Mutual learning, in which multiple networks learn by sharing their knowledge, improves the performance of each network. However, the performance of ensembles of networks that have undergone mutual learning does not improve significantly from that of normal ensembles without mutual learning, even though the performance of each network has improved significantly. This may be due to the relationship between the knowledge in mutual learning and the individuality of the networks in the ensemble. In this study, we propose an ensemble method using knowledge transfer to improve the accuracy of ensembles by introducing a loss design that promotes diversity among networks in mutual learning. We use an attention map as knowledge, which represents the probability distribution and information in the middle layer of a network. There are many ways to combine networks and loss designs for knowledge transfer methods. Therefore, we use the automatic optimization of knowledge-transfer graphs to consider a variety of knowledge-transfer methods by graphically representing conventional mutual-learning and distillation methods and optimizing each element through hyperparameter search. The proposed method consists of a mechanism for constructing an ensemble in a knowledge-transfer graph, attention loss, and a loss design that promotes diversity among networks. We explore optimal ensemble learning by optimizing a knowledge-transfer graph to maximize ensemble accuracy. From exploration of graphs and evaluation experiments using the datasets of Stanford Dogs, Stanford Cars, and CUB-200-2011, we confirm that the proposed method is more accurate than a conventional ensemble method.
University of Otago（奥塔哥大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
We present an end-to-end deep network for fine-grained visual categorization called Collaborative Convolutional Network (CoCoNet). The network uses a collaborative layer after the convolutional layers to represent an image as an optimal weighted collaboration of features learned from training samples as a whole rather than one at a time. This gives CoCoNet more power to encode the fine-grained nature of the data with limited samples. We perform a detailed study of the performance with 1-stage and 2-stage transfer learning. The ablation study shows that the proposed method outperforms its const…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；UBTECH Sydney AI Centre（优必选悉尼人工智能中心）；Australian Centre for Field Robotics（澳大利亚现场机器人研究中心）
Data augmentation has been proved effective in training deep models. Existing data augmentation methods tackle the fine-grained problem by blending image pairs and fusing corresponding labels according to the statistics of mixed pixels, which produces additional noise harmful to the performance of networks. Motivated by this, we present a simple yet effective cross ensemble knowledge distillation (CEKD) model for fine-grained feature learning. We innovatively propose a cross distillation module to provide additional supervision to alleviate the noise problem, and propose a collaborative ensemb…
Traditional knowledge distillation uses a two-stage training strategy to transfer knowledge from a high-capacity teacher model to a compact student model, which relies heavily on the pre-trained teacher. Recent online knowledge distillation alleviates this limitation by collaborative learning, mutual learning and online ensembling, following a one-stage end-to-end training fashion. However, collaborative learning and mutual learning fail to construct an online high-capacity teacher, whilst online ensembling ignores the collaboration among branches and its logit summation impedes the further op…
School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学光电与智能研究院）；School of Computer Science and School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院与光电与智能研究院）
In recent years, hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) has become an active topic and plays a significant role in military and civilian fields. As a classic HAD method, the collaboration representation-based detector (CRD) has attracted extensive attention and in-depth research. Despite the good performance of the CRD method, its computational cost mainly arising from the sliding dual window strategy is too high for wide applications. Moreover, it takes multiple repeated tests to determine the size of the dual window, which needs to be reset once the dataset changes and cannot be identified in…
Automatic snake species recognition is important because it has vast potential to help lower deaths and disabilities caused by snakebites. We introduce our solution in SnakeCLEF 2022 for fine-grained snake species recognition on a heavy long-tailed class distribution. First, a network architecture is designed to extract and fuse features from multiple modalities, i.e. photograph from visual modality and geographic locality information from language modality. Then, logit adjustment based methods are studied to relieve the impact caused by the severe class imbalance. Next, a combination of super…
Deep neural networks have significantly improved appearance-based gaze estimation accuracy. However, it still suffers from unsatisfactory performance when generalizing the trained model to new domains, e.g., unseen environments or persons. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play gaze adaptation framework (PnP-GA), which is an ensemble of networks that learn collaboratively with the guidance of outliers. Since our proposed framework does not require ground-truth labels in the target domain, the existing gaze estimation networks can be directly plugged into PnP-GA and generalize the algorithms…
