DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Layerwise Optimization by Gradient Decomposition for Continual Learning
Authors: Shixiang Tang, Dapeng Chen, Jinguo Zhu, Shijie Yu, Wanli Ouyang

Abstract: Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art and sometimes super-human performance across a variety of domains. However, when learning tasks sequentially, the networks easily forget the knowledge of previous tasks, known as "catastrophic forgetting". To achieve the consistencies between the old tasks and the new task, one effective solution is to modify the gradient for update. Previous methods enforce independent gradient constraints for different tasks, while we consider these gradients contain complex information, and propose to leverage inter-task information by gradient decomposition. In particular, the gradient of an old task is decomposed into a part shared by all old tasks and a part specific to that task. The gradient for update should be close to the gradient of the new task, consistent with the gradients shared by all old tasks, and orthogonal to the space spanned by the gradients specific to the old tasks. In this way, our approach will encourage common knowledge consolidation but will not impair the task-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the optimization is performed for the gradients of each layer separately rather than the concatenation of all gradients as in previous works. This effectively avoids the influence of the magnitude variation of the gradients in different layers. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of both gradient-decomposed optimization and layer-wise updates. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks of continual learning.
Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging
Authors: S. Mahdi H. Miangoleh, Sebastian Dille, Long Mai, Sylvain Paris, Yagiz Aksoy

Abstract: Neural networks have shown great abilities in estimating depth from a single image. However, the inferred depth maps are well below one-megapixel resolution and often lack fine-grained details, which limits their practicality. Our method builds on our analysis on how the input resolution and the scene structure affects depth estimation performance. We demonstrate that there is a trade-off between a consistent scene structure and the high-frequency details, and merge low- and high-resolution estimations to take advantage of this duality using a simple depth merging network. We present a double estimation method that improves the whole-image depth estimation and a patch selection method that adds local details to the final result. We demonstrate that by merging estimations at different resolutions with changing context, we can generate multi-megapixel depth maps with a high level of detail using a pre-trained model.
Blind Deblurring for Saturated Images
Authors: Liang Chen, Jiawei Zhang, Songnan Lin, Faming Fang, Jimmy S. Ren

Abstract: Blind deblurring has received considerable attention in recent years. However, state-of-the-art methods often fail to process saturated blurry images. The main reason is that saturated pixels are not conforming to the commonly used linear blur model. Pioneer arts suggest excluding saturated pixels during the deblurring process, which sacrifices the informative edges from saturated regions and results in insufficient information for kernel estimation when large saturated regions exist. To address this problem, we introduce a new blur model to fit both saturated and unsaturated pixels, and all informative pixels can be considered during deblurring process. Based on our model, we develop an effective maximum a posterior (MAP)-based optimization framework. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets and challenging real-world examples show that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods.
Turning Frequency to Resolution: Video Super-Resolution via Event Cameras
Authors: Yongcheng Jing, Yiding Yang, Xinchao Wang, Mingli Song, Dacheng Tao

Abstract: State-of-the-art video super-resolution (VSR) methods focus on exploiting inter- and intra-frame correlations to estimate high-resolution (HR) video frames from low-resolution (LR) ones. In this paper, we study VSR from an exotic perspective, by explicitly looking into the role of temporal frequency of video frames. Through experiments, we observe that a higher frequency, and hence a smaller pixel displacement between consecutive frames, tends to deliver favorable super-resolved results. This discovery motivates us to introduce Event Cameras, a novel sensing device that responds instantly to pixel intensity changes and produces up to millions of asynchronous events per second, to facilitate VSR. To this end, we propose an Event-based VSR framework (E-VSR), of which the key component is an asynchronous interpolation (EAI) module that reconstructs a high-frequency (HF) video stream with uniform and tiny pixel displacements between neighboring frames from an event stream. The derived HF video stream is then encoded into a VSR module to recover the desired HR videos. Furthermore, an LR bi-directional interpolation loss and an HR self-supervision loss are also introduced to respectively regulate the EAI and VSR modules. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach yields results superior to the state of the art.
Time Adaptive Recurrent Neural Network
Authors: Anil Kag, Venkatesh Saligrama

Abstract: We propose a learning method that, dynamically modifies the time-constants of the continuous-time counterpart of a vanilla RNN. The time-constants are modified based on the current observation and hidden state. Our proposal overcomes the issues of RNN trainability, by mitigating exploding and vanishing gradient phenomena based on placing novel constraints on the parameter space, and by suppressing noise in inputs based on pondering over informative inputs to strengthen their contribution in the hidden state. As a result, our method is computationally efficient overcoming overheads of many existing methods that also attempt to improve RNN training. Our RNNs, despite being simpler and having light memory footprint, shows competitive performance against standard LSTMs and baseline RNN models on many benchmark datasets including those that require long-term memory.
DeFMO: Deblurring and Shape Recovery of Fast Moving Objects
Authors: Denys Rozumnyi, Martin R. Oswald, Vittorio Ferrari, Jiri Matas, Marc Pollefeys

