No Arabic abstract
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the dominant deep neural network (DNN) architecture for computer vision. Recently, Transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models, such as Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer, started to lead new trends as they showed promising results in the ImageNet classification task. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on these DNN structures and try to understand their respective pros and cons. To ensure a fair comparison, we first develop a unified framework called SPACH which adopts separate modules for spatial and channel processing. Our experiments under the SPACH framework reveal that all structures can achieve competitive performance at a moderate scale. However, they demonstrate distinctive behaviors when the network size scales up. Based on our findings, we propose two hybrid models using convolution and Transformer modules. The resulting Hybrid-MS-S+ model achieves 83.9% top-1 accuracy with 63M parameters and 12.3G FLOPS. It is already on par with the SOTA models with sophisticated designs. The code and models will be made publicly available.
Language Models based on recurrent neural networks have dominated recent image caption generation tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Language CNN model which is suitable for statistical language modeling tasks and shows competitive performance in image captioning. In contrast to previous models which predict next word based on one previous word and hidden state, our language CNN is fed with all the previous words and can model the long-range dependencies of history words, which are critical for image captioning. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on two datasets MS COCO and Flickr30K. Our extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms the vanilla recurrent neural network based language models and is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the go-to model for computer vision. Recently, attention-based networks, such as the Vision Transformer, have also become popular. In this paper we show that while convolutions and attention are both sufficient for good performance, neither of them are necessary. We present MLP-Mixer, an architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). MLP-Mixer contains two types of layers: one with MLPs applied independently to image patches (i.e. mixing the per-location features), and one with MLPs applied across patches (i.e. mixing spatial information). When trained on large datasets, or with modern regularization schemes, MLP-Mixer attains competitive scores on image classification benchmarks, with pre-training and inference cost comparable to state-of-the-art models. We hope that these results spark further research beyond the realms of well established CNNs and Transformers.
Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures is vital for medical image analysis. The state-of-the-art accuracy is typically achieved by supervised learning methods, where gathering the requisite expert-labeled image annotations in a scalable manner remains a main obstacle. Therefore, annotation-efficient methods that permit to produce accurate anatomical structure segmentation are highly desirable. In this work, we present Contour Transformer Network (CTN), a one-shot anatomy segmentation method with a naturally built-in human-in-the-loop mechanism. We formulate anatomy segmentation as a contour evolution process and model the evolution behavior by graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Training the CTN model requires only one labeled image exemplar and leverages additional unlabeled data through newly introduced loss functions that measure the global shape and appearance consistency of contours. On segmentation tasks of four different anatomies, we demonstrate that our one-shot learning method significantly outperforms non-learning-based methods and performs competitively to the state-of-the-art fully supervised deep learning methods. With minimal human-in-the-loop editing feedback, the segmentation performance can be further improved to surpass the fully supervised methods.
To establish an appropriate model for photo aesthetic assessment, in this paper, a D-measure which reflects the disentanglement degree of the final layer FC nodes of CNN is introduced. By combining F-measure with D-measure to obtain a FD measure, an algorithm of determining the optimal model from the multiple photo score prediction models generated by CNN-based repetitively self-revised learning(RSRL) is proposed. Furthermore, the first fixation perspective(FFP) and the assessment interest region(AIR) of the models are defined and calculated. The experimental results show that the FD measure is effective for establishing the appropriate model from the multiple score prediction models with different CNN structures. Moreover, the FD-determined optimal models with the comparatively high FD always have the FFP an AIR which are close to the humans aesthetic perception when enjoying photos.
An Axial Shifted MLP architecture (AS-MLP) is proposed in this paper. Different from MLP-Mixer, where the global spatial feature is encoded for the information flow through matrix transposition and one token-mixing MLP, we pay more attention to the local features communication. By axially shifting channels of the feature map, AS-MLP is able to obtain the information flow from different axial directions, which captures the local dependencies. Such an operation enables us to utilize a pure MLP architecture to achieve the same local receptive field as CNN-like architecture. We can also design the receptive field size and dilation of blocks of AS-MLP, etc, just like designing those of convolution kernels. With the proposed AS-MLP architecture, our model obtains 83.3% Top-1 accuracy with 88M parameters and 15.2 GFLOPs on the ImageNet-1K dataset. Such a simple yet effective architecture outperforms all MLP-based architectures and achieves competitive performance compared to the transformer-based architectures (e.g., Swin Transformer) even with slightly lower FLOPs. In addition, AS-MLP is also the first MLP-based architecture to be applied to the downstream tasks (e.g., object detection and semantic segmentation). The experimental results are also impressive. Our proposed AS-MLP obtains 51.5 mAP on the COCO validation set and 49.5 MS mIoU on the ADE20K dataset, which is competitive compared to the transformer-based architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/AS-MLP.