Tianchen Zhao

dblp:217/2471 · DBLP profile ↗
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31ranked-venue papers
9as first author
27since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 22 · 8 first-author · 18 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 14 · 4 first-author · 11 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 5 · 1 first-author · 5 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 2 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 AuthGuard: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Language Guidance
abstract
Existing deepfake detection techniques struggle to keep-up with the ever-evolving novel, unseen forgeries methods. This limitation stems from their reliance on statistical artifacts learned during training, which are often tied to specific generation processes that may not be representative of samples from new, unseen deepfake generation methods encountered at test time. We propose that incorporating language guidance can improve deepfake detection generalization by integrating human-like commonsense reasoning – such as recognizing logical inconsistencies and perceptual anomalies – alongside statistical cues. To achieve this, we train an expert deepfake vision encoder by combining discriminative classification with image-text contrastive learning, where the text is generated by generalist MLLMs using few-shot prompting. This allows the encoder to extract both language-describable, commonsense deepfake artifacts and statistical forgery artifacts from pixel-level distributions. To further enhance robustness, we integrate data uncertainty learning into vision-language contrastive learning, mitigating noise in image-text supervision. Our expert vision encoder seamlessly interfaces with an LLM, further enabling more generalized and interpretable deepfake detection while also boosting accuracy. The resulting framework, AuthGuard, achieves state-of-the-art deepfake detection accuracy in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, achieving AUC gains of 6.15% on the DFDC dataset and 16.68% on the DF40 dataset. Additionally, AuthGuard significantly enhances deepfake reasoning, improving performance by 24.69% on the DDVQA dataset.
Guangyu Shen, Tianchen Zhao, Zheng Zhang 0001, Dongsheng An, Zhuowen Tu, Yifan Xing
WACV4
2025 Optimal Transport-Guided Source-Free Adaptation for Face Anti-Spoofing
abstract
Developing a face anti-spoofing model that meets the security requirements of clients worldwide is challenging due to the domain gap between training datasets and diverse end-user test data. Moreover, for security and privacy reasons, it is undesirable for clients to share a large amount of their face data with service providers. In this work, we introduce a novel method in which the face anti-spoofing model can be adapted by the client itself to a target domain at test time using only a small sample of data while keeping model parameters and training data inaccessible to the client. Specifically, we develop a prototype-based base model and an optimal transport-guided adaptor that enables adaptation in either a lightweight training or training-free fashion, without updating base model’s parameters. Furthermore, we propose geodesic mixup, an optimal transport-based synthesis method that generates augmented training data along the geodesic path between source prototypes and target data distribution. This allows training a lightweight classifier to effectively adapt to target-specific characteristics while retaining essential knowledge learned from the source domain. In cross-domain and cross-attack settings, compared with recent methods, our method achieves average relative improvements of 19.17% in HTER and 8.58% in AUC, respectively.
Zhuowei Li 0002, Tianchen Zhao, Xuanbai Chen, Alessandro Bergamo, Anil K. Jain 0001, Yifan Xing
CVPR2
2025 Model Diagnosis and Correction via Linguistic and Implicit Attribute Editing
abstract
How can we troubleshoot a deep visual model, i.e. understand why it makes certain mistakes and further take action to correct its behavior? We design a ${\mathbf{M}}$ odel ${\mathbf{D}}$ iagnosis and ${\mathbf{C}}$ orrection system (MDC), an automated framework that analyzes the pattern of errors, proposes candidate causes of attributes, conducts hypothesis testing via attribute editing, and ultimately generates counterfactual training samples to improve the performance of the model. Unlike previous methods, in addition to the linguistic attributes, our method also incorporates the analysis for implicit causal attributes, those cannot to be accurately described by natural language. To achieve this, we propose an image editing module capable of leveraging both implicit and linguistic attributes to generate counterfactual images depicting error patterns and further experimentally validate causality relationships. Lastly, we enrich the training set with synthetic samples depicting verified causal attributes and retrain the model, further boosting accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on both generalized and specialized domains demonstrate the superiority of MDC in model diagnosis and correction. Specifically, we achieve an average relative improvement of 62.01% in HTER for face security application over state-of-the-art methods.
