DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
AdaBins: Depth Estimation Using Adaptive Bins
Authors: Shariq Farooq Bhat, Ibraheem Alhashim, Peter Wonka

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating a high quality dense depth map from a single RGB input image. We start out with a baseline encoder-decoder convolutional neural network architecture and pose the question of how the global processing of information can help improve overall depth estimation. To this end, we propose a transformer-based architecture block that divides the depth range into bins whose center value is estimated adaptively per image. The final depth values are estimated as linear combinations of the bin centers. We call our new building block AdaBins. Our results show a decisive improvement over the state-of-the-art on several popular depth datasets across all metrics. We also validate the effectiveness of the proposed block with an ablation study and provide the code and corresponding pre-trained weights of the new state-of-the-art model.
VirFace: Enhancing Face Recognition via Unlabeled Shallow Data
Authors: Wenyu Li, Tianchu Guo, Pengyu Li, Binghui Chen, Biao Wang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Recently, exploiting the effect of the unlabeled data for face recognition attracts increasing attention. However, there are still few works considering the situation that the unlabeled data is shallow which widely exists in real-world scenarios. The existing semi-supervised face recognition methods which focus on generating pseudo labels or minimizing softmax classification probabilities of the unlabeled data don't work very well on the unlabeled shallow data. Thus, it is still a challenge on how to effectively utilize the unlabeled shallow face data for improving the performance of face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition method, named VirFace, to effectively apply the unlabeled shallow data for face recognition. VirFace consists of VirClass and VirInstance. Specifically, VirClass enlarges the inter-class distance by injecting the unlabeled data as new identities. Furthermore, VirInstance produces virtual instances sampled from the learned distribution of each identity to further enlarge the inter-class distance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first working on tackling the unlabeled shallow face data. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both the small- and large-scale datasets, e.g. LFW and IJB-C, etc, showing the superiority of the proposed method.
Pulsar: Efficient Sphere-Based Neural Rendering
Authors: Christoph Lassner, Michael Zollhofer

Abstract: We propose Pulsar, an efficient sphere-based differentiable rendering module that is orders of magnitude faster than competing techniques, modular, and easy-to-use due to its tight integration with PyTorch. Differentiable rendering is the foundation for modern neural rendering approaches, since it enables end-to-end training of 3D scene representations from image observations. However, gradient-based optimization of neural mesh, voxel, or function representations suffers from multiple challenges, i.e., topological in-consistencies, high memory footprints, or slow rendering speeds. To alleviate these problems, Pulsar employs: 1) asphere-based scene representation, 2) a modular, efficient differentiable projection operation, and 3) (optional) neural shading. Pulsar executes orders of magnitude faster than existing techniques and allows real-time rendering and optimization of representations with millions of spheres. Using spheres for the scene representation, unprecedented speed is obtained while avoiding topology problems. Pulsar is fully differentiable and thus enables a plethora of applications, ranging from 3D reconstruction to neural rendering.
Contrastive Learning Based Hybrid Networks for Long-Tailed Image Classification
Authors: Peng Wang, Kai Han, Xiu-Shen Wei, Lei Zhang, Lei Wang

Abstract: Learning discriminative image representations plays a vital role in long-tailed image classification because it can ease the classifier learning in imbalanced cases. Given the promising performance contrastive learning has shown recently in representation learning, in this work, we explore effective supervised contrastive learning strategies and tailor them to learn better image representations from imbalanced data in order to boost the classification accuracy thereon. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid network structure being composed of a supervised contrastive loss to learn image representations and a cross-entropy loss to learn classifiers, where the learning is progressively transited from feature learning to the classifier learning to embody the idea that better features make better classifiers. We explore two variants of contrastive loss for feature learning, which vary in the forms but share a common idea of pulling the samples from the same class together in the normalized embedding space and pushing the samples from different classes apart. One of them is the recently proposed supervised contrastive (SC) loss, which is designed on top of the state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive loss by incorporating positive samples from the same class. The other is a prototypical supervised contrastive (PSC) learning strategy which addresses the intensive memory consumption in standard SC loss and thus shows more promise under limited memory budget. Extensive experiments on three long-tailed classification datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed contrastive learning based hybrid networks in long-tailed classification.
Visualizing Adapted Knowledge in Domain Transfer
Authors: Yunzhong Hou, Liang Zheng

