No Arabic abstract
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a natural language grounding task where an agent learns to follow language instructions and navigate to specified destinations in real-world environments. A key challenge is to recognize and stop at the correct location, especially for complicated outdoor environments. Existing methods treat the STOP action equally as other actions, which results in undesirable behaviors that the agent often fails to stop at the destination even though it might be on the right path. Therefore, we propose Learning to Stop (L2Stop), a simple yet effective policy module that differentiates STOP and other actions. Our approach achieves the new state of the art on a challenging urban VLN dataset Touchdown, outperforming the baseline by 6.89% (absolute improvement) on Success weighted by Edit Distance (SED).
Recently, research efforts have been concentrated on revealing how pre-trained model makes a difference in neural network performance. Self-supervision and semi-supervised learning technologies have been extensively explored by the community and are proven to be of great potential in obtaining a powerful pre-trained model. However, these models require huge training costs (i.e., hundreds of millions of images or training iterations). In this paper, we propose to improve existing baseline networks via knowledge distillation from off-the-shelf pre-trained big powerful models. Different from existing knowledge distillation frameworks which require student model to be consistent with both soft-label generated by teacher model and hard-label annotated by humans, our solution performs distillation by only driving prediction of the student model consistent with that of the teacher model. Therefore, our distillation setting can get rid of manually labeled data and can be trained with extra unlabeled data to fully exploit capability of teacher model for better learning. We empirically find that such simple distillation settings perform extremely effective, for example, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k validation set of MobileNetV3-large and ResNet50-D can be significantly improved from 75.2% to 79% and 79.1% to 83%, respectively. We have also thoroughly analyzed what are dominant factors that affect the distillation performance and how they make a difference. Extensive downstream computer vision tasks, including transfer learning, object detection and semantic segmentation, can significantly benefit from the distilled pretrained models. All our experiments are implemented based on PaddlePaddle, codes and a series of improved pretrained models with ssld suffix are available in PaddleClas.
Vision-language pre-training has recently emerged as a promising alternative for representation learning. It shifts from the tradition of using images and discrete labels for learning a fixed set of weights, seen as visual concepts, to aligning images and raw text for two separate encoders. Such a paradigm benefits from a broader source of supervision and allows zero-shot transfer to downstream tasks since visual concepts can be diametrically generated from natural language, known as prompt. In this paper, we identify that a major challenge of deploying such models in practice is prompt engineering. This is because designing a proper prompt, especially for context words surrounding a class name, requires domain expertise and typically takes a significant amount of time for words tuning since a slight change in wording could have a huge impact on performance. Moreover, different downstream tasks require specific designs, further hampering the efficiency of deployment. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach named context optimization (CoOp). The main idea is to model context in prompts using continuous representations and perform end-to-end learning from data while keeping the pre-trained parameters fixed. In this way, the design of task-relevant prompts can be fully automated. Experiments on 11 datasets show that CoOp effectively turns pre-trained vision-language models into data-efficient visual learners, requiring as few as one or two shots to beat hand-crafted prompts with a decent margin and able to gain significant improvements when using more shots (e.g., at 16 shots the average gain is around 17% with the highest reaching over 50%). CoOp also exhibits strong robustness to distribution shift.
Computer vision has witnessed several advances in recent years, with unprecedented performance provided by deep representation learning research. Image formats thus appear attractive to other fields such as malware detection, where deep learning on images alleviates the need for comprehensively hand-crafted features generalising to different malware variants. We postulate that this research direction could become the next frontier in Android malware detection, and therefore requires a clear roadmap to ensure that new approaches indeed bring novel contributions. We contribute with a first building block by developing and assessing a baseline pipeline for image-based malware detection with straightforward steps. We propose DexRay, which converts the bytecode of the app DEX files into grey-scale vector images and feeds them to a 1-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network model. We view DexRay as foundational due to the exceedingly basic nature of the design choices, allowing to infer what could be a minimal performance that can be obtained with image-based learning in malware detection. The performance of DexRay evaluated on over 158k apps demonstrates that, while simple, our approach is effective with a high detection rate(F1-score= 0.96). Finally, we investigate the impact of time decay and image-resizing on the performance of DexRay and assess its resilience to obfuscation. This work-in-progress paper contributes to the domain of Deep Learning based Malware detection by providing a sound, simple, yet effective approach (with available artefacts) that can be the basis to scope the many profound questions that will need to be investigated to fully develop this domain.
Interaction and navigation defined by natural language instructions in dynamic environments pose significant challenges for neural agents. This paper focuses on addressing two challenges: handling long sequence of subtasks, and understanding complex human instructions. We propose Episodic Transformer (E.T.), a multimodal transformer that encodes language inputs and the full episode history of visual observations and actions. To improve training, we leverage synthetic instructions as an intermediate representation that decouples understanding the visual appearance of an environment from the variations of natural language instructions. We demonstrate that encoding the history with a transformer is critical to solve compositional tasks, and that pretraining and joint training with synthetic instructions further improve the performance. Our approach sets a new state of the art on the challenging ALFRED benchmark, achieving 38.4% and 8.5% task success rates on seen and unseen test splits.
Vision-language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to navigate step-by-step while perceiving the visual observations and comprehending a natural language instruction. Large data bias, which is caused by the disparity ratio between the small data scale and large navigation space, makes the VLN task challenging. Previous works have proposed various data augmentation methods to reduce data bias. However, these works do not explicitly reduce the data bias across different house scenes. Therefore, the agent would overfit to the seen scenes and achieve poor navigation performance in the unseen scenes. To tackle this problem, we propose the Random Environmental Mixup (REM) method, which generates cross-connected house scenes as augmented data via mixuping environment. Specifically, we first select key viewpoints according to the room connection graph for each scene. Then, we cross-connect the key views of different scenes to construct augmented scenes. Finally, we generate augmented instruction-path pairs in the cross-connected scenes. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our augmentation data via REM help the agent reduce its performance gap between the seen and unseen environment and improve the overall performance, making our model the best existing approach on the standard VLN benchmark.