Xuanbai Chen, Tianchen Zhao, Pietro Perona, Yifan Xing
CVPR4
2025 PARO: Hardware-Software Co-design with Pattern-aware Reorder-based Attention Quantization in Video Generation Models
abstract
Transformer-based video generation models have demonstrated significant potential in content creation. However, the current state-of-the-art model employing “ 3 D full attention” encounters substantial computation and storage challenges. For instance, the attention map size for $\operatorname{Cog}$ VideoX-5B requires 56.50 GB, and generating a video of 49 frames takes approximately 1 minute on an NVIDIA A100 GPU under FP16. Although model quantization has proven effective in reducing both memory and computational costs, applying it to video generation models still faces challenges in preserving algorithm performance while ensuring efficient hardware processing. To address these issues, we introduce PARO, a video generation accelerator with patternaware reorder-based attention quantization. PARO investigates the diverse attention patterns of 3D full attention and proposes a novel reorder technique to unify these patterns into a unified “block diagonal” structure. Block-wise mixed precision quantization is further applied to achieve lossless compression under an average bitwidth of 4.80 bits. In terms of hardware, to overcome the limitation of existing mixed-precision computing units could not fully utilize the attention map bitwidth to accelerate $Q K$ multiplication, PARO designs an output-bitwidth aware mixedprecision processing element (PE) array through hardwaresoftware co-design. This approach ensures that the mixedprecision characteristics are fully utilized to enhance hardware efficiency in the bottleneck attention computation. Experiments demonstrate that PARO delivers up to $2.71 \times$ improvement in end-to-end performance compared to an NVIDIA A100 GPU and achieves up to $6.38 \sim 7.05 \times$ speedup over state-of-the-art ASICbased accelerators on the CogVideoX-2B and 5B models.
Tianchen Zhao, Wenheng Ma, Shulin Zeng, Zhenhua Zhu 0002, Xuefei Ning, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
DAC2
2025 ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation
abstract
Diffusion transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual generation tasks, such as generating realistic images or videos based on textual instructions. However, larger model sizes and multi-frame processing for video generation lead to increased computational and memory costs, posing challenges for practical deployment on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective method for reducing memory costs and computational complexity. When quantizing diffusion transformers, we find that existing quantization methods face challenges when applied to text-to-image and video tasks. To address these challenges, we begin by systematically analyzing the source of quantization error and conclude with the unique challenges posed by DiT quantization. Accordingly, we design an improved quantization scheme: ViDiT-Q (**V**ideo \& **I**mage **Di**ffusion **T**ransformer **Q**uantization), tailored specifically for DiT models. We validate the effectiveness of ViDiT-Q across a variety of text-to-image and video models, achieving W8A8 and W4A8 with negligible degradation in visual quality and metrics. Additionally, we implement efficient GPU kernels to achieve practical 2-2.5x memory optimization and a 1.4-1.7x end-to-end latency speedup.
Tianchen Zhao, Tongcheng Fang, Haofeng Huang, Rui Wan, Widyadewi Soedarmadji, Enshu Liu, Zinan Lin 0001, Guohao Dai 0001, Shengen Yan, Huazhong Yang, Xuefei Ning, Yu Wang 0002
ICLR1
2025 REACT3D: Real-time Edge Accelerator for Incremental Training in 3D Gaussian Splatting based SLAM Systems
abstract
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising approach for high-fidelity scene reconstruction and has been widely adopted in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems.3DGS SLAM requires incremental training and rendering of Gaussians in real-time from continuous camera viewpoints.To match the streaming nature of SLAM, 3DGS-based mapping must sustain over 30 frames per second (FPS), which is a widely recognized threshold for maintaining accurate tracking and mapping quality.Existing GPU-based solutions and prior accelerators fall short of this target, primarily due to redundant training computation, unnecessary loss computing, and irregular memory access patterns.To address these challenges, we propose REACT3D, a real-time edge accelerator designed for incremental training in 3DGS SLAM systems.At the algorithmic level, we introduce spatial consistency and convergence aware sparsification, which eliminates redundant computation in both forward and backward rendering by predicting under-optimized regions based on spatial coherence and convergence dynamics.At the architectural level, we design a pixel blockwise fine-grained dataflow to eliminate explicit loss computing, establish a tightly coupled pipeline, and improve hardware utilization.Furthermore, we develop a Content Addressable Memory (CAM)-based Dual-index Gaussian Buffer to resolve discontinuous * Equal contribution.
