In this report, we present a fast and accurate object detection method dubbed DAMO-YOLO, which achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art YOLO series. DAMO-YOLO is extended from YOLO with some new technologies, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS), efficient Reparameterized Generalized-FPN (RepGFPN), a lightweight head with AlignedOTA label assignment, and distillation enhancement. In particular, we use MAE-NAS, a method guided by the principle of maximum entropy, to search our detection backbone under the constraints of low latency and high performance, producing ResNet-like / CSP-like structures with spatial pyramid pooling and focus modules. In the design of necks and heads, we follow the rule of "large neck, small head". We import Generalized-FPN with accelerated queen-fusion to build the detector neck and upgrade its CSPNet with efficient layer aggregation networks (ELAN) and reparameterization. Then we investigate how detector head size affects detection performance and find that a heavy neck with only one task projection layer would yield better results. In addition, AlignedOTA is proposed to solve the misalignment problem in label assignment. And a distillation schema is introduced to improve performance to a higher level. Based on these new techs, we build a suite of models at various scales to meet the needs of different scenarios, i.e., DAMO-YOLO-Tiny/Small/Medium. They can achieve 43.0/46.8/50.0 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 2.78/3.83/5.62 ms on T4 GPUs respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/tinyvision/damo-yolo.

在传统的对象检测框架中，从图像识别模型继承的骨干体提取了深层特征，然后颈部模块融合了这些潜在特征，以在不同的尺度上捕获信息。由于对象检测的分辨率比图像识别大得多，因此骨干的计算成本通常主导了总推断成本。这种沉重的背部设计范式主要是由于历史遗产将图像识别模型传输到对象检测时，而不是端到端的优化设计以进行对象检测。在这项工作中，我们表明这种范式确实导致了亚最佳对象检测模型。为此，我们提出了一种新型的重颈范式，长颈鹿，这是一个类似长颈鹿的网络，用于有效的对象检测。长颈鹿使用极轻的骨干和非常深的颈部模块，可同时同时在不同的空间尺度以及不同级别的潜在语义之间进行密集的信息交换。该设计范式允许检测器即使在网络的早期阶段，也可以在相同的优先级处理高级语义信息和低级空间信息，从而使其在检测任务中更有效。对多个流行对象检测基准的数值评估表明，长颈鹿在广泛的资源约束中始终优于先前的SOTA模型。源代码可在https://github.com/jyqi/giraffedet上获得。

This paper focuses on designing efficient models with low parameters and FLOPs for dense predictions. Even though CNN-based lightweight methods have achieved stunning results after years of research, trading-off model accuracy and constrained resources still need further improvements. This work rethinks the essential unity of efficient Inverted Residual Block in MobileNetv2 and effective Transformer in ViT, inductively abstracting a general concept of Meta-Mobile Block, and we argue that the specific instantiation is very important to model performance though sharing the same framework. Motivated by this phenomenon, we deduce a simple yet efficient modern \textbf{I}nverted \textbf{R}esidual \textbf{M}obile \textbf{B}lock (iRMB) for mobile applications, which absorbs CNN-like efficiency to model short-distance dependency and Transformer-like dynamic modeling capability to learn long-distance interactions. Furthermore, we design a ResNet-like 4-phase \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{MO}del (EMO) based only on a series of iRMBs for dense applications. Massive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, our EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass \textbf{SoTA} CNN-/Transformer-based models, while trading-off the model accuracy and efficiency well.

We aim to bridge the gap between our common-sense few-sample human learning and large-data machine learning. We derive a theory of human-like few-shot learning from von-Neuman-Landauer's principle. modelling human learning is difficult as how people learn varies from one to another. Under commonly accepted definitions, we prove that all human or animal few-shot learning, and major models including Free Energy Principle and Bayesian Program Learning that model such learning, approximate our theory, under Church-Turing thesis. We find that deep generative model like variational autoencoder (VAE) can be used to approximate our theory and perform significantly better than baseline models including deep neural networks, for image recognition, low resource language processing, and character recognition.

