MLP-like architectures demonstrate that the proposed token distillation mechanism can efficiently improve the accuracy. For example, the proposed STD boosts the top-1 accuracy of Mixer-S16 on ImageNet from 73. 8% to 75. 7% without any costly pre-training on JFT-300M. When applied to stronger architectures, e. g. CycleMLP-B1 and CycleMLP-B2, STD can still harvest about 1. 1% and 0. 5% accuracy gains, respectively.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

An Empirical Study of Adder Neural Networks for Object Detection

Xinghao Chen
Chang Xu
Minjing Dong
Chunjing Xu
Yunhe Wang

Adder neural networks (AdderNets) have shown impressive performance on image classification with only addition operations, which are more energy efficient than traditional convolutional neural networks built with multiplications. Compared with classification, there is a strong demand on reducing the energy consumption of modern object detectors via AdderNets for real-world applications such as autonomous driving and face detection. In this paper, we present an empirical study of AdderNets for object detection. We first reveal that the batch normalization statistics in the pre-trained adder backbone should not be frozen, since the relatively large feature variance of AdderNets. Moreover, we insert more shortcut connections in the neck part and design a new feature fusion architecture for avoiding the sparse features of adder layers. We present extensive ablation studies to explore several design choices of adder detectors. Comparisons with state-of-the-arts are conducted on COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Specifically, the proposed Adder FCOS achieves a 37. 8% AP on the COCO val set, demonstrating comparable performance to that of the convolutional counterpart with an about $1. 4\times$ energy reduction.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Handling Long-tailed Feature Distribution in AdderNets

Minjing Dong
Yunhe Wang
Xinghao Chen
Chang Xu

Adder neural networks (ANNs) are designed for low energy cost which replace expensive multiplications in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with cheaper additions to yield energy-efficient neural networks and hardware accelerations. Although ANNs achieve satisfactory efficiency, there exist gaps between ANNs and CNNs where the accuracy of ANNs can hardly be compared to CNNs without the assistance of other training tricks, such as knowledge distillation. The inherent discrepancy lies in the similarity measurement between filters and features, however how to alleviate this difference remains unexplored. To locate the potential problem of ANNs, we focus on the property difference due to similarity measurement. We demonstrate that unordered heavy tails in ANNs could be the key component which prevents ANNs from achieving superior classification performance since fatter tails tend to overlap in feature space. Through pre-defining Multivariate Skew Laplace distributions and embedding feature distributions into the loss function, ANN features can be fully controlled and designed for various properties. We further present a novel method for tackling existing heavy tails in ANNs with only a modification of classifier where ANN features are clustered with their tails well-formulated through proposed angle-based constraint on the distribution parameters to encourage high diversity of tails. Experiments conducted on several benchmarks and comparison with other distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach for boosting the performance of ANNs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Towards Stable and Robust AdderNets

Minjing Dong
Yunhe Wang
Xinghao Chen
Chang Xu

Adder neural network (AdderNet) replaces the original convolutions with massive multiplications by cheap additions while achieving comparable performance thus yields a series of energy-efficient neural networks. Compared with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the training of AdderNets is much more sophisticated including several techniques for adjusting gradient and batch normalization. In addition, variances of both weights and activations in resulting adder networks are very enormous which limits its performance and the potential for applying to other tasks. To enhance the stability and robustness of AdderNets, we first thoroughly analyze the variance estimation of weight parameters and output features of an arbitrary adder layer. Then, we develop a weight normalization scheme for adaptively optimizing the weight distribution of AdderNets during the training procedure, which can reduce the perturbation on running mean and variance in batch normalization layers. Meanwhile, the proposed weight normalization can also be utilized to enhance the adversarial robustness of resulting networks. Experiments conducted on several benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach for generating AdderNets with higher performance.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Neural Architecture Search in A Proxy Validation Loss Landscape

Yanxi Li 0001
Minjing Dong
Yunhe Wang 0001
Chang Xu 0002

This paper searches for the optimal neural architecture by minimizing a proxy of validation loss. Existing neural architecture search (NAS) methods used to discover the optimal neural architecture that best fits the validation examples given the up-to-date network weights. However, back propagation with a number of validation examples could be time consuming, especially when it needs to be repeated many times in NAS. Though these intermediate validation results are invaluable, they would be wasted if we cannot use them to predict the future from the past. In this paper, we propose to approximate the validation loss landscape by learning a mapping from neural architectures to their corresponding validate losses. The optimal neural architecture thus can be easily identified as the minimum of this proxy validation loss landscape. A novel sampling strategy is further developed for an efficient approximation of the loss landscape. Theoretical analysis indicates that the validation loss estimator learnt with our sampling strategy can reach a lower error rate and a lower label complexity compared with a uniform sampling. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that the architecture searched by the proposed algorithm can achieve a satisfactory accuracy with less time cost.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Crafting Efficient Neural Graph of Large Entropy

Minjing Dong
Hanting Chen
Yunhe Wang
Chang Xu

Network pruning is widely applied to deep CNN models due to their heavy computation costs and achieves high performance by keeping important weights while removing the redundancy. Pruning redundant weights directly may hurt global information flow, which suggests that an efficient sparse network should take graph properties into account. Thus, instead of paying more attention to preserving important weight, we focus on the pruned architecture itself. We propose to use graph entropy as the measurement, which shows useful properties to craft high-quality neural graphs and enables us to propose efficient algorithm to construct them as the initial network architecture. Our algorithm can be easily implemented and deployed to different popular CNN models and achieve better trade-offs.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

On Retrospecting Human Dynamics with Attention

Minjing Dong
Chang Xu

Deep recurrent neural networks have achieved impressive success in forecasting human motion with a sequence to sequence architecture. However, forecasting in longer time horizons often leads to implausible human poses or converges to mean poses, because of error accumulation and difficulties in keeping track of longerterm information. To address these challenges, we propose to retrospect human dynamics with attention. A retrospection module is designed upon RNN to regularly retrospect past frames and correct mistakes in time. This significantly improves the memory of RNN and provides sufficient information for the decoder networks to generate longer term prediction. Moreover, we present a spatial attention module to explore and exploit cooperation among joints in performing a particular motion. Residual connections are also included to guarantee the performance of short term prediction. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the largest and most challenging Human 3. 6M dataset in the field. Experimental results demonstrate the necessity of investigating motion prediction in a self audit manner and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in both short term and long term predictions.

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