Zhenhua Zhu 0002, Tianchen Zhao, Yunfei Xiang, Huazhong Yang, Yuan Xie 0001, Yu Wang 0002
MICRO3
2025 Salient Concept-Aware Generative Data Augmentation
abstract
Recent generative data augmentation methods conditioned on both image and text prompts struggle to balance between fidelity and diversity, as it is challenging to preserve essential image details while aligning with varied text prompts. This challenge arises because representations in the synthesis process often become entangled with non-essential input image attributes such as environmental contexts, creating conflicts with text prompts intended to modify these elements. To address this, we propose a personalized image generation framework that uses a salient concept-aware image embedding model to reduce the influence of irrelevant visual details during the synthesis process, thereby maintaining intuitive alignment between image and text inputs. By generating images that better preserve class-discriminative features with additional controlled variations, our framework effectively enhances the diversity of training datasets and thereby improves the robustness of downstream models. Our approach demonstrates superior performance across eight fine-grained vision datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art augmentation methods with averaged classification accuracy improvements by 0.73\% and 6.5\% under conventional and long-tail settings, respectively.
Tianchen Zhao, Xuanbai Chen, Dongsheng An, Zhuowen Tu, Yifan Xing
NeurIPS1
2025 PAROAttention: Pattern-Aware ReOrdering for Efficient Sparse and Quantized Attention in Visual Generation Models
abstract
In visual generation, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms results in high memory and computational costs, especially for longer token sequences required in high-resolution image or multi-frame video generation. To address this, prior research has explored techniques such as sparsification and quantization. However, these techniques face significant challenges under low density and reduced bitwidths. Through systematic analysis, we identify that the core difficulty stems from the dispersed and irregular characteristics of visual attention patterns. Therefore, instead of introducing specialized sparsification and quantization design to accommodate such patterns, we propose an alternative strategy: "reorganizing" the attention pattern to alleviate the challenges. Inspired by the local aggregatin nature of visual feature extraction, we design a novel **P**attern-**A**ware token **R**e**O**rdering (**PARO**) technique, which unifies the diverse attention patterns into a hardware-friendly block-wise pattern. This unification substantially simplifies and enhances both sparsification and quantization. We evaluate the performance-efficiency trade-offs of various design choices and finalize a methodology tailored for the unified pattern. Our approach, **PAROAttention**, achieves video and image generation with lossless metrics, and nearly identical results from full-precision (FP) baselines, while operating at notably lower density (**20%-30%**) and bitwidth (**INT8/INT4**), achieving a **1.9 - 2.7x** end-to-end latency speedup.
Tianchen Zhao, Ke Hong, Xuefeng Xiao 0001, Huixia Li, Ruiqi Xie, Yichong Zhang, Yu Wang 0002
NeurIPS1
2025 TransADMM: Transformer enhanced unrolling alternating direction method of multipliers framework for electrical impedance tomography
Zichen Wang 0001, Tao Zhang 0110, Tianchen Zhao, Wenxu Wu, Qi Wang 0040
Expert Syst. Appl.3
2025 Multiobjective backbone network architecture search based on transfer learning in steel defect detection
Tianchen Zhao, Xianpeng Wang 0002, Xiangman Song
Neurocomputing1
2024 FlashEval: Towards Fast and Accurate Evaluation of Text-to-Image Diffusion Generative Models
abstract
In recent years, there has been significant progress in the development of text-to-image generative models. Evaluating the quality of the generative models is one essential step in the development process. Unfortunately, the evaluation process could consume a significant amount of computational resources, making the required periodic evaluation of model performance (e.g., monitoring training progress) impractical. Therefore, we seek to improve the evaluation efficiency by selecting the representative subset of the text-image dataset. We systematically investigate the design choices, including the selection criteria (textural features or image-based metrics) and the selection granularity (prompt-level or set-level). We find that the insights from prior work on subset selection for training data do not generalize to this problem, and we propose FlashEval, an iterative search algorithm tailored to evaluation data selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FlashEval on ranking diffusion models with various configurations, including architectures, quantization levels, and sampler schedules on COCO and DiffusionDB datasets. Our searched 50-item subset could achieve compa-rable evaluation quality to the randomly sampled 500-item subset for COCO annotations on unseen models, achieving a 10x evaluation speedup. We release the condensed subset of these commonly used datasets to help facilitate diffusion algorithm design and evaluation, and open-source FlashE-val as a tool for condensing future datasets, accessible at https://github.com/thu-nics/FlashEval.
