DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Synthesizing Long-Term 3D Human Motion and Interaction in 3D Scenes
Authors: Jiashun Wang, Huazhe Xu, Jingwei Xu, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang

Abstract: Synthesizing 3D human motion plays an important role in many graphics applications as well as understanding human activity. While many efforts have been made on generating realistic and natural human motion, most approaches neglect the importance of modeling human-scene interactions and affordances. On the other hand, affordance reasoning (e.g., standing on the floor or sitting on the chair) has mainly been studied with static human pose and gestures, and it has rarely been addressed with human motion. In this paper, we propose to bridge human motion synthesis and scene affordance reasoning. We present a hierarchical generative framework which synthesizes long-term 3D human motion conditioning on the 3D scene structure. We also further enforce multiple geometry constraints between the human mesh and scene point clouds via optimization to improve realistic synthesis. Our experiments show significant improvements over previous approaches on generating natural and physically plausible human motion in a scene.
How Well Do Self-Supervised Models Transfer?
Authors: Linus Ericsson, Henry Gouk, Timothy M. Hospedales

Abstract: Self-supervised visual representation learning has seen huge progress recently, but no large scale evaluation has compared the many models now available. We evaluate the transfer performance of 13 top self-supervised models on 40 downstream tasks, including many-shot and few-shot recognition, object detection, and dense prediction. We compare their performance to a supervised baseline and show that on most tasks the best self-supervised models outperform supervision, confirming the recently observed trend in the literature. We find ImageNet Top-1 accuracy to be highly correlated with transfer to many-shot recognition, but increasingly less so for few-shot, object detection and dense prediction. No single self-supervised method dominates overall, suggesting that universal pre-training is still unsolved. Our analysis of features suggests that top self-supervised learners fail to preserve colour information as well as supervised alternatives, but tend to induce better classifier calibration, and less attentive overfitting than supervised learners.
Understanding Object Dynamics for Interactive Image-to-Video Synthesis
Authors: Andreas Blattmann, Timo Milbich, Michael Dorkenwald, Bjorn Ommer

Abstract: What would be the effect of locally poking a static scene? We present an approach that learns naturally-looking global articulations caused by a local manipulation at a pixel level. Training requires only videos of moving objects but no information of the underlying manipulation of the physical scene. Our generative model learns to infer natural object dynamics as a response to user interaction and learns about the interrelations between different object body regions. Given a static image of an object and a local poking of a pixel, the approach then predicts how the object would deform over time. In contrast to existing work on video prediction, we do not synthesize arbitrary realistic videos but enable local interactive control of the deformation. Our model is not restricted to particular object categories and can transfer dynamics onto novel unseen object instances. Extensive experiments on diverse objects demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to common video prediction frameworks. Project page is available at https://bit.ly/3cxfA2L.
Pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis
Authors: Eric R. Chan, Marco Monteiro, Petr Kellnhofer, Jiajun Wu, Gordon Wetzstein

Abstract: We have witnessed rapid progress on 3D-aware image synthesis, leveraging recent advances in generative visual models and neural rendering. Existing approaches however fall short in two ways: first, they may lack an underlying 3D representation or rely on view-inconsistent rendering, hence synthesizing images that are not multi-view consistent; second, they often depend upon representation network architectures that are not expressive enough, and their results thus lack in image quality. We propose a novel generative model, named Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks (p-GAN or pi-GAN), for high-quality 3D-aware image synthesis. p-GAN leverages neural representations with periodic activation functions and volumetric rendering to represent scenes as view-consistent radiance fields. The proposed approach obtains state-of-the-art results for 3D-aware image synthesis with multiple real and synthetic datasets.
Diverse Branch Block: Building a Convolution as an Inception-Like Unit
Authors: Xiaohan Ding, Xiangyu Zhang, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

Abstract: We propose a universal building block of Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) to improve the performance without any inference-time costs. The block is named Diverse Branch Block (DBB), which enhances the representational capacity of a single convolution by combining diverse branches of different scales and complexities to enrich the feature space, including sequences of convolutions, multi-scale convolutions, and average pooling. After training, a DBB can be equivalently converted into a single conv layer for deployment. Unlike the advancements of novel ConvNet architectures, DBB complicates the training-time microstructure while maintaining the macro architecture, so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement for regular conv layers of any architecture. In this way, the model can be trained to reach a higher level of performance and then transformed into the original inference-time structure for inference. DBB improves ConvNets on image classification (up to 1.9% higher top-1 accuracy on ImageNet), object detection and semantic segmentation. The PyTorch code and models are released at https://github.com/DingXiaoH/DiverseBranchBlock.
Post-Hoc Uncertainty Calibration for Domain Drift Scenarios
Authors: Christian Tomani, Sebastian Gruber, Muhammed Ebrar Erdem, Daniel Cremers, Florian Buettner

