Abstract: In this paper we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Our framework includes attention and adaptation to different quantization parameters (QPs) in a single model. The attention module exploits global receptive fields that can capture and align long-range correlations between consecutive frames, which can be beneficial for enhancing perceptual quality of videos. The frame to be enhanced is fed into the deep network together with its neighboring frames, and in the first stage features at different depths are extracted. Then extracted features are fed into attention blocks to explore global temporal correlations, followed by a series of upsampling and convolution layers. Finally, the resulting features are processed by the QP-conditional adaptation module which leverages the corresponding QP information. In this way, a single model can be used to enhance adaptively to various QPs without requiring multiple models specific for every QP value, while having similar performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed PeQuENet compared with the state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.

Abstract: Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework.

Abstract: In video compression the luma channel can be useful for predicting chroma channels (Cb, Cr), as has been demonstrated with the Cross-Component Linear Model (CCLM) used in Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. More recently, it has been shown that neural networks can even better capture the relationship among different channels. In this paper, a new attention-based neural network is proposed for cross-component intra prediction. With the goal to simplify neural network design, the new framework consists of four branches: boundary branch and luma branch for extracting features from reference samples, attention branch for fusing the first two branches, and prediction branch for computing the predicted chroma samples. The proposed scheme is integrated into VVC test model together with one additional binary block-level syntax flag which indicates whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate 0.31%/2.36%/2.00% BD-rate reductions on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, on top of the VVC Test Model (VTM) 7.0 which uses CCLM.

Abstract: We propose a new method for exemplar-free class incremental training of ViTs. The main challenge of exemplar-free continual learning is maintaining plasticity of the learner without causing catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. This is often achieved via exemplar replay which can help recalibrate previous task classifiers to the feature drift which occurs when learning new tasks. Exemplar replay, however, comes at the cost of retaining samples from previous tasks which for many applications may not be possible. To address the problem of continual ViT training, we first propose gated class-attention to minimize the drift in the final ViT transformer block. This mask-based gating is applied to class-attention mechanism of the last transformer block and strongly regulates the weights crucial for previous tasks. Importantly, gated class-attention does not require the task-ID during inference, which distinguishes it from other parameter isolation methods. Secondly, we propose a new method of feature drift compensation that accommodates feature drift in the backbone when learning new tasks. The combination of gated class-attention and cascaded feature drift compensation allows for plasticity towards new tasks while limiting forgetting of previous ones. Extensive experiments performed on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet100 demonstrate that our exemplar-free method obtains competitive results when compared to rehearsal based ViT methods.

Abstract: Visual illusions expand our understanding of the visual system by imposing constraints in the models in two different ways: i) visual illusions for humans should induce equivalent illusions in the model, and ii) illusions synthesized from the model should be compelling for human viewers too. These constraints are alternative strategies to find good vision models. Following the first research strategy, recent studies have shown that artificial neural network architectures also have human-like illusory percepts when stimulated with classical hand-crafted stimuli designed to fool humans. In this work we focus on the second (less explored) strategy: we propose a framework to synthesize new visual illusions using the optimization abilities of current automatic differentiation techniques. The proposed framework can be used with classical vision models as well as with more recent artificial neural network architectures. This framework, validated by psychophysical experiments, can be used to study the difference between a vision model and the actual human perception and to optimize the vision model to decrease this difference.

Abstract: GANs have matured in recent years and are able to generate high-resolution, realistic images. However, the computational resources and the data required for the training of high-quality GANs are enormous, and the study of transfer learning of these models is therefore an urgent topic. Many of the available high-quality pretrained GANs are unconditional (like StyleGAN). For many applications, however, conditional GANs are preferable, because they provide more control over the generation process, despite often suffering more training difficulties. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on transferring from high-quality pretrained unconditional GANs to conditional GANs. This requires architectural adaptation of the pretrained GAN to perform the conditioning. To this end, we propose hyper-modulated generative networks that allow for shared and complementary supervision. To prevent the additional weights of the hypernetwork to overfit, with subsequent mode collapse on small target domains, we introduce a self-initialization procedure that does not require any real data to initialize the hypernetwork parameters. To further improve the sample efficiency of the transfer, we apply contrastive learning in the discriminator, which effectively works on very limited batch sizes. In extensive experiments, we validate the efficiency of the hypernetworks, self-initialization and contrastive loss for knowledge transfer on standard benchmarks.

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of incremental meta-learning in which classes are presented incrementally in discrete tasks. We propose Episodic Replay Distillation (ERD), that mixes classes from the current task with exemplars from previous tasks when sampling episodes for meta-learning. To allow the training to benefit from a large as possible variety of classes, which leads to more gener-
alizable feature representations, we propose the cross-task meta loss. Furthermore, we propose episodic replay distillation that also exploits exemplars for improved knowledge distillation. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that ERD surpasses the state-of-the-art. In particular, on the more challenging one-shot, long task sequence scenarios, we reduce the gap between Incremental Meta-Learning and
the joint-training upper bound from 3.5% / 10.1% / 13.4% / 11.7% with the current state-of-the-art to 2.6% / 2.9% / 5.0% / 0.2% with our method on Tiered-ImageNet / Mini-ImageNet / CIFAR100 / CUB, respectively.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the continual learning of Vision Transformers (ViT) for the challenging exemplar-free scenario, with special focus on how to efficiently distill the knowledge of its crucial self-attention mechanism (SAM). Our work takes an initial step towards a surgical investigation of SAM for designing coherent continual learning methods in ViTs. We first carry out an evaluation of established continual learning regularization techniques. We then examine the effect of regularization when applied to two key enablers of SAM: (a) the contextualized embedding layers, for their ability to capture well-scaled representations with respect to the values, and (b) the prescaled attention maps, for carrying value-independent global contextual information. We depict the perks of each distilling strategy on two image recognition benchmarks (CIFAR100 and ImageNet-32) – while (a) leads to a better overall accuracy, (b) helps enhance the rigidity by maintaining competitive performances. Furthermore, we identify the limitation imposed by the symmetric nature of regularization losses. To alleviate this, we propose an asymmetric variant and apply it to the pooled output distillation (POD) loss adapted for ViTs. Our experiments confirm that introducing asymmetry to POD boosts its plasticity while retaining stability across (a) and (b). Moreover, we acknowledge low forgetting measures for all the compared methods, indicating that ViTs might be naturally inclined continual learners. 1