Hyperparameter optimization in black-box image processing using differentiable proxies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nearly every commodity imaging system we directly interact with, or indirectly rely on, leverages power efficient, application-adjustable black-box hardware image signal processing (ISPs) units, running either in dedicated hardware blocks, or as proprietary software modules on programmable hardware. The configuration parameters of these black-box ISPs often have complex interactions with the output image, and must be adjusted prior to deployment according to application-specific quality and performance metrics. Today, this search is commonly performed manually by "golden eye" experts or algorithm developers leveraging domain expertise. We present a fully automatic system to optimize the parameters of black-box hardware and software image processing pipelines according to any arbitrary (i.e., application-specific) metric. We leverage a differentiable mapping between the configuration space and evaluation metrics, parameterized by a convolutional neural network that we train in an end-to-end fashion with imaging hardware in-the-loop. Unlike prior art, our differentiable proxies allow for high-dimension parameter search with stochastic first-order optimizers, without explicitly modeling any lower-level image processing transformations. As such, we can efficiently optimize black-box image processing pipelines for a variety of imaging applications, reducing application-specific configuration times from months to hours. Our optimization method is fully automatic, even with black-box hardware in the loop. We validate our method on experimental data for real-time display applications, object detection, and extreme low-light imaging. The proposed approach outperforms manual search qualitatively and quantitatively for all domain-specific applications tested. When applied to traditional denoisers, we demonstrate that---just by changing hyperparameters---traditional algorithms can outperform recent deep learning methods by a substantial margin on recent benchmarks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it