DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Probabilistic Model Distillation for Semantic Correspondence
Authors: Xin Li, Deng-Ping Fan, Fan Yang, Ao Luo, Hong Cheng, Zicheng Liu

Abstract: Semantic correspondence is a fundamental problem in computer vision, which aims at establishing dense correspondences across images depicting different instances under the same category. This task is challenging due to large intra-class variations and a severe lack of ground truth. A popular solution is to learn correspondences from synthetic data. However, because of the limited intra-class appearance and background variations within synthetically generated training data, the model's capability for handling "real" image pairs using such strategy is intrinsically constrained. We address this problem with the use of a novel Probabilistic Model Distillation (PMD) approach which transfers knowledge learned by a probabilistic teacher model on synthetic data to a static student model with the use of unlabeled real image pairs. A probabilistic supervision reweighting (PSR) module together with a confidence-aware loss (CAL) is used to mine the useful knowledge and alleviate the impact of errors. Experimental results on a variety of benchmarks show that our PMD achieves state-of-the-art performance. To demonstrate the generalizability of our approach, we extend PMD to incorporate stronger supervision for better accuracy -- the probabilistic teacher is trained with stronger key-point supervision. Again, we observe the superiority of our PMD. The extensive experiments verify that PMD is able to infer more reliable supervision signals from the probabilistic teacher for representation learning and largely alleviate the influence of errors in pseudo labels.
OpenRooms: An Open Framework for Photorealistic Indoor Scene Datasets
Authors: Zhengqin Li, Ting-Wei Yu, Shen Sang, Sarah Wang, Meng Song, Yuhan Liu, Yu-Ying Yeh, Rui Zhu, Nitesh Gundavarapu, Jia Shi, Sai Bi, Hong-Xing Yu, Zexiang Xu, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Milos Hasan, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Manmohan Chandraker

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for creating large-scale photorealistic datasets of indoor scenes, with ground truth geometry, material, lighting and semantics. Our goal is to make the dataset creation process widely accessible, allowing researchers to transform scans into datasets with highquality ground truth. We demonstrate our framework by creating a photorealistic synthetic version of the publicly available ScanNet dataset with consistent layout, semantic labels, high quality spatially-varying BRDF and complex lighting. We render photorealistic images, as well as complex spatially-varying lighting, including direct, indirect and visibility components. Such a dataset enables important applications in inverse rendering, scene understanding and robotics. We show that deep networks trained on the proposed dataset achieve competitive performance for shape, material and lighting estimation on real images, enabling photorealistic augmented reality applications, such as object insertion and material editing. We also show our semantic labels may be used for segmentation and multitask learning. Finally, we demonstrate that our framework may also be integrated with physics engines, to create virtual robotics environments with unique ground truth such as friction coefficients and correspondence to real scenes. The dataset and all the tools to create such datasets will be publicly released, enabling others in the community to easily build large-scale datasets of their own.
SSAN: Separable Self-Attention Network for Video Representation Learning
Authors: Xudong Guo, Xun Guo, Yan Lu

Abstract: Self-attention has been successfully applied to video representation learning due to the effectiveness of modeling long range dependencies. Existing approaches build the dependencies merely by computing the pairwise correlations along spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously. However, spatial correlations and temporal correlations represent different contextual information of scenes and temporal reasoning. Intuitively, learning spatial contextual information first will benefit temporal modeling. In this paper, we propose a separable self-attention (SSA) module, which models spatial and temporal correlations sequentially, so that spatial contexts can be efficiently used in temporal modeling. By adding SSA module into 2D CNN, we build a SSA network (SSAN) for video representation learning. On the task of video action recognition, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something and Kinetics-400 datasets. Our models often outperform counterparts with shallower network and less modality. We further verify the semantic learning ability of our method in visual-language task of video retrieval, which showcase the homogeneity of video representations and text embeddings. On MSR-VTT and Youcook2 datasets, video representations learnt by SSA significantly improve the state-of-the-art methods.
4D Panoptic LiDAR Segmentation
Authors: Mehmet Aygun, Aljosa Osep, Mark Weber, Maxim Maximov, Cyrill Stachniss, Jens Behley, Laura Leal-Taixe

