EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Da Li 0001
dblp:43/4804-1
· DBLP profile ↗
37ranked-venue papers
4as first author
28since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-2101-2989ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 30 · 4 first-author · 22 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 26 · 4 first-author · 17 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | HierarchicalPrune: Position-Aware Compression for Large-Scale Diffusion ModelsabstractState-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) achieve remarkable quality, yet their massive parameter scale (8-11B) poses significant challenges for inferences on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present HierarchicalPrune, a novel compression framework grounded in a key observation: DM blocks exhibit distinct functional hierarchies, where early blocks establish semantic structures while later blocks handle texture refinements. HierarchicalPrune synergistically combines three techniques: (1) Hierarchical Position Pruning, which identifies and removes less essential later blocks based on position hierarchy; (2) Positional Weight Preservation, which systematically protects early model portions that are essential for semantic structural integrity; and (3) Sensitivity-Guided Distillation, which adjusts knowledge-transfer intensity based on our discovery of block-wise sensitivity variations. As a result, our framework brings billion-scale diffusion models into a range more suitable for on-device inference, while preserving the quality of the output images. Specifically, combined with INT4 weight quantisation, HierarchicalPrune achieves 77.5-80.4% memory footprint reduction (e.g., from 15.8 GB to 3.2 GB) and 27.9-38.0% latency reduction, measured on server and consumer grade GPUs, with the minimum drop of 2.6% in GenEval score and 7% in HPSv2 score compared to the original model. Finally, our comprehensive user study with 85 participants demonstrates that HierarchicalPrune maintains perceptual quality comparable to the original model while significantly outperforming prior works. Young D. Kwon, Rui Li 0052, Da Li 0001, Sourav Bhattacharya, Stylianos I. Venieris |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2026 | One-Step Generative Policies with Q-Learning: A Reformulation of MeanFlowabstractWe introduce a one-step generative policy for offline reinforcement learning that maps *noise* directly to *actions* via a *residual reformulation* of MeanFlow, making it compatible with Q-learning. While one-step Gaussian policies enable fast inference, they struggle to capture complex, multimodal action distributions. Existing flow-based methods improve expressivity but typically rely on distillation and two-stage training when trained with Q-learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose to reformulate MeanFlow to enable *direct noise-to-action generation* by integrating the velocity field and noise-to-action transformation into a single policy network—eliminating the need for separate velocity estimation. We explore several reformulation variants and identify an effective *residual formulation* that supports expressive and stable policy learning. Our method offers three key advantages: 1) efficient one-step noise-to-action generation, 2) expressive modelling of multimodal action distributions, and 3) efficient and stable policy learning via Q-learning in a single-stage training setup. Extensive experiments on 73 tasks across the OGBench and D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance in both offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning settings. Da Li 0001, Ye Shi 0001, Yanwei Fu 0001 |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2026 | Generative models for noise-robust training in unsupervised domain adaptation
Zhongying Deng, Da Li 0001, Junjun He, Xiaojiang Peng, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002 |
Pattern Recognit. | 2 |
| 2026 | BORT2: Bi-level optimization for robust target training in multi-source domain adaptation
Zhongying Deng, Da Li 0001, Xiaojiang Peng, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002 |
Pattern Recognit. | 2 |
| 2026 | Boosting Multimodal Chain of Thought Reasoning by Selective Mixture of Experts
Qilei Li, Shitong Sun, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales, Shaogang Gong |
Pattern Recognit. | 3 |
| 2025 | ConceptPrune: Concept Editing in Diffusion Models via Skilled Neuron PruningabstractWhile large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image-generation capabilities, there are significant concerns about their potential misuse for generating unsafe content, violating copyright, and perpetuating societal biases. Recently, the text-to-image generation community has begun addressing these concerns by editing or unlearning undesired concepts from pre-trained models. However, these methods often involve data-intensive and inefficient fine-tuning or utilize various forms of token remapping, rendering them susceptible to adversarial jailbreaks. In this paper, we present a simple and effective training-free approach, ConceptPrune, wherein we first identify critical regions