DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
ReMix: Towards Image-to-Image Translation With Limited Data
Authors: Jie Cao, Luanxuan Hou, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Ran He, Zhenan Sun

Abstract: Image-to-image (I2I) translation methods based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) typically suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. In this work, we propose a data augmentation method (ReMix) to tackle this issue. We interpolate training samples at the feature level and propose a novel content loss based on the perceptual relations among samples. The generator learns to translate the in-between samples rather than memorizing the training set, and thereby forces the discriminator to generalize. The proposed approach effectively reduces the ambiguity of generation and renders content-preserving results. The ReMix method can be easily incorporated into existing GAN models with minor modifications. Experimental results on numerous tasks demonstrate that GAN models equipped with the ReMix method achieve significant improvements.
Adaptive Rank Estimate in Robust Principal Component Analysis
Authors: Zhengqin Xu, Rui He, Shoulie Xie, Shiqian Wu

Abstract: Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and its variants have gained wide applications in computer vision. However, these methods either involve manual adjustment of some parameters, or require the rank of a low-rank matrix to be known a prior. In this paper, an adaptive rank estimate based RPCA (ARE-RPCA) is proposed, which adaptively assigns weights on different singular values via rank estimation. More specifically, we study the characteristics of the low-rank matrix, and develop an improved Gerschgorin disk theorem to estimate the rank of the low-rank matrix accurately. Furthermore in view of the issue occurred in the Gerschgorin disk theorem that adjustment factor need to be manually pre-defined, an adaptive setting method, which greatly facilitates the practical implementation of the rank estimation, is presented. Then, the weights of singular values in the nuclear norm are updated adaptively based on iteratively estimated rank, and the resultant low-rank matrix is close to the target. Experimental results show that the proposed ARE-RPCA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in various complex scenarios.
Continual Adaptation of Visual Representations via Domain Randomization and Meta-Learning
Authors: Riccardo Volpi, Diane Larlus, Gregory Rogez

Abstract: Most standard learning approaches lead to fragile models which are prone to drift when sequentially trained on samples of a different nature -- the well-known "catastrophic forgetting" issue. In particular, when a model consecutively learns from different visual domains, it tends to forget the past domains in favor of the most recent ones. In this context, we show that one way to learn models that are inherently more robust against forgetting is domain randomization -- for vision tasks, randomizing the current domain's distribution with heavy image manipulations. Building on this result, we devise a meta-learning strategy where a regularizer explicitly penalizes any loss associated with transferring the model from the current domain to different "auxiliary" meta-domains, while also easing adaptation to them. Such meta-domains are also generated through randomized image manipulations. We empirically demonstrate in a variety of experiments -- spanning from classification to semantic segmentation -- that our approach results in models that are less prone to catastrophic forgetting when transferred to new domains.
DeepACG: Co-Saliency Detection via Semantic-Aware Contrast Gromov-Wasserstein Distance
Authors: Kaihua Zhang, Mingliang Dong, Bo Liu, Xiao-Tong Yuan, Qingshan Liu

Abstract: The objective of co-saliency detection is to segment the co-occurring salient objects in a group of images. To address this task, we introduce a new deep network architecture via semantic-aware contrast Gromov-Wasserstein distance (DeepACG). We first adopt the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance to build dense hierarchical 4D correlation volumes for all pairs of image pixels within the image group. This dense correlation volumes enables the network to accurately discover the structured pair-wise pixel similarities among the common salient objects. Second, we develop a semantic-aware co-attention module (SCAM) to enhance the foreground saliency through predicted categorical information. Specifically, SCAM recognizes the semantic class of the foreground objects; and this information is then projected to the deep representations to localize the related pixels. Third, we design a contrast edge enhanced module (EEM) to capture richer context and preserve fine-grained spatial information. We validate the effectiveness of our model using three popular benchmark datasets (Cosal2015, CoSOD3k and CoCA). Extensive experiments have demonstrated the substantial practical merit of each module. Compared with the existing works, DeepACG shows significant improvements and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be made available soon.
SurFree: A Fast Surrogate-Free Black-Box Attack
Authors: Thibault Maho, Teddy Furon, Erwan Le Merrer

