DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
DAP: Detection-Aware Pre-Training With Weak Supervision
Authors: Yuanyi Zhong, Jianfeng Wang, Lijuan Wang, Jian Peng, Yu-Xiong Wang, Lei Zhang

Abstract: This paper presents a detection-aware pre-training (DAP) approach, which leverages only weakly-labeled classification-style datasets (e.g., ImageNet) for pre-training, but is specifically tailored to benefit object detection tasks. In contrast to the widely used image classification-based pre-training (e.g., on ImageNet), which does not include any location-related training tasks, we transform a classification dataset into a detection dataset through a weakly supervised object localization method based on Class Activation Maps to directly pre-train a detector, making the pre-trained model location-aware and capable of predicting bounding boxes. We show that DAP can outperform the traditional classification pre-training in terms of both sample efficiency and convergence speed in downstream detection tasks including VOC and COCO. In particular, DAP boosts the detection accuracy by a large margin when the number of examples in the downstream task is small.
Spatial Assembly Networks for Image Representation Learning
Authors: Yang Li, Shichao Kan, Jianhe Yuan, Wenming Cao, Zhihai He

Abstract: It has been long recognized that deep neural networks are sensitive to changes in spatial configurations or scene structures. Image augmentations, such as random translation, cropping, and resizing, can be used to improve the robustness of deep neural networks under spatial transforms. However, changes in object part configurations, spatial layout of object, and scene structures of the images may still result in major changes in the their feature representations generated by the network, creating significant challenges for various visual learning tasks, including representation or metric learning, image classification and retrieval. In this work, we introduce a new learnable module, called spatial assembly network (SAN), to address this important issue. This SAN module examines the input image and performs a learned re-organization and assembly of feature points from different spatial locations conditioned by feature maps from previous network layers so as to maximize the discriminative power of the final feature representation. This differentiable module can be flexibly incorporated into existing network architectures, improving their capabilities in handling spatial variations and structural changes of the image scene. We demonstrate that the proposed SAN module is able to significantly improve the performance of various metric / representation learning, image retrieval and classification tasks, in both supervised and unsupervised learning scenarios.
Linguistic Structures As Weak Supervision for Visual Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Keren Ye, Adriana Kovashka

Abstract: Prior work in scene graph generation requires categorical supervision at the level of triplets---subjects and objects, and predicates that relate them, either with or without bounding box information. However, scene graph generation is a holistic task: thus holistic, contextual supervision should intuitively improve performance. In this work, we explore how linguistic structures in captions can benefit scene graph generation. Our method captures the information provided in captions about relations between individual triplets, and context for subjects and objects (e.g. visual properties are mentioned). Captions are a weaker type of supervision than triplets since the alignment between the exhaustive list of human-annotated subjects and objects in triplets, and the nouns in captions, is weak. However, given the large and diverse sources of multimodal data on the web (e.g. blog posts with images and captions), linguistic supervision is more scalable than crowdsourced triplets. We show extensive experimental comparisons against prior methods which leverage instance- and image-level supervision, and ablate our method to show the impact of leveraging phrasal and sequential context, and techniques to improve localization of subjects and objects.
SKFAC: Training Neural Networks With Faster Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature
Authors: Zedong Tang, Fenlong Jiang, Maoguo Gong, Hao Li, Yue Wu, Fan Yu, Zidong Wang, Min Wang

Abstract: The bottleneck of computation burden limits the widespread use of the 2nd order optimization algorithms for training deep neural networks. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient approximation for natural gradient descent, named Swift Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (SKFAC), which combines Kronecker factorization and a fast low-rank matrix inversion technique. Our research aims at both fully connected and convolutional layers. For the fully connected layers, by utilizing the low-rank property of Kronecker factors of Fisher information matrix, our method only requires inverting a small matrix to approximate the curvature with desirable accuracy. For convolutional layers, we propose a way with two strategies to save computational efforts without affecting the empirical performance by reducing across the spatial dimension or receptive fields of feature maps. Specifically, we propose two effective dimension reduction methods for this purpose: Spatial Subsampling and Reduce Sum. Experimental results of training several deep neural networks on Cifar-10 and ImageNet-1k datasets demonstrate that SKFAC can capture the main curvature and yield comparative performance to K-FAC. The proposed method bridges the wall-clock time gap between the 1st and 2nd order algorithms.
Global2Local: Efficient Structure Search for Video Action Segmentation
Authors: Shang-Hua Gao, Qi Han, Zhong-Yu Li, Pai Peng, Liang Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng

Abstract: Temporal receptive fields of models play an important role in action segmentation. Large receptive fields facilitate the long-term relations among video clips while small receptive fields help capture the local details. Existing methods construct models with hand-designed receptive fields in layers. Can we effectively search for receptive field combinations to replace hand-designed patterns? To answer this question, we propose to find better receptive field combinations through a global-to-local search scheme. Our search scheme exploits both global search to find the coarse combinations and local search to get the refined receptive field combination patterns further. The global search finds possible coarse combinations other than human-designed patterns. On top of the global search, we propose an expectation guided iterative local search scheme to refine combinations effectively. Our global-to-local search can be plugged into existing action segmentation methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code is publicly available on http://mmcheng.net/g2lsearch.
Picasso: A CUDA-Based Library for Deep Learning Over 3D Meshes
Authors: Huan Lei, Naveed Akhtar, Ajmal Mian

Abstract: We present Picasso, a CUDA-based library comprising novel modules for deep learning over complex real-world 3D meshes. Hierarchical neural architectures have proved effective in multi-scale feature extraction which signifies the need for fast mesh decimation. However, existing methods rely on CPU-based implementations to obtain multi-resolution meshes. We design GPU-accelerated mesh decimation to facilitate network resolution reduction efficiently on-the-fly. Pooling and unpooling modules are defined on the vertex clusters gathered during decimation. For feature learning over meshes, Picasso contains three types of novel convolutions namely, facet2vertex, vertex2facet, and facet2facet convolution. Hence, it treats a mesh as a geometric structure comprising vertices and facets, rather than a spacial graph with edges as previous methods do. Picasso also incorporates a fuzzy mechanism in its filters for robustness to mesh sampling (vertex density). It exploits Gaussian mixtures to define fuzzy coefficients for the facet2vertex convolution, and barycentric interpolation to define the coefficients for the remaining two convolutions. In this release, we demonstrate the effectivenss of the proposed modules with competitive segmentation results on S3DIS. The library will be made public through github.
DeFlow: Learning Complex Image Degradations From Unpaired Data With Conditional Flows
Authors: Valentin Wolf, Andreas Lugmayr, Martin Danelljan, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte

Abstract: The difficulty of obtaining paired data remains a major bottleneck for learning image restoration and enhancement models for real-world applications. Current strategies aim to synthesize realistic training data by modeling noise and degradations that appear in real-world settings. We propose DeFlow, a method for learning stochastic image degradations from unpaired data. Our approach is based on a novel unpaired learning formulation for conditional normalizing flows. We model the degradation process in the latent space of a shared flow encoder-decoder network. This allows us to learn the conditional distribution of a noisy image given the clean input by solely minimizing the negative log-likelihood of the marginal distributions. We validate our DeFlow formulation on the task of joint image restoration and super-resolution. The models trained with the synthetic data generated by DeFlow outperform previous learnable approaches on three recent datasets. Code and trained models will be made available at: https://github.com/volflow/DeFlow
Student-Teacher Learning From Clean Inputs to Noisy Inputs
Authors: Guanzhe Hong, Zhiyuan Mao, Xiaojun Lin, Stanley H. Chan

Abstract: Feature-based student-teacher learning, a training method that encourages the student's hidden features to mimic those of the teacher network, is empirically successful in transferring the knowledge from a pre-trained teacher network to the student network. Furthermore, recent empirical results demonstrate that, the teacher's features can boost the student network's generalization even when the student's input sample is corrupted by noise. However, there is a lack of theoretical insights into why and when this method of transferring knowledge can be successful between such heterogeneous tasks. We analyze this method theoretically using deep linear networks, and experimentally using nonlinear networks. We identify three vital factors to the success of the method: (1) whether the student is trained to zero training loss; (2) how knowledgeable the teacher is on the clean-input problem; (3) how the teacher decomposes its knowledge in its hidden features. Lack of proper control in any of the three factors leads to failure of the student-teacher learning method.
AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles
Authors: Jingkang Wang, Ava Pun, James Tu, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Abbas Sadat, Sergio Casas, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: As self-driving systems become better, simulating scenarios where the autonomy stack may fail becomes more important. Traditionally, those scenarios are generated for a few scenes with respect to the planning module that takes ground-truth actor states as input. This does not scale and cannot identify all possible autonomy failures, such as perception failures due to occlusion. In this paper, we propose AdvSim, an adversarial framework to generate safety-critical scenarios for any LiDAR-based autonomy system. Given an initial traffic scenario, AdvSim modifies the actors' trajectories in a physically plausible manner and updates the LiDAR sensor data to match the perturbed world. Importantly, by simulating directly from sensor data, we obtain adversarial scenarios that are safety-critical for the full autonomy stack. Our experiments show that our approach is general and can identify thousands of semantically meaningful safety-critical scenarios for a wide range of modern self-driving systems. Furthermore, we show that the robustness and safety of these systems can be further improved by training them with scenarios generated by AdvSim.
MoViNets: Mobile Video Networks for Efficient Video Recognition
Authors: Dan Kondratyuk, Liangzhe Yuan, Yandong Li, Li Zhang, Mingxing Tan, Matthew Brown, Boqing Gong