Tianchen Zhao, Zinan Lin 0001, Xuefei Ning, Guohao Dai 0001, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
CVPR2
2024 DyPIM: Dynamic-Inference-Enabled Processing - In-Memory Accelerator
abstract
Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. Dynamic networks selectively skip redundant computations conditioned on the input during inference (i.e., dynamic inference). And they have demonstrated superior trade-offs between accuracy and inference efficiency. However, memory I/O turns irregular and dominant because of the fine-grained computation skip in dynamic networks. Processing-In-Memory (PIM) can perform Matrix-Vector Multiplications inside the memory, eliminating the data movement of network parameters. So, it is promising to address the memory I/O challenge. However, deploying dynamic networks on PIM architectures faces severe performance degradation caused by (1) Pipeline stall when deciding on computation to be skipped. (2) Mismatch between fine-grained algorithm computation skip and coarse-grained hardware computing granularity. (3) Improper proxy of hardware performance during training. To tackle these problems, we propose DyPIM, the dynamic inference-enabled PIM accelerator with software-hardware co-optimizations. At the algorithm level, a PIM-friendly dynamic network with a standalone mask generation network and a throughput-optimal training technique is proposed. At the hardware level, a PIM architecture supporting dynamic networks is proposed, with a pipeline controller to process the dynamic dataflow. Peripheral circuits are also designed in processing units to enable non-contiguous activating of non-zero wordlines to better utilize the computation skip. Experiments show that DyPIM can achieve 1.52x to 2.74x speedup and 2.05x to 3.95x throughput improvement over the existing PIM architectures for Res Net networks.
Tongxin Xie, Tianchen Zhao, Zhenhua Zhu 0002, Xuefei Ning, Bing Li 0017, Guohao Dai 0001, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
DATE2
2024 MixDQ: Memory-Efficient Few-Step Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Metric-Decoupled Mixed Precision Quantization
Tianchen Zhao, Xuefei Ning, Tongcheng Fang, Enshu Liu, Guyue Huang, Zinan Lin 0001, Shengen Yan, Guohao Dai 0001, Yu Wang 0002
ECCV (14)1
2024 Rad-NeRF: Ray-decoupled Training of Neural Radiance Field
abstract
Although the neural radiance field (NeRF) exhibits high-fidelity visualization on the rendering task, it still suffers from rendering defects, especially in complex scenes. In this paper, we delve into the reason for the unsatisfactory performance and conjecture that it comes from interference in the training process. Due to occlusions in complex scenes, a 3D point may be invisible to some rays. On such a point, training with those rays that do not contain valid information about the point might interfere with the NeRF training. Based on the above intuition, we decouple the training process of NeRF in the ray dimension softly and propose a Ray-decoupled Training Framework for neural rendering (Rad-NeRF). Specifically, we construct an ensemble of sub-NeRFs and train a soft gate module to assign the gating scores to these sub-NeRFs based on specific rays. The gate module is jointly optimized with the sub-NeRF ensemble to learn the preference of sub-NeRFs for different rays automatically. Furthermore, we introduce depth-based mutual learning to enhance the rendering consistency among multiple sub-NeRFs and mitigate the depth ambiguity. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that Rad-NeRF can enhance the rendering performance across a wide range of scene types compared with existing single-NeRF and multi-NeRF methods. With only 0.2% extra parameters, Rad-NeRF improves rendering performance by up to 1.5dB. Code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/Rad-NeRF.