Abstract: Temporal semantic scene understanding is critical for self-driving cars or robots operating in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose 4D panoptic LiDAR segmentation to assign a semantic class and a temporally-consistent instance ID to a sequence of 3D points. To this end, we present an approach and a novel evaluation metric. Our approach determines a semantic class for every point while modeling object instances as probability distributions in the 4D spatio-temporal domain. We process multiple point clouds in parallel and resolve point-to-instance associations, effectively alleviating the need for explicit temporal data association. Inspired by recent advances in benchmarking of multi-object tracking, we propose to adopt a new evaluation metric that separates the semantic and point-to-instance association aspects of the task. With this work, we aim at paving the road for future developments aiming at temporal LiDAR panoptic perception.
SceneGen: Learning To Generate Realistic Traffic Scenes
Authors: Shuhan Tan, Kelvin Wong, Shenlong Wang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: We consider the problem of generating realistic traffic scenes automatically. Existing methods typically insert actors into the scene according to a set of hand-crafted heuristics and are limited in their ability to model the true complexity and diversity of real traffic scenes, thus inducing a content gap between synthesized traffic scenes versus real ones. As a result, existing simulators lack the fidelity necessary to train and test self-driving vehicles. To address this limitation, we present SceneGen, a neural autoregressive model of traffic scenes that eschews the need for rules and heuristics. In particular, given the ego-vehicle state and a high definition map of surrounding area, SceneGen inserts actors of various classes into the scene and synthesizes their sizes, orientations, and velocities. We demonstrate on two large-scale datasets SceneGen's ability to faithfully model distributions of real traffic scenes. Moreover, we show that SceneGen coupled with sensor simulation can be used to train perception models that generalize to the real world.
Natural Adversarial Examples
Authors: Dan Hendrycks, Kevin Zhao, Steven Basart, Jacob Steinhardt, Dawn Song

Abstract: We introduce two challenging datasets that reliably cause machine learning model performance to substantially degrade. The datasets are collected with a simple adversarial filtration technique to create datasets with limited spurious cues. Our datasets' real-world, unmodified examples transfer to various unseen models reliably, demonstrating that computer vision models have shared weaknesses. The first dataset is called ImageNet-A and is like the ImageNet test set, but it is far more challenging for existing models. We also curate an adversarial out-of-distribution detection dataset called ImageNet-O, which is the first out-of-distribution detection dataset created for ImageNet models. On ImageNet-A a DenseNet-121 obtains around 2% accuracy, an accuracy drop of approximately 90%, and its out-of-distribution detection performance on ImageNet-O is near random chance levels. We find that existing data augmentation techniques hardly boost performance, and using other public training datasets provides improvements that are limited. However, we find that improvements to computer vision architectures provide a promising path towards robust models.
CausalVAE: Disentangled Representation Learning via Neural Structural Causal Models
Authors: Mengyue Yang, Furui Liu, Zhitang Chen, Xinwei Shen, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang

Abstract: Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, factors with semantics are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure which renders these factors dependent. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes a Causal Layer to transform independent exogenous factors into causal endogenous ones that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We further analyze the model identifiabitily, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic and real word benchmark CelebA. Results show that the causal representations learned by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and their causal relationship as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is identified with good accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed CausalVAE model is able to generate counterfactual data through "do-operation" to the causal factors.
VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning With Temporally Adversarial Examples
Authors: Tian Pan, Yibing Song, Tianyu Yang, Wenhao Jiang, Wei Liu

Abstract: MoCo is effective for unsupervised image representation learning. In this paper, we propose VideoMoCo for unsupervised video representation learning. Given a video sequence as an input sample, we improve the temporal feature representations of MoCo from two perspectives. First, we introduce a generator to drop out several frames from this sample temporally. The discriminator is then learned to encode similar feature representations regardless of frame removals. By adaptively dropping out different frames during training iterations of adversarial learning, we augment this input sample to train a temporally robust encoder. Second, we use temporal decay to model key attenuation in the memory queue when computing the contrastive loss. As the momentum encoder updates after keys enqueue, the representation ability of these keys degrades when we use the current input sample for contrastive learning. This degradation is reflected via temporal decay to attend the input sample to recent keys in the queue. As a result, we adapt MoCo to learn video representations without empirically designing pretext tasks. By empowering the temporal robustness of the encoder and modeling the temporal decay of the keys, our VideoMoCo improves MoCo temporally based on contrastive learning. Experiments on benchmark datasets including UCF101 and HMDB51 show that VideoMoCo stands as a state-of-the-art video representation learning method.
Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation
Authors: Ye Zheng, Jiahong Wu, Yongqiang Qin, Faen Zhang, Li Cui

