Sum-Product-Attention Networks: Leveraging Self-Attention in Probabilistic Circuits

Probabilistic circuits (PCs) have become the de-facto standard for learning and inference in probabilistic modeling. We introduce Sum-Product-Attention Networks (SPAN), a new generative model that integrates probabilistic circuits with Transformers. SPAN uses self-attention to select the most relevant parts of a probabilistic circuit, here sum-product networks, to improve the modeling capability of the underlying sum-product network. We show that while modeling, SPAN focuses on a specific set of independent assumptions in every product layer of the sum-product network. Our empirical evaluations show that SPAN outperforms state-of-the-art probabilistic generative models on various benchmark data sets as well is an efficient generative image model.

Few-Shot Learning for Video Object Detection in a Transfer-Learning Scheme

Different from static images, videos contain additional temporal and spatial information for better object detection. However, it is costly to obtain a large number of videos with bounding box annotations that are required for supervised deep learning. Although humans can easily learn to recognize new objects by watching only a few video clips, deep learning usually suffers from overfitting. This leads to an important question: how to effectively learn a video object detector from only a few labeled video clips? In this paper, we study the new problem of few-shot learning for video object detection. We first define the few-shot setting and create a new benchmark dataset for few-shot video object detection derived from the widely used ImageNet VID dataset. We employ a transfer-learning framework to effectively train the video object detector on a large number of base-class objects and a few video clips of novel-class objects. By analyzing the results of two methods under this framework (Joint and Freeze) on our designed weak and strong base datasets, we reveal insufficiency and overfitting problems. A simple but effective method, called Thaw, is naturally developed to trade off the two problems and validate our analysis. Extensive experiments on our proposed benchmark datasets with different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel analysis in this new few-shot video object detection problem.