NLP based Person Retrival

A Transformer is a model architecture that eschews recurrence and instead relies entirely on an attention mechanism to draw global dependencies between input and output. Before Transformers, the dominant sequence transduction models were based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The Transformer also employs an encoder and decoder, but removing recurrence in favor of attention mechanisms allows for significantly more parallelization than methods like RNNs and CNNs.

Absolute Position Encodings are a type of position embeddings for [Transformer-based models] where positional encodings are added to the input embeddings at the bottoms of the encoder and decoder stacks. The positional encodings have the same dimension $d\_{model}$ as the embeddings, so that the two can be summed. In the original implementation, sine and cosine functions of different frequencies are used: $$ \text{PE}\left(pos, 2i\right) = \sin\left(pos/10000^{2i/d\_{model}}\right) $$ $$ \text{PE}\left(pos, 2i+1\right) = \cos\left(pos/10000^{2i/d\_{model}}\right) $$ where $pos$ is the position and $i$ is the dimension. That is, each dimension of the positional encoding corresponds to a sinusoid. The wavelengths form a geometric progression from $2\pi$ to $10000 \dot 2\pi$. This function was chosen because the authors hypothesized it would allow the model to easily learn to attend by relative positions, since for any fixed offset $k$, $\text{PE}\_{pos+k}$ can be represented as a linear function of $\text{PE}\_{pos}$. Image Source: D2L.ai

BART is a denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models. It is trained by (1) corrupting text with an arbitrary noising function, and (2) learning a model to reconstruct the original text. It uses a standard Transformer-based neural machine translation architecture. It uses a standard seq2seq/NMT architecture with a bidirectional encoder (like BERT) and a left-to-right decoder (like GPT). This means the encoder's attention mask is fully visible, like BERT, and the decoder's attention mask is causal, like GPT2.

OPT is a suite of decoder-only pre-trained transformers ranging from 125M to 175B parameters. The model uses an AdamW optimizer and weight decay of 0.1. It follows a linear learning rate schedule, warming up from 0 to the maximum learning rate over the first 2000 steps in OPT-175B, or over 375M tokens in the smaller models, and decaying down to 10% of the maximum LR over 300B tokens. The batch sizes range from 0.5M to 4M depending on the model size and is kept constant throughout the course of training.

VQ-VAE is a type of variational autoencoder that uses vector quantisation to obtain a discrete latent representation. It differs from VAEs in two key ways: the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent representation, ideas from vector quantisation (VQ) are incorporated. Using the VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of posterior collapse - where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful autoregressive decoder - typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes.

BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total).

Hard Swish is a type of activation function based on Swish, but replaces the computationally expensive sigmoid with a piecewise linear analogue: $$\text{h-swish}\left(x\right) = x\frac{\text{ReLU6}\left(x+3\right)}{6} $$

Longformer is a modified Transformer architecture. Traditional Transformer-based models are unable to process long sequences due to their self-attention operation, which scales quadratically with the sequence length. To address this, Longformer uses an attention pattern that scales linearly with sequence length, making it easy to process documents of thousands of tokens or longer. The attention mechanism is a drop-in replacement for the standard self-attention and combines a local windowed attention with a task motivated global attention. The attention patterns utilised include: sliding window attention, dilated sliding window attention and global + sliding window. These can be viewed in the components section of this page.

SegNet is a semantic segmentation model. This core trainable segmentation architecture consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. The architecture of the encoder network is topologically identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network. The role of the decoder network is to map the low resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps for pixel-wise classification. The novelty of SegNet lies is in the manner in which the decoder upsamples its lower resolution input feature maps. Specifically, the decoder uses pooling indices computed in the max-pooling step of the corresponding encoder to perform non-linear upsampling.

A Residual GRU is a gated recurrent unit (GRU) that incorporates the idea of residual connections from ResNets.

PEGASUS proposes a transformer-based model for abstractive summarization. It uses a special self-supervised pre-training objective called gap-sentences generation (GSG) that's designed to perform well on summarization-related downstream tasks. As reported in the paper, "both GSG and MLM are applied simultaneously to this example as pre-training objectives. Originally there are three sentences. One sentence is masked with [MASK1] and used as target generation text (GSG). The other two sentences remain in the input, but some tokens are randomly masked by [MASK2]."

UNETR, or UNet Transformer, is a Transformer-based architecture for medical image segmentation that utilizes a pure transformer as the encoder to learn sequence representations of the input volume -- effectively capturing the global multi-scale information. The transformer encoder is directly connected to a decoder via skip connections at different resolutions like a U-Net to compute the final semantic segmentation output.

