DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening
Authors: Sungha Choi, Sanghun Jung, Huiwon Yun, Joanne T. Kim, Seungryong Kim, Jaegul Choo

Abstract: Enhancing the generalization capability of deep neural networks to unseen domains is crucial for safety-critical applications in the real world such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel instance selective whitening loss to improve the robustness of the segmentation networks for unseen domains. Our approach disentangles the domain-specific style and domain-invariant content encoded in higher-order statistics (i.e., feature covariance) of the feature representations and selectively removes only the style information causing domain shift. As shown in Fig. 1, our method provides reasonable predictions for (a) low-illuminated, (b) rainy, and (c) unseen structures. These types of images are not included in the training dataset, where the baseline shows a significant performance drop, contrary to ours. Being simple yet effective, our approach improves the robustness of various backbone networks without additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments in urban-scene segmentation and show the superiority of our approach to existing work.
Monocular Real-Time Full Body Capture With Inter-Part Correlations
Authors: Yuxiao Zhou, Marc Habermann, Ikhsanul Habibie, Ayush Tewari, Christian Theobalt, Feng Xu

Abstract: We present the first method for real-time full body capture that estimates shape and motion of body and hands together with a dynamic 3D face model from a single color image. Our approach uses a new neural network architecture that exploits correlations between body and hands at high computational efficiency. Unlike previous works, our approach is jointly trained on multiple datasets focusing on hand, body or face separately, without requiring data where all the parts are annotated at the same time, which is much more difficult to create at sufficient variety. The possibility of such multi-dataset training enables superior generalization ability. In contrast to earlier monocular full body methods, our approach captures more expressive 3D face geometry and color by estimating the shape, expression, albedo and illumination parameters of a statistical face model. Our method achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks, while being significantly faster and providing more complete face reconstructions.
Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer
Authors: Hanting Chen, Yunhe Wang, Tianyu Guo, Chang Xu, Yiping Deng, Zhenhua Liu, Siwei Ma, Chunjing Xu, Chao Xu, Wen Gao

Abstract: As the computing power of modern hardware is increasing strongly, pre-trained deep learning models (e.g., BERT, GPT-3) learned on large-scale datasets have shown their effectiveness over conventional methods. The big progress is mainly contributed to the representation ability of transformer and its variant architectures. In this paper, we study the low-level computer vision task (e.g., denoising, super-resolution and deraining) and develop a new pre-trained model, namely, image processing transformer (IPT). To maximally excavate the capability of transformer, we present to utilize the well-known ImageNet benchmark for generating a large amount of corrupted image pairs. The IPT model is trained on these images with multi-heads and multi-tails. In addition, the constructive learning is introduced for well adapting to different image processing tasks. The pre-trained model can therefore efficiently employed on desired task after fine-tuning. With only one pre-trained model, IPT outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various low-level benchmarks. Code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/mindspore/tree/master/model_zoo/research/cv/IPT
Robust and Accurate Object Detection via Adversarial Learning
Authors: Xiangning Chen, Cihang Xie, Mingxing Tan, Li Zhang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Boqing Gong

Abstract: Data augmentation has become a de facto component for training high-performance deep image classifiers, but its potential is under-explored for object detection. Noting that most state-of-the-art object detectors benefit from fine-tuning a pre-trained classifier, we first study how the classifiers' gains from various data augmentations transfer to object detection. The results are discouraging; the gains diminish after fine-tuning in terms of either accuracy or robustness. This work instead augments the fine-tuning stage for object detectors by exploring adversarial examples, which can be viewed as a model-dependent data augmentation. Our method dynamically selects the stronger adversarial images sourced from a detector's classification and localization branches and evolves with the detector to ensure the augmentation policy stays current and relevant. This model-dependent augmentation generalizes to different object detectors better than AutoAugment, a model-agnostic augmentation policy searched based on one particular detector. Our approach boosts the performance of state-of-the-art EfficientDets by +1.1 mAP on the COCO object detection benchmark. It also improves the detectors' robustness against natural distortions by +3.8 mAP and against domain shift by +1.3 mAP.
Faster Meta Update Strategy for Noise-Robust Deep Learning
Authors: Youjiang Xu, Linchao Zhu, Lu Jiang, Yi Yang