Abstract: Machine learning classifiers are critically prone to evasion attacks. Adversarial examples are slightly modified inputs that are then misclassified, while remaining perceptively close to their originals. Last couple of years have witnessed a striking decrease in the amount of queries a black box attack submits to the target classifier, in order to forge adversarials. This particularly concerns the black box score-based setup, where the attacker has access to top predicted probabilites: the amount of queries went from to millions of to less than a thousand. This paper presents SurFree, a geometrical approach that achieves a similar drastic reduction in the amount of queries in the hardest setup: black box decision-based attacks (only the top-1 label is available). We first highlight that the most recent attacks in that setup, HSJA, QEBA and GeoDA all perform costly gradient surrogate estimations. SurFree proposes to bypass these, by instead focusing on careful trials along diverse directions, guided by precise indications of geometrical properties of the classifier decision boundaries. We motivate this geometric approach before performing a head-to-head comparison with previous attacks with the amount of queries as a first class citizen. We exhibit a faster distortion decay under low query amounts (few hundreds to a thousand), while remaining competitive at higher query budgets.
Beyond Image to Depth: Improving Depth Prediction Using Echoes
Authors: Kranti Kumar Parida, Siddharth Srivastava, Gaurav Sharma

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating depth with multi modal audio visual data. Inspired by the ability of animals, such as bats and dolphins, to infer distance of objects with echolocation, some recent methods have utilized echoes for depth estimation. We propose an end-to-end deep learning based pipeline utilizing RGB images, binaural echoes and estimated material properties of various objects within a scene. We argue that the relation between image, echoes and depth, for different scene elements, is greatly influenced by the properties of those elements, and a method designed to leverage this information can lead to significantly improved depth estimation from audio visual inputs. We propose a novel multi modal fusion technique, which incorporates the material properties explicitly while combining audio (echoes) and visual modalities to predict the scene depth. We show empirically, with experiments on Replica dataset, that the proposed method obtains 28% improvement in RMSE compared to the state-of-the-art audio-visual depth prediction method. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on larger dataset, we report competitive performance on Matterport3D, proposing to use it as a multi modal depth prediction benchmark with echoes for the first time. We also analyse the proposed method with exhaustive ablation experiments and qualitative results.
Rich Features for Perceptual Quality Assessment of UGC Videos
Authors: Yilin Wang, Junjie Ke, Hossein Talebi, Joong Gon Yim, Neil Birkbeck, Balu Adsumilli, Peyman Milanfar, Feng Yang

Abstract: Video quality assessment for User Generated Content (UGC) is an important topic in both industry and academia. Most existing methods only focus on one aspect of the perceptual quality assessment, such as technical quality or compression artifacts. In this paper, we create a large scale dataset to comprehensively investigate characteristics of generic UGC video quality. Besides the subjective ratings and content labels of the dataset, we also propose a DNN-based framework to thoroughly analyze importance of content, technical quality, and compression level in perceptual quality. Our model is able to provide quality scores as well as human-friendly quality indicators, to bridge the gap between low level video signals to human perceptual quality. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art correlation with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS).
Sequential Graph Convolutional Network for Active Learning
Authors: Razvan Caramalau, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Abstract: We propose a novel pool-based Active Learning frame-work constructed on a sequential Graph Convolution Net-work (GCN). Each image's feature from a pool of data rep-resents a node in the graph and the edges encode their similarities. With a small number of randomly sampled images as seed labelled examples, we learn the parameters of the graph to distinguish labelled vs unlabelled nodes by minimising the binary cross-entropy loss. GCN performs message-passing operations between the nodes, and hence, induces similar representations of the strongly associated nodes. We exploit these characteristics of GCN to select the unlabelled examples which are sufficiently different from la-belled ones. To this end, we utilise the graph node embed-dings and their confidence scores and adapt sampling techniques such as CoreSet and uncertainty-based methods to query the nodes. We flip the label of newly queried nodes from unlabelled to labelled, re-train the learner to optimise the downstream task and the graph to minimise its modified objective. We continue this process within a fixed budget. We evaluate our method on 6 different benchmarks: 4 real image classification, 1 depth-based hand pose estimation and 1 synthetic RGB image classification datasets. Our method outperforms several competitive baselines such as VAAL, Learning Loss, CoreSet and attains the new state-of-the-art performance on multiple applications.
Generative Classifiers as a Basis for Trustworthy Image Classification
Authors: Radek Mackowiak, Lynton Ardizzone, Ullrich Kothe, Carsten Rother

Abstract: With the maturing of deep learning systems, trustworthiness is becoming increasingly important for model assessment. We understand trustworthiness as the combination of explainability and robustness. Generative classifiers (GCs) are a promising class of models that are said to naturally accomplish these qualities. However, this has mostly been demonstrated on simple datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR in the past. In this work, we firstly develop an architecture and training scheme that allows GCs to operate on a more relevant level of complexity for practical computer vision, namely the ImageNet challenge. Secondly, we demonstrate the immense potential of GCs for trustworthy image classification. Explainability and some aspects of robustness are vastly improved compared to feed-forward models, even when the GCs are just applied naively. While not all trustworthiness problems are solved completely, we observe that GCs are a highly promising basis for further algorithms and modifications. We release our trained model for download in the hope that it serves as a starting point for other generative classification tasks, in much the same way as pretrained ResNet architectures do for discriminative classification.
EffiScene: Efficient Per-Pixel Rigidity Inference for Unsupervised Joint Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, Camera Pose and Motion Segmentation
Authors: Yang Jiao, Trac D. Tran, Guangming Shi

