DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Disentangled Cycle Consistency for Highly-Realistic Virtual Try-On
Authors: Chongjian Ge, Yibing Song, Yuying Ge, Han Yang, Wei Liu, Ping Luo

Abstract: Image virtual try-on replaces the clothes on a person image with a desired in-shop clothes image. It is challenging because the person and the in-shop clothes are unpaired. Existing methods formulate virtual try-on as either in-painting or cycle consistency. Both of these two formulations encourage the generation networks to reconstruct the input image in a self-supervised manner. However, existing methods do not differentiate clothing and non-clothing regions. A straightforward generation impedes the virtual try-on quality because of the heavily coupled image contents. In this paper, we propose a Disentangled Cycle-consistency Try-On Network (DCTON). The DCTON is able to produce highly-realistic try-on images by disentangling important components of virtual try-on including clothes warping, skin synthesis, and image composition. Moreover, DCTON can be naturally trained in a self-supervised manner following cycle consistency learning. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that DCTON outperforms state-of-the-art approaches favorably.
M3DSSD: Monocular 3D Single Stage Object Detector
Authors: Shujie Luo, Hang Dai, Ling Shao, Yong Ding

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a Monocular 3D Single Stage object Detector (M3DSSD) with feature alignment and asymmetric non-local attention. Current anchor-based monocular 3D object detection methods suffer from feature mismatching. To overcome this, we propose a two-step feature alignment approach. In the first step, the shape alignment is performed to enable the receptive field of the feature map to focus on the pre-defined anchors with high confidence scores. In the second step, the center alignment is used to align the features at 2D/3D centers. Further, it is often difficult to learn global information and capture long-range relationships, which are important for the depth prediction of objects. Therefore, we propose a novel asymmetric non-local attention block with multi-scale sampling to extract depth-wise features. The proposed M3DSSD achieves significantly better performance than the monocular 3D object detection methods on the KITTI dataset, in both 3D object detection and bird's eye view tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/mumianyuxin/M3DSSD.
Structure-Aware Face Clustering on a Large-Scale Graph With 107 Nodes
Authors: Shuai Shen, Wanhua Li, Zheng Zhu, Guan Huang, Dalong Du, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou

Abstract: Face clustering is a promising method for annotating unlabeled face images. Recent supervised approaches have boosted the face clustering accuracy greatly, however their performance is still far from satisfactory. These methods can be roughly divided into global-based and local-based ones. Global-based methods suffer from the limitation of training data scale, while local-based ones are difficult to grasp the whole graph structure information and usually take a long time for inference. Previous approaches fail to tackle these two challenges simultaneously. To address the dilemma of large-scale training and efficient inference, we propose the STructure-AwaRe Face Clustering (STAR-FC) method. Specifically, we design a structure-preserved subgraph sampling strategy to explore the power of large-scale training data, which can increase the training data scale from 10^5 to 10^7. During inference, the STAR-FC performs efficient full-graph clustering with two steps: graph parsing and graph refinement. And the concept of node intimacy is introduced in the second step to mine the local structural information. The STAR-FC gets 91.97 pairwise F-score on partial MS1M within 310s which surpasses the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we are the first to train on very large-scale graph with 20M nodes, and achieve superior inference results on 12M testing data. Overall, as a simple and effective method, the proposed STAR-FC provides a strong baseline for large-scale face clustering. Code is available at https://sstzal.github.io/STAR-FC/.
Objects Are Different: Flexible Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yunpeng Zhang, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou

Abstract: The precise localization of 3D objects from a single image without depth information is a highly challenging problem. Most existing methods adopt the same approach for all objects regardless of their diverse distributions, leading to limited performance especially for truncated objects. In this paper, we propose a flexible framework for monocular 3D object detection which explicitly decouples the truncated objects and adaptively combines multiple approaches for object depth estimation. Specifically, we decouple the edge of the feature map for predicting long-tail truncated objects so that the optimization of normal objects is not influenced. Furthermore, we formulate the object depth estimation as an uncertainty-guided ensemble of directly regressed object depth and solved depths from different groups of keypoints. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by relatively 27% for moderate level and 30% for hard level in the test set of KITTI benchmark while maintaining real-time efficiency.
Permuted AdaIN: Reducing the Bias Towards Global Statistics in Image Classification
Authors: Oren Nuriel, Sagie Benaim, Lior Wolf