Mix-FFN is a feedforward layer used in the SegFormer architecture. ViT uses positional encoding (PE) to introduce the location information. However, the resolution of $\mathrm{PE}$ is fixed. Therefore, when the test resolution is different from the training one, the positional code needs to be interpolated and this often leads to dropped accuracy. To alleviate this problem, CPVT uses $3 \times 3$ Conv together with the PE to implement a data-driven PE. The authors of Mix-FFN argue that positional encoding is actually not necessary for semantic segmentation. Instead, they use Mix-FFN which considers the effect of zero padding to leak location information, by directly using a $3 \times 3$ Conv in the feed-forward network (FFN). Mix-FFN can be formulated as: $$ \mathbf{x}\_{\text {out }}=\operatorname{MLP}\left(\operatorname{GELU}\left(\operatorname{Conv}\_{3 \times 3}\left(\operatorname{MLP}\left(\mathbf{x}\_{i n}\right)\right)\right)\right)+\mathbf{x}\_{i n} $$ where $\mathbf{x}\_{i n}$ is the feature from a self-attention module. Mix-FFN mixes a $3 \times 3$ convolution and an MLP into each FFN.

SegFormer is a Transformer-based framework for semantic segmentation that unifies Transformers with lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoders. SegFormer has two appealing features: 1) SegFormer comprises a novel hierarchically structured Transformer encoder which outputs multiscale features. It does not need positional encoding, thereby avoiding the interpolation of positional codes which leads to decreased performance when the testing resolution differs from training. 2) SegFormer avoids complex decoders. The proposed MLP decoder aggregates information from different layers, and thus combining both local attention and global attention to render powerful representations.

NesT stacks canonical transformer layers to conduct local self-attention on every image block independently, and then "nests" them hierarchically. Coupling of processed information between spatially adjacent blocks is achieved through a proposed block aggregation between every two hierarchies. The overall hierarchical structure can be determined by two key hyper-parameters: patch size $S × S$ and number of block hierarchies $T_d$. All blocks inside each hierarchy share one set of parameters. Given input of image, each image is linearly projected to an embedding. All embeddings are partitioned to blocks and flattened to generate final input. Each transformer layers is composed of a multi-head self attention (MSA) layer followed by a feed-forward fully-connected network (FFN) with skip-connection and Layer normalization. Positional embeddings are added to encode spatial information before feeding into the block. Lastly, a nested hierarchy with block aggregation is built -- every four spatially connected blocks are merged into one.

CodeT5 is a Transformer-based model for code understanding and generation based on the T5 architecture. It utilizes an identifier-aware pre-training objective that considers the crucial token type information (identifiers) from code. Specifically, the denoising Seq2Seq objective of T5 is extended with two identifier tagging and prediction tasks to enable the model to better leverage the token type information from programming languages, which are the identifiers assigned by developers. To improve the natural language-programming language alignment, a bimodal dual learning objective is used for a bidirectional conversion between natural language and programming language.

This method introduces several regularization schemes that can be applied to an Autoencoder. To make the model generative ex-post density estimation is proposed and consists in fitting a Mixture of Gaussian distribution on the train data embeddings after the model is trained.

Dense Prediction Transformers (DPT) are a type of vision transformer for dense prediction tasks. The input image is transformed into tokens (orange) either by extracting non-overlapping patches followed by a linear projection of their flattened representation (DPT-Base and DPT-Large) or by applying a ResNet-50 feature extractor (DPT-Hybrid). The image embedding is augmented with a positional embedding and a patch-independent readout token (red) is added. The tokens are passed through multiple transformer stages. The tokens are reassembled from different stages into an image-like representation at multiple resolutions (green). Fusion modules (purple) progressively fuse and upsample the representations to generate a fine-grained prediction.

An RGCN, or Relational Graph Convolution Network, is a an application of the GCN framework to modeling relational data, specifically to link prediction and entity classification tasks. See here for an in-depth explanation of RGCNs by DGL.

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set, models used to address them should be permutation invariant. We present an attention-based neural network module, the Set Transformer, specifically designed to model interactions among elements in the input set. The model consists of an encoder and a decoder, both of which rely on attention mechanisms. In an effort to reduce computational complexity, we introduce an attention scheme inspired by inducing point methods from sparse Gaussian process literature. It reduces the computation time of self-attention from quadratic to linear in the number of elements in the set. We show that our model is theoretically attractive and we evaluate it on a range of tasks, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance compared to recent methods for set-structured data.

Spatial Broadcast Decoder is an architecture that aims to improve disentangling, reconstruction accuracy, and generalization to held-out regions in data space. It provides a particularly dramatic benefit when applied to datasets with small objects. Source: Watters et al. Image source: Watters et al.

Collaborative Distillation is a new knowledge distillation method (named Collaborative Distillation) for encoder-decoder based neural style transfer to reduce the number of convolutional filters. The main idea is underpinned by a finding that the encoder-decoder pairs construct an exclusive collaborative relationship, which is regarded as a new kind of knowledge for style transfer models.

