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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently attracted enormous research interest since their event-driven and brain-inspired structure enables low-power computation. In image recognition tasks, the best results are achieved by SNN so far utilizing ANN-SNN conversion methods that replace activation functions in artificial neural networks~(ANNs) with integrate-and-fire neurons. Compared to source ANNs, converted SNNs usually suffer from accuracy loss and require a considerable number of time steps to achieve competitive accuracy. We find that the performance degradation of converted SNN stems from the fact that the information capacity of spike trains in transferred networks is smaller than that of activation values in source ANN, resulting in less information being passed during SNN inference.
 
 To better correlate ANN and SNN for better performance, we propose a conversion framework to mitigate the gap between the activation value of source ANN and the generated spike train of target SNN. The conversion framework originates from exploring an identical relation in the conversion and exploits temporal separation scheme and novel neuron model for the relation to hold. We demonstrate almost lossless ANN-SNN conversion using SpikeConverter for VGG-16, ResNet-20/34, and MobileNet-v2 SNNs on challenging datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Our results also show that SpikeConverter achieves the abovementioned accuracy across different network architectures and datasets using 32X - 512X fewer inference time-steps than state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion methods.

AAAI 2022

SpikeConverter: An Efficient Conversion Framework Zipping the Gap between Artificial Neural Networks and Spiking Neural Networks

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

technical paper

Some applications may require performing face recognition (FR) on third-party servers, which could be accessed by attackers 
 with malicious intents to compromise the privacy of users' face information. This paper advocates a practical privacy-preserving FR scheme without key management realized in the frequency domain. The new scheme first collects the components of the same frequency from different blocks of a face image to form component channels. Only part of the channels are retained and fed into the analysis network that performs an interpretable privacy-accuracy trade-off analysis to identify channels important for face image visualization but not crucial for maintaining high FR accuracy. For this purpose, the loss function of the analysis network consists of the empirical FR error loss and a face visualization penalty term, and the network is trained in an end-to-end manner. We find that with the developed analysis network, more than 94% of the image energy can be dropped while the face recognition accuracy stays almost undegraded. In order to further protect the remaining frequency components, we propose a fast masking method. Effectiveness of the new scheme in removing the visual information of face images while maintaining their distinguishability is validated over several large face datasets. Results show that the proposed scheme achieves a recognition performance and inference time comparable to ArcFace operating on original face images directly.

Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition in the Frequency Domain

The 2:4 structured sparsity pattern released by NVIDIA Ampere architecture, requiring four consecutive values containing at least two zeros, enables doubling math throughput for matrix multiplications. Recent works mainly focus on inference speedup via 2:4 sparsity while training acceleration has been largely overwhelmed where backpropagation consumes around 70% of the training time. However, unlike inference, training speedup with structured pruning is nontrivial due to the need to maintain the fidelity of gradients and reduce the additional overhead of performing 2:4 sparsity online. For the first time, this article proposes fully sparse training (FST) where `fully' indicates that ALL matrix multiplications in forward/backward propagation are structurally pruned while maintaining accuracy. To this end, we begin with saliency analysis, investigating the sensitivity of different sparse objects to structured pruning. Based on the observation of spatial similarity among activations, we propose pruning activations with fixed 2:4 masks. Moreover, an Information Restoration block is proposed to retrieve the lost information, which can be implemented by efficient gradient-shift operation. Evaluation of accuracy and efficiency shows that we can achieve 2Ã— training acceleration with negligible accuracy degradation on challenging large-scale classification and detection tasks.

