Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) aims to transfer pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks by learning a small number of parameters. Compared to traditional fine-tuning, which updates the entire model, PET significantly reduces storage and transfer costs for each task regardless of exponentially increasing pre-trained model capacity. However, most PET methods inherit the inference latency of their large backbone models and often introduce additional computational overhead due to additional modules (e.g. adapters), limiting their practicality for compute-intensive applications. In this paper, we propose Faster Parameter-Efficient Tuning (FPET), a novel approach that enhances inference speed and training efficiency while maintaining high storage efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a plug-and-play token redundancy reduction module delicately designed for PET. This module refines tokens from the self-attention layer using an adapter to learn the accurate similarity between tokens and cuts off the tokens through a fully-differentiable token merging strategy, which uses a straight-through estimator for optimal token reduction. Experimental results prove that our FPET achieves faster inference and higher memory efficiency than the pre-trained backbone while keeping competitive performance on par with state-of-the-art PET methods. The code is available at https://github.com/kyk120/fpet.

Visual scenes are naturally organized in a hierarchy, where a coarse semantic is recursively comprised of several fine details. Exploring such a visual hierarchy is crucial to recognize the complex relations of visual elements, leading to a comprehensive scene understanding. In this paper, we propose a Visual Hierarchy Mapper (Hi-Mapper), a novel approach for enhancing the structured understanding of the pre-trained Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Hi-Mapper investigates the hierarchical organization of the visual scene by 1) pre-defining a hierarchy tree through the encapsulation of probability densities; and 2) learning the hierarchical relations in hyperbolic space with a novel hierarchical contrastive loss. The pre-defined hierarchy tree recursively interacts with the visual features of the pre-trained DNNs through hierarchy decomposition and encoding procedures, thereby effectively identifying the visual hierarchy and enhancing the recognition of an entire scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-Mapper significantly enhances the representation capability of DNNs, leading to an improved performance on various tasks, including image classification and dense prediction tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/kwonjunn0l/Hi-Mapper.

Given the inevitability of domain shifts during inference in real-world applications, test-time adaptation (TTA) is essential for model adaptation after deployment. However, the real-world scenario of continuously changing target distributions presents challenges including catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation. Existing TTA methods for non-stationary domain shifts, while effective, incur excessive computational load, making them impractical for on-device settings. In this paper, we introduce a layer-wise auto-weighting algorithm for continual and gradual TTA that autonomously identifies layers for preservation or concentrated adaptation. By leveraging the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), we first design the learning weight to selectively focus on layers associated with log-likelihood changes while preserving unrelated ones. Then, we further propose an exponential min-max scaler to make certain layers nearly frozen while mitigating outliers. This minimizes forgetting and error accumulation, leading to efficient adaptation to non-stationary target distribution. Experiments on CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, and ImageNet-C show our method outperforms conventional continual and gradual TTA approaches while significantly reducing computational load, highlighting the importance of FIM-based learning weight in adapting to continuously or gradually shifting target domains.1

Recent progress in deterministic prompt learning has become a promising alternative to various downstream vision tasks, enabling models to learn powerful visual representations with the help of pre-trained vision-language models. However, this approach results in limited performance for dense prediction tasks that require handling more complex and diverse objects, since a single and deterministic description cannot sufficiently represent the entire image. In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic prompt learning to fully exploit the vision-language knowledge in dense prediction tasks. First, we introduce learnable class-agnostic attribute prompts to describe universal attributes across the object class. The attributes are combined with class information and visual-context knowledge to define the class-specific textual distribution. Text representations are sampled and used to guide the dense prediction task using the probabilistic pixel-text matching loss, enhancing the stability and generalization capability of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on different dense prediction tasks and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Recent DETR-based video grounding models have made the model directly predict moment timestamps without any hand-crafted components, such as a pre-defined proposal or non-maximum suppression, by learning moment queries. However, their input-agnostic moment queries inevitably overlook an intrinsic temporal structure of a video, providing limited positional information. In this paper, we formulate an event-aware dynamic moment query to enable the model to take the input-specific content and positional information of the video into account. To this end, we present two levels of reasoning: 1) Event reasoning that captures distinctive event units constituting a given video using a slot attention mechanism; and 2) moment reasoning that fuses the moment queries with a given sentence through a gated fusion transformer layer and learns interactions between the moment queries and video-sentence representations to predict moment timestamps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the event-aware dynamic moment queries, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on several video grounding benchmarks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinhyunj/EaTR.

The rise of deep neural networks has led to several break-throughs for semantic segmentation. In spite of this, a model trained on source domain often fails to work properly in new challenging domains, that is directly concerned with the generalization capability of the model. In this paper, we present a novel memory-guided domain generalization method for semantic segmentation based on meta-learning framework. Especially, our method abstracts the conceptual knowledge of semantic classes into categorical memory which is constant beyond the domains. Upon the meta-learning concept, we repeatedly train memory-guided networks and simulate virtual test to 1) learn how to memorize a domain-agnostic and distinct information of classes and 2) offer an externally settled memory as a class-guidance to reduce the ambiguity of representation in the test data of arbitrary unseen domain. To this end, we also propose memory divergence and feature cohesion losses, which encourage to learn memory reading and update processes for category-aware domain generalization. Extensive experiments for semantic segmentation demonstrate the superior generalization capability of our method over state-of-the-art works on various benchmarks.11https://github.com/Genie-Kim/PintheMemory

Domain generalization aims to learn a prediction model on multi-domain source data such that the model can generalize to a target domain with unknown statistics. Most existing approaches have been developed under the assumption that the source data is well-balanced in terms of both domain and class. However, real-world training data collected with different composition biases often exhibits severe distribution gaps for domain and class, leading to substantial performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a self-balanced domain generalization framework that adaptively learns the weights of losses to alleviate the bias caused by different distributions of the multi-domain source data. The self-balanced scheme is based on an auxiliary reweighting network that iteratively updates the weight of loss conditioned on the domain and class information by leveraging balanced meta data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method overwhelming state-of-the-art works for domain generalization.