DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
What if We Only Use Real Datasets for Scene Text Recognition? Toward Scene Text Recognition With Fewer Labels
Authors: Jeonghun Baek, Yusuke Matsui, Kiyoharu Aizawa

Abstract: Scene text recognition (STR) task has a common practice: All state-of-the-art STR models are trained on large synthetic data. In contrast to this practice, training STR models only on fewer real labels (STR with fewer labels) is important when we have to train STR models without synthetic data: for handwritten or artistic texts that are difficult to generate synthetically and for languages other than English for which we do not always have synthetic data. However, there has been implicit common knowledge that training STR models on real data is nearly impossible because real data is insufficient. We consider that this common knowledge has obstructed the study of STR with fewer labels. In this work, we would like to reactivate STR with fewer labels by disproving the common knowledge. We consolidate recently accumulated public real data and show that we can train STR models satisfactorily only with real labeled data. Subsequently, we find simple data augmentation to fully exploit real data. Furthermore, we improve the models by collecting unlabeled data and introducing semi- and self-supervised methods. As a result, we obtain a competitive model to state-of-the-art methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that 1) shows sufficient performance by only using real labels and 2) introduces semi- and self-supervised methods into STR with fewer labels. Our code and data are available.
Incremental Learning via Rate Reduction
Authors: Ziyang Wu, Christina Baek, Chong You, Yi Ma

Abstract: Current deep learning architectures suffer from catastrophic forgetting, a failure to retain knowledge of previously learned classes when incrementally trained on new classes. The fundamental roadblock faced by deep learning methods is that the models are optimized as "black boxes", making it difficult to properly adjust the model parameters to preserve knowledge about previously seen data. To overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting, we propose utilizing an alternative "white box" architecture derived from the principle of rate reduction, where each layer of the network is explicitly computed without back propagation. Under this paradigm, we demonstrate that, given a pretrained network and new data classes, our approach can provably construct a new network that emulates joint training with all past and new classes. Finally, our experiments show that our proposed learning algorithm observes significantly less decay in classification performance, outperforming state of the art methods on MNIST and CIFAR-10 by a large margin and justifying the use of "white box" algorithms for incremental learning even for sufficiently complex image data.
Neural Descent for Visual 3D Human Pose and Shape
Authors: Andrei Zanfir, Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, Mihai Zanfir, William T. Freeman, Rahul Sukthankar, Cristian Sminchisescu

Abstract: We present deep neural network methodology to reconstruct the 3d pose and shape of people, including hand gestures and facial expression, given an input RGB image. We rely on a recently introduced, expressive full body statistical 3d human model, GHUM, trained end-to-end, and learn to reconstruct its pose and shape state in a self-supervised regime. Central to our methodology, is a learning to learn and optimize approach, referred to as HUman Neural Descent (HUND), which avoids both second-order differentiation when training the model parameters, and expensive state gradient descen tin order to accurately minimize a semantic differentiable rendering loss at test time. Instead, we rely on novel recurrent stages to update the pose and shape parameters such that not only losses are minimized effectively, but the process is meta-regularized in order to ensure end-progress. HUND's symmetry between training and testing makes it the first 3d human sensing architecture to natively support different operating regimes including self-supervised ones. In diverse tests, we show that HUND achieves very competitive results in datasets like H3.6M and 3DPW, as well as good quality 3d reconstructions for complex imagery collected in-the-wild.
HR-NAS: Searching Efficient High-Resolution Neural Architectures With Lightweight Transformers
Authors: Mingyu Ding, Xiaochen Lian, Linjie Yang, Peng Wang, Xiaojie Jin, Zhiwu Lu, Ping Luo

Abstract: High-resolution representations (HR) are essential for dense prediction tasks such as segmentation, detection, and pose estimation. Learning HR representations is typically ignored in previous Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that focus on image classification. This work proposes a novel NAS method, called HR-NAS, which is able to find efficient and accurate networks for different tasks, by effectively encoding multiscale contextual information while maintaining high-resolution representations. In HR-NAS, we renovate the NAS search space as well as its searching strategy. To better encode multiscale image contexts in the search space of HR-NAS, we first carefully design a lightweight transformer, whose computational complexity can be dynamically changed with respect to different objective functions and computation budgets. To maintain high-resolution representations of the learned networks, HR-NAS adopts a multi-branch architecture that provides convolutional encoding of multiple feature resolutions, inspired by HRNet. Last, we proposed an efficient fine-grained search strategy to train HR-NAS, which effectively explores the search space, and finds optimal architectures given various tasks and computation resources. HR-NAS is capable of achieving state-of-the-art trade-offs between performance and FLOPs for three dense prediction tasks and an image classification task, given only small computational budgets. For example, HR-NAS surpasses SqueezeNAS that is specially designed for semantic segmentation by a large margin of 3.61% while improving efficiency by 45.9%. Code is available at https://github.com/dingmyu/HR-NAS.
Transitional Adaptation of Pretrained Models for Visual Storytelling
Authors: Youngjae Yu, Jiwan Chung, Heeseung Yun, Jongseok Kim, Gunhee Kim

