Despite satisfactory results on "easy" cases of single image reflection separation, prior dual-stream methods still suffer from considerable performance degradation when facing complex ones, i.e., the transmission layer is densely entangled with the reflection having a wide distribution of spatial intensity. The main reasons come from the lack of concern on the feature correlation during interaction, and the limited receptive field. To remedy these deficiencies, this paper presents a Dual-Stream Interactive Transformer (DSIT) design. Specifically, we devise a dual-attention interactive structure that embraces a dual-stream self-attention and a layer-aware dual-stream cross-attention mechanism to simultaneously capture intra-layer and inter-layer feature correlations. Meanwhile, the introduction of attention mechanisms can also mitigate the receptive field limitation. We modulate single-stream pre-trained Transformer embeddings with dual-stream convolutional features through cross-architecture interactions to provide richer semantic priors, thereby further relieving the ill-posedness of the problem. Extensive experimental results reveal the merits of the proposed DSIT over other state-of-the-art alternatives. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mingcv/DSIT.

Pre-training (PT) followed by fine-tuning (FT) is an effective method for training neural networks, and has led to significant performance improvements in many domains. PT can incorporate various design choices such as task and data reweighting strategies, augmentation policies, and noise models, all of which can significantly impact the quality of representations learned. The hyperparameters introduced by these strategies therefore must be tuned appropriately. However, setting the values of these hyperparameters is challenging. Most existing methods either struggle to scale to high dimensions, are too slow and memory-intensive, or cannot be directly applied to the two-stage PT and FT learning process.

The top-k operation, i.e., finding the k largest or smallest elements from a collection of scores, is an important model component, which is widely used in information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. However, if the top-k operation is implemented in an algorithmic way, e.g., using bubble algorithm, the resulting model cannot be trained in an end-to-end way using prevalent gradient descent algorithms. This is because these implementations typically involve swapping indices, whose gradient cannot be computed. Moreover, the corresponding mapping from the input scores to the indicator vector of whether this element belongs to the top-k set is essentially discontinuous. To address the issue, we propose a smoothed approximation, namely the SOFT (Scalable Optimal transport-based diFferenTiable) top-k operator. Specifically, our SOFT top-k operator approximates the output of the top-k operation as the solution of an Entropic Optimal Transport (EOT) problem. The gradient of the SOFT operator can then be efficiently approximated based on the optimality conditions of EOT problem. We apply the proposed operator to the k-nearest neighbors and beam search algorithms, and demonstrate improved performance.