Lidong Guo, Xuefei Ning, Yonggan Fu, Tianchen Zhao, Zhuoliang Kang, Yingyan (Celine) Lin, Yu Wang 0002
NeurIPS4
2024 DiTFastAttn: Attention Compression for Diffusion Transformer Models
abstract
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) excel at image and video generation but face computational challenges due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention operators. We propose DiTFastAttn, a post-training compression method to alleviate the computational bottleneck of DiT. We identify three key redundancies in the attention computation during DiT inference: (1) spatial redundancy, where many attention heads focus on local information; (2) temporal redundancy, with high similarity between the attention outputs of neighboring steps; (3) conditional redundancy, where conditional and unconditional inferences exhibit significant similarity. We propose three techniques to reduce these redundancies: (1) $\textit{Window Attention with Residual Sharing}$ to reduce spatial redundancy; (2) $\textit{Attention Sharing across Timesteps}$ to exploit the similarity between steps; (3) $\textit{Attention Sharing across CFG}$ to skip redundant computations during conditional generation.
Zhihang Yuan, Hanling Zhang, Lu Pu, Xuefei Ning, Linfeng Zhang 0001, Tianchen Zhao, Shengen Yan, Guohao Dai 0001, Yu Wang 0002
NeurIPS6
2024 TCP: Triplet Contrastive-relationship Preserving for Class-Incremental Learning
abstract
In class-incremental learning (CIL), when deep neural networks learn new classes, their recognition performance in old classes will drop significantly. This phenomenon is widely known as catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate catastrophic forgetting, existing methods store a small portion of old class data with a memory buffer and replay it while learning new classes. These methods suffer from a severe imbalance problem between old and new classes. In this paper, we discover that the imbalance problem in CIL makes it difficult to preserve the feature relation of old classes and hard to learn the feature relation between old and new classes. To mitigate the above two issues, we design a triplet contrastive preserving (TCP) loss to preserve old knowledge, and propose an asymmetric augmented contrastive learning (A2CL) method to learn new classes. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which increases the average accuracies by 1.26% and 0.95% on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Especially under smaller memory buffer settings where the imbalance problem is more severe, our method can surpass the baselines by a large margin (up to 3.2%). We also show that TCP can be easily plugged into other methods and further improve their performance.
Xuefei Ning, Shanghang Zhang, Lidong Guo, Tianchen Zhao, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
WACV5
2023 Memory-Oriented Structural Pruning for Efficient Image Restoration
abstract
Deep learning (DL) based methods have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art for image restoration (IR) task. Nevertheless, DL-based IR models are highly computation- and memory-intensive. The surging demands for processing higher-resolution images and multi-task paralleling in practical mobile usage further add to their computation and memory burdens. In this paper, we reveal the overlooked memory redundancy of the IR models and propose a Memory-Oriented Structural Pruning (MOSP) method. To properly compress the long-range skip connections (a major source of the memory burden), we introduce a compactor module onto each skip connection to decouple the pruning of the skip connections and the main branch. MOSP progressively prunes the original model layers and the compactors to cut down the peak memory while maintaining high IR quality. Experiments on real image denoising, image super-resolution and low-light image enhancement show that MOSP can yield models with higher memory efficiency while better preserving performance compared with baseline pruning methods.
Xiangsheng Shi, Xuefei Ning, Lidong Guo, Tianchen Zhao, Enshu Liu, Yi Cai 0003, Yuhan Dong, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
AAAI4
2023 Dynamic Ensemble of Low-Fidelity Experts: Mitigating NAS "Cold-Start"
abstract
Predictor-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) employs an architecture performance predictor to improve the sample efficiency. However, predictor-based NAS suffers from the severe ``cold-start'' problem, since a large amount of architecture-performance data is required to get a working predictor. In this paper, we focus on exploiting information in cheaper-to-obtain performance estimations (i.e., low-fidelity information) to mitigate the large data requirements of predictor training. Despite the intuitiveness of this idea, we observe that using inappropriate low-fidelity information even damages the prediction ability and different search spaces have different preferences for low-fidelity information types. To solve the problem and better fuse beneficial information provided by different types of low-fidelity information, we propose a novel dynamic ensemble predictor framework that comprises two steps. In the first step, we train different sub-predictors on different types of available low-fidelity information to extract beneficial knowledge as low-fidelity experts. In the second step, we learn a gating network to dynamically output a set of weighting coefficients conditioned on each input neural architecture, which will be used to combine the predictions of different low-fidelity experts in a weighted sum. The overall predictor is optimized on a small set of actual architecture-performance data to fuse the knowledge from different low-fidelity experts to make the final prediction. We conduct extensive experiments across five search spaces with different architecture encoders under various experimental settings. For example, our methods can improve the Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient between actual performance and predicted scores from 0.2549 to 0.7064 with only 25 actual architecture-performance data on NDS-ResNet. Our method can easily be incorporated into existing predictor-based NAS frameworks to discover better architectures. Our method will be implemented in Mindspore (Huawei 2020), and the example code is published at https://github.com/A-LinCui/DELE.