Abstract: Previous models for vision-to-language generation tasks usually pretrain a visual encoder and a language generator in the respective domains and jointly finetune them with the target task. However, this direct transfer practice may suffer from the discord between visual specificity and language fluency since they are often separately trained from large corpora of visual and text data with no common ground. In this work, we claim that a transitional adaptation task is required between pretraining and finetuning to harmonize the visual encoder and the language model for challenging downstream target tasks like visual storytelling. We propose a novel approach named Transitional Adaptation of Pretrained Model (TAPM) that adapts the multi-modal modules to each other with a simpler alignment task between visual inputs only with no need for text labels. Through extensive experiments, we show that the adaptation step significantly improves the performance of multiple language models for sequential video and image captioning tasks. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both language metrics and human evaluation in the multi-sentence description task of LSMDC 2019 and the image storytelling task of VIST. Our experiments reveal that this improvement in caption quality does not depend on the specific choice of language models.
Improving Panoptic Segmentation at All Scales
Authors: Lorenzo Porzi, Samuel Rota Bulo, Peter Kontschieder

Abstract: Crop-based training strategies decouple training resolution from GPU memory consumption, allowing the use of large-capacity panoptic segmentation networks on multi-megapixel images. Using crops, however, can introduce a bias towards truncating or missing large objects. To address this, we propose a novel crop-aware bounding box regression loss (CABB loss), which promotes predictions to be consistent with the visible parts of the cropped objects, while not over-penalizing them for extending outside of the crop. We further introduce a novel data sampling and augmentation strategy which improves generalization across scales by counteracting the imbalanced distribution of object sizes. Combining these two contributions with a carefully designed, top-down panoptic segmentation architecture, we obtain new state-of-the-art results on the challenging Mapillary Vistas (MVD), Indian Driving and Cityscapes datasets, surpassing the previously best approach on MVD by +4.5% PQ and +5.2% mAP.
Model-Contrastive Federated Learning
Authors: Qinbin Li, Bingsheng He, Dawn Song

Abstract: Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
Scalability vs. Utility: Do We Have To Sacrifice One for the Other in Data Importance Quantification?
Authors: Ruoxi Jia, Fan Wu, Xuehui Sun, Jiacen Xu, David Dao, Bhavya Kailkhura, Ce Zhang, Bo Li, Dawn Song

Abstract: Quantifying the importance of each training point to a learning task is a fundamental problem in machine learning and the estimated importance scores have been leveraged to guide a range of data workflows such as data summarization and domain adaption. One simple idea is to use the leave-one-out error of each training point to indicate its importance. Recent work has also proposed to use the Shapley value, as it defines a unique value distribution scheme that satisfies a set of appealing properties. However, calculating Shapley values is often expensive, which limits its applicability in real-world applications at scale. Multiple heuristics to improve the scalability of calculating Shapley values have been proposed recently, with the potential risk of compromising their utility in real-world applications. How well do existing data quantification methods perform on existing workflows? How do these methods compare with each other, empirically and theoretically? Must we sacrifice scalability for the utility in these workflows when using these methods? In this paper, we conduct a novel theoretical analysis comparing the utility of different importance quantification methods, and report extensive experimental studies on settings such as noisy label detection, watermark removal, data summarization, data acquisition, and domain adaptation on existing and proposed workflows. We show that Shapley value approximation based on a KNN surrogate over pre-trained feature embeddings obtains comparable utility with existing algorithms while achieving significant scalability improvement, often by orders of magnitude. Our theoretical analysis also justifies its advantage over the leave-one-out error. The code is available at https://github.com/AI-secure/Shapley-Study.
Hierarchical Layout-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Unified Aesthetics Assessment
Authors: Dongyu She, Yu-Kun Lai, Gaoxiong Yi, Kun Xu

