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Yohei Nakata

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5 papers
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5

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference

  • Yuan Zhang 0020
  • Chun-Kai Fan
  • Junpeng Ma
  • Wenzhao Zheng
  • Tao Huang 0020
  • Kuan Cheng
  • Denis A. Gudovskiy
  • Tomoyuki Okuno

In vision-language models (VLMs), visual tokens usually consume a significant amount of computational overhead, despite their sparser information density compared to text tokens. To address this, most existing methods learn a network to prune redundant visual tokens and require additional training data. Differently, we propose an efficient training-free token optimization mechanism dubbed SparseVLM without extra parameters or fine-tuning costs. Concretely, given that visual tokens complement text tokens in VLMs for linguistic reasoning, we select visual-relevant text tokens to rate the significance of vision tokens within the self-attention matrix extracted from the VLMs. Then we progressively prune irrelevant tokens. To maximize sparsity while retaining essential information, we introduce a rank-based strategy to adaptively determine the sparsification ratio for each layer, alongside a token recycling method that compresses pruned tokens into more compact representations. Experimental results show that our SparseVLM improves the efficiency of various VLMs across a range of image and video understanding tasks. In particular, when LLaVA is equipped with SparseVLM, it achieves a 54% reduction in FLOPs, lowers CUDA time by 37%, and maintains an accuracy rate of 97%. Our code is available at https: //github. com/Gumpest/SparseVLMs.

UAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

ContextFlow++: Generalist-Specialist Flow-based Generative Models with Mixed-variable Context Encoding

  • Denis A. Gudovskiy
  • Tomoyuki Okuno
  • Yohei Nakata

Normalizing flow-based generative models have been widely used in applications where the exact density estimation is of major importance. Recent research proposes numerous methods to improve their expressivity. However, conditioning on a context is largely overlooked area in the bijective flow research. Conventional conditioning with the vector concatenation is limited to only a few flow types. More importantly, this approach cannot support a practical setup where a set of context-conditioned (*specialist*) models are trained with the fixed pretrained general-knowledge (*generalist*) model. We propose ContextFlow++ approach to overcome these limitations using an additive conditioning with explicit generalist-specialist knowledge decoupling. Furthermore, we support discrete contexts by the proposed mixed-variable architecture with context encoders. Particularly, our context encoder for discrete variables is a surjective flow from which the context-conditioned continuous variables are sampled. Our experiments on rotated MNIST-R, corrupted CIFAR-10C, real-world ATM predictive maintenance and SMAP unsupervised anomaly detection benchmarks show that the proposed ContextFlow++ offers faster stable training and achieves higher performance metrics. Our code is publicly available at [github. com/gudovskiy/contextflow](https: //github. com/gudovskiy/contextflow).

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Efficient Deweahter Mixture-of-Experts with Uncertainty-Aware Feature-Wise Linear Modulation

  • Rongyu Zhang
  • Yulin Luo
  • Jiaming Liu
  • Huanrui Yang
  • Zhen Dong
  • Denis Gudovskiy
  • Tomoyuki Okuno
  • Yohei Nakata

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach has demonstrated outstanding scalability in multi-task learning including low-level upstream tasks such as concurrent removal of multiple adverse weather effects. However, the conventional MoE architecture with parallel Feed Forward Network (FFN) experts leads to significant parameter and computational overheads that hinder its efficient deployment. In addition, the naive MoE linear router is suboptimal in assigning task-specific features to multiple experts which limits its further scalability. In this work, we propose an efficient MoE architecture with weight sharing across the experts. Inspired by the idea of linear feature modulation (FM), our architecture implicitly instantiates multiple experts via learnable activation modulations on a single shared expert block. The proposed Feature Modulated Expert (FME) serves as a building block for the novel Mixture-of-Feature-Modulation-Experts (MoFME) architecture, which can scale up the number of experts with low overhead. We further propose an Uncertainty-aware Router (UaR) to assign task-specific features to different FM modules with well-calibrated weights. This enables MoFME to effectively learn diverse expert functions for multiple tasks. The conducted experiments on the multi-deweather task show that our MoFME outperforms the state-of-the-art in the image restoration quality by 0.1-0.2 dB while saving more than 74% of parameters and 20% inference time over the conventional MoE counterpart. Experiments on the downstream segmentation and classification tasks further demonstrate the generalizability of MoFME to real open-world applications.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Split-Ensemble: Efficient OOD-aware Ensemble via Task and Model Splitting

  • Anthony Chen
  • Huanrui Yang
  • Yulu Gan
  • Denis A. Gudovskiy
  • Zhen Dong 0003
  • Haofan Wang
  • Tomoyuki Okuno
  • Yohei Nakata

Uncertainty estimation is crucial for deep learning models to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. However, the naive deep learning classifiers produce uncalibrated uncertainty for OOD data. Improving the uncertainty estimation typically requires external data for OOD-aware training or considerable costs to build an ensemble. In this work, we improve on uncertainty estimation without extra OOD data or additional inference costs using an alternative Split-Ensemble method. Specifically, we propose a novel subtask-splitting ensemble training objective where a task is split into several complementary subtasks based on feature similarity. Each subtask considers part of the data as in distribution while all the rest as OOD data. Diverse submodels can therefore be trained on each subtask with OOD-aware objectives, learning generalizable uncertainty estimation. To avoid overheads, we enable low-level feature sharing among submodels, building a tree-like Split-Ensemble architecture via iterative splitting and pruning. Empirical study shows Split-Ensemble, without additional computational cost, improves accuracy over a single model by 0. 8%, 1. 8%, and 25. 5% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet, respectively. OOD detection for the same backbone and in-distribution datasets surpasses a single model baseline by 2. 2%, 8. 1%, and 29. 6% in mean AUROC, respectively.

UAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Concurrent Misclassification and Out-of-Distribution Detection for Semantic Segmentation via Energy-Based Normalizing Flow

  • Denis A. Gudovskiy
  • Tomoyuki Okuno
  • Yohei Nakata

Recent semantic segmentation models accurately classify test-time examples that are similar to a training dataset distribution. However, their discriminative closed-set approach is not robust in practical data setups with distributional shifts and out-of-distribution (OOD) classes. As a result, the predicted probabilities can be very imprecise when used as confidence scores at test time. To address this, we propose a generative model for concurrent in-distribution misclassification (IDM) and OOD detection that relies on a normalizing flow framework. The proposed flow-based detector with an energy-based inputs (FlowEneDet) can extend previously deployed segmentation models without their time-consuming retraining. Our FlowEneDet results in a low-complexity architecture with marginal increase in the memory footprint. FlowEneDet achieves promising results on Cityscapes, Cityscapes-C, FishyScapes and SegmentMeIfYouCan benchmarks in IDM/OOD detection when applied to pretrained DeepLabV3+ and SegFormer semantic segmentation models.

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