Abstract: Recent work has shown that convolutional neural network classifiers overly rely on texture at the expense of shape cues. We make a similar but different distinction between shape and local image cues, on the one hand, and global image statistics, on the other. Our method, called Permuted Adaptive Instance Normalization (pAdaIN), reduces the representation of global statistics in the hidden layers of image classifiers. pAdaIN samples a random permutation p that rearranges the samples in a given batch. Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) is then applied between the activations of each (non-permuted) sample i and the corresponding activations of the sample p(i), thus swapping statistics between the samples of the batch. Since the global image statistics are distorted, this swapping procedure causes the network to rely on cues, such as shape or texture. By choosing the random permutation with probability p and the identity permutation otherwise, one can control the effect's strength. With the correct choice of p, fixed apriori for all experiments and selected without considering test data, our method consistently outperforms baselines in multiple settings. In image classification, our method improves on both CIFAR100 and ImageNet using multiple architectures. In the setting of robustness, our method improves on both ImageNet-C and Cifar-100-C for multiple architectures. In the setting of domain adaptation and domain generalization, our method achieves state of the art results on the transfer learning task from GTAV to Cityscapes and on the PACS benchmark.
Pixel Codec Avatars
Authors: Shugao Ma, Tomas Simon, Jason Saragih, Dawei Wang, Yuecheng Li, Fernando De la Torre, Yaser Sheikh

Abstract: Telecommunication with photorealistic avatars in virtual or augmented reality is a promising path for achieving authentic face-to-face communication in 3D over remote physical distances. In this work, we present the Pixel Codec Avatars (PiCA): a deep generative model of 3D human faces that achieves state of the art reconstruction performance while being computationally efficient and adaptive to the rendering conditions during execution. Our model combines two core ideas: (1) a fully convolutional architecture for decoding spatially varying features, and (2) a rendering-adaptive per-pixel decoder. Both techniques are integrated via a dense surface representation that is learned in a weakly-supervised manner from low-topology mesh tracking over training images. We demonstrate that PiCA improves reconstruction over existing techniques across testing expressions and views on persons of different gender and skin tone. Importantly, we show that the PiCA model is much smaller than the state-of-art baseline model, and makes multi-person telecommunicaiton possible: on a single Oculus Quest 2 mobile VR headset, 5 avatars are rendered in realtime in the same scene.
SimPLE: Similar Pseudo Label Exploitation for Semi-Supervised Classification
Authors: Zijian Hu, Zhengyu Yang, Xuefeng Hu, Ram Nevatia

Abstract: A common classification task situation is where one has a large amount of data available for training, but only a small portion is annotated with class labels. The goal of semi-supervised training, in this context, is to improve classification accuracy by leverage information not only from labeled data but also from a large amount of unlabeled data. Recent works have developed significant improvements by exploring the consistency constrain between differently augmented labeled and unlabeled data. Following this path, we propose a novel unsupervised objective that focuses on the less studied relationship between the high confidence unlabeled data that are similar to each other. The new proposed Pair Loss minimizes the statistical distance between high confidence pseudo labels with similarity above a certain threshold. Combining the Pair Loss with the techniques developed by the MixMatch family, our proposed SimPLE algorithm shows significant performance gains over previous algorithms on CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet, and is on par with the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-10 and SVHN. Furthermore, SimPLE also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the transfer learning setting, where models are initialized by the weights pre-trained on ImageNet or DomainNet-Real. The code is available at github.com/zijian-hu/SimPLE.
Context-Aware Layout to Image Generation With Enhanced Object Appearance
Authors: Sen He, Wentong Liao, Michael Ying Yang, Yongxin Yang, Yi-Zhe Song, Bodo Rosenhahn, Tao Xiang

Abstract: A layout to image (L2I) generation model aims to generate a complicated image containing multiple objects (things) against natural background (stuff), conditioned on a given layout. Built upon the recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), recent L2I models have made great progress. However, a close inspection of their generated images reveals two major limitations: (1) the object-to-object as well as object-to-stuff relations are often broken and (2) each object's appearance is typically distorted lacking the key defining characteristics associated with the object class. We argue that these are caused by the lack of context-aware object and stuff feature encoding in their generators, and location-sensitive appearance representation in their discriminators. To address these limitations, two new modules are proposed in this work. First, a contextual feature transformation module is introduced in the generator to ensure that the generated feature encoding of either object or stuff is aware of other co-existing objects/stuff in the scene. Second, instead of feeding location-insensitive image features to the discriminator, we use the Gram matrix computed from the feature maps of the generated object images to preserve location-sensitive information, resulting in much enhanced object appearance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO-Thing-Stuff and Visual Genome benchmarks.
Mask-Embedded Discriminator With Region-Based Semantic Regularization for Semi-Supervised Class-Conditional Image Synthesis
Authors: Yi Liu, Xiaoyang Huo, Tianyi Chen, Xiangping Zeng, Si Wu, Zhiwen Yu, Hau-San Wong

