AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision Meetup

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.