Knowledge distillation (KD) emerges as a promising yet challenging technique for compressing deep neural networks, aiming to transfer extensive learning representations from proficient and computationally intensive teacher models to compact student models. However, current KD methods for super-resolution (SR) models have limited performance and restricted applications, since the characteristics of SR tasks are overlooked. In this paper, we put forth an approach from the perspective of effective data utilization, namely, the Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation (DUKD), which facilitates the student model by the prior knowledge the teacher provided through the upcycled in-domain data derived from the input images. Besides, for the first time, we realize the label consistency regularization in KD for SR models, which is implemented by the paired invertible data augmentations. It constrains the training process of KD and leads to better generalization capability of the student model. The DUKD, due to its versatility, can be applied across a broad spectrum of teacher-student architectures (e.g., CNN and Transformer models) and SR tasks, such as single image SR, real-world SR, and SR quantization, and is in parallel with other compression techniques. Comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that the DUKD method significantly outperforms previous art.

We introduce Efficient Motion Diffusion Model (EMDM) for fast and high-quality human motion generation. Although previous motion diffusion models have shown impressive results, they struggle to achieve fast generation while maintaining high-quality human motions. Motion latent diffusion has been proposed for efficient motion generation. However, effectively learning a latent space can be non-trivial in such a two-stage manner. Meanwhile, accelerating motion sampling by increasing the step size, e.g., DDIM, typically leads to a decline in motion quality due to the inapproximation of complex data distributions when naively increasing the step size. In this paper, we propose EMDM that allows for much fewer sample steps for fast motion generation by modeling the complex denoising distribution during multiple sampling steps. Specifically, we develop a Conditional Denoising Diffusion GAN to capture multimodal data distributions conditioned on both control signals, i.e., textual description and denoising time step. By modeling the complex data distribution, a larger sampling step size and fewer steps are achieved during motion synthesis, significantly accelerating the generation process. To effectively capture the human dynamics and reduce undesired artifacts, we employ motion geometric loss during network training, which improves the motion quality and training efficiency. As a result, EMDM achieves a remarkable speed-up at the generation stage while maintaining high-quality motion generation in terms of fidelity and diversity.

Gaussian Process Upper Confidence Bound (GP-UCB) is one of the most popular methods for optimizing black-box functions with noisy observations, due to its simple structure and superior performance. Its empirical successes lead to a natural, yet unresolved question: Is GP-UCB regret optimal? In this paper, we offer the first generally affirmative answer to this important open question in the Bayesian optimization literature. We establish new upper bounds on both the simple and cumulative regret of GP-UCB when the objective function to optimize admits certain smoothness property. These upper bounds match the known minimax lower bounds (up to logarithmic factors independent of the feasible region's dimensionality) for optimizing functions with the same smoothness. Intriguingly, our findings indicate that, with the same level of exploration, GP-UCB can simultaneously achieve optimality in both simple and cumulative regret. The crux of our analysis hinges on a refined uniform error bound for online estimation of functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. This error bound, which we derive from empirical process theory, is of independent interest, and its potential applications may reach beyond the scope of this study.

In generative modeling, numerous successful approaches leverage a low-dimensional latent space, e.g., Stable Diffusion models the latent space induced by an encoder and generates images through a paired decoder. Although the selection of the latent space is empirically pivotal, determining the optimal choice and the process of identifying it remain unclear. In this study, we aim to shed light on this under-explored topic by rethinking the latent space from the perspective of model complexity. Our investigation starts with the classic generative adversarial networks (GANs). Inspired by the GAN training objective, we propose a novel "distance" between the latent and data distributions, whose minimization coincides with that of the generator complexity. The minimizer of this distance is characterized as the optimal data-dependent latent that most effectively capitalizes on the generator's capacity. Then, we consider parameterizing such a latent distribution by an encoder network and propose a two-stage training strategy called Decoupled Autoencoder (DAE), where the encoder is only updated in the first stage with an auxiliary decoder and then frozen in the second stage while the actual decoder is being trained. DAE can improve the latent distribution and as a result, improve the generative performance. Our theoretical analyses are corroborated by comprehensive experiments on various models such as VQGAN and Diffusion Transformer, where our modifications yield significant improvements in sample quality with decreased model complexity.

Guidance in conditional diffusion generation is of great importance for sample quality and controllability. However, existing guidance schemes are to be desired. On one hand, mainstream methods such as classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance both require extra training with labeled data, which is time-consuming and unable to adapt to new conditions. On the other hand, training-free methods such as universal guidance, though more flexible, have yet to demonstrate comparable performance. In this work, through a comprehensive investigation into the design space, we show that it is possible to achieve significant performance improvements over existing guidance schemes by leveraging off-the-shelf classifiers in a training-free fashion, enjoying the best of both worlds. Employing calibration as a general guideline, we propose several pre-conditioning techniques to better exploit pretrained off-the-shelf classifiers for guiding diffusion generation. Extensive experiments on ImageNet validate our proposed method, showing that state-of-the-art diffusion models (DDPM, EDM, DiT) can be further improved (up to 20%) using off-the-shelf classifiers with barely any extra computational cost. With the proliferation of publicly available pretrained classifiers, our proposed approach has great potential and can be readily scaled up to text-to-image generation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/AlexMaOLS/EluCD/tree/main.