Abstract: We address the problem of uncertainty calibration. While standard deep neural networks typically yield uncalibrated predictions, calibrated confidence scores that are representative of the true likelihood of a prediction can be achieved using post-hoc calibration methods. However, to date, the focus of these approaches has been on in-domain calibration. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we show that existing post-hoc calibration methods yield highly over-confident predictions under domain shift. Second, we introduce a simple strategy where perturbations are applied to samples in the validation set before performing the post-hoc calibration step. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this perturbation step results in substantially better calibration under domain shift on a wide range of architectures and modelling tasks.
Slimmable Compressive Autoencoders for Practical Neural Image Compression
Authors: Fei Yang, Luis Herranz, Yongmei Cheng, Mikhail G. Mozerov

Abstract: Neural image compression leverages deep neural networks to outperform traditional image codecs in rate-distortion performance. However, the resulting models are also heavy, computationally demanding and generally optimized for a single rate, limiting their practical use. Focusing on practical image compression, we propose slimmable compressive autoencoders (SlimCAEs), where rate (R) and distortion (D) are jointly optimized for different capacities. Once trained, encoders and decoders can be executed at different capacities, leading to different rates and complexities. We show that a successful implementation of SlimCAEs requires suitable capacity-specific RD tradeoffs. Our experiments show that SlimCAEs are highly flexible models that provide excellent rate-distortion performance, variable rate, and dynamic adjustment of memory, computational cost and latency, thus addressing the main requirements of practical image compression.
Function4D: Real-Time Human Volumetric Capture From Very Sparse Consumer RGBD Sensors
Authors: Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Kaiwen Guo, Pengpeng Liu, Qionghai Dai, Yebin Liu

Abstract: Human volumetric capture is a long-standing topic in computer vision and computer graphics. Although high-quality results can be achieved using sophisticated off-line systems, real-time human volumetric capture of complex scenarios, especially using light-weight setups, remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a human volumetric capture method that combines temporal volumetric fusion and deep implicit functions. To achieve high-quality and temporal-continuous reconstruction, we propose dynamic sliding fusion to fuse neighboring depth observations together with topology consistency. Moreover, for detailed and complete surface generation, we propose detail-preserving deep implicit functions for RGBD input which can not only preserve the geometric details on the depth inputs but also generate more plausible texturing results. Results and experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of view sparsity, generalization capacity, reconstruction quality, and run-time efficiency.
LAU-Net: Latitude Adaptive Upscaling Network for Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Xin Deng, Hao Wang, Mai Xu, Yichen Guo, Yuhang Song, Li Yang

Abstract: The omnidirectional images (ODIs) are usually at low-resolution, due to the constraints of collection, storage and transmission. The traditional two-dimensional (2D) image super-resolution methods are not effective for spherical ODIs, because ODIs tend to have non-uniformly distributed pixel density and varying texture complexity across latitudes. In this work, we propose a novel latitude adaptive upscaling network (LAU-Net) for ODI super-resolution, which allows pixels at different latitudes to adopt distinct upscaling factors. Specifically, we introduce a Laplacian multi-level separation architecture to split an ODI into different latitude bands, and hierarchically upscale them with different factors. In addition, we propose a deep reinforcement learning scheme with a latitude adaptive reward, in order to automatically select optimal upscaling factors for different latitude bands. To the best of our knowledge, LAU-Net is the first attempt to consider the latitude difference for ODI super-resolution. Extensive results demonstrate that our LAU-Net significantly advances the super-resolution performance for ODIs.
UP-DETR: Unsupervised Pre-Training for Object Detection With Transformers
Authors: Zhigang Dai, Bolun Cai, Yugeng Lin, Junying Chen