Abstract: Objects moving at high speed appear significantly blurred when captured with cameras. The blurry appearance is especially ambiguous when the object has complex shape or texture. In such cases, classical methods, or even humans, are unable to recover the object's appearance and motion. We propose a method that, given a single image with its estimated background, outputs the object's appearance and position in a series of sub-frames as if captured by a high-speed camera (i.e. temporal super-resolution). The proposed generative model embeds an image of the blurred object into a latent space representation, disentangles the background, and renders the sharp appearance. Inspired by the image formation model, we design novel self-supervised loss function terms that boost performance and show good generalization capabilities. The proposed DeFMO method is trained on a complex synthetic dataset, yet it performs well on real-world data from several datasets. DeFMO outperforms the state of the art and generates high-quality temporal super-resolution frames.
PISE: Person Image Synthesis and Editing With Decoupled GAN
Authors: Jinsong Zhang, Kun Li, Yu-Kun Lai, Jingyu Yang

Abstract: Person image synthesis, e.g., pose transfer, is a challenging problem due to large variation and occlusion. Existing methods have difficulties predicting reasonable invisible regions and fail to decouple the shape and style of clothing, which limits their applications on person image editing. In this paper, we propose PISE, a novel two-stage generative model for person image synthesis and editing, which can generate realistic person images with desired poses, textures, and semantic layouts. To better predict the invisible region, we first synthesize a human parsing map aligned with the target pose to represent the shape of clothing by a parsing generator, and then generate the final image by an image generator. To decouple the shape and style of clothing, we propose joint global and local per-region encoding and normalization to predict the reasonable style of clothing for invisible regions. We also propose spatial-aware normalization to retain the spatial context relationship in the source image. The results of qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model. Besides, the results of texture transfer and parsing editing show that our model can be applied to person image editing.
4D Hyperspectral Photoacoustic Data Restoration With Reliability Analysis
Authors: Weihang Liao, Art Subpa-asa, Yinqiang Zheng, Imari Sato

Abstract: Hyperspectral photoacoustic (HSPA) spectroscopy is an emerging bi-modal imaging technology that is able to show the wavelength-dependent absorption distribution of the interior of a 3D volume. However, HSPA devices have to scan an object exhaustively in the spatial and spectral domains; and the acquired data tend to suffer from complex noise. This time-consuming scanning process and noise severely affects the usability of HSPA. It is therefore critical to examine the feasibility of 4D HSPA data restoration from an incomplete and noisy observation. In this work, we present a data reliability analysis for the depth and spectral domain. On the basis of this analysis, we explore the inherent data correlations and develop a restoration algorithm to recover 4D HSPA cubes. Experiments on real data verify that the proposed method achieves satisfactory restoration results.
OBoW: Online Bag-of-Visual-Words Generation for Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Spyros Gidaris, Andrei Bursuc, Gilles Puy, Nikos Komodakis, Matthieu Cord, Patrick Perez

Abstract: Learning image representations without human supervision is an important and active research field. Several recent approaches have successfully leveraged the idea of making such a representation invariant under different types of perturbations, especially via contrastive-based instance discrimination training. Although effective visual representations should indeed exhibit such invariances, there are other important characteristics, such as encoding contextual reasoning skills, for which alternative reconstruction-based approaches might be better suited. With this in mind, we propose a teacher-student scheme to learn representations by training a convolutional net to reconstruct a bag-of-visual-words (BoW) representation of an image, given as input a perturbed version of that same image. Our strategy performs an online training of both the teacher network (whose role is to generate the BoW targets) and the student network (whose role is to learn representations), along with an online update of the visual-words vocabulary (used for the BoW targets). This idea effectively enables fully online BoW-guided unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the interest of our BoW-based strategy, which surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods (including contrastive-based ones) in several applications. For instance, in downstream tasks such Pascal object detection, Pascal classification and Places205 classification, our method improves over all prior unsupervised approaches, thus establishing new state-of-the-art results that are also significantly better even than those of supervised pre-training. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/valeoai/obow.
Learning-Based Image Registration With Meta-Regularization
Authors: Ebrahim Al Safadi, Xubo Song

Abstract: We introduce a meta-regularization framework for learning-based image registration. Current learning-based image registration methods use high-resolution architectures such as U-Nets to produce spatial transformations, and impose simple and explicit regularization on the output of the network to ensure that the estimated displacements are smooth. While this approach works well on small deformations, it has been known to struggle when the deformations are large. Our method uses a more advanced form of meta-regularization to increase the generalization ability of learned registration models. We motivate our approach based on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) theory, and approximate that framework via a meta-regularization convolutional layer with radially symmetric, positive semi-definite filters that inherent its regularization properties. We then provide a method to learn such regularization filters while also learning to register. Our experiments on synthetic and real datasets as well as ablation analysis show that our method can improve anatomical correspondence compared to competing methods, and reduce the percentage of folding and tear in the large deformation setting, reflecting better regularization and model generalization.
A Hyperbolic-to-Hyperbolic Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Jindou Dai, Yuwei Wu, Zhi Gao, Yunde Jia

Abstract: Hyperbolic graph convolutional networks (GCNs) demonstrate powerful representation ability to model graphs with hierarchical structure. Existing hyperbolic GCNs resort to tangent spaces to realize graph convolution on hyperbolic manifolds, which is inferior because tangent space is only a local approximation of a manifold. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic-to-hyperbolic graph convolutional network (H2H-GCN) that directly works on hyperbolic manifolds. Specifically, we developed a manifold-preserving graph convolution that consists of a hyperbolic feature transformation and a hyperbolic neighborhood aggregation. The hyperbolic feature transformation works as linear transformation on hyperbolic manifolds. It ensures the transformed node representations still lie on the hyperbolic manifold by imposing the orthogonal constraint on the transformation sub-matrix. The hyperbolic neighborhood aggregation updates each node representation via the Einstein midpoint. The H2H-GCN avoids the distortion caused by tangent space approximations and keeps the global hyperbolic structure. Extensive experiments show that the H2H-GCN achieves substantial improvements on the link prediction, node classification, and graph classification tasks.
Deep Homography for Efficient Stereo Image Compression
Authors: Xin Deng, Wenzhe Yang, Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Enpeng Liu, Qianhan Feng, Radu Timofte

Abstract: In this paper, we propose HESIC, an end-to-end trainable deep network for stereo image compression (SIC). To fully explore the mutual information across two stereo images, we use a deep regression model to estimate the homography matrix, i.e., H matrix. Then, the left image is spatially transformed by the H matrix, and only the residual information between the left and right images is encoded to save bit-rates. A two-branch auto-encoder architecture is adopted in HESIC, corresponding to the left and right images, respectively. For entropy coding, we propose two conditional stereo entropy models, i.e., Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based and context based entropy models, to fully explore the correlation between the two images to reduce the coding bit-rates. In decoding, a cross quality enhancement module is proposed to enhance the image quality based on inverse H matrix. Experimental results show that our HESIC outperforms state-of-the-art SIC methods on InStereo2K and KITTI datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Point2Skeleton: Learning Skeletal Representations from Point Clouds
Authors: Cheng Lin, Changjian Li, Yuan Liu, Nenglun Chen, Yi-King Choi, Wenping Wang

Abstract: We introduce Point2Skeleton, an unsupervised method to learn skeletal representations from point clouds. Existing skeletonization methods are limited to tubular shapes and the stringent requirement of watertight input, while our method aims to produce more generalized skeletal representations for complex structures and handle point clouds. Our key idea is to use the insights of the medial axis transform (MAT) to capture the intrinsic geometric and topological natures of the original input points. We first predict a set of skeletal points by learning a geometric transformation, and then analyze the connectivity of the skeletal points to form skeletal mesh structures. Extensive evaluations and comparisons show our method has superior performance and robustness. The learned skeletal representation will benefit several unsupervised tasks for point clouds, such as surface reconstruction and segmentation.
Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery
Authors: Zhun Zhong, Enrico Fini, Subhankar Roy, Zhiming Luo, Elisa Ricci, Nicu Sebe

Abstract: In this paper, we address Novel Class Discovery (NCD), the task of unveiling new classes in a set of unlabeled samples given a labeled dataset with known classes. We exploit the peculiarities of NCD to build a new framework, named Neighborhood Contrastive Learning (NCL), to learn discriminative representations that are important to clustering performance. Our contribution is twofold. First, we find that a feature extractor trained on the labeled set generates representations in which a generic query sample and its neighbors are likely to share the same class. We exploit this observation to retrieve and aggregate pseudo positive pairs with contrastive learning, thus encouraging the model to learn more discriminative representations. Second, we notice that most of the instances are easily discriminated by the network, contributing less to the contrastive loss. To overcome this issue, we propose to generate hard negatives by mixing labeled and unlabeled samples in the feature space. We experimentally demonstrate that these two ingredients significantly contribute to clustering performance and lead our model to outperform state of the art by a large margin (e.g., clustering accuracy +13% on CIFAR-100 and +8% on ImageNet).
SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Ye Yuan, Shih-En Wei, Tomas Simon, Kris Kitani, Jason Saragih

Abstract: Accurate estimation of 3D human motion from monocular video requires modeling both kinematics (body motion without physical forces) and dynamics (motion with physical forces). To demonstrate this, we present SimPoE, a Simulation-based approach for 3D human Pose Estimation, which integrates image-based kinematic inference and physics-based dynamics modeling. SimPoE learns a policy that takes as input the current-frame pose estimate and the next image frame to control a physically-simulated character to output the next-frame pose estimate. The policy contains a learnable kinematic pose refinement unit that uses 2D keypoints to iteratively refine its kinematic pose estimate of the next frame. Based on this refined kinematic pose, the policy learns to compute dynamics-based control (e.g., joint torques) of the character to advance the current-frame pose estimate to the pose estimate of the next frame. This design couples the kinematic pose refinement unit with the dynamics-based control generation unit, which are learned jointly with reinforcement learning to achieve accurate and physically-plausible pose estimation. Furthermore, we propose a meta-control mechanism that dynamically adjusts the character's dynamics parameters based on the character state to attain more accurate pose estimates. Experiments on large-scale motion datasets demonstrate that our approach establishes the new state of the art in pose accuracy while ensuring physical plausibility.
Neural Camera Simulators
Authors: Hao Ouyang, Zifan Shi, Chenyang Lei, Ka Lung Law, Qifeng Chen

Abstract: We present a controllable camera simulator based on deep neural networks to synthesize raw image data under different camera settings, including exposure time, ISO, and aperture. The proposed simulator includes an exposure module that utilizes the principle of modern lens designs for correcting the luminance level. It also contains a noise module using the noise level function and an aperture module with adaptive attention to simulate the side effects on noise and defocus blur. To facilitate the learning of a simulator model, we collect a dataset of the 10,000 raw images of 450 scenes with different exposure settings. Quantitative experiments and qualitative comparisons show that our approach outperforms relevant baselines in raw data synthesize on multiple cameras. Furthermore, the camera simulator enables various applications, including large-aperture enhancement, HDR, auto exposure, and data augmentation for training local feature detectors. Our work represents the first attempt to simulate a camera sensor's behavior leveraging both the advantage of traditional raw sensor features and the power of data-driven deep learning.
Neighborhood Normalization for Robust Geometric Feature Learning
Authors: Xingtong Liu, Benjamin D. Killeen, Ayushi Sinha, Masaru Ishii, Gregory D. Hager, Russell H. Taylor, Mathias Unberath

Abstract: Extracting geometric features from 3D models is a common first step in applications such as 3D registration, tracking, and scene flow estimation. Many hand-crafted and learning-based methods aim to produce consistent and distinguishable geometric features for 3D models with partial overlap. These methods work well in cases where the point density and scale of the overlapping 3D objects are similar, but struggle in applications where 3D data are obtained independently with unknown global scale and scene overlap. Unfortunately, instances of this resolution mismatch are common in practice, e.g., when aligning data from multiple sensors. In this work, we introduce a new normalization technique, Batch-Neighborhood Normalization, aiming to improve robustness to mean-std variation of local feature distributions that presumably can happen in samples with varying point density. We empirically demonstrate that the presented normalization method's performance compares favorably to comparison methods in indoor and outdoor environments, and on a clinical dataset, on common point registration benchmarks in both standard and, particularly, resolution-mismatch settings. The source code and clinical dataset are available at https://github.com/lppllppl920/NeighborhoodNormalization-Pytorch.
Video Rescaling Networks With Joint Optimization Strategies for Downscaling and Upscaling
Authors: Yan-Cheng Huang, Yi-Hsin Chen, Cheng-You Lu, Hui-Po Wang, Wen-Hsiao Peng, Ching-Chun Huang

Abstract: This paper addresses the video rescaling task, which arises from the needs of adapting the video spatial resolution to suit individual viewing devices. We aim to jointly optimize video downscaling and upscaling as a combined task. Most recent studies focus on image-based solutions, which do not consider temporal information. We present two joint optimization approaches based on invertible neural networks with coupling layers. Our Long Short-Term Memory Video Rescaling Network (LSTM-VRN) leverages temporal information in the low-resolution video to form an explicit prediction of the missing high-frequency information for upscaling. Our Multi-input Multi-output Video Rescaling Network (MIMO-VRN) proposes a new strategy for downscaling and upscaling a group of video frames simultaneously. Not only do they outperform the image-based invertible model in terms of quantitative and qualitative results, but also show much improved upscaling quality than the video rescaling methods without joint optimization. To our best knowledge, this work is the first attempt at the joint optimization of video downscaling and upscaling.