Junbo Zhao 0007, Xuefei Ning, Enshu Liu, Binxin Ru, Tianchen Zhao, Chen Chen 0077, Jiajin Zhang, Qingmin Liao, Yu Wang 0002
AAAI6
2023 Ada3D : Exploiting the Spatial Redundancy with Adaptive Inference for Efficient 3D Object Detection
abstract
Voxel-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, their significant computational and memory costs pose a challenge for their application to resource-constrained vehicles. One reason for this high resource consumption is the presence of a large number of redundant background points in Lidar point clouds, resulting in spatial redundancy in both 3D voxel and BEV map representations. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive inference framework called Ada3D, which focuses on reducing the spatial redundancy to compress the model’s computational and memory cost. Ada3D adaptively filters the redundant input, guided by a lightweight importance predictor and the unique properties of the Lidar point cloud. Additionally, we maintain the BEV features’ intrinsic sparsity by introducing the Sparsity Preserving Batch Normalization. With Ada3D, we achieve 40% reduction for 3D voxels and decrease the density of 2D BEV feature maps from 100% to 20% without sacrificing accuracy. Ada3D reduces the model computational and memory cost by 5×, and achieves 1.52× / 1.45× end-to-end GPU latency and 1.5× / 4.5× GPU peak memory optimization for the 3D and 2D backbone respectively.
Tianchen Zhao, Xuefei Ning, Ke Hong, Zhongyuan Qiu, Pu Lu, Yali Zhao, Linfeng Zhang 0001, Lipu Zhou, Guohao Dai 0001, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
ICCV1
2023 A Generic Graph-Based Neural Architecture Encoding Scheme With Multifaceted Information
abstract
Neural architecture search (NAS) can automatically discover well-performing architectures in a large search space and has been shown to bring improvements to various applications. However, the computational burden of NAS is huge, since exploring a large search space can need evaluating more than thousands of architecture samples. To improve the sample efficiency of search space exploration, predictor-based NAS methods learn a performance predictor of architectures, and utilize the predictor to sample worth-evaluating architectures. The encoding scheme of NN architectures is crucial to the predictor's generalization ability, and thus crucial to the efficacy of the NAS process. To this end, we have designed a generic Graph-based neural ArchiTecture Encoding Scheme (GATES), a more reasonable modeling of NN architectures that mimics their data processing. Nevertheless, GATES is unaware of the concrete computing semantic of NN operations or architectures. Thus, the learning of operation embeddings and weights in GATES can only exploit the information in architectures-performance pairs. We propose GATES++, which incorporates multifaceted information about NN's operation-level and architecture-level computing semantics into its construction and training, respectively. Experiments on benchmark search spaces show that both the operation-level and architecture-level information can bring improvements alone, and GATES++ can discover better architectures after evaluating the same number of architectures.
Xuefei Ning, Tianchen Zhao, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.4
2022 CodedVTR: Codebook-based Sparse Voxel Transformer with Geometric Guidance
abstract
Transformers have gained much attention by outperforming convolutional neural networks in many 2D vision tasks. However, they are known to have generalization problems and rely on massive-scale pre-training and sophisticated training techniques. When applying to 3D tasks, the irregular data structure and limited data scale add to the difficulty of transformer's application. We propose CodedVTR (Codebook-based Voxel TRansformer), which improves data efficiency and generalization ability for 3D sparse voxel transformers. On the one hand, we propose the codebook-based attention that projects an attention space into its subspace represented by the combination of “prototypes” in a learnable codebook. It regularizes attention learning and improves generalization. On the other hand, we propose geometry-aware self-attention that utilizes geometric information (geometric pattern, density) to guide attention learning. CodedVTR could be embedded into existing sparse convolution-based methods, and bring consistent performance improvements for indoor and outdoor 3D semantic segmentation tasks.