Abstract: Object detection with transformers (DETR) reaches competitive performance with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a pretext task named random query patch detection to Unsupervisedly Pre-train DETR (UP-DETR) for object detection. Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the original image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade off classification and localization preferences in the pretext task, we freeze the CNN backbone and propose a patch feature reconstruction branch which is jointly optimized with patch detection. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we introduce UP-DETR from single-query patch and extend it to multi-query patches with object query shuffle and attention mask. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher average precision on object detection, one-shot detection and panoptic segmentation. Code and pre-training models: https://github.com/dddzg/up-detr.
Self-Attention Based Text Knowledge Mining for Text Detection
Authors: Qi Wan, Haoqin Ji, Linlin Shen

Abstract: Pre-trained models play an important role in deep learning based text detectors. However, most methods ignore the gap between natural images and scene text images and directly apply ImageNet for pre-training. To address such a problem, some of them firstly pre-train the model using a large amount of synthetic data and then fine-tune it on target datasets, which is task-specific and has limited generalization capability. In this paper, we focus on providing general pre-trained models for text detectors. Considering the importance of exploring text contents for text detection, we propose STKM (Self-attention based Text Knowledge Mining), which consists of a CNN Encoder and a Self-attention Decoder, to learn general prior knowledge for text detection from SynthText. Given only image level text labels, Self-attention Decoder directly decodes features extracted from CNN Encoder to texts without requirement of detection, which guides the CNN backbone to explicitly learn discriminative semantic representations ignored by previous approaches. After that, the text knowledge learned by the backbone can be transferred to various text detectors to significantly improve their detection performance (e.g., 5.89% higher F-measure for EAST on ICDAR15 dataset) without bells and whistles. Pre-trained model is available at: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/STKM
Image De-Raining via Continual Learning
Authors: Man Zhou, Jie Xiao, Yifan Chang, Xueyang Fu, Aiping Liu, Jinshan Pan, Zheng-Jun Zha

Abstract: While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success on image de-raining task, most existing methods can only learn fixed mapping rules between paired rainy/clean images on a single dataset. This limits their applications in practical situations with multiple and incremental datasets where the mapping rules may change for different types of rain streaks. However, the catastrophic forgetting of traditional deep CNN model challenges the design of generalized framework for multiple and incremental datasets. A strategy of sharing the network structure but independently updating and storing the network parameters on each dataset has been developed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, this strategy is not applicable to compact systems as it dramatically increases the overall training time and parameter space. To alleviate such limitation, in this study, we propose a parameter importance guided weights modification approach, named PIGWM. Specifically, with new dataset (e.g. new rain dataset), the well-trained network weights are updated according to their importance evaluated on previous training dataset. With extensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that a single network with a single parameter set of our proposed method can process multiple rain datasets almost without performance degradation. The proposed model is capable of achieving superior performance on both inhomogeneous and incremental datasets, and is promising for highly compact systems to gradually learn myriad regularities of the different types of rain streaks. The results indicate that our proposed method has great potential for other computer vision tasks with dynamic learning environments.
Layer-Wise Searching for 1-Bit Detectors
Authors: Sheng Xu, Junhe Zhao, Jinhu Lu, Baochang Zhang, Shumin Han, David Doermann

Abstract: 1-bit detectors show great promise for resource-constrained embedded devices but often suffer from a significant performance gap compared with their real-valued counterparts. The primary reason lies in the layer-wise error during binarization. This paper presents a layer-wise search (LWS) strategy to generate 1-bit detectors that maintain a performance very close to the original real-valued model. The approach introduces angular and amplitude angular error loss functions to increase detector capacity. At each layer, it exploits a differentiable binarization search (DBS) to minimize the angular error in a student-teacher framework. It then fine-tunes the scale parameter of that layer to reduce the amplitude error. Extensive experiments show that LWS-Det outperforms state-of-the-art 1-bit detectors by a considerable margin on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. For example, the LWS-Det achieves 1-bit Faster-RCNN with ResNet-34 backbone within 2.0% mAP of its real-valued counterpart on the PASCAL VOC dataset.
Distilling Audio-Visual Knowledge by Compositional Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yanbei Chen, Yongqin Xian, A. Sophia Koepke, Ying Shan, Zeynep Akata

Abstract: Having access to multi-modal cues (e.g. vision and audio) empowers some cognitive tasks to be done faster compared to learning from a single modality. In this work, we propose to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous modalities, even though these data modalities may not be semantically correlated. Rather than directly aligning the representations of different modalities, we compose audio, image, and video representations across modalities to uncover the richer multi-modal knowledge. Our main idea is to learn a compositional embedding that closes the cross-modal semantic gap and captures the task-relevant semantics, which facilitates pulling together representations across modalities by compositional contrastive learning. We establish a new, comprehensive multi-modal distillation benchmark on three video datasets: UCF101, ActivityNet, and VGGSound. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms a variety of existing knowledge distillation methods in transferring audio-visual knowledge to improve video representation learning.
Unsupervised Visual Attention and Invariance for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xudong Wang, Long Lian, Stella X. Yu