Despite significant progress in object categorization, in recent years, a number of important challenges remain; mainly, the ability to learn from limited labeled data and to recognize object classes within large, potentially open, set of labels. Zero-shot learning is one way of addressing these challenges, but it has only been shown to work with limited sized class vocabularies and typically requires separation between supervised and unsupervised classes, allowing former to inform the latter but not vice versa. We propose the notion of vocabulary-informed learning to alleviate the above mentioned challenges and address problems of supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and open set recognition using a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a weighted maximum margin framework for semantic manifold-based recognition that incorporates distance constraints from (both supervised and unsupervised) vocabulary atoms. Distance constraints ensure that labeled samples are projected closer to their correct prototypes, in the embedding space, than to others. We illustrate that resulting model shows improvements in supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot, and large open set recognition, with up to 310K class vocabulary on Animal with Attributes and ImageNet datasets.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is currently one of the most commonly used techniques for traffic signal control (TSC), which can adaptively adjusted traffic signal phase and duration according to real-time traffic data. However, a fully centralized RL approach is beset with difficulties in a multi-network scenario because of exponential growth in state-action space with increasing intersections. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can overcome the high-dimension problem by employing the global control of each local RL agent, but it also brings new challenges, such as the failure of convergence caused by the non-stationary Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper, we introduce an off-policy nash deep Q-Network (OPNDQN) algorithm, which mitigates the weakness of both fully centralized and MARL approaches. The OPNDQN algorithm solves the problem that traditional algorithms cannot be used in large state-action space traffic models by utilizing a fictitious game approach at each iteration to find the nash equilibrium among neighboring intersections, from which no intersection has incentive to unilaterally deviate. One of main advantages of OPNDQN is to mitigate the non-stationarity of multi-agent Markov process because it considers the mutual influence among neighboring intersections by sharing their actions. On the other hand, for training a large traffic network, the convergence rate of OPNDQN is higher than that of existing MARL approaches because it does not incorporate all state information of each agent. We conduct an extensive experiments by using Simulation of Urban MObility simulator (SUMO), and show the dominant superiority of OPNDQN over several existing MARL approaches in terms of average queue length, episode training reward and average waiting time.

The growing interest in intelligent services and privacy protection for mobile devices has given rise to the widespread application of federated learning in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Diverse user behaviors call for personalized services with heterogeneous Machine Learning (ML) models on different devices. Federated Multi-task Learning (FMTL) is proposed to train related but personalized ML models for different devices, whereas previous works suffer from excessive communication overhead during training and neglect the model heterogeneity among devices in MEC. Introducing knowledge distillation into FMTL can simultaneously enable efficient communication and model heterogeneity among clients, whereas existing methods rely on a public dataset, which is impractical in reality. To tackle this dilemma, Federated MultI-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge CompuTing (FedICT) is proposed. FedICT direct local-global knowledge aloof during bi-directional distillation processes between clients and the server, aiming to enable multi-task clients while alleviating client drift derived from divergent optimization directions of client-side local models. Specifically, FedICT includes Federated Prior Knowledge Distillation (FPKD) and Local Knowledge Adjustment (LKA). FPKD is proposed to reinforce the clients' fitting of local data by introducing prior knowledge of local data distributions. Moreover, LKA is proposed to correct the distillation loss of the server, making the transferred local knowledge better match the generalized representation. Experiments on three datasets show that FedICT significantly outperforms all compared benchmarks in various data heterogeneous and model architecture settings, achieving improved accuracy with less than 1.2% training communication overhead compared with FedAvg and no more than 75% training communication round compared with FedGKT.

With the development of technology and sharing economy, Airbnb as a famous short-term rental platform, has become the first choice for many young people to select. The issue of Airbnb's pricing has always been a problem worth studying. While the previous studies achieve promising results, there are exists deficiencies to solve. Such as, (1) the feature attributes of rental are not rich enough; (2) the research on rental text information is not deep enough; (3) there are few studies on predicting the rental price combined with the point of interest(POI) around the house. To address the above challenges, we proposes a multi-source information embedding(MSIE) model to predict the rental price of Airbnb. Specifically, we first selects the statistical feature to embed the original rental data. Secondly, we generates the word feature vector and emotional score combination of three different text information to form the text feature embedding. Thirdly, we uses the points of interest(POI) around the rental house information generates a variety of spatial network graphs, and learns the embedding of the network to obtain the spatial feature embedding. Finally, this paper combines the three modules into multi source rental representations, and uses the constructed fully connected neural network to predict the price. The analysis of the experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed model.