State Space Models (SSMs) have recently enjoyed a rise to prominence in the field of deep learning for sequence modeling, especially as an alternative to Transformers. Their success stems from avoiding two well-known drawbacks of attention-based models: quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length and inability to model long-range dependencies. The SSM variant Mamba has demonstrated performance comparable to Transformers without any form of attention, thanks to the use of a selective mechanism for the state parameters. Selectivity, however, is only evaluated empirically and the reasons of its effectiveness remain unclear. In this work, we show how selectivity is related to the sequence processing. Our analysis shows that selective time intervals in Mamba act as linear approximators of information. Then, we propose our SeRpEnt architecture, a SSM that further exploits selectivity to compress sequences in an information-aware fashion. It employs a resampling mechanism that aggregates elements based on their information content. Our empirical results in the Long Range Arena benchmark and other language modeling tasks show benefits of the SeRpEnt's resampling mechanism.

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) can model data distributions with expressive infinite-length architectures. But this modeling involves computationally expensive process of solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE) during maximum likelihood training. Recently proposed flow matching (FM) framework allows to substantially simplify the training phase using a regression objective with the interpolated forward vector field. In this paper, we propose an interpolant-free dual flow matching (DFM) approach without explicit assumptions about the modeled vector field. DFM optimizes the forward and, additionally, a reverse vector field model using a novel objective that facilitates bijectivity of the forward and reverse transformations. Our experiments with the SMAP unsupervised anomaly detection show advantages of DFM when compared to the CNF trained with either maximum likelihood or FM objectives with the state-of-the-art performance metrics.

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 https://github.com/gudovskiy/contextflow.

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 baselines in the image restoration quality by 0.1-0.2 dB and achieves SOTA-compatible performance while saving more than 72% of parameters and 39% 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.

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.

AutoAugment has sparked an interest in automated augmentation methods for deep learning models. These methods estimate image transformation policies for train data that improve generalization to test data. While recent papers evolved in the direction of decreasing policy search complexity, we show that those methods are not robust when applied to biased and noisy data. To overcome these limitations, we reformulate AutoAugment as a generalized automated dataset optimization (AutoDO) task that minimizes the distribution shift between test data and distorted train dataset. In our AutoDO model, we explicitly estimate a set of per-point hyperparameters to flexibly change distribution of train data. In particular, we include hyperparameters for augmentation, loss weights, and soft-labels that are jointly estimated using implicit differentiation. We develop a theoretical probabilistic interpretation of this framework using Fisher information and show that its complexity scales linearly with the dataset size. Our experiments on SVHN, CIFAR-10/100, and ImageNet classification show up to 9.3% improvement for biased datasets with label noise compared to prior methods and, importantly, up to 36.6% gain for underrepresented SVHN classes.