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenging unsupervised scene flow estimation problem by jointly learning four low-level vision sub-tasks: optical flow F, stereo-depth D, camera pose P and motion segmentation S. Our key insight is that the rigidity of the scene shares the same inherent geometrical structure with object movements and scene depth. Hence, rigidity from S can be inferred by jointly coupling F, D and S to achieve more robust estimation. To this end, we propose a novel scene flow framework named EffiScene with efficient joint rigidity learning, going beyond the existing pipeline with independent auxiliary structures. In EffiScene, we first estimate optical flow and depth at the coarse level and then compute camera pose by Perspective-n-Points method. To jointly learn local rigidity, we design a novel Rigidity From Motion (RfM) layer with three principal components: (i) correlation extraction; (ii) boundary learning; and (iii) outlier exclusion. Final outputs are fused based on the rigid map M_R from RfM at finer levels. To efficiently train EffiScene, two new losses L_bnd and L_unc are designed to prevent trivial solutions and to regularize the flow boundary discontinuity. Extensive experiments on scene flow benchmark KITTI show that our method is effective and significantly improves the state-of-the-art approaches for all sub-tasks, i.e. optical flow (5.19 -> 4.20), depth estimation (3.78 -> 3.46), visual odometry (0.012 -> 0.011) and motion segmentation (0.57 -> 0.62).
Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way
Authors: Honglie Chen, Weidi Xie, Triantafyllos Afouras, Arsha Nagrani, Andrea Vedaldi, Andrew Zisserman

Abstract: The objective of this work is to localize sound sources that are visible in a video without using manual annotations. Our key technical contribution is to show that, by training the network to explicitly discriminate challenging image fragments, even for images that do contain the object emitting the sound, we can significantly boost the localization performance. We do so elegantly by introducing a mechanism to mine hard samples and add them to a contrastive learning formulation automatically. We show that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on the popular Flickr SoundNet dataset. Furthermore, we introduce the VGG-Sound Source (VGG-SS) benchmark, a new set of annotations for the recently-introduced VGG-Sound dataset, where the sound sources visible in each video clip are explicitly marked with bounding box annotations. This dataset is 20 times larger than analogous existing ones, contains 5K videos spanning over 200 categories, and, differently from Flickr SoundNet, is video-based. On VGG-SS, we also show that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance against several baselines. Code and datasets can be found at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/ vgg/research/lvs/
Synthesize-It-Classifier: Learning a Generative Classifier Through Recurrent Self-Analysis
Authors: Arghya Pal, Raphael C.-W. Phan, KokSheik Wong

Abstract: In this work, we show the generative capability of an image classifier network by synthesizing high-resolution, photo-realistic, and diverse images at scale. The overall methodology, called Synthesize-It-Classifier (STIC), does not require an explicit generator network to estimate the density of the data distribution and sample images from that, but instead uses the classifier's knowledge of the boundary to perform gradient ascent w.r.t. class logits and then synthesizes images using Gram Matrix Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (GRMALA) by drawing on a blank canvas. During training, the classifier iteratively uses these synthesized images as fake samples and re-estimates the class boundary in a recurrent fashion to improve both the classification accuracy and quality of synthetic images. The STIC shows that mixing of the hard fake samples (i.e. those synthesized by the one hot class conditioning), and the soft fake samples (which are synthesized as a convex combination of classes, i.e. a mixup of classes) improves class interpolation. We demonstrate an Attentive-STIC network that shows iterative drawing of synthesized images on the ImageNet dataset that has thousands of classes. In addition, we introduce the synthesis using a class conditional score classifier (Score-STIC) instead of a normal image classifier and show improved results on several real world datasets, i.e. ImageNet, LSUN and CIFAR 10.
Self-Point-Flow: Self-Supervised Scene Flow Estimation From Point Clouds With Optimal Transport and Random Walk
Authors: Ruibo Li, Guosheng Lin, Lihua Xie

