A New Way to Train Deep Models: Meet UFO

Training a single, relatively smaller model to handle numerous tasks all at once. That's what the Unified Feature Optimization (UFO) method is all about. UFO aims to make large-scale pretraining beneficial for each task by squeezing multiple AI functions into one moderate-sized model. Unlike some other methods, UFO doesn't need extra costs to adapt to new tasks. Instead, it focuses on making the model highly efficient for tasks it has already encountered. One of the coolest things about UFO is that it doesn't just make the model smaller; it can even boost accuracy on certain tasks. This strange magic happens because UFO uses a clever strategy to reduce conflicts between tasks while keeping the benefits of related tasks. It's like having a superhero team where some members support each other, while others have to be managed to avoid conflicts.When UFO is put to the test, the results are impressive. Models trained using UFO show higher accuracy and are smaller compared to models trained for a single task. This has been proven in various deep representation learning tasks like face recognition, person re-identification, vehicle re-identification, and product retrieval. Also, UFO has helped release a massive computer vision foundation model with 17 billion parameters, which is currently the largest in the industry.