Existing domain adaptation methods aim at learning features that can be generalized among domains. These methods commonly require to update source classifier to adapt to the target domain and do not properly handle the trade-off between the source domain and the target domain. In this work, instead of training a classifier to adapt to the target domain, we use a separable component called data calibrator to help the fixed source classifier recover discrimination power in the target domain, while preserving the source domain’s performance. When the difference between two domains is small, the source classifier’s representation is sufficient to perform well in the target domain and outperforms GAN-based methods in digits. Otherwise, the proposed method can leverage synthetic images generated by GANs to boost performance and achieve state-of-the-art performance in digits datasets and driving scene semantic segmentation. Our method also empirically suggests the potential connection between domain adaptation and adversarial attacks. Code release is available at https://github.com/yeshaokai/Calibrator-Domain-Adaptation

Training process is crucial for the deployment of the network in applications which have two strict requirements on both accuracy and robustness. However, most existing approaches are in a dilemma, i.e. model accuracy and robustness forming an embarrassing tradeoff – the improvement of one leads to the drop of the other. The challenge remains for as we try to improve the accuracy and robustness simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel training method via introducing the auxiliary classifiers for training on corrupted samples, while the clean samples are normally trained with the primary classifier. In the training stage, a novel distillation method named input-aware self distillation is proposed to facilitate the primary classifier to learn the robust information from auxiliary classifiers. Along with it, a new normalization method - selective batch normal- ization is proposed to prevent the model from the negative influence of corrupted images. At the end of the training period, a L2-norm penalty is applied to the weights of primary and auxiliary classifiers such that their weights are asymptotically identical. In the stage of inference, only the primary classifier is used and thus no extra computation and storage are needed. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet show that noticeable improvements on both accuracy and robustness can be observed by the proposed auxiliary training. On average, auxiliary training achieves 2.21% accuracy and 21.64% robustness (measured by corruption error) improvements over traditional training methods on CIFAR100. Codes have been released on github.

Although ordinary differential equations (ODEs) provide insights for designing network architectures, its relationship with the non-residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is still unclear. In this paper, we present a novel ODE model by adding a damping term. It can be shown that the proposed model can recover both a ResNet and a CNN by adjusting an interpolation coefficient. Therefore, the damped ODE model provides a unified framework for the interpretation of residual and non-residual networks. The Lyapunov analysis reveals better stability of the proposed model, and thus yields robustness improvement of the learned networks. Experiments on a number of image classification benchmarks show that the proposed model substantially improves the accuracy of ResNet and ResNeXt over the perturbed inputs from both stochastic noise and adversarial attack methods. Moreover, the loss landscape analysis demonstrates the improved robustness of our method along the attack direction.

Feature distillation, a primary method in knowledge distillation, always leads to significant accuracy improvements. Most existing methods distill features in the teacher network through a manually designed transformation. In this paper, we propose a novel distillation method named task-oriented feature distillation (TOFD) where the transformation is convolutional layers that are trained in a data-driven manner by task loss. As a result, the task-oriented information in the features can be captured and distilled to students. Moreover, an orthogonal loss is applied to the feature resizing layer in TOFD to improve the performance of knowledge distillation. Experiments show that TOFD outperforms other distillation methods by a large margin on both image classification and 3D classification tasks. Codes have been released in Github[3].

Designing an unsupervised image denoising approach in practical applications is a challenging task due to the complicated data acquisition process. In the realworld case, the noise distribution is so complex that the simplified additive white Gaussian (AWGN) assumption rarely holds, which significantly deteriorates the Gaussian denoisers’ performance. To address this problem, we apply a deep neural network that maps the noisy image into a latent space in which the AWGN assumption holds, and thus any existing Gaussian denoiser is applicable. More specifically, the proposed neural network consists of the encoder-decoder structure and approximates the likelihood term in the Bayesian framework. Together with a Gaussian denoiser, the neural network can be trained with the input image itself and does not require any pre-training in other datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world noisy image datasets have shown that the combination of neural networks and Gaussian denoisers improves the performance of the original Gaussian denoisers by a large margin. In particular, the neural network+BM3D method significantly outperforms other unsupervised denoising approaches and is competitive with supervised networks such as DnCNN, FFDNet, and CBDNet.