within pre-trained models responsible for generating undesirable concepts, thereby facilitating straightforward concept unlearning via weight pruning. Experiments across a range of concepts including artistic styles, nudity, and object erasure demonstrate that target concepts can be efficiently erased by pruning a tiny fraction, approximately 0.12% of total weights, enabling multi-concept erasure and robustness against various white-box and black-box adversarial attacks. Ruchika Chavhan, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | Reserve to Adapt: Mining Inter-Class Relations for Open-Set Domain AdaptationabstractOpen-Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims at adapting a model trained on a labelled source domain, to an unlabeled target domain that is corrupted with unknown classes. The key challenge inherent to this open-set setting is therefore how best to avoid the negative transfer incurred by unknown classes during model adaptation. Most existing works tackle this challenge by simply pushing the entire unknown classes away. In this paper, we take a different stance - instead of addressing these unknown classes as a single entity, we "reserve" in-between spaces for their subsets in the learned embedding. Our key finding is that the inter-class relations learned off the source domain, can help to enforce class separations in the target domain - thereby reserving spaces for unknown classes. More specifically, we first prep the "reservation" by tightening the known-class representations while enlarging their inter-class margin. We then learn soft-label prototypes in the source domain to facilitate the discrimination of known and unknown samples in the target domain. It follows that these two steps are iterated at each epoch in a mutually beneficial manner - better discrimination of unknown samples helps with space reservation, and vice versa. We show state-of-the-art results on four standard OSDA datasets, Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA and ImageCLEF, and conduct further analysis to help understand our method. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Reserve_to_Adapt. Yujun Tong, Dongliang Chang, Da Li 0001, Kongming Liang, Zhongjiang He, Yi-Zhe Song, Zhanyu Ma |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 3 |
| 2024 | Neural Fine-Tuning Search for Few-Shot LearningabstractIn few-shot recognition, a classifier that has been trained on one set of classes is required to rapidly adapt and generalize to a disjoint, novel set of classes. To that end, recent studies have shown the efficacy of fine-tuning with carefully-crafted adaptation architectures. However this raises the question of: How can one design the optimal adaptation strategy? In this paper, we study this question through the lens of neural architecture search (NAS). Given a pre-trained neural network, our algorithm discovers the optimal arrangement of adapters, which layers to keep frozen, and which to fine-tune. We demonstrate the generality of our NAS method by applying it to both residual networks and vision transformers and report state-of-the-art performance on Meta-Dataset and Meta-Album. Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Lukasz Dudziak, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2024 | Recurrent Early Exits for Federated Learning with Heterogeneous ClientsabstractFederated learning (FL) has enabled distributed learning of a model across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the main challenges of FL is to accommodate clients with varying hardware capacities; clients have differing compute and memory requirements. To tackle this challenge, recent state-of-the-art approaches leverage the use of early exits. Nonetheless, these approaches fall short of mitigating the challenges of joint learning multiple exit classifiers, often relying on hand-picked heuristic solutions for knowledge distillation among classifiers and/or utilizing additional layers for weaker classifiers. In this work, instead of utilizing multiple classifiers, we propose a recurrent early exit approach named ReeFL that fuses features from different sub-models into a single shared classifier. Specifically, we use a transformer-based early-exit module shared among sub-models to i) better exploit multi-layer feature representations for task-specific prediction and ii) modulate the feature representation of the backbone model for subsequent predictions. We additionally present a per-client self-distillation approach where the best sub-model is automatically selected as the teacher of the other sub-models at each client. Our experiments on standard image and speech classification benchmarks across various emerging federated fine-tuning baselines demonstrate ReeFL effectiveness over previous works. Royson Lee, Javier Fernández-Marqués, Shell Xu Hu, Da Li 0001, Stefanos Laskaridis, Lukasz Dudziak, Timothy M. Hospedales, Ferenc Huszar, Nicholas D. Lane |
ICML | 4 |
