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Thomas Mensink

Thomas Mensink contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Dual-Rate Diffusion: Accelerating diffusion models with an interleaved heavy-light network

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but suffer from high computational costs during inference due to the repeated evaluation of a heavy neural network. In this work, we propose Dual-Rate Diffusion, a method to accelerate sampling by interleaving the execution of a heavy high-capacity context encoder and a light efficient denoising model. The context encoder is evaluated sparsely to extract high-dimensional features, which are effectively reused by the light denoising model at every step to refine the sample efficiently. This approach significantly accelerates inference without compromising sample quality. On ImageNet benchmarks, Dual-Rate Diffusion matches the performance of standard baselines while reducing computational cost by a factor of $2$-$4$. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is compatible with distillation techniques, such as Moment Matching Distillation, enabling further efficiency gains in few-step generation.

preprint2022arXiv

Post-hoc Calibration of Neural Networks by g-Layers

Calibration of neural networks is a critical aspect to consider when incorporating machine learning models in real-world decision-making systems where the confidence of decisions are equally important as the decisions themselves. In recent years, there is a surge of research on neural network calibration and the majority of the works can be categorized into post-hoc calibration methods, defined as methods that learn an additional function to calibrate an already trained base network. In this work, we intend to understand the post-hoc calibration methods from a theoretical point of view. Especially, it is known that minimizing Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) will lead to a calibrated network on the training set if the global optimum is attained (Bishop, 1994). Nevertheless, it is not clear learning an additional function in a post-hoc manner would lead to calibration in the theoretical sense. To this end, we prove that even though the base network ($f$) does not lead to the global optimum of NLL, by adding additional layers ($g$) and minimizing NLL by optimizing the parameters of $g$ one can obtain a calibrated network $g \circ f$. This not only provides a less stringent condition to obtain a calibrated network but also provides a theoretical justification of post-hoc calibration methods. Our experiments on various image classification benchmarks confirm the theory.

preprint2022arXiv

The Missing Link: Finding label relations across datasets

Computer vision is driven by the many datasets available for training or evaluating novel methods. However, each dataset has a different set of class labels, visual definition of classes, images following a specific distribution, annotation protocols, etc. In this paper we explore the automatic discovery of visual-semantic relations between labels across datasets. We aim to understand how instances of a certain class in a dataset relate to the instances of another class in another dataset. Are they in an identity, parent/child, overlap relation? Or is there no link between them at all? To find relations between labels across datasets, we propose methods based on language, on vision, and on their combination. We show that we can effectively discover label relations across datasets, as well as their type. We apply our method to four applications: understand label relations, identify missing aspects, increase label specificity, and predict transfer learning gains. We conclude that label relations cannot be established by looking at the names of classes alone, as they depend strongly on how each of the datasets was constructed.

preprint2022arXiv

Transferability Estimation using Bhattacharyya Class Separability

Transfer learning has become a popular method for leveraging pre-trained models in computer vision. However, without performing computationally expensive fine-tuning, it is difficult to quantify which pre-trained source models are suitable for a specific target task, or, conversely, to which tasks a pre-trained source model can be easily adapted to. In this work, we propose Gaussian Bhattacharyya Coefficient (GBC), a novel method for quantifying transferability between a source model and a target dataset. In a first step we embed all target images in the feature space defined by the source model, and represent them with per-class Gaussians. Then, we estimate their pairwise class separability using the Bhattacharyya coefficient, yielding a simple and effective measure of how well the source model transfers to the target task. We evaluate GBC on image classification tasks in the context of dataset and architecture selection. Further, we also perform experiments on the more complex semantic segmentation transferability estimation task. We demonstrate that GBC outperforms state-of-the-art transferability metrics on most evaluation criteria in the semantic segmentation settings, matches the performance of top methods for dataset transferability in image classification, and performs best on architecture selection problems for image classification.

preprint2022arXiv

Transferability Metrics for Selecting Source Model Ensembles

We address the problem of ensemble selection in transfer learning: Given a large pool of source models we want to select an ensemble of models which, after fine-tuning on the target training set, yields the best performance on the target test set. Since fine-tuning all possible ensembles is computationally prohibitive, we aim at predicting performance on the target dataset using a computationally efficient transferability metric. We propose several new transferability metrics designed for this task and evaluate them in a challenging and realistic transfer learning setup for semantic segmentation: we create a large and diverse pool of source models by considering 17 source datasets covering a wide variety of image domain, two different architectures, and two pre-training schemes. Given this pool, we then automatically select a subset to form an ensemble performing well on a given target dataset. We compare the ensemble selected by our method to two baselines which select a single source model, either (1) from the same pool as our method; or (2) from a pool containing large source models, each with similar capacity as an ensemble. Averaged over 17 target datasets, we outperform these baselines by 6.0% and 2.5% relative mean IoU, respectively.

preprint2021arXiv

Range Conditioned Dilated Convolutions for Scale Invariant 3D Object Detection

This paper presents a novel 3D object detection framework that processes LiDAR data directly on its native representation: range images. Benefiting from the compactness of range images, 2D convolutions can efficiently process dense LiDAR data of a scene. To overcome scale sensitivity in this perspective view, a novel range-conditioned dilation (RCD) layer is proposed to dynamically adjust a continuous dilation rate as a function of the measured range. Furthermore, localized soft range gating combined with a 3D box-refinement stage improves robustness in occluded areas, and produces overall more accurate bounding box predictions. On the public large-scale Waymo Open Dataset, our method sets a new baseline for range-based 3D detection, outperforming multiview and voxel-based methods over all ranges with unparalleled performance at long range detection.

preprint2020arXiv

Novel View Synthesis from Single Images via Point Cloud Transformation

In this paper the argument is made that for true novel view synthesis of objects, where the object can be synthesized from any viewpoint, an explicit 3D shape representation isdesired. Our method estimates point clouds to capture the geometry of the object, which can be freely rotated into the desired view and then projected into a new image. This image, however, is sparse by nature and hence this coarse view is used as the input of an image completion network to obtain the dense target view. The point cloud is obtained using the predicted pixel-wise depth map, estimated from a single RGB input image,combined with the camera intrinsics. By using forward warping and backward warpingbetween the input view and the target view, the network can be trained end-to-end without supervision on depth. The benefit of using point clouds as an explicit 3D shape for novel view synthesis is experimentally validated on the 3D ShapeNet benchmark. Source code and data will be available at https://lhoangan.github.io/pc4novis/.

preprint2020arXiv

PointMixup: Augmentation for Point Clouds

This paper introduces data augmentation for point clouds by interpolation between examples. Data augmentation by interpolation has shown to be a simple and effective approach in the image domain. Such a mixup is however not directly transferable to point clouds, as we do not have a one-to-one correspondence between the points of two different objects. In this paper, we define data augmentation between point clouds as a shortest path linear interpolation. To that end, we introduce PointMixup, an interpolation method that generates new examples through an optimal assignment of the path function between two point clouds. We prove that our PointMixup finds the shortest path between two point clouds and that the interpolation is assignment invariant and linear. With the definition of interpolation, PointMixup allows to introduce strong interpolation-based regularizers such as mixup and manifold mixup to the point cloud domain. Experimentally, we show the potential of PointMixup for point cloud classification, especially when examples are scarce, as well as increased robustness to noise and geometric transformations to points. The code for PointMixup and the experimental details are publicly available.