Abstract: Learning computational models of image aesthetics can have a substantial impact on visual art and graphic design. Although automatic image aesthetics assessment is a challenging topic by its subjective nature, psychological studies have confirmed a strong correlation between image layouts and perceived image quality. While previous state-of-the-art methods attempt to learn holistic information using deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), our approach is motivated by the fact that Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture is conceivably more suited for modeling complex relations among image regions than vanilla convolutional layers. Specifically, we present a Hierarchical Layout-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (HLA-GCN) to capture layout information. It is a dedicated double-subnet neural network consisting of two LAGCN modules. The first LA-GCN module constructs an aesthetics-related graph in the coordinate space and performs reasoning over spatial nodes. The second LA-GCN module performs graph reasoning after aggregating significant regions in a latent space. The model output is a hierarchical representation with layout-aware features from both spatial and aggregated nodes for unified aesthetics assessment. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the AVA and AADB datasets across three different tasks. The code is available at http://github.com/days1011/HLAGCN.
Normalized Avatar Synthesis Using StyleGAN and Perceptual Refinement
Authors: Huiwen Luo, Koki Nagano, Han-Wei Kung, Qingguo Xu, Zejian Wang, Lingyu Wei, Liwen Hu, Hao Li

Abstract: We introduce a highly robust GAN-based framework for digitizing a normalized 3D avatar of a person from a single unconstrained photo. While the input image can be of a smiling person or taken in extreme lighting conditions, our method can reliably produce a high-quality textured model of a person's face in neutral expression and skin textures under diffuse lighting condition. Cutting-edge 3D face reconstruction methods use non-linear morphable face models combined with GAN-based decoders to capture the likeness and details of a person but fail to produce neutral head models with unshaded albedo textures which is critical for creating relightable and animation-friendly avatars for integration in virtual environments. The key challenges for existing methods to work is the lack of training and ground truth data containing normalized 3D faces. We propose a two-stage approach to address this problem. First, we adopt a highly robust normalized 3D face generator by embedding a non-linear morphable face model into a StyleGAN2 network. This allows us to generate detailed but normalized facial assets. This inference is then followed by a perceptual refinement step that uses the generated assets as regularization to cope with the limited available training samples of normalized faces. We further introduce a Normalized Face Dataset, which consists of a combination photogrammetry scans, carefully selected photographs, and generated fake people with neutral expressions in diffuse lighting conditions. While our prepared dataset contains two orders of magnitude less subjects than cutting edge GAN-based 3D facial reconstruction methods, we show that it is possible to produce high-quality normalized face models for very challenging unconstrained input images, and demonstrate superior performance to the current state-of-the-art.
CT-Net: Complementary Transfering Network for Garment Transfer With Arbitrary Geometric Changes
Authors: Fan Yang, Guosheng Lin

Abstract: Garment transfer shows great potential in realistic applications with the goal of transfering outfits across different people images. However, garment transfer between images with heavy misalignments or severe occlusions still remains as a challenge. In this work, we propose Complementary Transfering Network (CT-Net) to adaptively model different levels of geometric changes and transfer outfits between different people. In specific, CT-Net consists of three modules: i) A complementary warping module first estimates two complementary warpings to transfer the desired clothes in different granularities. ii) A layout prediction module is proposed to predict the target layout, which guides the preservation or generation of the body parts in the synthesized images. iii) A dynamic fusion module adaptively combines the advantages of the complementary warpings to render the garment transfer results. Extensive experiments conducted on DeepFashion dataset demonstrate that our network synthesizes high-quality garment transfer images and significantly outperforms the state-of-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our source code will be available online.
MetaCorrection: Domain-Aware Meta Loss Correction for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xiaoqing Guo, Chen Yang, Baopu Li, Yixuan Yuan

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing self-training based UDA approaches assign pseudo labels for target data and treat them as ground truth labels to fully leverage unlabeled target data for model adaptation. However, the generated pseudo labels from the model optimized on the source domain inevitably contain noise due to the domain gap. To tackle this issue, we advance a MetaCorrection framework, where a Domain-aware Meta-learning strategy is devised to benefit Loss Correction (DMLC) for UDA semantic segmentation. In particular, we model the noise distribution of pseudo labels in target domain by introducing a noise transition matrix (NTM) and construct meta data set with domain-invariant source data to guide the estimation of NTM. Through the risk minimization on the meta data set, the optimized NTM thus can correct the noisy issues in pseudo labels and enhance the generalization ability of the model on the target data. Considering the capacity gap between shallow and deep features, we further employ the proposed DMLC strategy to provide matched and compatible supervision signals for different level features, thereby ensuring deep adaptation. Extensive experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our method against existing state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks.
Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration
Authors: Syed Waqas Zamir, Aditya Arora, Salman Khan, Munawar Hayat, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Ling Shao