| 2024 | SketchAnimator: Animate Sketch via Motion Customization of Text-to-Video Diffusion ModelsabstractSketching is a uniquely human tool for expressing ideas and creativity. The animation of sketches infuses life into these static drawings, opening a new dimension for designers. Animating sketches is a time-consuming process that demands professional skills and extensive experience, often proving daunting for amateurs. In this paper, we propose a novel sketch animation model SketchAnimator, which enables adding creative motion to a given sketch, like "a jumping car". Namely, given an input sketch and a reference video, we divide the sketch animation into three stages: Appearance Learning, Motion Learning and Video Prior Distillation. In stages 1 and 2, we utilize LoRA to integrate sketch appearance information and motion dynamics from the reference video into the pre-trained T2V model. In the third stage, we utilize Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to update the parameters of the Bézier curves in each sketch frame according to the acquired motion information. Consequently, our model produces a sketch video that not only retains the original appearance of the sketch but also mirrors the dynamic movements of the reference video. We compare our method with alternative approaches and demonstrate that it generates the desired sketch video under the challenge of one-shot motion customization. Ruolin Yang 0001, Da Li 0001, Honggang Zhang 0002, Yi-Zhe Song |
VCIP | 2 |
| 2024 | Feed-Forward Latent Domain AdaptationabstractWe study a new highly-practical problem setting that enables resource-constrained edge devices to adapt a pre-trained model to their local data distributions. Recognizing that device’s data are likely to come from multiple latent domains that include a mixture of unlabelled domain-relevant and domain-irrelevant examples, we focus on the comparatively under-studied problem of latent domain adaptation. Considering limitations of edge devices, we aim to only use a pre-trained model and adapt it in a feed-forward way, without using back-propagation and without access to the source data. Modelling these realistic constraints bring us to the novel and practically important problem setting of feed-forward latent domain adaptation. Our solution is to meta-learn a network capable of embedding the mixed-relevance target dataset and dynamically adapting inference for target examples using cross-attention. The resulting framework leads to consistent improvements over strong ERM baselines. We also show that our framework sometimes even improves on the upper bound of domain-supervised adaptation, where only domain-relevant instances are provided for adaptation. This suggests that human annotated domain labels may not always be optimal, and raises the possibility of doing better through automated instance selection. Ondrej Bohdal, Da Li 0001, Shell Xu Hu, Timothy M. Hospedales |
WACV | 2 |
| 2023 | Sketch-based Video Object Segmentation: Benchmark and Analysis
Ruolin Yang 0001, Da Li 0001, Conghui Hu, Timothy M. Hospedales, Honggang Zhang 0002, Yi-Zhe Song |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2023 | Meta Omnium: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Learning-to-LearnabstractMeta-learning and other approaches to few-shot learning are widely studied for image recognition, and are increasingly applied to other vision tasks such as pose estimation and dense prediction. This naturally raises the question of whether there is any fewshot metalearning algorithm capable of generalizing across these diverse task types? To support the community in answering this question, we introduce Meta Omnium, a dataset-of-datasets spanning multiple vision tasks including recognition, keypoint localization, semantic segmentation and regression. We experiment with popular fewshot metalearning baselines and analyze their ability to generalize across tasks and to transfer knowledge between them. Meta Omnium enables metalearning researchers to evaluate model generalization to a much wider array of tasks than previously possible, and provides a single framework for evaluating meta-learners across a wide suite of vision applications in a consistent manner. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/edi-meta-learning/meta-omnium. Ondrej Bohdal, Yinbing Tian, Yongshuo Zong, Ruchika Chavhan, Da Li 0001, Henry Gouk, Timothy M. Hospedales |
CVPR | 5 |
| 2023 | Zero-Shot Everything Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, and in Explainable StyleabstractThis paper studies the problem of zero-short sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), however with two significant differentiators to prior art (i) we tackle all variants (inter-category, intracategory, and cross datasets) of ZS-SBIR with just one network (“everything”), and (ii) we would really like to understand how this sketch-photo matching operates (“explainable”). Our key innovation lies with the realization that such a cross-modal matching problem could be reduced to comparisons of groups of key local patches - akin to the seasoned “bag-of-words” paradigm. Just with this change, we are able to achieve both of the aforementioned goals, with the added benefit of no longer requiring external semantic knowledge. Technically, ours is a transformer-based cross-modal network, with three novel components (i) a self-attention module with a learnable tokenizer to produce