Towards Fully Sparse Training: Information Restoration with Spatial Similarity

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have drawn extensive interest due to the unique probabilistic representation framework.
 However, Bayesian neural networks have limited publicized deployments because of the relatively poor model performance in real-world applications.
 In this paper, we argue that the randomness of sampling in Bayesian neural networks causes errors in the updating of model parameters during training and some sampled models with poor performance in testing.
 To solve this, we propose to train Bayesian neural networks with Adversarial Distribution as a theoretical solution. 
 To avoid the difficulty of calculating Adversarial Distribution analytically, we further present the Adversarial Sampling method as an approximation in practice. 
 We conduct extensive experiments with multiple network structures on different datasets, e.g., CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. 
 Experimental results validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the Adversarial Sampling on improving model performance.
 Additionally, models trained with Adversarial Sampling still keep their ability to model uncertainties and perform better when predictions are retained according to the uncertainties, which further verifies the generality of the Adversarial Sampling approach.

Improving Bayesian Neural Networks by Adversarial Sampling

Continual learning is an intellectual ability of artificial agents to learn new streaming labels from sequential data. The main impediment to continual learning is catastrophic forgetting, a severe performance degradation on previously learned tasks. Although simply replaying all previous data or continuously adding the model parameters could alleviate the issue, it is impractical in real-world applications due to the limited available resources. Inspired by the mechanism of the human brain to deepen its past impression, we propose a novel framework, Deep Retrieval and Imagination (DRI), which consists of two components: 1) an embedding network that constructs a unified embedding space without adding model parameters on the arrival of new tasks; and 2) a generative model to produce additional (imaginary) data based on the limited memory. By retrieving the past experiences and corresponding imaginary data, DRI distills knowledge and rebalances the embedding space to further mitigate forgetting. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that DRI can reduce the loss approximation error and improve the robustness through retrieval and imagination, bringing better generalizability to the network. Extensive experiments show that DRI performs significantly better than the existing state-of-the-art continual learning methods and effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting.

Continual Learning Through Retrieval and Imagination

Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) has made significant progress in producing realistic textures using an external reference (Ref) image. However, existing RefSR methods obtain high-quality correspondence matchings consuming quadratic computation resources with respect to the input size, limiting its application. Moreover, these approaches usually suffer from scale misalignments between the low-resolution (LR) image and Ref image. In this paper, we propose an Accelerated Multi-Scale Aggregation network (AMSA) for Reference-based Super-Resolution, including Coarse-to-Fine Embedded PatchMatch (CFE-PatchMatch) and Multi-Scale Dynamic Aggregation (MSDA) module. To improve matching efficiency, we design a novel Embedded PatchMacth scheme with random samples propagation, which involves end-to-end training with asymptotic linear computational cost to the input size. To further reduce computational cost and speed up convergence, we apply the coarse-to-fine strategy on Embedded PatchMacth constituting CFE-PatchMatch. To fully leverage reference information across multiple scales and enhance robustness to scale misalignment, we develop the MSDA module consisting of Dynamic Aggregation and Multi-Scale Aggregation. The Dynamic Aggregation corrects minor scale misalignment by dynamically aggregating features, and the Multi-Scale Aggregation brings robustness to large scale misalignment by fusing multi-scale information. Experimental results show that the proposed AMSA achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Coarse-to-Fine Embedded PatchMatch and Multi-Scale Dynamic Aggregation for Reference-Based Super-Resolution

Subject-invariant facial action unit (AU) recognition remains challenging for the reason that the data distribution varies among subjects. In this paper, we propose a causal inference framework for subject-invariant facial action unit recognition. To illustrate the causal effect existing in AU recognition task, we formulate the causalities among facial images, subjects, latent AU semantic relations, and estimated AU occurrence probabilities via a structural causal model. By constructing such a causal diagram, we clarify the causal-effect among variables and propose a plug-in causal intervention module, CIS, to deconfound the confounder Subject in the causal diagram. Extensive experiments conducted on two commonly used AU benchmark datasets, BP4D and DISFA, show the effectiveness of our CIS, and the model with CIS inserted, CISNet, has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Causal Intervention for Subject-Deconfounded Facial Action Unit Recognition

As a popular deep neural networks (DNN) compression technique, knowledge distillation (KD) has attracted increasing attentions recently. Existing KD methods usually utilize one kind of knowledge in an intermediate layer of DNN for classification tasks to transfer useful information from cumbersome teacher networks to compact student networks. However, this paradigm is not very suitable for semantic segmentation, a comprehensive vision task based on both pixel-level and contextual information, since it cannot provide rich information for distillation. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-knowledge aggregation and transfer (MKAT) framework to comprehensively distill knowledge within an intermediate layer for semantic segmentation. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of three parts: Independent Transformers and Encoders module (ITE), Auxiliary Prediction Branch (APB), and Mutual Label Calibration (MLC) mechanism, which can take advantage of abundant knowledge from intermediate features. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three segmentation datasets: Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, and CamVid, showing that MKAT outperforms the other KD methods.

