DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Multi-View 3D Reconstruction of a Texture-Less Smooth Surface of Unknown Generic Reflectance
Authors: Ziang Cheng, Hongdong Li, Yuta Asano, Yinqiang Zheng, Imari Sato

Abstract: Recovering the 3D geometry of a purely texture-less object with generally unknown surface reflectance (e.g. nonLambertian) is regarded as a challenging task in multiview reconstruction. The major obstacle revolves around establishing cross-view correspondences where photometric constancy is violated. This paper proposes a simple and practical solution to overcome this challenge based on a co-located camera-light scanner device. Unlike existing solutions, we do not explicitly solve for correspondence. Instead, we argue the problem is generally well-posed by multi-view geometrical and photometric constraints, and can be solved from a small number of input views. We formulate the reconstruction task as a joint energy minimization over the surface geometry and reflectance. Despite this energy is highly non-convex, we develop an optimization algorithm that robustly recovers globally optimal shape and reflectance even from a random initialization. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data have validated our method, and possible future extensions are discussed
Rectification-Based Knowledge Retention for Continual Learning
Authors: Pravendra Singh, Pratik Mazumder, Piyush Rai, Vinay P. Namboodiri

Abstract: Deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained in an incremental learning setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address the task incremental learning problem, which involves training a model on new tasks that arrive in an incremental manner. The task incremental learning problem becomes even more challenging when the test set contains classes that are not part of the train set, i.e., a task incremental generalized zero-shot learning problem. Our approach can be used in both the zero-shot and non zero-shot task incremental learning settings. Our proposed method uses weight rectifications and affine transformations in order to adapt the model to different tasks that arrive sequentially. Specifically, we adapt the network weights to work for new tasks by "rectifying" the weights learned from the previous task. We learn these weight rectifications using very few parameters. We additionally learn affine transformations on the outputs generated by the network in order to better adapt them for the new task. We perform experiments on several datasets in both zero-shot and non zero-shot task incremental learning settings and empirically show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results. Specifically, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art non zero-shot task incremental learning method by over 5% on the CIFAR-100 dataset. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art task incremental generalized zero-shot learning method by absolute margins of 6.91% and 6.33% for the AWA1 and CUB datasets, respectively. We validate our approach using various ablation studies.
Scale-Aware Automatic Augmentation for Object Detection
Authors: Yukang Chen, Yanwei Li, Tao Kong, Lu Qi, Ruihang Chu, Lei Li, Jiaya Jia

Abstract: We propose Scale-aware AutoAug to learn data augmentation policies for object detection. We define a new scale-aware search space, where both image- and box-level augmentations are designed for maintaining scale invariance. Upon this search space, we propose a new search metric, termed Pareto Scale Balance, to facilitate search with high efficiency. In experiments, Scale-aware AutoAug yields significant and consistent improvement on various object detectors (e.g., RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and FCOS), even compared with strong multi-scale training baselines. Our searched augmentation policies are transferable to other datasets and box-level tasks beyond object detection (e.g., instance segmentation and keypoint estimation) to improve performance. The search cost is much less than previous automated augmentation approaches for object detection. It is notable that our searched policies have meaningful patterns, which intuitively provide valuable insight for human data augmentation design.
Towards Robust Classification Model by Counterfactual and Invariant Data Generation
Authors: Chun-Hao Chang, George Alexandru Adam, Anna Goldenberg

Abstract: Despite the success of machine learning applications in science, industry, and society in general, many approaches are known to be non-robust, often relying on spurious correlations to make predictions. Spuriousness occurs when some features correlate with labels but are not causal; relying on such features prevents models from generalizing to unseen environments where such correlations break. In this work, we focus on image classification and propose two data generation processes to reduce spuriousness. Given human annotations of the subset of the features responsible (causal) for the labels (e.g. bounding boxes), we modify this causal set to generate a surrogate image that no longer has the same label (i.e. a counterfactual image). We also alter non-causal features to generate images still recognized as the original labels, which helps to learn a model invariant to these features. In several challenging datasets, our data generations outperform state-of-the-art methods in accuracy when spurious correlations break, and increase the saliency focus on causal features providing better explanations.
Fully Convolutional Networks for Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yanwei Li, Hengshuang Zhao, Xiaojuan Qi, Liwei Wang, Zeming Li, Jian Sun, Jiaya Jia

