Deep learning (DL) systems have been gaining popularity in critical tasks such as credit evaluation and crime prediction.

To promote better performance-bandwidth trade-off for multi-agent perception, we propose a novel distilled collaboration graph (DiscoGraph) to model trainable, pose-aware, and adaptive collaboration among agents. Our key novelties lie in two aspects. First, we propose a teacher-student framework to train DiscoGraph via knowledge distillation. The teacher model employs an early collaboration with holistic-view inputs; the student model is based on intermediate collaboration with single-view inputs. Our framework trains DiscoGraph by constraining post-collaboration feature maps in the student model to match the correspondences in the teacher model.

Reliable evaluation of adversarial defenses is a challenging task, currently limited to an expert who manually crafts attacks that exploit the defense's inner workings, or to approaches based on ensemble of fixed attacks, none of which may be effective for the specific defense at hand. Our key observation is that adaptive attacks are composed from a set of reusable building blocks that can be formalized in a search space and used to automatically discover attacks for unknown defenses. We evaluated our approach on 24 adversarial defenses and show that it outperforms AutoAttack, the current state-of-the-art tool for reliable evaluation of adversarial defenses: our tool discovered significantly stronger attacks by producing 3.0%-50.8%

Adder neural networks (ANNs) are designed for low energy cost which replace expensive multiplications in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with cheaper additions to yield energy-efficient neural networks and hardware accelerations. Although ANNs achieve satisfactory efficiency, there exist gaps between ANNs and CNNs where the accuracy of ANNs can hardly be compared to CNNs without the assistance of other training tricks, such as knowledge distillation. The inherent discrepancy lies in the similarity measurement between filters and features, however how to alleviate this difference remains unexplored. To locate the potential problem of ANNs, we focus on the property difference due to similarity measurement. We demonstrate that unordered heavy tails in ANNs could be the key component which prevents ANNs from achieving superior classification performance since fatter tails tend to overlap in feature space. Through pre-defining Multivariate Skew Laplace distributions and embedding feature distributions into the loss function, ANN features can be fully controlled and designed for various properties. We further present a novel method for tackling existing heavy tails in ANNs with only a modification of classifier where ANN features are clustered with their tails well-formulated through proposed angle-based constraint on the distribution parameters to encourage high diversity of tails. Experiments conducted on several benchmarks and comparison with other distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach for boosting the performance of ANNs.

We introduce Invertible Dense Networks (i-DenseNets), a more parameter efficient extension of Residual Flows. The method relies on an analysis of the Lipschitz continuity of the concatenation in DenseNets, where we enforce invertibility of the network by satisfying the Lipschitz constant. Furthermore, we propose a learnable weighted concatenation, which not only improves the model performance but also indicates the importance of the concatenated weighted representation. Additionally, we introduce the Concatenated LipSwish as activation function, for which we show how to enforce the Lipschitz condition and which boosts performance. The new architecture, i-DenseNet, out-performs Residual Flow and other flow-based models on density estimation evaluated in bits per dimension, where we utilize an equal parameter budget. Moreover, we show that the proposed model out-performs Residual Flows when trained as a hybrid model where the model is both a generative and a discriminative model.

Dubbing is a post-production process of re-recording actors' dialogues, which is extensively used in filmmaking and video production. It is usually performed manually by professional voice actors who read lines with proper prosody, and in synchronization with the pre-recorded videos. In this work, we propose Neural Dubber, the first neural network model to solve a novel automatic video dubbing (AVD) task: synthesizing human speech synchronized with the given video from the text. Neural Dubber is a multi-modal text-to-speech (TTS) model that utilizes the lip movement in the video to control the prosody of the generated speech. Furthermore, an image-based speaker embedding (ISE) module is developed for the multi-speaker setting, which enables Neural Dubber to generate speech with a reasonable timbre according to the speaker's face. Experiments on the chemistry lecture single-speaker dataset and LRS2 multi-speaker dataset show that Neural Dubber can generate speech audios on par with state-of-the-art TTS models in terms of speech quality. Most importantly, both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that Neural Dubber can control the prosody of synthesized speech by the video, and generate high-fidelity speech temporally synchronized with the video.

Transformer is a new kind of neural architecture which encodes the input data as powerful features via the attention mechanism. Basically, the visual transformers first divide the input images into several local patches and then calculate both representations and their relationship. Since natural images are of high complexity with abundant detail and color information, the granularity of the patch dividing is not fine enough for excavating features of objects in different scales and locations. In this paper, we point out that the attention inside these local patches are also essential for building visual transformers with high performance and we explore a new architecture, namely, Transformer iN Transformer (TNT). Specifically, we regard the local patches (\eg, 16$\times$16) as "visual sentences" and present to further divide them into smaller patches (\eg, 4$\times$4) as "visual words". The attention of each word will be calculated with other words in the given visual sentence with negligible computational costs. Features of both words and sentences will be aggregated to enhance the representation ability. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TNT architecture, \eg, we achieve an 81.5\% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet, which is about 1.7\% higher than that of the state-of-the-art visual transformer with similar computational cost.

Sparse training is a natural idea to accelerate the training speed of deep neural networks and save the memory usage, especially since large modern neural networks are significantly over-parameterized. However, most of the existing methods cannot achieve this goal in practice because the chain rule based gradient (w.r.t.

Shift neural networks reduce computation complexity by removing expensive multiplication operations and quantizing continuous weights into low-bit discrete values, which are fast and energy-efficient compared to conventional neural networks. However, existing shift networks are sensitive to the weight initialization and yield a degraded performance caused by vanishing gradient and weight sign freezing problem. To address these issues, we propose S$^3$ re-parameterization, a novel technique for training low-bit shift networks.

We propose a new active learning algorithm for parametric linear regression with random design. We provide finite sample convergence guarantees for general distributions in the misspecified model. This is the first active learner for this setting that provably can improve over passive learning. Unlike other learning settings (such as classification), in regression the passive learning rate of O(1/epsilon) cannot in general be improved upon. Nonetheless, the so-called `constant' in the rate of convergence, which is characterized by a distribution-dependent risk, can be improved in many cases. For a given distribution, achieving the optimal risk requires prior knowledge of the distribution. Following the stratification technique advocated in Monte-Carlo function integration, our active learner approaches a the optimal risk using piecewise constant approximations.