Abstract: It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks. Code are released at https://github.com/youjiangxu/FaMUS.
ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact To Improve Grasps
Authors: Patrick Grady, Chengcheng Tang, Christopher D. Twigg, Minh Vo, Samarth Brahmbhatt, Charles C. Kemp

Abstract: Physical contact between hands and objects plays a critical role in human grasps. We show that optimizing the pose of a hand to achieve expected contact with an object can improve hand poses inferred via image-based methods. Given a hand mesh and an object mesh, a deep model trained on ground truth contact data infers desirable contact across the surfaces of the meshes. Then, ContactOpt efficiently optimizes the pose of the hand to achieve desirable contact using a differentiable contact model. Notably, our contact model encourages mesh interpenetration to approximate deformable soft tissue in the hand. In our evaluations, our methods result in grasps that better match ground truth contact, have lower kinematic error, and are significantly preferred by human participants. Code and models are available online.
Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-Free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Zixiang Zhou, Yang Zhang, Hassan Foroosh

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation presents a new challenge in exploiting the merits of both detection and segmentation, with the aim of unifying instance segmentation and semantic segmentation in a single framework. However, an efficient solution for panoptic segmentation in the emerging domain of LiDAR point cloud is still an open research problem and is very much under-explored. In this paper, we present a fast and robust LiDAR point cloud panoptic segmentation framework, referred to as Panoptic-PolarNet. We learn both semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance clustering in a single inference network using a polar Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation, enabling us to circumvent the issue of occlusion among instances in urban street scenes. To improve our network's learnability, we also propose an adapted instance augmentation technique and a novel adversarial point cloud pruning method. Our experiments show that Panoptic-PolarNet outperforms the baseline methods on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets with an almost real-time inference speed. Panoptic-PolarNet achieved 54.1% PQ in the public SemanticKITTI panoptic segmentation leaderboard and leading performance for the validation set of nuScenes.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yuang Liu, Wei Zhang, Jun Wang

Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can tackle the challenge that convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches for semantic segmentation heavily rely on the pixel-level annotated data, which is labor-intensive. However, existing UDA approaches in this regard inevitably require the full access to source datasets to reduce the gap between the source and target domains during model adaptation, which are impractical in the real scenarios where the source datasets are private, and thus cannot be released along with the well-trained source models. To cope with this issue, we propose a source-free domain adaptation framework for semantic segmentation, namely SFDA, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target domain dataset are available for adaptation. SFDA not only enables to recover and preserve the source domain knowledge from the source model via knowledge transfer during model adaptation, but also distills valuable information from the target domain for self-supervised learning. The pixel- and patch-level optimization objectives tailored for semantic segmentation are seamlessly integrated in the framework. The extensive experimental results on numerous benchmark datasets highlight the effectiveness of our framework against the existing UDA approaches relying on source data.
Adaptive Weighted Discriminator for Training Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Vasily Zadorozhnyy, Qiang Cheng, Qiang Ye

Abstract: Generative adversarial network (GAN) has become one of the most important neural network models for classical unsupervised machine learning. A variety of discriminator loss functions have been developed to train GAN's discriminators and they all have a common structure: a sum of real and fake losses that only depends on the actual and generated data respectively. One challenge associated with an equally weighted sum of two losses is that the training may benefit one loss but harm the other, which we show causes instability and mode collapse. In this paper, we introduce a new family of discriminator loss functions that adopts a weighted sum of real and fake parts, which we call adaptive weighted loss functions or aw-loss functions. Using the gradients of the real and fake parts of the loss, we can adaptively choose weights to train a discriminator in the direction that benefits the GAN's stability. Our method can be potentially applied to any discriminator model with a loss that is a sum of the real and fake parts. Experiments validated the effectiveness of our loss functions on unconditional and conditional image generation tasks, improving the baseline results by a significant margin on CIFAR-10, STL-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets in Inception Scores (IS) and Frechet Inception Distance (FID) metrics.
Depth From Camera Motion and Object Detection
Authors: Brent A. Griffin, Jason J. Corso

