The referring video object segmentation task (RVOS) involves segmentation of a text-referred object instance in the frames of a given video. Due to the complex nature of this multimodal task, which combines text reasoning, video understanding, instance segmentation and tracking, existing approaches typically rely on sophisticated pipelines in order to tackle it. In this paper, we propose a simple Transformer-based approach to RVOS. Our framework, termed Multimodal Tracking Transformer (MTTR), models the RVOS task as a sequence prediction problem. Following recent advancements in computer vision and natural language processing, MTTR is based on the realization that video and text can be processed together effectively and elegantly by a single multimodal Transformer model. MTTR is end-to-end trainable, free of text-related inductive bias components and requires no additional mask-refinement post-processing steps. As such, it simplifies the RVOS pipeline considerably compared to existing methods. Evaluation on standard benchmarks reveals that MTTR significantly outperforms previous art across multiple metrics. In particular, MTTR shows impressive +5.7 and +5.0 mAP gains on the A2D-Sentences and JHMDB-Sentences datasets respectively, while processing 76 frames per second. In addition, we report strong results on the public validation set of Refer-YouTube-VOS, a more challenging RVOS dataset that has yet to receive the attention of researchers. The code to reproduce our experiments is avail-able at https://github.com/mttr2021/MTTR.

The success of learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods relies heavily on the success of a warm-up stage where standard supervised training is performed using the full (noisy) training set. In this paper, we identify a "warm-up obstacle": the inability of standard warm-up stages to train high quality feature extractors and avert memorization of noisy labels. We propose "Contrast to Divide" (C2D), a simple framework that solves this problem by pre-training the feature extractor in a self-supervised fashion. Using self-supervised pre-training boosts the performance of existing LNL approaches by drastically reducing the warm-up stage's susceptibility to noise level, shortening its duration, and improving extracted feature quality. C2D works out of the box with existing methods and demonstrates markedly improved performance, especially in the high noise regime, where we get a boost of more than 27% for CIFAR-100 with 90% noise over the previous state of the art. In real-life noise settings, C2D trained on mini-WebVision outperforms previous works both in WebVision and ImageNet validation sets by 3% top-1 accuracy. We perform an in-depth analysis of the framework, including investigating the performance of different pre-training approaches and estimating the effective upper bound of the LNL performance with semi-supervised learning. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at https://github.com/ContrastToDivide/C2D.

One major obstacle hindering the ubiquitous use of CNNs for inference is their relatively high memory bandwidth requirements, which can be the primary energy consumer and throughput bottleneck in hardware accelerators. Inspired by quantization-aware training approaches, we propose a compression-aware training (CAT) method that involves training the model to allow better compression of weights and feature maps during neural network deployment. Our method trains the model to achieve low-entropy feature maps, enabling efficient compression at inference time using classical transform coding methods. CAT significantly improves the state-of-the-art results reported for quantization evaluated on various vision and NLP tasks, such as image classification (ImageNet), image detection (Pascal VOC), sentiment analysis (CoLa), and textual entailment (MNLI). For example, on ResNet-18, we achieve near baseline ImageNet accuracy with an average representation of only 1.5 bits per value with 5-bit quantization. Moreover, we show that entropy reduction of weights and activations can be applied together, further improving bandwidth reduction. Reference implementation is available.

Neural network quantization enables the deployment of large models on resource-constrained devices. Current post-training quantization methods fall short in terms of accuracy for INT4 (or lower) but provide reasonable accuracy for INT8 (or above). In this work, we study the effect of quantization on the structure of the loss landscape. We show that the structure is flat and separable for mild quantization, enabling straightforward post-training quantization methods to achieve good results. We show that with more aggressive quantization, the loss landscape becomes highly non-separable with steep curvature, making the selection of quantization parameters more challenging. Armed with this understanding, we design a method that quantizes the layer parameters jointly, enabling significant accuracy improvement over current post-training quantization methods. Reference implementation is available at https://github.com/ynahshan/nn-quantization-pytorch/tree/master/lapq .

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in a variety of tasks in computer vision and beyond. One of the major obstacles hindering the ubiquitous use of CNNs for inference on low-power edge devices is their high computational complexity and memory bandwidth requirements. The latter often dominates the energy footprint on modern hardware. In this paper, we introduce a lossy transform coding approach, inspired by image and video compression, designed to reduce the memory bandwidth due to the storage of intermediate activation calculation results. Our method does not require fine-tuning the network weights and halves the data transfer volumes to the main memory by compressing feature maps, which are highly correlated, with variable length coding. Our method outperform previous approach in term of the number of bits per value with minor accuracy degradation on ResNet-34 and MobileNetV2. We analyze the performance of our approach on a variety of CNN architectures and demonstrate that FPGA implementation of ResNet-18 with our approach results in a reduction of around 40% in the memory energy footprint, compared to quantized network, with negligible impact on accuracy. When allowing accuracy degradation of up to 2%, the reduction of 60% is achieved. A reference implementation accompanies the paper.

We present a novel method for neural network quantization. Our method, named UNIQ , emulates a non-uniform k -quantile quantizer and adapts the model to perform well with quantized weights by injecting noise to the weights at training time. As a by-product of injecting noise to weights, we find that activations can also be quantized to as low as 8-bit with only a minor accuracy degradation. Our non-uniform quantization approach provides a novel alternative to the existing uniform quantization techniques for neural networks. We further propose a novel complexity metric of number of bit operations performed (BOPs), and we show that this metric has a linear relation with logic utilization and power. We suggest evaluating the trade-off of accuracy vs. complexity (BOPs). The proposed method, when evaluated on ResNet18/34/50 and MobileNet on ImageNet, outperforms the prior state of the art both in the low-complexity regime and the high accuracy regime. We demonstrate the practical applicability of this approach, by implementing our non-uniformly quantized CNN on FPGA.