visual tokens that correspond to the most informative local regions, (ii) a cross-attention module to compute local correspondences between the visual tokens across two modalities, and finally (iii) a kernel-based relation network to assemble local putative matches and produce an overall similarity metric for a sketch-photo pair. Experiments show ours indeed delivers superior performances across all ZS-SBIR settings. The all important explainable goal is elegantly achieved by visualizing cross-modal token correspondences, and for the first time, via sketch to photo synthesis by universal replacement of all matched photo patches. Code and model are available at https://github.com/buptLinfy/ZSE-SBIR. Fengyin Lin, Mingkang Li 0003, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales, Yi-Zhe Song, Yonggang Qi |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | Quality Diversity for Visual Pre-TrainingabstractModels pre-trained on large datasets such as ImageNet provide the de-facto standard for transfer learning, with both supervised and self-supervised approaches proving effective. However, emerging evidence suggests that any single pre-trained feature will not perform well on diverse downstream tasks. Each pre-training strategy encodes a certain inductive bias, which may suit some downstream tasks but not others. Notably, the augmentations used in both supervised and self-supervised training lead to features with high invariance to spatial and appearance transformations. This renders them sub-optimal for tasks that demand sensitivity to these factors. In this paper we develop a feature that better supports diverse downstream tasks by providing a diverse set of sensitivities and invariances. In particular, we are inspired by Quality-Diversity in evolution, to define a pre-training objective that requires high quality yet diverse features — where diversity is defined in terms of transformation (in)variances. Our framework plugs in to both supervised and self-supervised pre-training, and produces a small ensemble of features. We further show how downstream tasks can easily and efficiently select their preferred (in)variances. Both empirical and theoretical analysis show the efficacy of our representation and transfer learning approach for diverse downstream tasks. Code available at https://github.com/ruchikachavhan/quality-diversity-pretraining.git Ruchika Chavhan, Henry Gouk, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2023 | Domain Generalisation via Domain Adaptation: An Adversarial Fourier Amplitude Approach
Minyoung Kim 0001, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2023 | SketchKnitter: Vectorized Sketch Generation with Diffusion Models
Haoge Deng, Yonggang Qi, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2023 | FedL2P: Federated Learning to PersonalizeabstractFederated learning (FL) research has made progress in developing algorithms for distributed learning of global models, as well as algorithms for local personalization of those common models to the specifics of each client’s local data distribution. However, different FL problems may require different personalization strategies, and it may not even be possible to define an effective one-size-fits-all personalization strategy for all clients: Depending on how similar each client’s optimal predictor is to that of the global model, different personalization strategies may be preferred. In this paper, we consider the federated meta-learning problem of learning personalization strategies. Specifically, we consider meta-nets that induce the batch-norm and learning rate parameters for each client given local data statistics. By learning these meta-nets through FL, we allow the whole FL network to collaborate in learning a customized personalization strategy for each client. Empirical results show that this framework improves on a range of standard hand-crafted personalization baselines in both label and feature shift situations. Royson Lee, Minyoung Kim 0001, Da Li 0001, Xinchi Qiu, Timothy M. Hospedales, Ferenc Huszar, Nicholas D. Lane |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2023 | Prediction Calibration for Generalized Few-Shot Semantic SegmentationabstractGeneralized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (GFSS) aims to segment each image pixel into either base classes with abundant training examples or novel classes with only a handful of (e.g., 1-5) training images per class. Compared to the widely studied Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS), which is limited to segmenting novel classes only, GFSS is much under-studied despite being more practical. Existing approach to GFSS is based on classifier parameter fusion whereby a newly trained novel class classifier and a pre-trained base class classifier are combined to form a new classifier. As the training data is dominated by base classes, this approach is inevitably biased towards the base classes. In this work, we propose a novel Prediction Calibration Network (PCN) to address this problem. Instead of fusing the classifier parameters, we fuse the scores produced separately by the base and novel classifiers. To ensure that the fused scores are not biased to either the base or novel classes, a new Transformer-based calibration module is introduced. It is known that the lower-level features are useful of detecting edge information in an input image than higher-level features. Thus, we build a cross-attention module that guides the classifier’s final prediction using the fused multi-level features. However, transformers are computationally demanding. Crucially, to make the proposed cross-attention module training tractable at the pixel level, this module is designed based on feature-score cross-covariance and episodically trained to be generalizable at inference time. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-$5^{i}$and COCO-$20^{i}$show that our PCN outperforms the state-the-the-art alternatives by large margins. Zhihe Lu, Sen He 0001, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002 |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 3 |
| 2023 | Uncertainty-Aware Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic SegmentationabstractSource-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) is becoming topical to address the challenge of distribution shift between training and deployment data, while also relaxing the requirement of source data availability during target domain adaptation. In this paper, we focus on SFDA for semantic segmentation, in which pseudo labeling based target domain self-training is a common solution. However, pseudo labels generated by the source models are particularly unreliable on the target domain data due to the domain shift issue. Therefore, we propose to use Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) to improve the target self-training by better estimating and exploiting pseudo-label uncertainty. With the uncertainty estimation of BNNs, we introduce two novel self-training based components: Uncertainty-aware Online Teacher-Student Learning (UOTSL) and Uncertainty-aware FeatureMix (UFM). Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, GTA 5 → Cityscapes and SYNTHIA → Cityscapes, show the superiority of our proposed method with mIoU gains of 3.6% and 5.7% over the state-of-the-art respectively. Zhihe Lu, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002, Timothy M. Hospedales |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 2 |
| 2022 | Robust Target Training for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation
Zhongying Deng, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002 |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2022 | Learning to Augment via Implicit Differentiation for Domain Generalization
Tingwei Wang, Da Li 0001, Kaiyang Zhou, Tao Xiang 0002, Yi-Zhe Song |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2022 | Pushing the Limits of Simple Pipelines for Few-Shot Learning: External Data and Fine-Tuning Make a DifferenceabstractFew-shot learning (FSL) is an important and topical problem in computer vision that has motivated extensive research into numerous methods spanning from sophisticated metalearning methods to simple transfer learning baselines. We seek to push the limits of a simple-but-effective pipeline for real-worldfew-shot image classification in practice. To this end, we explore few-shot learning from the perspective of neural architecture, as well as a three stage pipeline of pre-training on external data, meta-training with labelled few-shot tasks, and task-specific fine-tuning on unseen tasks. We investigate questions such as: ① How pre-training on external data benefits FSL? ② How state of the art transformer architectures can be exploited? and ③ How to best exploit finetuning? Ultimately, we show that a simple transformer-based pipeline yields surprisingly good performance on standard benchmarks such as Mini-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CDFSL and Meta-Dataset. Our code is available at https://hushell.github.io/pmf. Shell Xu Hu, Da Li 0001, Jan Stühmer, Minyoung Kim 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2022 | Fisher SAM: Information Geometry and Sharpness Aware MinimisationabstractRecent sharpness-aware minimisation (SAM) is known to find flat minima which is beneficial for better generalisation with improved robustness. SAM essentially modifies the loss function by the maximum loss value within the small neighborhood around the current iterate. However, it uses the Euclidean ball to define the neighborhood, which can be less accurate since loss functions for neural networks are typically defined over probability distributions (e.g., class predictive probabilities), rendering the parameter space no more Euclidean. In this paper we consider the information geometry of the model parameter space when defining the neighborhood, namely replacing SAM’s Euclidean balls with ellipsoids induced by the Fisher information. Our approach, dubbed Fisher SAM, defines more accurate neighborhood structures that conform to the intrinsic metric of the underlying statistical manifold. For instance, SAM may probe the worst-case loss value at either a too nearby or inappropriately distant point due to the ignorance of the parameter space geometry, which is avoided by our Fisher SAM. Another recent Adaptive SAM approach that stretches/shrinks the Euclidean ball in accordance with the scales of the parameter magnitudes, might be dangerous, potentially destroying the neighborhood structure even severely. We demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed Fisher SAM on several benchmark datasets/tasks. Minyoung Kim 0001, Da Li 0001, Shell Xu Hu, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICML | 2 |