Tianchen Zhao, Niansong Zhang, Xuefei Ning, He Wang 0010, Li Yi 0001, Yu Wang 0002
CVPR1
2022 TA-GATES: An Encoding Scheme for Neural Network Architectures
abstract
Neural architecture search tries to shift the manual design of neural network (NN) architectures to algorithmic design. In these cases, the NN architecture itself can be viewed as data and needs to be modeled. A better modeling could help explore novel architectures automatically and open the black box of automated architecture design. To this end, this work proposes a new encoding scheme for neural architectures, the Training-Analogous Graph-based ArchiTecture Encoding Scheme (TA-GATES). TA-GATES encodes an NN architecture in a way that is analogous to its training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the flexibility and discriminative power of TA-GATES lead to better modeling of NN architectures. We expect our methodology of explicitly modeling the NN training process to benefit broader automated deep learning systems. The code is available at https://github.com/walkerning/aw_nas.
Xuefei Ning, Junbo Zhao 0007, Tianchen Zhao, Yiping Deng, Changcheng Tang, Shuang Liang 0010, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang 0002
NeurIPS4
2022 Unsupervised Multi-Look SAR Image Change Detection Driven by Dual-Layer Graph With Intensity and Texture Attributes
abstract
This letter proposes a novel graph-guided approach for unsupervised change detection between multi-look synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The dual-layer graph (DG) is proposed to combine both the intensity and texture attributes of an SAR image. It can not only preserve the characteristics of each attribute in the single layer, but also excavate the multiple affinities of attributes from different layers. With the support of DG, change measure is achieved through comparing the graphs based on the supra-adjacency matrix, thus generating the difference image with good separability. The final change detection results are obtained via a traditional binary classification algorithm. Experimental results on two real SAR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed graph-guided approach in which DG and multiple affinities provide great contributions for improving the accuracy and robustness of change detection.
Jun Wang 0145, Tianchen Zhao, Xiaoliang Jiang
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.2
2022 A Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph for Unsupervised SAR Image Change Detection
abstract
This letter presents a novel graph-driven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection approach. A hierarchical heterogeneous graph is proposed, combining two distinct graphs: a weighted graph based on adjacency of superpixels of an initial over-segmentation, and the dual-weighted heterogeneous graph. The superpixel-based regional affinities are coupled with pixel-based heterogeneous affinities, being embedded into the structure of hierarchical heterogeneous graph. The difference image generation relies on the matching of the bitemporal graphs, as well as the multiscale features of vertex domain. Finally, traditional graph cuts algorithm is applied to separate the difference image into changed and unchanged areas. Experiments on three real SAR datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms other experimental approaches and is a good candidate for SAR image change detection tasks.
Jun Wang 0145, Tianchen Zhao, Xiaoliang Jiang, Kun Lan
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.2
2022 Exploring the Potential of Low-Bit Training of Convolutional Neural Networks
abstract
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in many tasks, but training CNNs is time consuming and energy hungry. Using the low-bit integer format has been proved promising for speeding up and improving the energy efficiency of CNN inference, while CNN training can hardly benefit from such a technique because of the following challenges: 1) the integer data format cannot meet the requirements of the data dynamic range in training, resulting in the accuracy drop; 2) the floating-point data format keeps sizeable dynamic range with much more exponent bits, thus using it results in higher accumulation power than using the integer data format; and 3) there are some specially designed data formats (e.g., with group-wise scaling) that have the potential to deal with the former two problems but common hardware platforms cannot support them efficiently. To tackle all these challenges and make the training phase of CNNs benefit from the low-bit format, we propose a low-bit training framework for CNNs to pursue a better tradeoff between accuracy and energy efficiency: 1) we adopt element-wise scaling to increase the dynamic range of data representation, which significantly reduces the quantization error; 2) group-wise scaling with hardware friendly factor format is designed to reduce the element-wise exponent bits without degrading the accuracy; and 3) we design the customized hardware unit that implements the low-bit tensor convolution arithmetic with our multilevel scaling data format. Experiments show that our framework achieves a superior tradeoff between the accuracy and the bit-width than previous low-bit training studies. For training various models on CIFAR-10, using 1-bit mantissa and 2-bit exponent is adequate to keep the accuracy loss within 1%. On larger datasets like ImageNet, using 4-bit mantissa and 2-bit exponent is adequate. Through the energy consumption simulation of the whole network, we can see that training a variety of models with our framework could achieve$4.9\times $–$10.2\times $higher energy efficiency than full-precision arithmetic.