Huawei Cloud（华为云）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation~(MSDA) aims at adapting models trained on multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-source domain adaptation framework based on collaborative learning for semantic segmentation. Firstly, a simple image translation method is introduced to align the pixel value distribution to reduce the gap between source domains and target domain to some extent. Then, to fully exploit the essential semantic information across source domains, we propose a collaborative learning method for domain adaptation w…
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；Osaka Prefecture University（大阪府立大学）；National University of Science and Technology (NUST)（国立科技大学（NUST））；Opthalmology Clinic（眼科诊所）
Visual artefacts of early diabetic retinopathy in retinal fundus images are usually small in size, inconspicuous, and scattered all over retina. Detecting diabetic retinopathy requires physicians to look at the whole image and fixate on some specific regions to locate potential biomarkers of the disease. Therefore, getting inspiration from ophthalmologist, we propose to combine coarse-grained classifiers that detect discriminating features from the whole images, with a recent breed of fine-grained classifiers that discover and pay particular attention to pathologically significant regions. To …
Collaborative Representation Classification (CRC) for face recognition attracts a lot attention recently due to its good recognition performance and fast speed. Compared to Sparse Representation Classification (SRC), CRC achieves a comparable recognition performance with 10-1000 times faster speed. In this paper, we propose to ensemble several CRC models to promote the recognition rate, where each CRC model uses different and divergent randomly generated biologically-inspired features as the face representation. The proposed ensemble algorithm calculates an ensemble weight for each CRC model t…
A discriminative ensemble tracker employs multiple classifiers, each of which casts a vote on all of the obtained samples. The votes are then aggregated in an attempt to localize the target object. Such method relies on collective competence and the diversity of the ensemble to approach the target/non-target classification task from different views. However, by updating all of the ensemble using a shared set of samples and their final labels, such diversity is lost or reduced to the diversity provided by the underlying features or internal classifiers' dynamics. Additionally, the classifiers d…
Multi-level Collaborative Distillation Meets Global Workspace Model: A Unified Framework for OCIL
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电信工程学院）
This paper introduces a simple but highly efficient ensemble for robust texture classification, which can effectively deal with translation, scale and changes of significant viewpoint problems. The proposed method first inherits the spirit of spatial pyramid matching model (SPM), which is popular for encoding spatial distribution of local features, but in a flexible way, partitioning the original image into different levels and incorporating different overlapping patterns of each level. This flexible setup helps capture the informative features and produces sufficient local feature codes by so…
Video-text retrieval has many real-world applications such as media analytics, surveillance, and robotics. This paper presents the 1st place solution to the video retrieval track of the ICCV VALUE Challenge 2021. We present a simple yet effective approach to jointly tackle two video-text retrieval tasks (video retrieval and video corpus moment retrieval) by leveraging the model trained only on the video retrieval task. In addition, we create an ensemble model that achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on all four datasets (TVr, How2r, YouCook2r, and VATEXr) presented in the VALUE Chall…
Shenyang Aerospace University（沈阳航空航天大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Nanjing Tech University（南京工业大学）；University of Technology of Troyes（特鲁瓦技术大学）
As an important research topic in computer vision, fine-grained classification which aims to recognition subordinate-level categories has attracted significant attention. We propose a novel region based ensemble learning network for fine-grained classification. Our approach contains a detection module and a module for classification. The detection module is based on the faster R-CNN framework to locate the semantic regions of the object. The classification module using an ensemble learning method, which trains a set of sub-classifiers for different semantic regions and combines them together t…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；United Imaging Intelligence（联影智能）
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where local nodes collaboratively train a central model while the training data remains decentralized. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they suffer from communication bottlenecks. More importantly, they risk privacy leakage. In this work, we develop a privacy preserving and communication efficient method in a FL framework with one-shot offline knowledge distillation using unlabeled, cross-domain public data. We propose a quantized a…
Technical Report for the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Pretraining-Diverse Ensemble of Foundation Vision Encoders for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding
LION Lab, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学 LION 实验室）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Four Eyes Are Better Than Two: Harnessing the Collaborative Potential of Large Models via Differentiated Thinking and Complementary Ensembles
Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
FedDCT: Federated Learning of Large Convolutional Neural Networks on Resource Constrained Devices using Divide and Collaborative Training