Abstract: We present Mobile Video Networks (MoViNets), a family of computation and memory efficient video networks that can operate on streaming video for online inference. 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are accurate at video recognition but require large computation and memory budgets and do not support online inference, making them difficult to work on mobile devices. We propose a three-step approach to improve computational efficiency while substantially reducing the peak memory usage of 3D CNNs. First, we design a video network search space and employ neural architecture search to generate efficient and diverse 3D CNN architectures. Second, we introduce the Stream Buffer technique that decouples memory from video clip duration, allowing 3D CNNs to embed arbitrary-length streaming video sequences for both training and inference with a small constant memory footprint. Third, we propose a simple ensembling technique to improve accuracy further without sacrificing efficiency. These three progressive techniques allow MoViNets to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency on the Kinetics, Moments in Time, and Charades video action recognition datasets. For instance, MoViNet-A5-Stream achieves the same accuracy as X3D-XL on Kinetics 600 while requiring 80% fewer FLOPs and 65% less memory. Code is available at https://github.com/google-research/movinet.
IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering
Authors: Qianqian Wang, Zhicheng Wang, Kyle Genova, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Howard Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Noah Snavely, Thomas Funkhouser

Abstract: We present a method that synthesizes novel views of complex scenes by interpolating a sparse set of nearby views. The core of our method is a network architecture that includes a multilayer perceptron and a ray transformer that estimates radiance and volume density at continuous 5D locations (3D spatial locations and 2D viewing directions), drawing appearance information on the fly from multiple source views. By drawing on source views at render time, our method hearkens back to classic work on image-based rendering (IBR), and allows us to render high-resolution imagery. Unlike neural scene representation work that optimizes per-scene functions for rendering, we learn a generic view interpolation function that generalizes to novel scenes. We render images using classic volume rendering, which is fully differentiable and allows us to train using only multi-view posed images as supervision. Experiments show that our method outperforms recent novel view synthesis methods that also seek to generalize to novel scenes. Further, if fine-tuned on each scene, our method is competitive with state-of-the-art single-scene neural rendering methods.
SelfAugment: Automatic Augmentation Policies for Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Colorado J Reed, Sean Metzger, Aravind Srinivas, Trevor Darrell, Kurt Keutzer

Abstract: A common practice in unsupervised representation learning is to use labeled data to evaluate the quality of the learned representations. This supervised evaluation is then used to guide critical aspects of the training process such as selecting the data augmentation policy. However, guiding an unsupervised training process through supervised evaluations is not possible for real-world data that does not actually contain labels (which may be the case, for example, in privacy sensitive fields such as medical imaging). Therefore, in this work we show that evaluating the learned representations with a self-supervised image rotation task is highly correlated with a standard set of supervised evaluations (rank correlation > 0.94). We establish this correlation across hundreds of augmentation policies, training settings, and network architectures and provide an algorithm (SelfAugment) to automatically and efficiently select augmentation policies without using supervised evaluations. Despite not using any labeled data, the learned augmentation policies perform comparably with augmentation policies that were determined using exhaustive supervised evaluations.
Adversarial Invariant Learning
Authors: Nanyang Ye, Jingxuan Tang, Huayu Deng, Xiao-Yun Zhou, Qianxiao Li, Zhenguo Li, Guang-Zhong Yang, Zhanxing Zhu

Abstract: Though machine learning algorithms are able to achieve pattern recognition from the correlation between data and labels, the presence of spurious features in the data decreases the robustness of these learned relationships with respect to varied testing environments. This is known as out-of-distribution (OoD) generalization problem. Recently, invariant risk minimization (IRM) attempts to tackle this issue by penalizing predictions based on the unstable spurious features in the data collected from different environments. However, similar to domain adaptation or domain generalization, a prevalent non-trivial limitation in these works is that the environment information is assigned by human specialists  i.e. a priori  or determined heuristically. However, an inappropriate group partitioning can dramatically deteriorate the OoD generalization and the process is expensive and time-consuming. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel theoretically principled min-max framework to iteratively construct a worst-case splitting, i.e. creating the most challenging environment splittings for the backbone learning paradigm (e.g. IRM) to learn the robust feature representation. We also design a differentiable training strategy to facilitate the feasible gradient-based computation. Numerical experiments show that our algorithmic framework has achieved superior and stable performance in various datasets, such as Colored MNIST and Punctuated Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST). Furthermore, we also find our algorithm to be robust even to a strong data poisoning attack. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first to adopt differentiable environment splitting method to enable stable predictions across environments without environment index information, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance on datasets with strong spurious correlation, such as Colored MNIST.
Densely Connected Multi-Dilated Convolutional Networks for Dense Prediction Tasks
Authors: Naoya Takahashi, Yuki Mitsufuji