Kai Zhong 0007, Xuefei Ning, Guohao Dai 0001, Zhenhua Zhu 0002, Tianchen Zhao, Shulin Zeng, Yu Wang 0002, Huazhong Yang
IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.5
2021 Learning Self-Consistency for Deepfake Detection
abstract
We propose a new method to detect deepfake images using the cue of the source feature inconsistency within the forged images. It is based on the hypothesis that images’ distinct source features can be preserved and extracted after going through state-of-the-art deepfake generation processes. We introduce a novel representation learning approach, called pair-wise self-consistency learning (PCL), for training ConvNets to extract these source features and detect deepfake images. It is accompanied by a new image synthesis approach, called inconsistency image genera-tor (I2G), to provide richly annotated training data for PCL. Experimental results on seven popular datasets show that our models improve averaged AUC over the state of the art from 96.45% to 98.05% in the in-dataset evaluation and from 86.03% to 92.18% in the cross-dataset evaluation.
Tianchen Zhao, Yuanjun Xiong, Wei Xia 0009
ICCV1
2021 Overcoming barriers to scalability in variational quantum Monte Carlo
abstract
The variational quantum Monte Carlo (VQMC) method received significant attention in the recent past because of its ability to overcome the curse of dimensionality inherent in many-body quantum systems. Close parallels exist between VQMC and the emerging hybrid quantum-classical computational paradigm of variational quantum algorithms. VQMC overcomes the curse of dimensionality by performing alternating steps of Monte Carlo sampling from a parametrized quantum state followed by gradient-based optimization. While VQMC has been applied to solve high-dimensional problems, it is known to be difficult to parallelize, primarily owing to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling step. In this work, we explore the scalability of VQMC when autoregressive models, with exact sampling, are used in place of MCMC. This approach can exploit distributed-memory, shared-memory and/or GPU parallelism in the sampling task without any bottlenecks. In particular, we demonstrate GPU-scalability of VQMC for solving up to ten-thousand dimensional combinatorial optimization problems.
Tianchen Zhao, Saibal De, James Stokes, Shravan K. Veerapaneni
SC1
2020 DSA: More Efficient Budgeted Pruning via Differentiable Sparsity Allocation
Xuefei Ning, Tianchen Zhao, Yu Wang 0002, Huazhong Yang
ECCV (3)2
2020 A Generic Graph-Based Neural Architecture Encoding Scheme for Predictor-Based NAS
Xuefei Ning, Tianchen Zhao, Yu Wang 0002, Huazhong Yang
ECCV (13)3
2019 Adversarial Defense via Learning to Generate Diverse Attacks
abstract
With the remarkable success of deep learning, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been applied as dominant tools to various machine learning domains. Despite this success, however, it has been found that DNNs are surprisingly vulnerable to malicious attacks; adding a small, perceptually indistinguishable perturbations to the data can easily degrade classification performance. Adversarial training is an effective defense strategy to train a robust classifier. In this work, we propose to utilize the generator to learn how to create adversarial examples. Unlike the existing approaches that create a one-shot perturbation by a deterministic generator, we propose a recursive and stochastic generator that produces much stronger and diverse perturbations that comprehensively reveal the vulnerability of the target classifier. Our experiment results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets show that the classifier adversarially trained with our method yields more robust performance over various white-box and black-box attacks.
Yunseok Jang 0001, Tianchen Zhao, Seunghoon Hong, Honglak Lee
ICCV2
2019 Diversity-Sensitive Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Dingdong Yang, Seunghoon Hong, Yunseok Jang 0001, Tianchen Zhao, Honglak Lee
ICLR (Poster)4