Abstract: A source model trained on source data and a target model learned through unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) usually encode different knowledge. To understand the adaptation process, we portray their knowledge difference with image translation. Specifically, we feed a translated image and its original version to the two models respectively, formulating two branches. Through updating the translated image, we force similar outputs from the two branches. When such requirements are met, differences between the two images can compensate for and hence represent the knowledge difference between models. To enforce similar outputs from the two branches and depict the adapted knowledge, we propose a source-free image translation method that generates source-style images using only target images and the two models. We visualize the adapted knowledge on several datasets with different UDA methods and find that generated images successfully capture the style difference between the two domains. For application, we show that generated images enable further tuning of the target model without accessing source data. Code available at https://github.com/hou-yz/DA_visualization.
Delving into Data: Effectively Substitute Training for Black-box Attack
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Bangjie Yin, Taiping Yao, Li Zhang, Yanwei Fu, Shouhong Ding, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Xiangyang Xue

Abstract: Deep models have shown their vulnerability when processing adversarial samples. As for the black-box attack, without access to the architecture and weights of the attacked model, training a substitute model for adversarial attacks has attracted wide attention. Previous substitute training approaches focus on stealing the knowledge of the target model based on real training data or synthetic data, without exploring what kind of data can further improve the transferability between the substitute and target models. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective substitute training that focuses on designing the distribution of data used in the knowledge stealing process. More specifically, a diverse data generation module is proposed to synthesize large-scale data with wide distribution. And adversarial substitute training strategy is introduced to focus on the data distributed near the decision boundary. The combination of these two modules can further boost the consistency of the substitute model and target model, which greatly improves the effectiveness of adversarial attack. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method against state-of-the-art competitors under non-target and target attack settings. Detailed visualization and analysis are also provided to help understand the advantage of our method.
How To Exploit the Transferability of Learned Image Compression to Conventional Codecs
Authors: Jan P. Klopp, Keng-Chi Liu, Liang-Gee Chen, Shao-Yi Chien

Abstract: Lossy image compression is often limited by the simplicity of the chosen loss measure. Recent research suggests that generative adversarial networks have the ability to overcome this limitation and serve as a multi-modal loss, especially for textures. Together with learned image compression, these two techniques can be used to great effect when relaxing the commonly employed tight measures of distortion. However, convolutional neural network-based algorithms have a large computational footprint. Ideally, an existing conventional codec should stay in place, ensuring faster adoption and adherence to a balanced computational envelope. As a possible avenue to this goal, we propose and investigate how learned image coding can be used as a surrogate to optimise an image for encoding. A learned filter alters the image to optimise a different performance measure or a particular task. Extending this idea with a generative adversarial network, we show how entire textures are replaced by ones that are less costly to encode but preserve a sense of detail. Our approach can remodel a conventional codec to adjust for the MS-SSIM distortion with over 20% rate improvement without any decoding overhead. On task-aware image compression, we perform favourably against a similar but codec-specific approach.
CorrNet3D: Unsupervised End-to-End Learning of Dense Correspondence for 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Yiming Zeng, Yue Qian, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou, Hui Yuan, Ying He

Abstract: Motivated by the intuition that one can transform two aligned point clouds to each other more easily and meaningfully than a misaligned pair, we propose CorrNet3D -the first unsupervised and end-to-end deep learning-based framework - to drive the learning of dense correspondence between 3D shapes by means of deformation-like reconstruction to overcome the need for annotated data. Specifically, CorrNet3D consists of a deep feature embedding module and two novel modules called correspondence indicator and symmetric deformer. Feeding a pair of raw point clouds, our model first learns the pointwise features and passes them into the indicator to generate a learnable correspondence matrix used to permute the input pair. The symmetric deformer, with an additional regularized loss, transforms the two permuted point clouds to each other to drive the unsupervised learning of the correspondence. The extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets of rigid and non-rigid 3D shapes show our CorrNet3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods to a large extent, including those taking meshes as input. CorrNet3D is a flexible framework in that it can be easily adapted to supervised learning if annotated data are available. The source code and pre-trained model will be available at https://github.com/ZENGYIMINGEAMON/CorrNet3D.git.
Single-View Robot Pose and Joint Angle Estimation via Render & Compare
Authors: Yann Labbe, Justin Carpentier, Mathieu Aubry, Josef Sivic