Abstract: Semi-supervised generative learning (SSGL) makes use of unlabeled data to achieve a trade-off between the data collection/annotation effort and generation performance, when adequate labeled data are not available. Learning precise class semantics is crucial for class-conditional image synthesis with limited supervision. Toward this end, we propose a semi-supervised Generative Adversarial Network with a Mask-Embedded Discriminator, which is referred to as MED-GAN. By incorporating a mask embedding module, the discriminator features are associated with spatial information, such that the focus of the discriminator can be limited in the specified regions when distinguishing between real and synthesized images. A generator is enforced to synthesize the instances holding more precise class semantics in order to deceive the enhanced discriminator. Also benefiting from mask embedding, region-based semantic regularization is imposed on the discriminator feature space, and the degree of separation between real and fake classes and among object categories can thus be increased. This eventually improves class-conditional distribution matching between real and synthesized data. In the experiments, the superior performance of MED-GAN demonstrates the effectiveness of mask embedding and associated regularizers in facilitating SSGL.
LEAP: Learning Articulated Occupancy of People
Authors: Marko Mihajlovic, Yan Zhang, Michael J. Black, Siyu Tang

Abstract: Substantial progress has been made on modeling rigid 3D objects using deep implicit representations. Yet, extending these methods to learn neural models of human shape is still in its infancy. Human bodies are complex and the key challenge is to learn a representation that generalizes such that it can express body shape deformations for unseen subjects in unseen, highly-articulated, poses. To address this challenge, we introduce LEAP (LEarning Articulated occupancy of People), a novel neural occupancy representation of the human body. Given a set of bone transformations (i.e. joint locations and rotations) and a query point in space, LEAP first maps the query point to a canonical space via learned linear blend skinning (LBS) functions and then efficiently queries the occupancy value via an occupancy network that models accurate identity- and pose-dependent deformations in the canonical space. Experiments show that our canonicalized occupancy estimation with the learned LBS functions greatly improves the generalization capability of the learned occupancy representation across various human shapes and poses, outperforming existing solutions in all settings.
ANR: Articulated Neural Rendering for Virtual Avatars
Authors: Amit Raj, Julian Tanke, James Hays, Minh Vo, Carsten Stoll, Christoph Lassner

Abstract: Deferred Neural Rendering (DNR) uses a three-step pipeline to translate a mesh representation into an RGB image. The combination of a traditional rendering stack with neural networks hits a sweet spot in terms of computational complexity and realism of the resulting images. Using skinned meshes for animatable objects is a natural extension for the framework and would open it up to a plethora of applications. However, in this case the neural shading step must account for deformations that are possibly not captured in the mesh, as well as alignment accuracies and dynamics---which is not well-supported in the DNR pipeline. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of possibilities to develop the DNR framework towards handling these cases. We outline several steps that can be easily integrated into the DNR pipeline for addressing stability and deformation. We demonstrate their efficiency by building a virtual avatar pipeline, a highly challenging case with animation and clothing deformation, and show the superiority of the presented method not only with respect to the DNR pipeline but also with methods specifically for virtual avatar creation and animation. In two user studies, we observe a clear preference for our avatar model and outperform other methods on SSIM and LPIPS metrics. Perceptually, we observe better temporal stability, level of detail and plausibility.
Flow-Based Kernel Prior With Application to Blind Super-Resolution
Authors: Jingyun Liang, Kai Zhang, Shuhang Gu, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte

Abstract: Kernel estimation is generally one of the key problems for blind image super-resolution (SR). Recently, Double-DIP proposes to model the kernel via a network architecture prior, while KernelGAN employs the deep linear network and several regularization losses to constrain the kernel space. However, they fail to fully exploit the general SR kernel assumption that anisotropic Gaussian kernels are sufficient for image SR. To address this issue, this paper proposes a normalizing flow-based kernel prior (FKP) for kernel modeling. By learning an invertible mapping between the anisotropic Gaussian kernel distribution and a tractable latent distribution, FKP can be easily used to replace the kernel modeling modules of Double-DIP and KernelGAN. Specifically, FKP optimizes the kernel in the latent space rather than the network parameter space, which allows it to generate reasonable kernel initialization, traverse the learned kernel manifold and improve the optimization stability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that the proposed FKP can significantly improve the kernel estimation accuracy with less parameters, runtime and memory usage, leading to state-of-the-art blind SR results.
Probabilistic Selective Encryption of Convolutional Neural Networks for Hierarchical Services
Authors: Jinyu Tian, Jiantao Zhou, Jia Duan