| 2022 | Dynamic Instance Domain AdaptationabstractMost existing studies on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) assume that each domain's training samples come with domain labels (e.g., painting, photo). Samples from each domain are assumed to follow the same distribution and the domain labels are exploited to learn domain-invariant features via feature alignment. However, such an assumption often does not hold true-there often exist numerous finer-grained domains (e.g., dozens of modern painting styles have been developed, each differing dramatically from those of the classic styles). Therefore, forcing feature distribution alignment across each artificially-defined and coarse-grained domain can be ineffective. In this paper, we address both single-source and multi-source UDA from a completely different perspective, which is to view each instance as a fine domain. Feature alignment across domains is thus redundant. Instead, we propose to perform dynamic instance domain adaptation (DIDA). Concretely, a dynamic neural network with adaptive convolutional kernels is developed to generate instance-adaptive residuals to adapt domain-agnostic deep features to each individual instance. This enables a shared classifier to be applied to both source and target domain data without relying on any domain annotation. Further, instead of imposing intricate feature alignment losses, we adopt a simple semi-supervised learning paradigm using only a cross-entropy loss for both labeled source and pseudo labeled target data. Our model, dubbed DIDA-Net, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several commonly used single-source and multi-source UDA datasets including Digits, Office-Home, DomainNet, Digit-Five, and PACS. Zhongying Deng, Kaiyang Zhou, Da Li 0001, Junjun He, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002 |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 3 |
| 2021 | Simple and Effective Stochastic Neural NetworksabstractStochastic neural networks (SNNs) are currently topical, with several paradigms being actively investigated including dropout, Bayesian neural networks, variational information bottleneck (VIB) and noise regularized learning. These neural network variants impact several major considerations, including generalization, network compression, robustness against adversarial attack and label noise, and model calibration. However, many existing networks are complicated and expensive to train, and/or only address one or two of these practical considerations. In this paper we propose a simple and effective stochastic neural network (SE-SNN) architecture for discriminative learning by directly modeling activation uncertainty and encouraging high activation variability. Compared to existing SNNs, our SE-SNN is simpler to implement and faster to train, and produces state of the art results on network compression by pruning, adversarial defense, learning with label noise, and model calibration. Yongxin Yang, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales, Tao Xiang 0002 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2021 | A Simple Feature Augmentation for Domain GeneralizationabstractThe topical domain generalization (DG) problem asks trained models to perform well on an unseen target domain with different data statistics from the source training domains. In computer vision, data augmentation has proven one of the most effective ways of better exploiting the source data to improve domain generalization. However, existing approaches primarily rely on image-space data augmentation, which requires careful augmentation design, and provides limited diversity of augmented data. We argue that feature augmentation is a more promising direction for DG. We find that an extremely simple technique of perturbing the feature embedding with Gaussian noise during training leads to a classifier with domain-generalization performance comparable to existing state of the art. To model more meaningful statistics reflective of cross-domain variability, we further estimate the full class-conditional feature covariance matrix iteratively during training. Subsequent joint stochastic feature augmentation provides an effective domain randomization method, perturbing features in the directions of intra-class/cross-domain variability. We verify our proposed method on three standard domain generalization benchmarks, Digit-DG, VLCS and PACS, and show it is outperforming or comparable to the state of the art in all setups, together with experimental analysis to illustrate how our method works towards training a robust generalisable model. Da Li 0001, Wei Li 0132, Shaogang Gong, Yanwei Fu 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2021 | Weight-covariance alignment for adversarially robust neural