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of learning to estimate the depth of detected objects given some measurement of camera motion (e.g., from robot kinematics or vehicle odometry). We achieve this by 1) designing a recurrent neural network (DBox) that estimates the depth of objects using a generalized representation of bounding boxes and uncalibrated camera movement and 2) introducing the Object Depth via Motion and Detection Dataset (ODMD). ODMD training data are extensible and configurable, and the ODMD benchmark includes 21,600 examples across four validation and test sets. These sets include mobile robot experiments using an end-effector camera to locate objects from the YCB dataset and examples with perturbations added to camera motion or bounding box data. In addition to the ODMD benchmark, we evaluate DBox in other monocular application domains, achieving state-of-the-art results on existing driving and robotics benchmarks and estimating the depth of objects using a camera phone.
PPR10K: A Large-Scale Portrait Photo Retouching Dataset With Human-Region Mask and Group-Level Consistency
Authors: Jie Liang, Hui Zeng, Miaomiao Cui, Xuansong Xie, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Different from general photo retouching tasks, portrait photo retouching (PPR), which aims to enhance the visual quality of a collection of flat-looking portrait photos, has its special and practical requirements such as human-region priority (HRP) and group-level consistency (GLC). HRP requires that more attention should be paid to human regions, while GLC requires that a group of portrait photos should be retouched to a consistent tone. Models trained on existing general photo retouching datasets, however, can hardly meet these requirements of PPR. To facilitate the research on this high-frequency task, we construct a large-scale PPR dataset, namely PPR10K, which is the first of its kind to our best knowledge. PPR10K contains 1, 681 groups and 11, 161 high-quality raw portrait photos in total. High-resolution segmentation masks of human regions are provided. Each raw photo is retouched by three experts, while they elaborately adjust each group of photos to have consistent tones. We define a set of objective measures to evaluate the performance of PPR and propose strategies to learn PPR models with good HRP and GLC performance. The constructed PPR10K dataset provides a good benchmark for studying automatic PPR methods, and experiments demonstrate that the proposed learning strategies are effective to improve the retouching performance. Datasets and codes are available: https://github.com/csjliang/PPR10K.
Transformation Driven Visual Reasoning
Authors: Xin Hong, Yanyan Lan, Liang Pang, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng

Abstract: This paper defines a new visual reasoning paradigm by introducing an important factor, i.e. transformation. The motivation comes from the fact that most existing visual reasoning tasks, such as CLEVR in VQA, are solely defined to test how well the machine understands the concepts and relations within static settings, like one image. We argue that this kind of state driven visual reasoning approach has limitations in reflecting whether the machine has the ability to infer the dynamics between different states, which has been shown as important as state-level reasoning for human cognition in Piaget's theory. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel transformation driven visual reasoning task. Given both the initial and final states, the target is to infer the corresponding single-step or multi-step transformation, represented as a triplet (object, attribute, value) or a sequence of triplets, respectively. Following this definition, a new dataset namely TRANCE is constructed on the basis of CLEVR, including three levels of settings, i.e. Basic (single-step transformation), Event (multi-step transformation), and View (multi-step transformation with variant views). Experimental results show that the state-of-the-art visual reasoning models perform well on Basic, but are still far from human-level intelligence on Event and View. We believe the proposed new paradigm will boost the development of machine visual reasoning. More advanced methods and real data need to be investigated in this direction. The resource of TVR is available at https://hongxin2019.github.io/TVR.
Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection With Learnable Proposals
Authors: Peize Sun, Rufeng Zhang, Yi Jiang, Tao Kong, Chenfeng Xu, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Lei Li, Zehuan Yuan, Changhu Wang, Ping Luo

Abstract: We present Sparse R-CNN, a purely sparse method for object detection in images. Existing works on object detection heavily rely on dense object candidates, such as k anchor boxes pre-defined on all grids of image feature map of size HxW. In our method, however, a fixed sparse set of learned object proposals, total length of N, are provided to object recognition head to perform classification and location. By eliminating HWk (up to hundreds of thousands) hand-designed object candidates to N (e.g. 100) learnable proposals, Sparse R-CNN completely avoids all efforts related to object candidates design and many-to-one label assignment. More importantly, final predictions are directly output without non-maximum suppression post-procedure. Sparse R-CNN demonstrates accuracy, run-time and training convergence performance on par with the well-established detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset, e.g., achieving 45.0 AP in standard 3x training schedule and running at 22 fps using ResNet-50 FPN model. We hope our work could inspire re-thinking the convention of dense prior in object detectors. The code is available at: https://github.com/PeizeSun/SparseR-CNN.
Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes
Authors: Madhawa Vidanapathirana, Qirui Wu, Yasutaka Furukawa, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva

Abstract: We address the task of converting a floorplan and a set of associated photos of a residence into a textured 3D mesh model, a task which we call Plan2Scene. Our system 1) lifts a floorplan image to a 3D mesh model; 2) synthesizes surface textures based on the input photos; and 3) infers textures for unobserved surfaces using a graph neural network architecture. To train and evaluate our system we create indoor surface texture datasets, and augment a dataset of floorplans and photos from prior work with rectified surface crops and additional annotations. Our approach handles the challenge of producing tileable textures for dominant surfaces such as floors, walls, and ceilings from a sparse set of unaligned photos that only partially cover the residence. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our system produces realistic 3D interior models, outperforming baseline approaches on a suite of texture quality metrics and as measured by a holistic user study.
Towards Semantic Segmentation of Urban-Scale 3D Point Clouds: A Dataset, Benchmarks and Challenges
Authors: Qingyong Hu, Bo Yang, Sheikh Khalid, Wen Xiao, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham

Abstract: An essential prerequisite for unleashing the potential of supervised deep learning algorithms in the area of 3D scene understanding is the availability of large-scale and richly annotated datasets. However, publicly available datasets are either in relatively small spatial scales or have limited semantic annotations due to the expensive cost of data acquisition and data annotation, which severely limits the development of fine-grained semantic understanding in the context of 3D point clouds. In this paper, we present an urban-scale photogrammetric point cloud dataset with nearly three billion richly annotated points, which is three times the number of labeled points than the existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. Our dataset consists of large areas from three UK cities, covering about 7.6 km^2 of the city landscape. In the dataset, each 3D point is labeled as one of 13 semantic classes. We extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on our dataset and provide a comprehensive analysis of the results. In particular, we identify several key challenges towards urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SensatUrban.
Towards Open World Object Detection
Authors: K J Joseph, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Vineeth N Balasubramanian

Abstract: Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call OREO: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyse the efficacy of OREO in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterising unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Conditional Bures Metric for Domain Adaptation
Authors: You-Wei Luo, Chuan-Xian Ren

Abstract: As a vital problem in classification-oriented transfer, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Previous UDA methods assume the marginal distributions of different domains are shifted while ignoring the discriminant information in the label distributions. This leads to classification performance degeneration in real applications. In this work, we focus on the conditional distribution shift problem which is of great concern to current conditional invariant models. We aim to seek a kernel covariance embedding for conditional distribution which remains yet unexplored. Theoretically, we propose the Conditional Kernel Bures (CKB) metric for characterizing conditional distribution discrepancy, and derive an empirical estimation for the CKB metric without introducing the implicit kernel feature map. It provides an interpretable approach to understand the knowledge transfer mechanism. The established consistency theory of the empirical estimation provides a theoretical guarantee for convergence. A conditional distribution matching network is proposed to learn the conditional invariant and discriminative features for UDA. Extensive experiments and analysis show the superiority of our proposed model.
DatasetGAN: Efficient Labeled Data Factory With Minimal Human Effort
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang, Huan Ling, Jun Gao, Kangxue Yin, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Adela Barriuso, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler

Abstract: We introduce DatasetGAN: an automatic procedure to generate massive datasets of high-quality semantically segmented images requiring minimal human effort. Current deep networks are extremely data-hungry, benefiting from training on large-scale datasets, which are time-consuming to annotate. Our method relies on the power of recent GANs to generate realistic images. We show how the GAN latent code can be decoded to produce a semantic segmentation of the image. Training the decoder only needs a few labeled examples to generalize to the rest of the latent space, resulting in an infinite annotated dataset generator! These generated datasets can then be used for training any computer vision architecture just as real datasets are. As only a few images need to be manually segmented, it becomes possible to annotate images in extreme detail and generate datasets with rich object and part segmentations. To showcase the power of our approach, we generated datasets for 7 image segmentation tasks which include pixel-level labels for 34 human face parts, and 32 car parts. Our approach outperforms all semi-supervised baselines significantly and is on par with fully supervised methods using labor-intensive annotations.