Abstract: Tasks that involve high-resolution dense prediction require a modeling of both local and global patterns in a large input field. Although the local and global structures often depend on each other and their simultaneous modeling is important, many convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches interchange representations in different resolutions only a few times. In this paper, we claim the importance of a dense simultaneous modeling of multiresolution representation and propose a novel CNN architecture called densely connected multidilated DenseNet (D3Net). D3Net involves a novel multidilated convolution that has different dilation factors in a single layer to model different resolutions simultaneously. By combining the multidilated convolution with the DenseNet architecture, D3Net incorporates multiresolution learning with an exponentially growing receptive field in almost all layers, while avoiding the aliasing problem that occurs when we naively incorporate the dilated convolution in DenseNet. Experiments on the image semantic segmentation task using Cityscapes and the audio source separation task using MUSDB18 show that the proposed method has superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.
Depth-Conditioned Dynamic Message Propagation for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Li Wang, Liang Du, Xiaoqing Ye, Yanwei Fu, Guodong Guo, Xiangyang Xue, Jianfeng Feng, Li Zhang

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to learn context- and depth-aware feature representation to solve the problem of monocular 3D object detection. We make following contributions: (i) rather than appealing to the complicated pseudo-LiDAR based approach, we propose a depth-conditioned dynamic message propagation (DDMP) network to effectively integrate the multi-scale depth information with the image context; (ii) this is achieved by first adaptively sampling context-aware nodes in the image context and then dynamically predicting hybrid depth-dependent filter weights and affinity matrices for propagating information; (iii) by augmenting a center-aware depth encoding (CDE) task, our method successfully alleviates the inaccurate depth prior; (iv) we thoroughly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and show state-of-the-art results among the monocular-based approaches on the KITTI benchmark dataset. Particularly, we rank 1st in the highly competitive KITTI monocular 3D object detection track on the submission day (November 16th, 2020). Code and models are released at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/DDMP
S2-BNN: Bridging the Gap Between Self-Supervised Real and 1-Bit Neural Networks via Guided Distribution Calibration
Authors: Zhiqiang Shen, Zechun Liu, Jie Qin, Lei Huang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Marios Savvides

Abstract: Previous studies dominantly target at self-supervised learning on real-valued networks and have achieved many promising results. However, on the more challenging binary neural networks (BNNs), this task has not yet been fully explored in the community. In this paper, we focus on this more difficult scenario: learning networks where both weights and activations are binary, meanwhile, without any human annotated labels. We observe that the commonly used contrastive objective is not satisfying on BNNs for competitive accuracy, since the backbone network contains relatively limited capacity and representation ability. Hence instead of directly applying existing self-supervised methods, which cause a severe decline in performance, we present a novel guided learning paradigm from real-valued to distill binary networks on the final prediction distribution, to minimize the loss and obtain desirable accuracy. Our proposed method can boost the simple contrastive learning baseline by an absolute gain of 5.5 15% on BNNs. We further reveal that it is difficult for BNNs to recover the similar predictive distributions as real-valued models when training without labels. Thus, how to calibrate them is key to address the degradation in performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale ImageNet and downstream datasets. Our method achieves substantial improvement over the simple contrastive learning baseline, and is even comparable to many mainstream supervised BNN methods. Code is available at https://github.com/szq0214/S2-BNN.
Learning Optical Flow From Still Images
Authors: Filippo Aleotti, Matteo Poggi, Stefano Mattoccia

Abstract: This paper deals with the scarcity of data for training optical flow networks, highlighting the limitations of existing sources such as labeled synthetic datasets or unlabeled real videos. Specifically, we introduce a framework to generate accurate ground-truth optical flow annotations quickly and in large amounts from any readily available single real picture. Given an image, we use an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimation network to build a plausible point cloud for the observed scene. Then, we virtually move the camera in the reconstructed environment with known motion vectors and rotation angles, allowing us to synthesize both a novel view and the corresponding optical flow field connecting each pixel in the input image to the one in the new frame. When trained with our data, state-of-the-art optical flow networks achieve superior generalization to unseen real data compared to the same models trained either on annotated synthetic datasets or unlabeled videos, and better specialization if combined with synthetic images.