Abstract: Deep learning has significantly improved the precision of instance segmentation with abundant labeled data. However, in many areas like medical and manufacturing, collecting sufficient data is extremely hard and labeling this data requires high professional skills. We follow this motivation and propose a new task set named zero-shot instance segmentation (ZSI). In the training phase of ZSI, the model is trained with seen data, while in the testing phase, it is used to segment all seen and unseen instances. We first formulate the ZSI task and propose a method to tackle the challenge, which consists of Zero-shot Detector, Semantic Mask Head, Background Aware RPN and Synchronized Background Strategy. We present a new benchmark for zero-shot instance segmentation based on the MS-COCO dataset. The extensive empirical results in this benchmark show that our method not only surpasses the state-of-the-art results in zero-shot object detection task but also achieves promising performance on ZSI. Our approach will serve as a solid baseline and facilitate future research in zero-shot instance segmentation. Code available at ZSI.
Stereo Radiance Fields (SRF): Learning View Synthesis for Sparse Views of Novel Scenes
Authors: Julian Chibane, Aayush Bansal, Verica Lazova, Gerard Pons-Moll

Abstract: Recent neural view synthesis methods have achieved impressive quality and realism, surpassing classical pipelines which rely on multi-view reconstruction. State-of-the-Art methods, such as NeRF, are designed to learn a single scene with a neural network and require dense multi-view inputs. Testing on a new scene requires re-training from scratch, which takes 2-3 days. In this work, we introduce Stereo Radiance Fields (SRF), a neural view synthesis approach that is trained end-to-end, generalizes to new scenes, and requires only sparse views at test time. The core idea is a neural architecture inspired by classical multi-view stereo methods, which estimates surface points by finding similar image regions in stereo images. In SRF, we predict color and density for each 3D point given an encoding of its stereo correspondence in the input images. The encoding is implicitly learned by an ensemble of pair-wise similarities -- emulating classical stereo. Experiments show that SRF learns structure instead of overfitting on a scene. We train on multiple scenes of the DTU dataset and generalize to new ones without re-training, requiring only 10 sparse and spread-out views as input. We show that 10-15 minutes of fine-tuning further improve the results, achieving significantly sharper, more detailed results than scene-specific models. The code, model, and videos are available at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/srf/.
Global Transport for Fluid Reconstruction With Learned Self-Supervision
Authors: Erik Franz, Barbara Solenthaler, Nils Thuerey

Abstract: We propose a novel method to reconstruct volumetric flows from sparse views via a global transport formulation. Instead of obtaining the space-time function of the observations, we reconstruct its motion based on a single initial state. In addition we introduce a learned self-supervision that constrains observations from unseen angles. These visual constraints are coupled via the transport constraints and a differentiable rendering step to arrive at a robust end-to-end reconstruction algorithm. This makes the reconstruction of highly realistic flow motions possible, even from only a single input view. We show with a variety of synthetic and real flows that the proposed global reconstruction of the transport process yields an improved reconstruction of the fluid motion.
SliceNet: Deep Dense Depth Estimation From a Single Indoor Panorama Using a Slice-Based Representation
Authors: Giovanni Pintore, Marco Agus, Eva Almansa, Jens Schneider, Enrico Gobbetti

Abstract: We introduce a novel deep neural network to estimate a depth map from a single monocular indoor panorama. The network directly works on the equirectangular projection, exploiting the properties of indoor 360 images. Starting from the fact that gravity plays an important role in the design and construction of man-made indoor scenes, we propose a compact representation of the scene into vertical slices of the sphere, and we exploit long- and short-term relationships among slices to recover the equirectangular depth map. Our design makes it possible to maintain high-resolution information in the extracted features even with a deep network. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art solutions in prediction accuracy, particularly for real-world data.
Offboard 3D Object Detection From Point Cloud Sequences
Authors: Charles R. Qi, Yin Zhou, Mahyar Najibi, Pei Sun, Khoa Vo, Boyang Deng, Dragomir Anguelov

Abstract: While current 3D object recognition research mostly focuses on the real-time, onboard scenario, there are many offboard use cases of perception that are largely under-explored, such as using machines to automatically generate high-quality 3D labels. Existing 3D object detectors fail to satisfy the high-quality requirement for offboard uses due to the limited input and speed constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel offboard 3D object detection pipeline using point cloud sequence data. Observing that different frames capture complementary views of objects, we design the offboard detector to make use of the temporal points through both multi-frame object detection and novel object-centric refinement models. Evaluated on the Waymo Open Dataset, our pipeline named 3D Auto Labeling shows significant gains compared to the state-of-the-art onboard detectors and our offboard baselines. Its performance is even on par with human labels verified through a human label study. Further experiments demonstrate the application of auto labels for semi-supervised learning and provide extensive analysis to validate various design choices.
STaR: Self-Supervised Tracking and Reconstruction of Rigid Objects in Motion With Neural Rendering
Authors: Wentao Yuan, Zhaoyang Lv, Tanner Schmidt, Steven Lovegrove