Abstract: Due to the scarcity of annotated scene flow data, self-supervised scene flow learning in point clouds has attracted increasing attention. In the self-supervised manner, establishing correspondences between two point clouds to approximate scene flow is an effective approach. Previous methods often obtain correspondences by applying point-wise matching that only takes the distance on 3D point coordinates into account, introducing two critical issues: (1) it overlooks other discriminative measures, such as color and surface normal, which often bring fruitful clues for accurate matching; and (2) it often generates sub-par performance, as the matching is operated in an unconstrained situation, where multiple points can be ended up with the same corresponding point. To address the issues, we formulate this matching task as an optimal transport problem. The output optimal assignment matrix can be utilized to guide the generation of pseudo ground truth. In this optimal transport, we design the transport cost by considering multiple descriptors and encourage one-to-one matching by mass equality constraints. Also, constructing a graph on the points, a random walk module is introduced to encourage the local consistency of the pseudo labels. Comprehensive experiments on FlyingThings3D and KITTI show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-supervised learning methods. Our self-supervised method even performs on par with some supervised learning approaches, although we do not need any ground truth flow for training.
Toward Joint Thing-and-Stuff Mining for Weakly Supervised Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yunhang Shen, Liujuan Cao, Zhiwei Chen, Feihong Lian, Baochang Zhang, Chi Su, Yongjian Wu, Feiyue Huang, Rongrong Ji

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation aims to partition an image to object instances and semantic content for thing and stuff categories, respectively. To date, learning weakly supervised panoptic segmentation (WSPS) with only image-level labels remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose an efficient jointly thing-and-stuff mining (JTSM) framework for WSPS. To this end, we design a novel mask of interest pooling (MoIPool) to extract fixed-size pixel-accurate feature maps of arbitrary-shape segmentations. MoIPool enables a panoptic mining branch to leverage multiple instance learning (MIL) to recognize things and stuff segmentation in a unified manner. We further refine segmentation masks with parallel instance and semantic segmentation branches via self-training, which collaborates the mined masks from panoptic mining with bottom-up object evidence as pseudo-ground-truth labels to improve spatial coherence and contour localization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of JTSM on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. As a by-product, we achieve competitive results for weakly supervised object detection and instance segmentation. This work is a first step towards tackling challenge panoptic segmentation task with only image-level labels.
Intelligent Carpet: Inferring 3D Human Pose From Tactile Signals
Authors: Yiyue Luo, Yunzhu Li, Michael Foshey, Wan Shou, Pratyusha Sharma, Tomas Palacios, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik

Abstract: Daily human activities, e.g., locomotion, exercises, and resting, are heavily guided by the tactile interactions between the human and the ground. In this work, leveraging such tactile interactions, we propose a 3D human pose estimation approach using the pressure maps recorded by a tactile carpet as input. We build a low-cost, high-density, large-scale intelligent carpet, which enables the real-time recordings of human-floor tactile interactions in a seamless manner. We collect a synchronized tactile and visual dataset on various human activities. Employing a state-of-the-art camera-based pose estimation model as supervision, we design and implement a deep neural network model to infer 3D human poses using only the tactile information. Our pipeline can be further scaled up to multi-person pose estimation. We evaluate our system and demonstrate its potential applications in diverse fields.
Railroad Is Not a Train: Saliency As Pseudo-Pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Seungho Lee, Minhyun Lee, Jongwuk Lee, Hyunjung Shim

Abstract: Existing studies in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using image-level weak supervision have several limitations: sparse object coverage, inaccurate object boundaries, and co-occurring pixels from non-target objects. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework, namely Explicit Pseudo-pixel Supervision (EPS), which learns from pixel-level feedback by combining two weak supervisions; the image-level label provides the object identity via the localization map and the saliency map from the off-the-shelf saliency detection model offers rich boundaries. We devise a joint training strategy to fully utilize the complementary relationship between both information. Our method can obtain accurate object boundaries and discard co-occurring pixels, thereby significantly improving the quality of pseudo-masks. Experimental results show that the proposed method remarkably outperforms existing methods by resolving key challenges of WSSS and achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on both PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/halbielee/EPS.
Stable View Synthesis
Authors: Gernot Riegler, Vladlen Koltun

Abstract: We present Stable View Synthesis (SVS). Given a set of source images depicting a scene from freely distributed viewpoints, SVS synthesizes new views of the scene. The method operates on a geometric scaffold computed via structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo. Each point on this 3D scaffold is associated with view rays and corresponding feature vectors that encode the appearance of this point in the input images. The core of SVS is view-dependent on-surface feature aggregation, in which directional feature vectors at each 3D point are processed to produce a new feature vector for a ray that maps this point into the new target view. The target view is then rendered by a convolutional network from a tensor of features synthesized in this way for all pixels. The method is composed of differentiable modules and is trained end-to-end. It supports spatially-varying view-dependent importance weighting and feature transformation of source images at each point; spatial and temporal stability due to the smooth dependence of on-surface feature aggregation on the target view; and synthesis of view-dependent effects such as specular reflection. Experimental results demonstrate that SVS outperforms state-of-the-art view synthesis methods both quantitatively and qualitatively on three diverse real-world datasets, achieving unprecedented levels of realism in free-viewpoint video of challenging large-scale scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/intel-isl/StableViewSynthesis