Abstract: We introduce RoboPose, a method to estimate the joint angles and the 6D camera-to-robot pose of a known articulated robot from a single RGB image. This is an important problem to grant mobile and itinerant autonomous systems the ability to interact with other robots using only visual information in non-instrumented environments, especially in the context of collaborative robotics. It is also challenging because robots have many degrees of freedom and an infinite space of possible configurations that often result in self-occlusions and depth ambiguities when imaged by a single camera. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce a new render & compare approach for estimating the 6D pose and joint angles of an articulated robot that can be trained from synthetic data, generalizes to new unseen robot configurations at test time, and can be applied to a variety of robots. Second, we experimentally demonstrate the importance of the robot parametrization for the iterative pose updates and design a parametrization strategy that is independent of the robot structure. Finally, we show experimental results on existing benchmark datasets for four different robots and demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state of the art. Code and pre-trained models are available on the project webpage.
Harmonious Semantic Line Detection via Maximal Weight Clique Selection
Authors: Dongkwon Jin, Wonhui Park, Seong-Gyun Jeong, Chang-Su Kim

Abstract: A novel algorithm to detect an optimal set of semantic lines is proposed in this work. We develop two networks: selection network (S-Net) and harmonization network (H-Net). First, S-Net computes the probabilities and offsets of line candidates. Second, we filter out irrelevant lines through a selection-and-removal process. Third, we construct a complete graph, whose edge weights are computed by H-Net. Finally, we determine a maximal weight clique representing an optimal set of semantic lines. Moreover, to assess the overall harmony of detected lines, we propose a novel metric, called HIoU. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can detect harmonious semantic lines effectively and efficiently. Our codes are available at https://github.com/dongkwonjin/Semantic-Line-MWCS.
Learning the Non-Differentiable Optimization for Blind Super-Resolution
Authors: Zheng Hui, Jie Li, Xiumei Wang, Xinbo Gao

Abstract: Previous convolutional neural network (CNN) based blind super-resolution (SR) methods usually adopt an iterative optimization way to approximate the ground-truth (GT) step-by-step. This solution always involves more computational costs to bring about time-consuming inference. At present, most blind SR algorithms are dedicated to obtaining high-fidelity results; their loss function generally employs L1 loss. To further improve the visual quality of SR results, perceptual metric, such as NIQE, is necessary to guide the network optimization. However, due to the non-differentiable property of NIQE, it cannot be as the loss function. Towards these issues, we propose an adaptive modulation network (AMNet) for multiple degradations SR, which is composed of the pivotal adaptive modulation layer (AMLayer). It is an efficient yet lightweight fusion layer between blur kernel and image features. Equipped with the blur kernel predictor, we naturally upgrade the AMNet to the blind SR model. Instead of considering iterative strategy, we make the blur kernel predictor trainable in the whole blind SR model, in which AMNet is well-trained. Also, we fit deep reinforcement learning into the blind SR model (AMNet-RL) to tackle the non-differentiable optimization problem. Specifically, the blur kernel predictor will be the actor to estimate the blur kernel from the input low-resolution (LR) image. The reward is designed by the pre-defined differentiable or non-differentiable metric. Extensive experiments show that our model can outperform state-of-the-art methods in both fidelity and perceptual metrics.
Progressive Temporal Feature Alignment Network for Video Inpainting
Authors: Xueyan Zou, Linjie Yang, Ding Liu, Yong Jae Lee

Abstract: Video inpainting aims to fill spatio-temporal "corrupted" regions with plausible content. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to find correspondences from neighbouring frames to faithfully hallucinate the unknown content. Current methods achieve this goal through attention, flow-based warping, or 3D temporal convolution. However, flow-based warping can create artifacts when optical flow is not accurate, while temporal convolution may suffer from spatial misalignment. We propose `Progressive Temporal Feature Alignment Network', which progressively enriches features extracted from the current frame with the feature warped from neighbouring frames using optical flow. Our approach corrects the spatial misalignment in the temporal feature propagation stage, greatly improving visual quality and temporal consistency of the inpainted videos. Using the proposed architecture, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the DAVIS and FVI datasets compared to existing deep learning approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/MaureenZOU/TSAM.
Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition
Authors: Aravind Srinivas, Tsung-Yi Lin, Niki Parmar, Jonathon Shlens, Pieter Abbeel, Ashish Vaswani