VQ-VAE-2 is a type of variational autoencoder that combines a a two-level hierarchical VQ-VAE with a self-attention autoregressive model (PixelCNN) as a prior. The encoder and decoder architectures are kept simple and light-weight as in the original VQ-VAE, with the only difference that hierarchical multi-scale latent maps are used for increased resolution.

Channel-wise Cross Attention is a module for semantic segmentation used in the UCTransNet architecture. It is used to fuse features of inconsistent semantics between the Channel Transformer and U-Net decoder. It guides the channel and information filtration of the Transformer features and eliminates the ambiguity with the decoder features. Mathematically, we take the $i$-th level Transformer output $\mathbf{O\_{i}} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×H×W}$ and i-th level decoder feature map $\mathbf{D\_{i}} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×H×W}$ as the inputs of Channel-wise Cross Attention. Spatial squeeze is performed by a global average pooling (GAP) layer, producing vector $\mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{X}\right) \in \mathbb{R}^{C×1×1}$ with its $k$th channel $\mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{X}\right) = \frac{1}{H×W}\sum^{H}\_{i=1}\sum^{W}\_{j=1}\mathbf{X}^{k}\left(i, j\right)$. We use this operation to embed the global spatial information and then generate the attention mask: $$ \mathbf{M}\_{i} = \mathbf{L}\_{1} \cdot \mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{O\_{i}}\right) + \mathbf{L}\_{2} \cdot \mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{D}\_{i}\right) $$ where $\mathbf{L}\_{1} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×C}$ and $\mathbf{L}\_{2} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×C}$ and being weights of two Linear layers and the ReLU operator $\delta\left(\cdot\right)$. This operation in the equation above encodes the channel-wise dependencies. Following ECA-Net which empirically showed avoiding dimensionality reduction is important for learning channel attention, the authors use a single Linear layer and sigmoid function to build the channel attention map. The resultant vector is used to recalibrate or excite $\mathbf{O\_{i}}$ to $\mathbf{\bar{O}\_{i}} = \sigma\left(\mathbf{M\_{i}}\right) \cdot \mathbf{O\_{i}}$, where the activation $\sigma\left(\mathbf{M\_{i}}\right)$ indicates the importance of each channel. Finally, the masked $\mathbf{\bar{O}}\_{i}$ is concatenated with the up-sampled features of the $i$-th level decoder.

GMVAE, or Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder, is a stochastic regularization layer for transformers. A GMVAE layer is trained using a 700-dimensional internal representation of the first MLP layer. For every output from the first MLP layer, the GMVAE layer first computes a latent low-dimensional representation sampling from the GMVAE posterior distribution to then provide at the output a reconstruction sampled from a generative model.

VL-T5 is a unified framework that learns different tasks in a single architecture with the same language modeling objective, i.e., multimodal conditional text generation. The model learns to generate labels in text based on the visual and textual inputs. In contrast to other existing methods, the framework unifies tasks as generating text labels conditioned on multimodal inputs. This allows the model to tackle vision-and-language tasks with unified text generation objective. The models use text prefixes to adapt to different tasks.

BASNet, or Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network, is an image segmentation architecture that consists of a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss. The proposed BASNet comprises a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss, for highly accurate image segmentation. The predict-refine architecture consists of a densely supervised encoder-decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively used to predict and refine a segmentation probability map. The hybrid loss is a combination of the binary cross entropy, structural similarity and intersection-over-union losses, which guide the network to learn three-level (i.e., pixel-, patch- and map- level) hierarchy representations.

STDC, or Short-Term Dense Concatenate, is a module for semantic segmentation to extract deep features with scalable receptive field and multi-scale information. It aims to remove structure redundancy in the BiSeNet architecture, specifically BiSeNet adds an extra path to encode spatial information which can be time-consuming,. Instead, STDC gradually reduces the dimension of feature maps and use the aggregation of them for image representation. We concatenate response maps from multiple continuous layers, each of which encodes input image/feature in different scales and respective fields, leading to multi-scale feature representation. To speed up, the filter size of layers is gradually reduced with negligible loss in segmentation performance.

MPRNet is a multi-stage progressive image restoration architecture that progressively learns restoration functions for the degraded inputs, thereby breaking down the overall recovery process into more manageable steps. Specifically, the model first learns the contextualized features using encoder-decoder architectures and later combines them with a high-resolution branch that retains local information. At each stage, a per-pixel adaptive design is introduced that leverages in-situ supervised attention to reweight the local features.

DALL·E 2 is a generative text-to-image model made up of two main components: a prior that generates a CLIP image embedding given a text caption, and a decoder that generates an image conditioned on the image embedding.