networksabstractStochastic Neural Networks (SNNs) that inject noise into their hidden layers have recently been shown to achieve strong robustness against adversarial attacks. However, existing SNNs are usually heuristically motivated, and often rely on adversarial training, which is computationally costly. We propose a new SNN that achieves state-of-the-art performance without relying on adversarial training, and enjoys solid theoretical justification. Specifically, while existing SNNs inject learned or hand-tuned isotropic noise, our SNN learns an anisotropic noise distribution to optimize a learning-theoretic bound on adversarial robustness. We evaluate our method on a number of popular benchmarks, show that it can be applied to different architectures, and that it provides robustness to a variety of white-box and black-box attacks, while being simple and fast to train compared to existing alternatives. Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Henry Gouk, Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICML | 3 |
| 2020 | Online Meta-learning for Multi-source and Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation
Da Li 0001, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ECCV (16) | 1 |
| 2020 | Sketch-a-Segmenter: Sketch-Based Photo Segmenter GenerationabstractGiven pixel-level annotated data, traditional photo segmentation techniques have achieved promising results. However, these photo segmentation models can only identify objects in categories for which data annotation and training have been carried out. This limitation has inspired recent work on few-shot and zero-shot learning for image segmentation. In this paper, we show the value of sketch for photo segmentation, in particular as a transferable representation to describe a concept to be segmented. We show, for the first time, that it is possible to generate a photo-segmentation model of a novel category using just a single sketch and furthermore exploit the unique fine-grained characteristics of sketch to produce more detailed segmentation. More specifically, we propose a sketch-based photo segmentation method that takes sketch as input and synthesizes the weights required for a neural network to segment the corresponding region of a given photo. Our framework can be applied at both the category-level and the instance-level, and fine-grained input sketches provide more accurate segmentation in the latter. This framework generalizes across categories via sketch and thus provides an alternative to zero-shot learning when segmenting a photo from a category without annotated training data. To investigate the instance-level relationship across sketch and photo, we create the SketchySeg dataset which contains segmentation annotations for photos corresponding to paired sketches in the Sketchy Dataset. Conghui Hu, Da Li 0001, Yongxin Yang, Timothy M. Hospedales, Yi-Zhe Song |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 2 |
| 2019 | Episodic Training for Domain GeneralizationabstractDomain generalization (DG) is the challenging and topical problem of learning models that generalize to novel testing domains with different statistics than a set of known training domains. The simple approach of aggregating data from all source domains and training a single deep neural network end-to-end on all the data provides a surprisingly strong baseline that surpasses many prior published methods. In this paper we build on this strong baseline by designing an episodic training procedure that trains a single deep network in a way that exposes it to the domain shift that characterises a novel domain at runtime. Specifically, we decompose a deep network into feature extractor and classifier components, and then train each component by simulating it interacting with a partner who is badly tuned for the current domain. This makes both components more robust, ultimately leading to our networks producing state-of-the-art performance on three DG benchmarks. Furthermore, we consider the pervasive workflow of using an ImageNet trained CNN as a fixed feature extractor for downstream recognition tasks. Using the Visual Decathlon benchmark, we demonstrate that our episodic-DG training improves the performance of such a general purpose feature extractor by explicitly training a feature for robustness to novel problems. This shows that DG training can benefit standard practice in computer vision. Da Li 0001, Jianshu Zhang 0001, Yongxin Yang, Cong Liu 0006, Yi-Zhe Song, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2019 | Robust Person Re-Identification by Modelling Feature UncertaintyabstractWe aim to learn deep person re-identification (ReID) models that are robust against noisy training data. Two types of noise are prevalent in practice: (1) label noise caused by human annotator errors and (2) data outliers caused by person detector errors or occlusion. Both types of noise pose serious problems for training ReID models, yet have been largely ignored so far. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network termed DistributionNet for robust ReID. Instead of representing each person image as a feature vector, DistributionNet models it as a Gaussian distribution with its variance representing the uncertainty of the extracted features. A carefully designed loss is formulated in DistributionNet to unevenly allocate uncertainty across training samples. Consequently, noisy samples are assigned large variance/uncertainty, which effectively alleviates their negative impacts on model fitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is more effective than alternative noise-robust deep models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/TianyuanYu/DistributionNet. Da Li 0001, Yongxin Yang, Timothy M. Hospedales, Tao Xiang 0002 |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2018 | Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain GeneralizationabstractDomain shift refers to the well known problem that a model trained in one source domain performs poorly when appliedto a target domain with different statistics. Domain Generalization (DG) techniques attempt to alleviate this issue by producing models which by design generalize well to novel testing domains. We propose a novel meta-learning method for domain generalization. Rather than designing a specific model that is robust to domain shift as in most previous DG work, we propose a model agnostic training procedure for DG. Our algorithm simulates train/test domain shift during training by synthesizing virtual testing domains within each mini-batch. The meta-optimization objective requires that steps to improve training domain performance should also improve testing domain performance. This meta-learning procedure trains models with good generalization ability to novel domains. We evaluate our method and achieve state of the art results on a recent cross-domain image classification benchmark, as well demonstrating its potential on two classic reinforcement learning tasks. Da Li 0001, Yongxin Yang, Yi-Zhe Song, Timothy M. Hospedales |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2018 | Sketch-a-Classifier: Sketch-Based Photo Classifier GenerationabstractContemporary deep learning techniques have made image recognition a reasonably reliable technology. However training effective photo classifiers typically takes numerous examples which limits image recognition's scalability and applicability to scenarios where images may not be available. This has motivated investigation into zero-shot learning, which addresses the issue via knowledge transfer from other modalities such as text. In this paper we investigate an alternative approach of synthesizing image classifiers: almost directly from a user's imagination, via freehand sketch. This approach doesn't require the category to be nameable or describable via attributes as per zero-shot learning. We achieve this via training a model regression network to map from free-hand sketch space to the space of photo classifiers. It turns out that this mapping can be learned in a category-agnostic way, allowing photo classifiers for new categories to be synthesized by user with no need for annotated training photos. We also demonstrate that this modality of classifier generation can also be used to enhance the granularity of an existing photo classifier, or as a complement to name-based zero-shot learning. Conghui Hu, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002, Timothy M. Hospedales |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2018 | Deep Factorised Inverse-Sketching
Kaiyue Pang, Da Li 0001, Jifei Song, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang 0002, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ECCV (15) | 2 |
| 2017 | Now You See Me: Deep Face Hallucination for Unviewed Sketches
Conghui Hu, Da Li 0001, Yi-Zhe Song, Timothy M. Hospedales |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2017 | Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain GeneralizationabstractThe problem of domain generalization is to learn from multiple training domains, and extract a domain-agnostic model that can then be applied to an unseen domain. Domain generalization (DG) has a clear motivation in contexts where there are target domains with distinct characteristics, yet sparse data for training. For example recognition in sketch images, which are distinctly more abstract and rarer than photos. Nevertheless, DG methods have primarily been evaluated on photo-only benchmarks focusing on alleviating the dataset bias where both problems of domain distinctiveness and data sparsity can be minimal. We argue that these benchmarks are overly straightforward, and show that simple deep learning baselines perform surprisingly well on them. In this paper, we make two main contributions: Firstly, we build upon the favorable domain shift-robust properties of deep learning methods, and develop a low-rank parameterized CNN model for end-to-end DG learning. Secondly, we develop a DG benchmark dataset covering photo, sketch, cartoon and painting domains. This is both more practically relevant, and harder (bigger domain shift) than existing benchmarks. The results show that our method outperforms existing DG alternatives, and our dataset provides a more significant DG challenge to drive future research. Da Li 0001, Yongxin Yang, Yi-Zhe Song, Timothy M. Hospedales |
ICCV | 1 |