Abstract: In this paper, we present a conceptually simple, strong, and efficient framework for panoptic segmentation, called Panoptic FCN. Our approach aims to represent and predict foreground things and background stuff in a unified fully convolutional pipeline. In particular, Panoptic FCN encodes each object instance or stuff category into a specific kernel weight with the proposed kernel generator and produces the prediction by convolving the high-resolution feature directly. With this approach, instance-aware and semantically consistent properties for things and stuff can be respectively satisfied in a simple generate-kernel-then-segment workflow. Without extra boxes for localization or instance separation, the proposed approach outperforms previous box-based and -free models with high efficiency on COCO, Cityscapes, and Mapillary Vistas datasets with single scale input. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-Research-Lab/PanopticFCN.
Benchmarking Representation Learning for Natural World Image Collections
Authors: Grant Van Horn, Elijah Cole, Sara Beery, Kimberly Wilber, Serge Belongie, Oisin Mac Aodha

Abstract: Recent progress in self-supervised learning has resulted in models that are capable of extracting rich representations from image collections without requiring any explicit label supervision. However, to date the vast majority of these approaches have restricted themselves to training on standard benchmark datasets such as ImageNet. We argue that fine-grained visual categorization problems, such as plant and animal species classification, provide an informative testbed for self-supervised learning. In order to facilitate progress in this area we present two new natural world visual classification datasets, iNat2021 and NeWT. The former consists of 2.7M images from 10k different species uploaded by users of the citizen science application iNaturalist. We designed the latter, NeWT, in collaboration with domain experts with the aim of benchmarking the performance of representation learning algorithms on a suite of challenging natural world binary classification tasks that go beyond standard species classification. These two new datasets allow us to explore questions related to large-scale representation and transfer learning in the context of fine-grained categories. We provide a comprehensive analysis of feature extractors trained with and without supervision on ImageNet and iNat2021, shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses of different learned features across a diverse set of tasks. We find that features produced by standard supervised methods still outperform those produced by self-supervised approaches such as SimCLR. However, improved self-supervised learning methods are constantly being released and the iNat2021 and NeWT datasets are a valuable resource for tracking their progress.
PGT: A Progressive Method for Training Models on Long Videos
Authors: Bo Pang, Gao Peng, Yizhuo Li, Cewu Lu

Abstract: Convolutional video models have an order of magnitude larger computational complexity than their counterpart image-level models. Constrained by computational resources, there is no model or training method that can train long video sequences end-to-end. Currently, the main-stream method is to split a raw video into clips, leading to incomplete fragmentary temporal information flow. Inspired by natural language processing techniques dealing with long sentences, we propose to treat videos as serial fragments satisfying Markov property, and train it as a whole by progressively propagating information through the temporal dimension in multiple steps. This progressive training (PGT) method is able to train long videos end-to-end with limited resources and ensures the effective transmission of information. As a general and robust training method, we empirically demonstrate that it yields significant performance improvements on different models and datasets. As an illustrative example, the proposed method improves SlowOnly network by 3.7 mAP on Charades and 1.9 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics with negligible parameter and computation overhead. The code is attached in supplementary files and will be published with this paper.
Prioritized Architecture Sampling With Monto-Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Xiu Su, Tao Huang, Yanxi Li, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Changshui Zhang, Chang Xu

Abstract: One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) methods significantly reduce the search cost by considering the whole search space as one network, which only needs to be trained once. However, current methods select each operation independently without considering previous layers. Besides, the historical information obtained with huge computation costs is usually used only once and then discarded. In this paper, we introduce a sampling strategy based on Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) with the search space modeled as a Monte Carlo tree (MCT), which captures the dependency among layers. Furthermore, intermediate results are stored in the MCT for future decisions and a better exploration-exploitation balance. Concretely, MCT is updated using the training loss as a reward to the architecture performance; for accurately evaluating the numerous nodes, we propose node communication and hierarchical node selection methods in the training and search stages, respectively, making better uses of the operation rewards and hierarchical information. Moreover, for a fair comparison of different NAS methods, we construct an open-source NAS benchmark of a macro search space evaluated on CIFAR-10, namely NAS-Bench-Macro. Extensive experiments on NAS-Bench-Macro and ImageNet demonstrate that our method significantly improves search efficiency and performance. For example, by only searching 20 architectures, our obtained architecture achieves 78.0% top-1 accuracy with 442M FLOPs on ImageNet. Code (Benchmark) is available at: https://github.com/xiusu/NAS-Bench-Macro.
HumanGPS: Geodesic PreServing Feature for Dense Human Correspondences
Authors: Feitong Tan, Danhang Tang, Mingsong Dou, Kaiwen Guo, Rohit Pandey, Cem Keskin, Ruofei Du, Deqing Sun, Sofien Bouaziz, Sean Fanello, Ping Tan, Yinda Zhang

