Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.

Abstract: Data-driven paradigms using machine learning are becoming ubiquitous in image processing and communications. In particular, image-to-image (I2I) translation is a generic and widely used approach to image processing problems, such as image synthesis, style transfer, and image restoration. At the same time, neural image compression has emerged as a data-driven alternative to traditional coding approaches in visual communications. In this paper, we study the combination of these two paradigms into a joint I2I compression and translation framework, focusing on multi-domain image synthesis. We first propose distributed I2I translation by integrating quantization and entropy coding into an I2I translation framework (i.e. I2Icodec). In practice, the image compression functionality (i.e. autoencoding) is also desirable, requiring to deploy alongside I2Icodec a regular image codec. Thus, we further propose a unified framework that allows both translation and autoencoding capabilities in a single codec. Adaptive residual blocks conditioned on the translation/compression mode provide flexible adaptation to the desired functionality. The experiments show promising results in both I2I translation and image compression using a single model.

Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data, but often that is not possible (e.g., due to data privacy or intellectual property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the observation that target data, which might not align with the source domain classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be assigned to reciprocal neighbors. To aggregate information with more context, we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. Furthermore, we consider the density around each target sample, which can alleviate the negative impact of potential outliers. In the experimental results we verify that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets.