DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Rethinking and Improving the Robustness of Image Style Transfer
Authors: Pei Wang, Yijun Li, Nuno Vasconcelos

Abstract: Extensive research in neural style transfer methods has shown that the correlation between features extracted by a pre-trained VGG network has remarkable ability to capture the visual style of an image. Surprisingly, however, this stylization quality is not robust and often degrades significantly when applied to features from more advanced and lightweight networks, such as those in the ResNet family. By performing extensive experiments with different network architectures, we find that residual connections, which represent the main architectural difference between VGG and ResNet, produce feature maps of small entropy, which are not suitable for style transfer. To improve the robustness of the ResNet architecture, we then propose a simple yet effective solution based on a softmax transformation of the feature activations that enhances their entropy. Experimental results demonstrate that this small magic can greatly improve the quality of stylization results, even for networks with random weights. This suggests that the architecture used for feature extraction is more important than the use of learned weights for the task of style transfer.
FSCE: Few-Shot Object Detection via Contrastive Proposal Encoding
Authors: Bo Sun, Banghuai Li, Shengcai Cai, Ye Yuan, Chi Zhang

Abstract: Emerging interests have been brought to recognize previously unseen objects given very few training examples, known as few-shot object detection (FSOD). Recent researches demonstrate that good feature embedding is the key to reach favorable few-shot learning performance. We observe object proposals with different Intersection-of-Union (IoU) scores are analogous to the intra-image augmentation used in contrastive visual representation learning. And we exploit this analogy and incorporate supervised contrastive learning to achieve more robust objects representations in FSOD. We present Few-Shot object detection via Contrastive proposals Encoding (FSCE), a simple yet effective approach to learning contrastive-aware object proposal encodings that facilitate the classification of detected objects. We notice the degradation of average precision (AP) for rare objects mainly comes from misclassifying novel instances as confusable classes. And we ease the misclassification issues by promoting instance level intra-class compactness and inter-class variance via our contrastive proposal encoding loss (CPE loss). Our design outperforms current state-of-the-art works in any shot and all data splits, with up to +8.8% on standard benchmark PASCAL VOC and +2.7% on challenging COCO benchmark. Code is available at: https://github.com/ MegviiDetection/FSCE.
Cross-Domain Similarity Learning for Face Recognition in Unseen Domains
Authors: Masoud Faraki, Xiang Yu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Yumin Suh, Manmohan Chandraker

Abstract: Face recognition models trained under the assumption of identical training and test distributions often suffer from poor generalization when faced with unknown variations, such as a novel ethnicity or unpredictable individual make-ups during test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-domain metric learning loss, which we dub Cross-Domain Triplet (CDT) loss, to improve face recognition in unseen domains. The CDT loss encourages learning semantically meaningful features by enforcing compact feature clusters of identities from one domain, where the compactness is measured by underlying similarity metrics that belong to another training domain with different statistics. Intuitively, it discriminatively correlates explicit metrics derived from one domain, with triplet samples from another domain in a unified loss function to be minimized within a network, which leads to better alignment of the training domains. The network parameters are further enforced to learn generalized features under domain shift, in a model-agnostic learning pipeline. Unlike the recent work of Meta Face Recognition, our method does not require careful hard-pair sample mining and filtering strategy during training. Extensive experiments on various face recognition benchmarks show the superiority of our method in handling variations, compared to baseline methods and the state-of-the-arts.
Learning 3D Shape Feature for Texture-Insensitive Person Re-Identification
Authors: Jiaxing Chen, Xinyang Jiang, Fudong Wang, Jun Zhang, Feng Zheng, Xing Sun, Wei-Shi Zheng

Abstract: It is well acknowledged that person re-identification (person ReID) highly relies on visual texture information like clothing. Despite significant progress has been made in recent years, texture-confusing situations like clothing changing and persons wearing the same clothes receive little attention from most existing ReID methods. In this paper, rather than relying on texture based information, we propose to improve the robustness of person ReID against clothing texture by exploiting the information of a person's 3D shape. Existing shape learning schemas for person ReID either ignore the 3D information of a person, or require extra physical devices to collect 3D source data. Differently, we propose a novel ReID learning framework that directly extracts a texture-insensitive 3D shape embedding from a 2D image by adding 3D body reconstruction as an auxiliary task and regularization, called 3D Shape Learning (3DSL). The 3D reconstruction based regularization forces the ReID model to decouple the 3D shape information from the visual texture, and acquire discriminative 3D shape ReID features. To solve the problem of lacking 3D ground truth, we design an adversarial self-supervised projection (ASSP) model, performing 3D reconstruction without ground truth. Extensive experiments on common ReID datasets and texture-confusing datasets validate the effectiveness of our model.
Virtual Fully-Connected Layer: Training a Large-Scale Face Recognition Dataset With Limited Computational Resources
Authors: Pengyu Li, Biao Wang, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Recently, deep face recognition has achieved significant progress because of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and large-scale datasets. However, training CNNs on a large-scale face recognition dataset with limited computational resources is still a challenge. This is because the classification paradigm needs to train a fully connected layer as the category classifier, and its parameters will be in the hundreds of millions if the training dataset contains millions of identities. This requires many computational resources, such as GPU memory. The metric learning paradigm is an economical computation method, but its performance is greatly inferior to that of the classification paradigm. To address this challenge, we propose a simple but effective CNN layer called the Virtual fully connected (Virtual FC) layer to reduce the computational consumption of the classification paradigm. Without bells and whistles, the proposed Virtual FC reduces the parameters by more than 100 times with respect to the fully connected layer and achieves competitive performance on mainstream face recognition evaluation datasets. Moreover, the performance of our Virtual FC layer on the evaluation datasets is superior to that of the metric learning paradigm by a significant margin. Our code will be released in hopes of disseminating our idea to other domains.
Multi-Person Implicit Reconstruction From a Single Image
Authors: Armin Mustafa, Akin Caliskan, Lourdes Agapito, Adrian Hilton

Abstract: We present a new end-to-end learning framework to obtain detailed and spatially coherent reconstructions of multiple people from a single image. Existing multi-person methods suffer from two main drawbacks: they are often model-based and therefore cannot capture accurate 3D models of people with loose clothing and hair; or they require manual intervention to resolve occlusions or interactions. Our method addresses both limitations by introducing the first end-to-end learning approach to perform model-free implicit reconstruction for realistic 3D capture of multiple clothed people in arbitrary poses (with occlusions) from a single image. Our network simultaneously estimates the 3D geometry of each person and their 6DOF spatial locations, to obtain a coherent multi-human reconstruction. In addition, we introduce a new synthetic dataset that depicts images with a varying number of inter-occluded humans in a variety of clothing and hair. We demonstrate robust, high-resolution reconstructions on images of multiple humans with complex occlusions, loose clothing and a large variety of poses, and scenes. Our quantitative evaluation on both synthetic and real world datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements in the accuracy and completeness of the reconstructions over competing approaches.
OPANAS: One-Shot Path Aggregation Network Architecture Search for Object Detection
Authors: Tingting Liang, Yongtao Wang, Zhi Tang, Guosheng Hu, Haibin Ling

Abstract: Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) has been exploited to design feature pyramid networks (FPNs) and achieved promising results for visual object detection. Encouraged by the success, we propose a novel One-Shot Path Aggregation Network Architecture Search (OPANAS) algorithm, which significantly improves both searching efficiency and detection accuracy. Specifically, we first introduce six heterogeneous information paths to build our search space, namely top-down, bottom-up, fusing-splitting, scale-equalizing, skip-connect, and none. Second, we propose a novel search space of FPNs, in which each FPN candidate is represented by a densely-connected directed acyclic graph (each node is a feature pyramid and each edge is one of the six heterogeneous information paths). Third, we propose an efficient one-shot search method to find the optimal path aggregation architecture, that is, we first train a super-net and then find the optimal candidate with an evolutionary algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed OPANAS for object detection: (1) OPANAS is more efficient than state-of-the-art methods (e.g., NAS-FPN and Auto-FPN), at significantly smaller searching cost (e.g., only 4 GPU days on MS-COCO); (2) the optimal architecture found by OPANAS significantly improves main-stream detectors including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN and Cascade R-CNN, by 2.3 3.2 % mAP comparing to their FPN counterparts; and (3) a new state-of-the-art accuracy-speed trade-off (52.2 % mAP at 7.6 FPS) at smaller training costs than comparable state-of-the-arts.
Bridge To Answer: Structure-Aware Graph Interaction Network for Video Question Answering
Authors: Jungin Park, Jiyoung Lee, Kwanghoon Sohn

Abstract: This paper presents a novel method, termed Bridge to Answer, to infer correct answers for questions about a given video by leveraging adequate graph interactions of heterogeneous crossmodal graphs. To realize this, we learn question conditioned visual graphs by exploiting the relation between video and question to enable each visual node using question-to-visual interactions to encompass both visual and linguistic cues. In addition, we propose bridged visual-to-visual interactions to incorporate two complementary visual information on appearance and motion by placing the question graph as an intermediate bridge. This bridged architecture allows reliable message passing through compositional semantics of the question to generate an appropriate answer. As a result, our method can learn the question conditioned visual representations attributed to appearance and motion that show powerful capability for video question answering. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed method provides effective and superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks.
Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads
Authors: Ziyan Wang, Timur Bagautdinov, Stephen Lombardi, Tomas Simon, Jason Saragih, Jessica Hodgins, Michael Zollhofer

Abstract: Photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans is an important ability for telepresence systems, virtual shopping, synthetic data generation, and more. Recently, neural rendering methods, which combine techniques from computer graphics and machine learning, have created high-fidelity models of humans and objects. Some of these methods do not produce results with high-enough fidelity for driveable human models (Neural Volumes) whereas others have extremely long rendering times (NeRF). We propose a novel compositional 3D representation that combines the best of previous methods to produce both higher-resolution and faster results. Our representation bridges the gap between discrete and continuous volumetric representations by combining a coarse 3D-structure-aware grid of animation codes with a continuous learned scene function that maps every position and its corresponding local animation code to its view-dependent emitted radiance and local volume density. Differentiable volume rendering is employed to compute photo-realistic novel views of the human head and upper body as well as to train our novel representation end-to-end using only 2D supervision. In addition, we show that the learned dynamic radiance field can be used to synthesize novel unseen expressions based on a global animation code. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of dynamic human heads and the upper body. See our project page for more results.
Partial Person Re-Identification With Part-Part Correspondence Learning
Authors: Tianyu He, Xu Shen, Jianqiang Huang, Zhibo Chen, Xian-Sheng Hua

Abstract: Driven by the success of deep learning, the last decade has seen rapid advances in person re-identification (re-ID). Nonetheless, most of approaches assume that the input is given with the fulfillment of expectations, while imperfect input remains rarely explored to date, which is a non-trivial problem since directly apply existing methods without adjustment can cause significant performance degradation. In this paper, we focus on recognizing partial (flawed) input with the assistance of proposed Part-Part Correspondence Learning (PPCL), a self-supervised learning framework that learns correspondence between image patches without any additional part-level supervision. Accordingly, we propose Part-Part Cycle (PP-Cycle) constraint and Part-Part Triplet (PP-Triplet) constraint that exploit the duality and uniqueness between corresponding image patches respectively. We verify our proposed PPCL on several partial person re-ID benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can surpass previous methods in terms of the standard evaluation metric.
Monte Carlo Scene Search for 3D Scene Understanding
Authors: Shreyas Hampali, Sinisa Stekovic, Sayan Deb Sarkar, Chetan S. Kumar, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Vincent Lepetit

Abstract: We explore how a general AI algorithm can be used for 3D scene understanding to reduce the need for training data. More exactly, we propose a modification of the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to retrieve objects and room layouts from noisy RGB-D scans. While MCTS was developed as a game-playing algorithm, we show it can also be used for complex perception problems. Our adapted MCTS algorithm has few easy-to-tune hyperparameters and can optimise general losses. We use it to optimise the posterior probability of objects and room layout hypotheses given the RGB-D data. This results in an analysis-by-synthesis approach that explores the solution space by rendering the current solution and comparing it to the RGB-D observations. To perform this exploration even more efficiently, we propose simple changes to the standard MCTS' tree construction and exploration policy. We demonstrate our approach on the ScanNet dataset. Our method often retrieves configurations that are better than some manual annotations, especially on layouts.
Coarse-To-Fine Person Re-Identification With Auxiliary-Domain Classification and Second-Order Information Bottleneck
Authors: Anguo Zhang, Yueming Gao, Yuzhen Niu, Wenxi Liu, Yongcheng Zhou

Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) is to retrieve a particular person captured by different cameras, which is of great significance for security surveillance and pedestrian behavior analysis. However, due to the large intra-class variation of a person across cameras, e.g., occlusions, illuminations, viewpoints, and poses, Re-ID is still a challenging task in the field of computer vision. In this paper, to attack the issues concerning with intra-class variation, we propose a coarse-to-fine Re-ID framework with the incorporation of auxiliary-domain classification (ADC) and second-order information bottleneck (2O-IB). In particular, as an auxiliary task, ADC is introduced to extract the coarse-grained essential features to distinguish a person from miscellaneous backgrounds, which leads to the effective coarse- and fine-grained feature representations for Re-ID. On the other hand, to cope with the redundancy, irrelevance, and noise contained in the Re-ID features caused by intra-class variations, we integrate 2O-IB into the network to compress and optimize the features, without increasing additional computation overhead during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly reduces the neural network output variance of intra-class person images and achieves the superior performance to state-of-the-art methods.
Transformer Tracking
Authors: Xin Chen, Bin Yan, Jiawen Zhu, Dong Wang, Xiaoyun Yang, Huchuan Lu

Abstract: Correlation acts as a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion manner to consider the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation itself is a local linear matching process, leading to lose semantic information and fall into local optimum easily, which may be the bottleneck of designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. Is there any better feature fusion method than correlation? To address this issue, inspired by Transformer, this work presents a novel attention-based feature fusion network, which effectively combines the template and search region features solely using attention. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. Finally, we present a Transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression head. Experiments show that our TransT achieves very promising results on six challenging datasets, especially on large-scale LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10k benchmarks. Our tracker runs at approximatively 50 fps on GPU. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT.
Structured Multi-Level Interaction Network for Video Moment Localization via Language Query
Authors: Hao Wang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Liang Li, Dong Liu, Jiebo Luo

Abstract: We address the problem of localizing a specific moment described by a natural language query. Existing works interact the query with either video frame or moment proposal, and neglect the inherent structure of moment construction for both cross-modal understanding and video content comprehension, which are the two crucial challenges for this task. In this paper, we disentangle the activity moment into boundary and content. Based on the explored moment structure, we propose a novel Structured Multi-level Interaction Network (SMIN) to tackle this problem through multi-levels of cross-modal interaction coupled with content-boundary-moment interaction. In particular, for cross-modal interaction, we interact the sentence-level query with the whole moment while interact the word-level query with content and boundary, as in a coarse-to-fine manner. For content-boundary-moment interaction, we capture the insightful relations between boundary, content, and the whole moment proposal. Through multi-level interactions, the model obtains robust cross-modal representation for accurate moment localization. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks (i.e., Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions, and TACoS) demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Hanqing Wang, Wenguan Wang, Wei Liang, Caiming Xiong, Jianbing Shen

Abstract: Recently, numerous algorithms have been developed to tackle the problem of vision-language navigation (VLN), i.e., entailing an agent to navigate 3D environments through following linguistic instructions. However, current VLN agents simply store their past experiences/observations as latent states in recurrent networks, failing to capture environment layouts and make long-term planning. To address these limitations, we propose a crucial architecture, called Structured Scene Memory (SSM). It is compartmentalized enough to accurately memorize the percepts during navigation. It also serves as a structured scene representation, which captures and disentangles visual and geometric cues in the environment. SSM has a collect-read controller that adaptively collects information for supporting current decision making and mimics iterative algorithms for long-range reasoning. As SSM provides a complete action space, i.e., all the navigable places on the map, a frontier-exploration based navigation decision making strategy is introduced to enable efficient and global planning. Experiment results on two VLN datasets (i.e., R2R and R4R) show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several metrics.
Unsupervised Pre-Training for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Dengpan Fu, Dongdong Chen, Jianmin Bao, Hao Yang, Lu Yuan, Lei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Dong Chen

Abstract: In this paper, we present a large scale unlabeled person re-identification (Re-ID) dataset "LUPerson" and make the first attempt of performing unsupervised pre-training for improving the generalization ability of the learned person Re-ID feature representation. This is to address the problem that all existing person Re-ID datasets are all of limited scale due to the costly effort required for data annotation. Previous research tries to leverage models pre-trained on ImageNet to mitigate the shortage of person Re-ID data but suffers from the large domain gap between ImageNet and person Re-ID data. LUPerson is an unlabeled dataset of 4M images of over 200K identities, which is 30xlarger than the largest existing Re-ID dataset. It also covers a much diverse range of capturing environments (e.g., camera settings, scenes, etc.). Based on this dataset, we systematically study the key factors for learning Re-ID features from two perspectives: data augmentation and contrastive loss. Unsupervised pre-training performed on this large-scale dataset effectively leads to a generic Re-ID feature that can benefit all existing person Re-ID methods. Using our pre-trained model in some basic frameworks, our methods achieve state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles on four widely used Re-ID datasets: CUHK03, Market1501, DukeMTMC, and MSMT17. Our results also show that the performance improvement is more significant on small-scale target datasets or under few-shot setting.