[May. 2021]

• 5 ICML'21 (auto graph contrastive learning + homotopy attack + imbalanced contrastive learning + graph lottery ticket + data-efficient lottery ticket) accepted
• 1 ACL'21 (EarlyBERT) accepted

[Apr. 2021]

• VITA Ph.D. student Tianlong Chen was selected to receive a 2021 academic year IBM PhD Fellowship -- that is after Tianlong being selected as a Baidu Scholarship 2021 finalist
• 2 CVPR'21 workshop (CNN high-frequency bias + BN-free training of binary networks) accepted
• Our group will co-organize the ICCV 2021 Workshop on Real-world Recognition from Low-quality Inputs (RLQ)

[Mar. 2021]

• 1 ICME'21 (arbitrary style transfer) accepted
• We thank UT Engineering News [article] for highlighting our group's research
• VITA welcomes Dr. Guoliang Kang to join us as Research Associate

[Feb. 2021]

• 3 CVPR'21 (CV lottery ticket + blind image IQA + assessing image enhancement) accepted
• 1 IJCV (open-world generalization of segmentation models) accepted
• 1 DAC'21 + 1 ICASSP'21 accepted (InstantNet + VGAI)
• We thank Yannic for making a very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, TransGAN [Paper] [Code]
• Our group will co-organize the CVPR 2021 tutorial: Data-Efficient Learning in An Imperfect World

[Jan. 2021]

• 8 ICLR'21 (lifelong lottery ticket + robust overfitting + nasty knowledge distillation + theory-guided NAS + domain generalization + LISTA unrolling + learning to optimize for minimax + efficient recommendation system) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (artistic text style transfer) accepted
• We thank IDG Connect [article] for covering our ICLR'20 work, Early Bird Lottery Ticket for Effcient Deep Learning
• Our group co-organized the IJCAI 2020 BOOM Workshop
• VITA welcomes new Ph.D. student Wenqing Zheng (Spring 2021 - )

[Dec. 2020]

• 1 AAAI'21 (learning-to-optimize for privacy protection) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (EnlightenGAN) accepted
• 1 Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (explainable deep learning for bioinformatics) accepted
• We thank MIT News [article] for covering our NeurIPS'20 work, BERT Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
• We thank US Army Research Lab for selecting our work of vision-based decentralized robotic control as No. 3 in US ARL’s “10 Coolest Techniques” of Year 2020 [Video Demo]
• Our group co-organized the NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on AI for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR)
• Our group will co-organize two CVPR 2021 workshops: Bridging Computational Photography and Visual Recognition (UG2+), and Future Video Conferencing (FVC)
• VITA's December 2020 squad of M.S. students graduated: Ting-Kuei joined Qualcomm Research as Senior Deep Learning Engineer, Yunhe joined ByteDance AI Lab as Research Engineer, and Sicheng joined Walmart as Data Scientist. Congratulations!

[Nov. 2020]

• 1 IJCV (single image deraining benchmark) accepted
• Our group co-organized the IEEE Workshop on Seeking Low-dimensionality in Deep Neural Networks (SLowDNN) [video record]

[Oct. 2020]

• Our three popular image enhancement algorithms: AOD-Net (ICCV 2017), EnlightenGAN (IEEE TIP 2020), and DeblurGAN-V2 (ICCV 2019), are included into the open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program toolbox (GIMP-ML), as deep-dehazing, enlighten, and deblur plugins

[Sep. 2020]

• 8 NeurIPS'20 (learning to optimize + once-for-all adversarial training + BERT lottery ticket + meta learning + robust contrastive learning + graph contrastive learning + ShiftAddNet + efficient quantized training) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (privacy-preserving visual recognition) accepted

[Aug. 2020]

• VITA's first Ph.D. student Ye Yuan graduated and joined ByteDance AI Lab, Silicon Valley, as a full-time researcher. A Memorable Point for both Ye and the group - Congratulations Ye!
• Our group won the 2nd place of CVPR 2020 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (video track)
• Our group co-organized the ECCV 2020 RLQ-TOD Workshop and Prize Challenge [video record]
• 1 IEEE Trans. GRS (deep hyperspectral image classification) accepted

[Jul. 2020]

• 3 ECCV'20 (GAN compression + sketch-to-image synthesis + on-device learning-to-optimize) accepted
• 1 ACM Multimedia'20 (MMHand synthesizer) accepted
• 1 InterSpeech'20 (AutoSpeech) accepted
• We thank Tech Xplore [article] for covering our work, adversarial 3-D logos

[Jun. 2020]

• 6 ICML'20 (domain generalization + noisy label training + self-supervised GCN + DNN optimization + GAN compression + NAS for Bayesian models) accepted
• Our group co-organized the CVPR 2020 UG2+ Workshop and Prize Challenge

[May. 2020]

• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (image enhancement for visual understanding) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Mobile Computing (adaptive model compression) accepted

[Apr. 2020]

• 2 CVPR'20 workshop (efficient triplet loss + fine-grained classification) accepted

[Mar. 2020]

• 1 ISCA'20 (algorithm-hardware co-design to reduce data movement) accepted

[Feb. 2020]

• 3 CVPR'20 (self-supervised adversarial robustness + fast GCN training + indoor scene reasoning) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (visual understanding in poor-visibility environments) accepted

[Jan. 2020]

• 1 AISTATS'20 (CNN uncertainty quantification) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. CSVT (GAN data augmentation) accepted

[A] As Goals -- Enhancing Deep Learning Robustness, Efficiency, and Privacy

We seek to build deep learning solutions that are way beyond just data-driven accurate predictors. In our opinion, an ideal model shall at least: (1) be robust to perturbations and attacks (therefore trustworthy); (2) be efficient and hardware-friendly (for deployments in practical platforms); and (3) be designed to respect individual privacy and fairness.

[B] As Toolkits -- Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), and Learning-Augmented Optimization

We are enthusiastic about the rising field of AutoML, on both consolidating its theoretical underpinnings and broadening its practical applicability. State-of-the-art ML systems consist of complex pipelines, with choices of model architectures, algorithms and hyperparameters, as well as other configuration details to be tuned for optimal performance. They further often need to be co-designed with multiple goals and constraints. We consider AutoML to be a powerful tool and a central hub, in addressing those design challenges faster and better.

[C] As Applications -- Computer Vision and Interdisciplinary Problems

We are interested in a broad range of computer vision problems, ranging from low-level (e.g, image reconstruction, enhancement and synthesis) to high-level topics (e.g., recognition, segmentation, and vision for UAV/autonomous driving). We are also growingly interested in several interdisciplinary fields, such as biomedical informatics, geoscience, and IoT.

Prospective students