VinUniversity（VinUniversity（温纳大学））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
University of Otago（奥塔哥大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Any generic deep machine learning algorithm is essentially a function fitting exercise, where the network tunes its weights and parameters to learn discriminatory features by minimizing some cost function. Though the network tries to learn the optimal feature space, it seldom tries to learn an optimal distance metric in the cost function, and hence misses out on an additional layer of abstraction. We present a simple effective way of achieving this by learning a generic Mahalanabis distance in a collaborative loss function in an end-to-end fashion with any standard convolutional network as the…
Semi-supervised video object segmentation is a fundamental yet Challenging task in computer vision. Embedding matching based CFBI series networks have achieved promising results by foreground-background integration approach. Despite its superior performance, these works exhibit distinct shortcomings, especially the false predictions caused by little appearance instances in first frame, even they could easily be recognized by previous frame. Moreover, they suffer from object's occlusion and error drifts. In order to overcome the shortcomings , we propose Collaborative Attention Memory Network w…
Descriptive region features extracted by object detection networks have played an important role in the recent advancements of image captioning. However, they are still criticized for the lack of contextual information and fine-grained details, which in contrast are the merits of traditional grid features. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual-Level Collaborative Transformer (DLCT) network to realize the complementary advantages of the two features. Concretely, in DLCT, these two features are first processed by a novelDual-way Self Attenion (DWSA) to mine their intrinsic properties, where a…
MoGen: A Unified Collaborative Framework for Controllable Multi-Object Image Generation
Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工学院）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学计算机科学与工程系）；School of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The networks trained on the long-tailed dataset vary remarkably, despite the same training settings, which shows the great uncertainty in long-tailed learning. To alleviate the uncertainty, we propose a Nested Collaborative Learning (NCL), which tackles the problem by collaboratively learning multiple experts together. NCL consists of two core components, namely Nested Individual Learning (NIL) and Nested Balanced Online Distillation (NBOD), which focus on the individual supervised learning for each single expert and the knowledge transferring among multiple experts, respectively. To learn rep…
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院国家医学图书馆）
Automated segmentation of tuberculosis (TB)-consistent lesions in chest X-rays (CXRs) using deep learning (DL) methods can help reduce radiologist effort, supplement clinical decision-making, and potentially result in improved patient treatment. The majority of works in the literature discuss training automatic segmentation models using coarse bounding box annotations. However, the granularity of the bounding box annotation could result in the inclusion of a considerable fraction of false positives and negatives at the pixel level that may adversely impact overall semantic segmentation perform…
Prediction of the action outcome is a new challenge for a robot collaboratively working with humans. With the impressive progress in video action recognition in recent years, fine-grained action recognition from video data turns into a new concern. Fine-grained action recognition detects subtle differences of actions in more specific granularity and is significant in many fields such as human-robot interaction, intelligent traffic management, sports training, health caring. Considering that the different outcomes are closely connected to the subtle differences in actions, fine-grained action r…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a key problem in autonomous driving systems. Collaborative perception can incorporate information from spatially diverse sensors and provide significant benefits for improving the perception accuracy of autonomous driving systems. In this work, we consider that the autonomous vehicle uses local point cloud data and combines information from neighboring infrastructures through wireless links for cooperative 3D object detection. However, information sharing among vehicle and infrastructures in predefined communication schemes may result in comm…
University of Twente（特文特大学）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）
Prototype-based methods use interpretable representations to address the black-box nature of deep learning models, in contrast to post-hoc explanation methods that only approximate such models. We propose the Neural Prototype Tree (ProtoTree), an intrinsically interpretable deep learning method for fine-grained image recognition. ProtoTree combines prototype learning with decision trees, and thus results in a globally interpretable model by design. Additionally, ProtoTree can locally explain a single prediction by outlining a decision path through the tree. Each node in our binary tree contain…
FineGen: A VLM-based Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Image-Text Dataset Construction
Shenzhen Polytechnic University（深圳职业技术大学）；Institute of Applied Artificial Intelligence of the Guangdong-Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay Area（粤港澳大湾区应用人工智能研究所）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