Abstract: Image restoration tasks demand a complex balance between spatial details and high-level contextualized information while recovering images. In this paper, we propose a novel synergistic design that can optimally balance these competing goals. Our main proposal is a multi-stage architecture, that progressively learns restoration functions for the degraded inputs, thereby breaking down the overall recovery process into more manageable steps. Specifically, our model first learns the contextualized features using encoder-decoder architectures and later combines them with a high-resolution branch that retains local information. At each stage, we introduce a novel per-pixel adaptive design that leverages in-situ supervised attention to reweight the local features. A key ingredient in such a multi-stage architecture is the information exchange between different stages. To this end, we propose a two-faceted approach where the information is not only exchanged sequentially from early to late stages, but lateral connections between feature processing blocks also exist to avoid any loss of information. The resulting tightly interlinked multi-stage architecture, named as MPRNet, delivers strong performance gains on ten datasets across a range of tasks including image deraining, deblurring, and denoising. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MPRNet.
PointNetLK Revisited
Authors: Xueqian Li, Jhony Kaesemodel Pontes, Simon Lucey

Abstract: We address the generalization ability of recent learning-based point cloud registration methods. Despite their success, these approaches tend to have poor performance when applied to mismatched conditions that are not well-represented in the training set, such as unseen object categories, different complex scenes, or unknown depth sensors. In these circumstances, it has often been better to rely on classical non-learning methods (e.g., Iterative Closest Point), which have better generalization ability. Hybrid learning methods, that use learning for predicting point correspondences and then a deterministic step for alignment, have offered some respite, but are still limited in their generalization abilities. We revisit a recent innovation---PointNetLK---and show that the inclusion of an analytical Jacobian can exhibit remarkable generalization properties while reaping the inherent fidelity benefits of a learning framework. Our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-art in mismatched conditions but also produces results competitive with current learning methods when operating on real-world test data close to the training set.
Deep Convolutional Dictionary Learning for Image Denoising
Authors: Hongyi Zheng, Hongwei Yong, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Inspired by the great success of deep neural networks (DNNs), many unfolding methods have been proposed to integrate traditional image modeling techniques, such as dictionary learning (DicL) and sparse coding, into DNNs for image restoration. However, the performance of such methods remains limited for several reasons. First, the unfolded architectures do not strictly follow the image representation model of DicL and lose the desired physical meaning. Second, handcrafted priors are still used in most unfolding methods without effectively utilizing the learning capability of DNNs. Third, a universal dictionary is learned to represent all images, reducing the model representation flexibility. We propose a novel framework of deep convolutional dictionary learning (DCDicL), which follows the representation model of DicL strictly, learns the priors for both representation coefficients and the dictionaries, and can adaptively adjust the dictionary for each input image based on its content. The effectiveness of our DCDicL method is validated on the image denoising problem. DCDicL demonstrates leading denoising performance in terms of both quantitative metrics (e.g., PSNR, SSIM) and visual quality. In particular, it can reproduce the subtle image structures and textures, which are hard to recover by many existing denoising DNNs. The code is available at: https://github.com/natezhenghy/DCDicL_denoising.
Fourier Contour Embedding for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection
Authors: Yiqin Zhu, Jianyong Chen, Lingyu Liang, Zhanghui Kuang, Lianwen Jin, Wayne Zhang

Abstract: One of the main challenges for arbitrary-shaped text detection is to design a good text instance representation that allows networks to learn diverse text geometry variances. Most of existing methods model text instances in image spatial domain via masks or contour point sequences in the Cartesian or the polar coordinate system. However, the mask representation might lead to expensive post-processing, while the point sequence one may have limited capability to model texts with highly-curved shapes. To tackle these problems, we model text instances in the Fourier domain and propose one novel Fourier Contour Embedding (FCE) method to represent arbitrary shaped text contours as compact signatures. We further construct FCENet with a backbone, feature pyramid networks (FPN) and a simple post-processing with the Inverse Fourier Transformation (IFT) and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). Different from previous methods, FCENet first predicts compact Fourier signatures of text instances, and then reconstructs text contours via IFT and NMS during test. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FCE is accurate and robust to fit contours of scene texts even with highly-curved shapes, and also validate the effectiveness and the good generalization of FCENet for arbitrary-shaped text detection. Furthermore, experimental results show that our FCENet is superior to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on CTW1500 and Total-Text, especially on challenging highly-curved text subset.