Abstract: The vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success. However, generalizing vision-based RL policy to unknown test environments still remains as a challenging problem. Unlike previous works that focus on training a universal RL policy that is invariant to discrepancies between test and training environment, we focus on developing an independent module to disperse interference factors irrelevant to the task, thereby providing ""clean"" observations for the RL policy. The proposed unsupervised visual attention and invariance method (VAI) contains three key components: 1) an unsupervised keypoint detection model which captures semantically meaningful keypoints in observations; 2) an unsupervised visual attention module which automatically generates the distraction-invariant attention mask for each observation; 3) a self-supervised adapter for visual distraction invariance which reconstructs distraction-invariant attention mask from observations with artificial disturbances generated by a series of foreground and background augmentations. All components are optimized in an unsupervised way, without manual annotation or access to environment internals, and only the adapter is used during inference time to provide distraction-free observations to RL policy. VAI empirically shows powerful generalization capabilities and significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method by 15% 49% in DeepMind Control suite benchmark and 61% 229% in our proposed robot manipulation benchmark, in term of cumulative rewards per episode.
CRFace: Confidence Ranker for Model-Agnostic Face Detection Refinement
Authors: Noranart Vesdapunt, Baoyuan Wang

Abstract: Face detection is a fundamental problem for many downstream face applications, and there is a rising demand for faster, more accurate yet support for higher resolution face detectors. Recent smartphones can record a video in 8K resolution, but many of the existing face detectors still fail due to the anchor size and training data. We analyze the failure cases and observe a large number of correct predicted boxes with incorrect confidences. To calibrate these confidences, we propose a confidence ranking network with a pairwise ranking loss to re-rank the predicted confidences locally within the same image. Our confidence ranker is model-agnostic, so we can augment the data by choosing the pairs from multiple face detectors during the training, and generalize to a wide range of face detectors during the testing. On WiderFace, we achieve the highest AP on the single-scale, and our AP is competitive with the previous multi-scale methods while being significantly faster. On 8K resolution, our method solves the GPU memory issue and allows us to indirectly train on 8K. We collect 8K resolution test set to show the improvement, and we will release our test set as a new benchmark for future research.
Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation
Authors: Changan Chen, Ziad Al-Halah, Kristen Grauman

Abstract: Recent work on audio-visual navigation assumes a constantly-sounding target and restricts the role of audio to signaling the target's position. We introduce semantic audio-visual navigation, where objects in the environment make sounds consistent with their semantic meaning (e.g., toilet flushing, door creaking) and acoustic events are sporadic or short in duration. We propose a transformer-based model to tackle this new semantic AudioGoal task, incorporating an inferred goal descriptor that captures both spatial and semantic properties of the target. Our model's persistent multimodal memory enables it to reach the goal even long after the acoustic event stops. In support of the new task, we also expand the SoundSpaces audio simulations to provide semantically grounded sounds for an array of objects in Matterport3D. Our method strongly outperforms existing audio-visual navigation methods by learning to associate semantic, acoustic, and visual cues. Project page: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/semantic-audio-visual-navigation.
Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Yihe Tang, Weifeng Chen, Yijun Luo, Yuting Zhang

Abstract: We propose a semi-supervised approach for contemporary object detectors following the teacher-student dual model framework. Our method is featured with 1) the exponential moving averaging strategy to update the teacher from the student online, 2) using plenty of region proposals and soft pseudo-labels as the student's training targets, and 3) a light-weighted detection-specific data ensemble for the teacher to generate more reliable pseudo labels. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art - STAC, which uses hard labels on sparsely selected hard pseudo samples, the teacher in our model exposes richer information to the student with soft-labels on many proposals. Our model achieves COCO-style AP of 53.04% on VOC07 val set, 8.4% better than STAC, when using VOC12 as unlabeled data. On MS-COCO, it outperforms prior work when only a small percentage of data is taken as labeled. It also reaches 53.8% AP on MS-COCO test-dev with 3.1% gain over the fully supervised ResNet-152 cascaded R-CNN, by tapping into unlabeled data of a similar size to the labeled data.