Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.

This paper concerns realizing highly efficient information-theoretic robot exploration with desired performance in complex scenes. We build a continuous lightweight inference model to predict the mutual information (MI) and the associated prediction confidence of the robot's candidate actions which have not been evaluated explicitly. This allows the decision-making stage in robot exploration to run with a logarithmic complexity approximately, this will also benefit online exploration in large unstructured, and cluttered places that need more spatial samples to assess and decide. We also develop an objective function to balance the local optimal action with the highest MI value and the global choice with high prediction variance. Extensive numerical and dataset simulations show the desired efficiency of our proposed method without losing exploration performance in different environments. We also provide our open-source implementation codes released on GitHub for the robot community.

In contrast to the control-theoretic methods, the lack of stability guarantee remains a significant problem for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Jointly learning a policy and a Lyapunov function has recently become a promising approach to ensuring the whole system with a stability guarantee. However, the classical Lyapunov constraints researchers introduced cannot stabilize the system during the sampling-based optimization. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Stability Certification (ASC), making the system reach sampling-based stability. Because the ASC condition can search for the optimal policy heuristically, we design the Adaptive Lyapunov-based Actor-Critic (ALAC) algorithm based on the ASC condition. Meanwhile, our algorithm avoids the optimization problem that a variety of constraints are coupled into the objective in current approaches. When evaluated on ten robotic tasks, our method achieves lower accumulated cost and fewer stability constraint violations than previous studies.

Representing and synthesizing novel views in real-world dynamic scenes from casual monocular videos is a long-standing problem. Existing solutions typically approach dynamic scenes by applying geometry techniques or utilizing temporal information between several adjacent frames without considering the underlying background distribution in the entire scene or the transmittance over the ray dimension, limiting their performance on static and occlusion areas. Our approach $\textbf{D}$istribution-$\textbf{D}$riven neural radiance fields offers high-quality view synthesis and a 3D solution to $\textbf{D}$etach the background from the entire $\textbf{D}$ynamic scene, which is called $\text{D}^4$NeRF. Specifically, it employs a neural representation to capture the scene distribution in the static background and a 6D-input NeRF to represent dynamic objects, respectively. Each ray sample is given an additional occlusion weight to indicate the transmittance lying in the static and dynamic components. We evaluate $\text{D}^4$NeRF on public dynamic scenes and our urban driving scenes acquired from an autonomous-driving dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods in rendering texture details and motion areas while also producing a clean static background. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Luciferbobo/D4NeRF.

Multivariate time series forecasting with hierarchical structure is pervasive in real-world applications, demanding not only predicting each level of the hierarchy, but also reconciling all forecasts to ensure coherency, i.e., the forecasts should satisfy the hierarchical aggregation constraints. Moreover, the disparities of statistical characteristics between levels can be huge, worsened by non-Gaussian distributions and non-linear correlations. To this extent, we propose a novel end-to-end hierarchical time series forecasting model, based on conditioned normalizing flow-based autoregressive transformer reconciliation, to represent complex data distribution while simultaneously reconciling the forecasts to ensure coherency. Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, we achieve the forecasting and reconciliation simultaneously without requiring any explicit post-processing step. In addition, by harnessing the power of deep model, we do not rely on any assumption such as unbiased estimates or Gaussian distribution. Our evaluation experiments are conducted on four real-world hierarchical datasets from different industrial domains (three public ones and a dataset from the application servers of Alipay's data center) and the preliminary results demonstrate efficacy of our proposed method.

Benefiting from its single-photon sensitivity, single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array has been widely applied in various fields such as fluorescence lifetime imaging and quantum computing. However, large-scale high-fidelity single-photon imaging remains a big challenge, due to the complex hardware manufacture craft and heavy noise disturbance of SPAD arrays. In this work, we introduce deep learning into SPAD, enabling super-resolution single-photon imaging over an order of magnitude, with significant enhancement of bit depth and imaging quality. We first studied the complex photon flow model of SPAD electronics to accurately characterize multiple physical noise sources, and collected a real SPAD image dataset (64 $\times$ 32 pixels, 90 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2790 images in total) to calibrate noise model parameters. With this real-world physical noise model, we for the first time synthesized a large-scale realistic single-photon image dataset (image pairs of 5 different resolutions with maximum megapixels, 17250 scenes, 10 different bit depth, 3 different illumination flux, 2.6 million images in total) for subsequent network training. To tackle the severe super-resolution challenge of SPAD inputs with low bit depth, low resolution, and heavy noise, we further built a deep transformer network with a content-adaptive self-attention mechanism and gated fusion modules, which can dig global contextual features to remove multi-source noise and extract full-frequency details. We applied the technique on a series of experiments including macroscopic and microscopic imaging, microfluidic inspection, and Fourier ptychography. The experiments validate the technique's state-of-the-art super-resolution SPAD imaging performance, with more than 5 dB superiority on PSNR compared to the existing methods.

Existing solutions to network scheduling typically assume that the instantaneous link rates are completely known before a scheduling decision is made or consider a bandit setting where the accurate link quality is discovered only after it has been used for data transmission. In practice, the decision maker can obtain (relatively accurate) channel information, e.g., through beamforming in mmWave networks, right before data transmission. However, frequent beamforming incurs a formidable overhead in densely deployed mmWave WLANs. In this paper, we consider the important problem of throughput optimization with joint link probing and scheduling. The problem is challenging even when the link rate distributions are pre-known (the offline setting) due to the necessity of balancing the information gains from probing and the cost of reducing the data transmission opportunity. We develop an approximation algorithm with guaranteed performance when the probing decision is non-adaptive, and a dynamic programming based solution for the more challenging adaptive setting. We further extend our solutions to the online setting with unknown link rate distributions and develop a contextual-bandit based algorithm and derive its regret bound. Numerical results using data traces collected from real-world mmWave deployments demonstrate the efficiency of our solutions.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), originally proposed for node classification, have also motivated many recent works on edge prediction (a.k.a., link prediction). However, existing methods lack elaborate design regarding the distinctions between two tasks that have been frequently overlooked: (i) edges only constitute the topology in the node classification task but can be used as both the topology and the supervisions (i.e., labels) in the edge prediction task; (ii) the node classification makes prediction over each individual node, while the edge prediction is determinated by each pair of nodes. To this end, we propose a novel edge prediction paradigm named Edge-aware Message PassIng neuRal nEtworks (EMPIRE). Concretely, we first introduce an edge splitting technique to specify use of each edge where each edge is solely used as either the topology or the supervision (named as topology edge or supervision edge). We then develop a new message passing mechanism that generates the messages to source nodes (through topology edges) being aware of target nodes (through supervision edges). In order to emphasize the differences between pairs connected by supervision edges and pairs unconnected, we further weight the messages to highlight the relative ones that can reflect the differences. In addition, we design a novel negative node-pair sampling trick that efficiently samples 'hard' negative instances in the supervision instances, and can significantly improve the performance. Experimental results verify that the proposed method can significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art models regarding the edge prediction task on multiple homogeneous and heterogeneous graph datasets.

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textit{\textbf{Se}gmented \textbf{C}ontext \textbf{B}elief \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{D}eep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.