Abstract: We present STaR, a novel method that performs Self-supervised Tracking and Reconstruction of dynamic scenes with rigid motion from multi-view RGB videos without any manual annotation. Recent work has shown that neural networks are surprisingly effective at the task of compressing many views of a scene into a learned function which maps from a viewing ray to an observed radiance value via volume rendering. Unfortunately, these methods lose all their predictive power once any object in the scene has moved. In this work, we explicitly model rigid motion of objects in the context of neural representations of radiance fields. We show that without any additional human specified supervision, we can reconstruct a dynamic scene with a single rigid object in motion by simultaneously decomposing it into its two constituent parts and encoding each with its own neural representation. We achieve this by jointly optimizing the parameters of two neural radiance fields and a set of rigid poses which align the two fields at each frame. On both synthetic and real world datasets, we demonstrate that our method can render photorealistic novel views, where novelty is measured on both spatial and temporal axes. Our factored representation furthermore enables animation of unseen object motion.
Generalization on Unseen Domains via Inference-Time Label-Preserving Target Projections
Authors: Prashant Pandey, Mrigank Raman, Sumanth Varambally, Prathosh AP

Abstract: Generalization of machine learning models trained on a set of source domains on unseen target domains with different statistics, is a challenging problem. While many approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, they only utilize source data during training, but do not take advantage of the fact that a single target example is available at the time of inference. Motivated by this, we propose a method that effectively uses the target sample during inference beyond mere classification. Our method has three components - (i) A label preserving feature or metric transformation on source data such that the source samples are clustered in accordance with their class irrespective of their domain (ii) A generative model trained on the these features (iii) A label-preserving projection of the target point on the source-feature manifold during inference via solving an optimization problem on the input space of the generative model using the learned metric. Finally, the projected target is used in the classifier. Since the projected target feature comes from the source manifold and has the same label as the real target by design, the classifier is expected to perform better on it than the true target. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art Domain Generalization methods on multiple datasets and tasks.
Monocular 3D Object Detection: An Extrinsic Parameter Free Approach
Authors: Yunsong Zhou, Yuan He, Hongzi Zhu, Cheng Wang, Hongyang Li, Qinhong Jiang

Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection is an important task in autonomous driving. It can be easily intractable where there exists ego-car pose change w.r.t. ground plane. This is common due to the slight fluctuation of road smoothness and slope. Due to the lack of insight in industrial application, existing methods on open datasets neglect camera pose information, which inevitably results in the detector being susceptible to camera extrinsic parameters. The perturbation of objects is very popular in most autonomous driving cases for industrial products. To this end, we propose a novel method to capture camera pose to formulate the detector free from extrinsic perturbation. Specifically, the proposed framework predicts camera extrinsic parameters by detecting vanishing point and horizon change. A converter is designed to rectify perturbative features in the latent space. By doing so, our 3D detector works independent of the extrinsic parameter variations, and produces accurate results in realistic cases, e.g., potholed and uneven roads, where almost all existing monocular detectors fail to handle. Experiments demonstrate our method yields best performance compared with the other state-of-the-arts by a large margin on both KITTI 3D and nuScenes datasets.
Communication Efficient SGD via Gradient Sampling With Bayes Prior
Authors: Liuyihan Song, Kang Zhao, Pan Pan, Yu Liu, Yingya Zhang, Yinghui Xu, Rong Jin

Abstract: Gradient compression has been widely adopted in data-parallel distributed training of deep neural networks to reduce communication overhead. Some literatures have demonstrated that large gradients are more important than small ones because they contain more information, such as Top-k compressor. Other mainstream methods, like random-k compressor and gradient quantization, usually treat all gradients equally. Different from all of them, we regard large and small gradients selection as the exploitation and exploration of gradient information, respectively. And we find taking both of them into consideration is the key to boost the final accuracy. So, we propose a novel gradient compressor: Gradient Sampling with Bayes Prior in this paper. Specifically, we sample important/large gradients based on the global gradient distribution, which is periodically updated across multiple workers. Then we introduce Bayes Prior into distribution model to further explore the gradients. We prove the convergence of our method for smooth non-convex problems in the distributed system. Compared with methods that running after high compression ratio at the expense of accuracy, we pursue no loss of accuracy and the actual acceleration benefit in practice. Experimental comparisons on a variety of computer vision tasks (e.g. image classification and object detection) and backbones (ResNet, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3 and AlexNet) show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both speed and accuracy, with the limitation of 100* compression ratio.