Multi-Knowledge Aggregation and Transfer for Semantic Segmentation

Understanding an articulated 3D object with its movable parts is an essential skill for an intelligent agent. This paper presents a novel approach to parse 3D part mobility from point cloud sequences. The key innovation is learning explicit point correspondence from a raw unordered point cloud sequence. We propose a novel deep network called P^3-Net to parallelize trajectory feature extraction and point correspondence establishment, performing joint optimization between them. Specifically, we design a Match-LSTM module to reaggregate point features among different frames by a point correspondence matrix, a.k.a. the matching matrix. To obtain this matrix, an attention module is proposed to calculate the point correspondence. Moreover, we implement a Gumbel-Sinkhorn module to reduce the many-to-one relationship for better point correspondence. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, including the motion dataset and the PartNet dataset. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms SOTA methods on various 3D parsing tasks of part mobility, including motion flow prediction, motion part segmentation, and motion attribute (i.e. axis & range) estimation. Moreover, we integrate our approach into a robot perception module to validate its robustness.

P^3-Net: Part Mobility Parsing from Point Cloud Sequences via Learning Explicit Point Correspondence

The demands of the modern world are increasingly responsible for causing psychological burdens and bringing adverse impacts on our mental health. As a result, neural conversational agents with empathetic responding and distress management capabilities have recently gained popularity. However, existing end-to-end empathetic conversational agents often generate generic and repetitive empathetic statements such as "I am sorry to hear that", which fail to convey specificity to a given situation. Due to the lack of controllability in such models, they also impose the risk of generating toxic responses. Chatbots leveraging reasoning over knowledge graphs is seen as an efficient and fail-safe solution over end-to-end models. However, such resources are limited in the context of emotional distress. To address this, we introduce HEAL, a knowledge graph developed based on 1M distress narratives and their corresponding consoling responses curated from Reddit. It consists of 22K nodes identifying different types of stressors, speaker expectations, responses, and feedback types associated with distress dialogues and forms 104K connections between different types of nodes. Each node is associated with one of 41 affective states. Statistical and visual analysis conducted on HEAL reveals emotional dynamics between speakers and listeners in distress-oriented conversations and identifies useful response patterns leading to emotional relief. Automatic and human evaluation experiments show that HEAL's responses are more diverse, empathetic, and reliable compared to the baselines.

HEAL: A Knowledge Graph for Distress Management Conversations

Current state-of-the-art saliency detection models rely heavily on large datasets of accurate pixel-wise annotations, but manually labeling pixels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. There are some weakly supervised methods developed for alleviating the problem, such as image label, bounding box label, and scribble label, while point label still has not been explored in this field. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection method using point supervision. To infer the saliency map, we first design an adaptive masked flood filling algorithm to generate pseudo labels. Then we develop a transformer-based point-supervised saliency detection model to produce the first round of saliency maps. However, due to the sparseness of the label, the weakly supervised model tends to degenerate into a general foreground detection model. To address this issue, we propose a Non-Salient Suppression (NSS) method to optimize the erroneous saliency maps generated in the first round and leverage them for the second round of training. Moreover, we build a new point-supervised dataset (P-DUTS) by relabeling the DUTS dataset. In P-DUTS, there is only one labeled point for each salient object. Comprehensive experiments on five largest benchmark datasets demonstrate our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods trained with the stronger supervision and even surpass several fully supervised state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/shuyonggao/PSOD.

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