Abstract: We present BoTNet, a conceptually simple yet powerful backbone architecture that incorporates self-attention for multiple computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. By just replacing the spatial convolutions with global self-attention in the final three bottleneck blocks of a ResNet and no other changes, our approach improves upon the baselines significantly on instance segmentation and object detection while also reducing the parameters, with minimal overhead in latency. Through the design of BoTNet, we also point out how ResNet bottleneck blocks with self-attention can be viewed as Transformer blocks. Without any bells and whistles, BoTNet achieves 44.4% Mask AP and 49.7% Box AP on the COCO Instance Segmentation benchmark using the Mask R-CNN framework; surpassing the previous best published single model and single scale results of ResNeSt evaluated on the COCO validation set. Finally, we present a simple adaptation of the BoTNet design for image classification, resulting in models that achieve a strong performance of 84.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet benchmark while being up to 1.64x faster in compute time than the popular EfficientNet models on TPU-v3 hardware. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in self-attention models for vision.
Calibrated RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Wei Ji, Jingjing Li, Shuang Yu, Miao Zhang, Yongri Piao, Shunyu Yao, Qi Bi, Kai Ma, Yefeng Zheng, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng

Abstract: Complex backgrounds and similar appearances between objects and their surroundings are generally recognized as challenging scenarios in Salient Object Detection (SOD). This naturally leads to the incorporation of depth information in addition to the conventional RGB image as input, known as RGB-D SOD or depth-aware SOD. Meanwhile, this emerging line of research has been considerably hindered by the noise and ambiguity that prevail in raw depth images. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a Depth Calibration and Fusion (DCF) framework that contains two novel components: 1) a learning strategy to calibrate the latent bias in the original depth maps towards boosting the SOD performance; 2) a simple yet effective cross reference module to fuse features from both RGB and depth modalities. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance against 27 state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed depth calibration strategy as a preprocessing step, can be further applied to existing cutting-edge RGB-D SOD models and noticeable improvements are achieved.
S3: Neural Shape, Skeleton, and Skinning Fields for 3D Human Modeling
Authors: Ze Yang, Shenlong Wang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Zeng Huang, Wei-Chiu Ma, Xinchen Yan, Ersin Yumer, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: Constructing and animating humans is an important component for building virtual worlds in a wide variety of applications such as virtual reality or robotics testing in simulation. As there are exponentially many variations of humans with different shape, pose and clothing, it is critical to develop methods that can automatically reconstruct and animate humans at scale from real world data. Towards this goal, we represent the pedestrian's shape, pose and skinning weights as neural implicit functions that are directly learned from data. This representation enables us to handle a wide variety of different pedestrian shapes and poses without explicitly fitting a human parametric body model, allowing us to handle a wider range of human geometries and topologies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various datasets and show that our reconstructions outperform existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our re-animation experiments show that we can generate 3D human animations at scale from a single RGB image (and/or an optional LiDAR sweep) as input.
OSTeC: One-Shot Texture Completion
Authors: Baris Gecer, Jiankang Deng, Stefanos Zafeiriou

Abstract: The last few years have witnessed the great success of non-linear generative models in synthesizing high-quality photorealistic face images. Many recent 3D facial texture reconstruction and pose manipulation from a single image approaches still rely on large and clean face datasets to train image-to-image Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Yet the collection of such a large scale high-resolution 3D texture dataset is still very costly and difficult to maintain age/ethnicity balance. Moreover, regression-based approaches suffer from generalization to the in-the-wild conditions and are unable to fine-tune to a target-image. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach for one-shot 3D facial texture completion that does not require large-scale texture datasets, but rather harnesses the knowledge stored in 2D face generators. The proposed approach rotates an input image in 3D and fill-in the unseen regions by reconstructing the rotated image in a 2D face generator, based on the visible parts. Finally, we stitch the most visible textures at different angles in the UV image-plane. Further, we frontalize the target image by projecting the completed texture into the generator. The qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the completed UV textures and frontalized images are of high quality, resembles the original identity, can be used to train a texture GAN model for 3DMM fitting and improve pose-invariant face recognition.
Learning To Count Everything
Authors: Viresh Ranjan, Udbhav Sharma, Thu Nguyen, Minh Hoai

Abstract: Existing works on visual counting primarily focus on one specific category at a time, such as people, animals, and cells. In this paper, we are interested in counting everything, that is to count objects from any category given only a few annotated instances from that category. To this end, we pose counting as a few-shot regression task. To tackle this task, we present a novel method that takes a query image together with a few exemplar objects from the query image and predicts a density map for the presence of all objects of interest in the query image. We also present a novel adaptation strategy to adapt our network to any novel visual category at test time, using only a few exemplar objects from the novel category. We also introduce a dataset of 147 object categories containing over 6000 images that are suitable for the few-shot counting task. The images are annotated with two types of annotation, dots and bounding boxes, and they can be used for developing few-shot counting models. Experiments on this dataset shows that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art object detectors and few-shot counting approaches. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/LearningToCountEverything.