Abstract: Model protection is vital when deploying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for commercial services, due to the massive costs of training them. In this work, we propose a selective encryption (SE) algorithm to protect CNN models from unauthorized access, with a unique feature of providing hierarchical services to users. Our algorithm firstly selects important model parameters via the proposed Probabilistic Selection Strategy (PSS). It then encrypts the most important parameters with the designed encryption method called Distribution Preserving Random Mask (DPRM), so as to maximize the performance degradation by encrypting only a very small portion of model parameters. We also design a set of access permissions, using which different amount of most important model parameters can be decrypted. Hence, different levels of model performance can be naturally provided for users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme could effectively protect the classification model VGG19 by merely encrypting 8% parameters of convolutional layers. We also implement the proposed model protection scheme in the denoising model DnCNN, showcasing the hierarchical denoising services.
Cuboids Revisited: Learning Robust 3D Shape Fitting to Single RGB Images
Authors: Florian Kluger, Hanno Ackermann, Eric Brachmann, Michael Ying Yang, Bodo Rosenhahn

Abstract: Humans perceive and construct the surrounding world as an arrangement of simple parametric models. In particular, man-made environments commonly consist of volumetric primitives such as cuboids or cylinders. Inferring these primitives is an important step to attain high-level, abstract scene descriptions. Previous approaches directly estimate shape parameters from a 2D or 3D input, and are only able to reproduce simple objects, yet unable to accurately parse more complex 3D scenes. In contrast, we propose a robust estimator for primitive fitting, which can meaningfully abstract real-world environments using cuboids. A RANSAC estimator guided by a neural network fits these primitives to 3D features, such as a depth map. We condition the network on previously detected parts of the scene, thus parsing it one-by-one. To obtain 3D features from a single RGB image, we additionally optimise a feature extraction CNN in an end-to-end manner. However, naively minimising point-to-primitive distances leads to large or spurious cuboids occluding parts of the scene behind. We thus propose an occlusion-aware distance metric correctly handling opaque scenes. The proposed algorithm does not require labour-intensive labels, such as cuboid annotations, for training. Results on the challenging NYU Depth v2 dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm successfully abstracts cluttered real-world 3D scene layouts.
Dive Into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Jiahui She, Yibo Hu, Hailin Shi, Jun Wang, Qiu Shen, Tao Mei

Abstract: Due to the subjective annotation and the inherent inter-class similarity of facial expressions, one of key challenges in Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is the annotation ambiguity. In this paper, we proposes a solution, named DMUE, to address the problem of annotation ambiguity from two perspectives: the latent Distribution Mining and the pairwise Uncertainty Estimation. For the former, an auxiliary multi-branch learning framework is introduced to better mine and describe the latent distribution in the label space. For the latter, the pairwise relationship of semantic feature between instances are fully exploited to estimate the ambiguity extent in the instance space. The proposed method is independent to the backbone architectures, and brings no extra burden for inference. The experiments are conducted on the popular real-world benchmarks and the synthetic noisy datasets. Either way, the proposed DMUE stably achieves leading performance.
Attention-Guided Image Compression by Deep Reconstruction of Compressive Sensed Saliency Skeleton
Authors: Xi Zhang, Xiaolin Wu

Abstract: We propose a deep learning system for attention-guided dual-layer image compression (AGDL). In the AGDL compression system, an image is encoded into two layers, a base layer and an attention-guided refinement layer. Unlike the existing ROI image compression methods that spend an extra bit budget equally on all pixels in ROI, AGDL employs a CNN module to predict those pixels on and near a saliency sketch within ROI that are critical to perceptual quality. Only the critical pixels are further sampled by compressive sensing (CS) to form a very compact refinement layer. Another novel CNN method is developed to jointly decode the two compression code layers for a much refined reconstruction, while strictly satisfying the transmitted CS constraints on perceptually critical pixels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AGDL system advances the state of the art in perception-aware image compression.
Cluster-Wise Hierarchical Generative Model for Deep Amortized Clustering
Authors: Huafeng Liu, Jiaqi Wang, Liping Jing

Abstract: In this paper, we propose Cluster-wise Hierarchical Generative Model for deep amortized clustering (CHiGac). It provides an efficient neural clustering architecture by grouping data points in a cluster-wise view rather than point-wise view. CHiGac simultaneously learns what makes a cluster, how to group data points into clusters, and how to adaptively control the number of clusters. The dedicated cluster generative process is able to sufficiently exploit pair-wise or higher-order interactions between data points in both inter- and intra-cluster, which is useful to sufficiently mine the hidden structure among data. To efficiently minimize the generalized lower bound of CHiGac, we design an Ergodic Amortized Inference (EAI) strategy by considering the average behavior over sequence on an inner variational parameter trajectory, which is theoretically proven to reduce the amortization gap. A series of experiments have been conducted on both synthetic and real-world data. The experimental results demonstrated that CHiGac can efficiently and accurately cluster datasets in terms of both internal and external evaluation metrics (DBI and ACC).