Pseudo labeling (PL) is a wide-applied strategy to enlarge the labeled dataset by self-annotating the potential samples during the training process. Several works have shown that it can improve the graph learning model performance in general. However, we notice that the incorrect labels can be fatal to the graph training process. Inappropriate PL may result in the performance degrading, especially on graph data where the noise can propagate. Surprisingly, the corresponding error is seldom theoretically analyzed in the literature. In this paper, we aim to give deep insights of PL on graph learning models. We first present the error analysis of PL strategy by showing that the error is bounded by the confidence of PL threshold and consistency of multi-view prediction. Then, we theoretically illustrate the effect of PL on convergence property. Based on the analysis, we propose a cautious pseudo labeling methodology in which we pseudo label the samples with highest confidence and multi-view consistency. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves graph learning process and outperforms other PL strategies on link prediction and node classification tasks.

Contrastive learning, especially self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL), has achieved great success in extracting powerful features from unlabeled data. In this work, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of SSCL and uncover its connection to the classic data visualization method, stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE) (Hinton & Roweis, 2002), whose goal is to preserve pairwise distances. From the perspective of preserving neighboring information, SSCL can be viewed as a special case of SNE with the input space pairwise similarities specified by data augmentation. The established correspondence facilitates deeper theoretical understanding of learned features of SSCL, as well as methodological guidelines for practical improvement. Specifically, through the lens of SNE, we provide novel analysis on domain-agnostic augmentations, implicit bias and robustness of learned features. To illustrate the practical advantage, we demonstrate that the modifications from SNE to t-SNE (Van der Maaten & Hinton, 2008) can also be adopted in the SSCL setting, achieving significant improvement in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization. In contrast to supervised learning, SSCL learns the representation through a large number of unlabeled data and artificially defined self-supervision signals, i.e., regarding the augmented views of a data sample as positive pairs and randomly sampled data as negative pairs. By enforcing the features of positive pairs to align and those of negative pairs to be distant, SSCL produces discriminative features with state-of-the-art performance for various downstream tasks. Despite the empirical success, the theoretical understanding is under-explored as to how the learned features depend on the data and augmentation, how different components in SSCL work and what are the implicit biases when there exist multiple empirical loss minimizers. For instance, SSCL methods are widely adopted for pretraining, whose feature mappings are to be utilized for various downstream tasks which are usually out-of-distribution (OOD). The distribution shift poses great challenges for the feature learning process with extra requirement for robustness and OOD generalization (Arjovsky et al., 2019; Krueger et al., 2021; Bai et al., 2021; He et al., 2020b; Zhao et al., 2023; Dong et al., 2022), which demands deeper understanding of the SSCL methods. The goal of SSCL is to learn the feature representations from data. For this problem, one classic method is SNE (Hinton et al., 2006) and its various extensions.

Random smoothing data augmentation is a unique form of regularization that can prevent overfitting by introducing noise to the input data, encouraging the model to learn more generalized features. Despite its success in various applications, there has been a lack of systematic study on the regularization ability of random smoothing. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by presenting a framework for random smoothing regularization that can adaptively and effectively learn a wide range of ground truth functions belonging to the classical Sobolev spaces. Specifically, we investigate two underlying function spaces: the Sobolev space of low intrinsic dimension, which includes the Sobolev space in $D$-dimensional Euclidean space or low-dimensional sub-manifolds as special cases, and the mixed smooth Sobolev space with a tensor structure. By using random smoothing regularization as novel convolution-based smoothing kernels, we can attain optimal convergence rates in these cases using a kernel gradient descent algorithm, either with early stopping or weight decay. It is noteworthy that our estimator can adapt to the structural assumptions of the underlying data and avoid the curse of dimensionality. This is achieved through various choices of injected noise distributions such as Gaussian, Laplace, or general polynomial noises, allowing for broad adaptation to the aforementioned structural assumptions of the underlying data. The convergence rate depends only on the effective dimension, which may be significantly smaller than the actual data dimension. We conduct numerical experiments on simulated data to validate our theoretical results.

Due to the inability to interact with the environment, offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods face the challenge of estimating the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) points. Most existing methods exclude the OOD areas or restrict the value of $Q$ function. However, these methods either are over-conservative or suffer from model uncertainty prediction. In this paper, we propose an authorized probabilistic-control policy learning (APAC) method. The proposed method learns the distribution characteristics of the feasible states/actions by utilizing the flow-GAN model. Specifically, APAC avoids taking action in the low probability density region of behavior policy, while allows exploration in the authorized high probability density region. Theoretical proofs are provided to justify the advantage of APAC. Empirically, APAC outperforms existing alternatives on a variety of simulated tasks, and yields higher expected returns.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to learn intrinsic features without labels. Despite the diverse architectures of SSL methods, the projection head always plays an important role in improving the performance of the downstream task. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of the projection head in SSL. Specifically, the projection head targets the uniformity part of SSL, which pushes the dissimilar samples away from each other, thus enabling the encoder to focus on extracting semantic features. Based on this understanding, we propose a Representation Evaluation Design (RED) in SSL models in which a shortcut connection between the representation and the projection vectors is built. Extensive experiments with different architectures, including SimCLR, MoCo-V2, and SimSiam, on various datasets, demonstrate that the representation evaluation design can consistently improve the baseline models in the downstream tasks. The learned representation from the RED-SSL models shows superior robustness to unseen augmentations and out-of-distribution data.