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of building pixel-wise dense correspondences between human images under arbitrary camera viewpoints and body poses. Previous methods either assume small motions or rely on discriminative descriptors extracted from local patches, which cannot handle large motion or visually ambiguous body parts, e.g. left v.s. right hand. In contrast, we propose a deep learning framework that maps each pixel to a feature space, where the feature distances reflect the geodesic distances among pixels as if they were projected onto the surface of 3D human scans. To this end, we introduce novel loss functions to push features apart according to their geodesic distances on the surface inside and across images. Without any semantic annotation, the features automatically learn to differentiate visually similar parts and align different subjects into a unified feature space. Extensive experiments show that the learned features can produce accurate correspondences between images with remarkable generalization capabilities on both intra and inter subjects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of applications such as optical flow, non-rigid tracking, occlusions detection, and human dense pose regression.
Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Shancheng Fang, Hongtao Xie, Yuxin Wang, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang

Abstract: Linguistic knowledge is of great benefit to scene text recognition. However, how to effectively model linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from: 1) implicitly language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet for scene text recognition. Firstly, the autonomous suggests to block gradient flow between vision and language models to enforce explicitly language modeling. Secondly, a novel bidirectional cloze network (BCN) as the language model is proposed based on bidirectional feature representation. Thirdly, we propose an execution manner of iterative correction for language model which can effectively alleviate the impact of noise input. Additionally, based on the ensemble of iterative predictions, we propose a self-training method which can learn from unlabeled images effectively. Extensive experiments indicate that ABINet has superiority on low-quality images and achieves state-of-the-art results on several mainstream benchmarks. Besides, the ABINet trained with ensemble self-training shows promising improvement in realizing human-level recognition.
Generic Perceptual Loss for Modeling Structured Output Dependencies
Authors: Yifan Liu, Hao Chen, Yu Chen, Wei Yin, Chunhua Shen

Abstract: The perceptual loss has been widely used as an effective loss term in image synthesis tasks including image super-resolution [16], and style transfer [14]. It was believed that the success lies in the high-level perceptual feature representations extracted from CNNs pretrained with a large set of images. Here we reveal that what matters is the network structure instead of the trained weights. Without any learning, the structure of a deep network is sufficient to capture the dependencies between multiple levels of variable statistics using multiple layers of CNNs. This insight removes the requirements of pre-training and a particular network structure (commonly, VGG) that are previously assumed for the perceptual loss, thus enabling a significantly wider range of applications. To this end, we demonstrate that a randomly-weighted deep CNN can be used to model the structured dependencies of outputs. On a few dense per-pixel prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and instance segmentation, we show improved results of using the extended randomized perceptual loss, compared to the baselines using pixel-wise loss alone. We hope that this simple, extended perceptual loss may serve as a generic structured-output loss that is applicable to most structured output learning tasks.
Style-Based Point Generator With Adversarial Rendering for Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Chulin Xie, Chuxin Wang, Bo Zhang, Hao Yang, Dong Chen, Fang Wen

Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a novel Style-based Point Generator with Adversarial Rendering (SpareNet) for point cloud completion. Firstly, we present the channel-attentive EdgeConv to fully exploit the local structures as well as the global shape in point features. Secondly, we observe that the concatenation manner used by vanilla foldings limits its potential of generating a complex and faithful shape. Enlightened by the success of StyleGAN, we regard the shape feature as style code that modulates the normalization layers during the folding, which considerably enhances its capability. Thirdly, we realize that existing point supervisions, e.g., Chamfer Distance or Earth Mover's Distance, cannot faithfully reflect the perceptual quality of the reconstructed points. To address this, we propose to project the completed points to depth maps with a differentiable renderer and apply adversarial training to advocate the perceptual realism under different viewpoints. Comprehensive experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI prove the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance while offering superior visual quality.
Neural Architecture Search With Random Labels
Authors: Xuanyang Zhang, Pengfei Hou, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Sun

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a new variant of neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm -- searching with random labels (RLNAS). The task sounds counter-intuitive for most existing NAS algorithms since random label provides few information on the performance of each candidate architecture. Instead, we propose a novel NAS framework based on ease-of-convergence hypothesis, which requires only random labels during searching. The algorithm involves two steps: first, we train a SuperNet using random labels; second, from the SuperNet we extract the sub-network whose weights change most significantly during the training. Extensive experiments are evaluated on multiple datasets (e.g. NAS-Bench-201 and ImageNet) and multiple search spaces (e.g. DARTS-like and MobileNet-like). Very surprisingly, RLNAS achieves comparable or even better results compared with state-of-the-art NAS methods such as PC-DARTS, Single Path One-Shot, even though the counterparts utilize full ground truth labels for searching. We hope our finding could inspire new understandings on the essential of NAS.
Towards Long-Form Video Understanding
Authors: Chao-Yuan Wu, Philipp Krahenbuhl

Abstract: Our world offers a never-ending stream of visual stimuli, yet today's vision systems only accurately recognize patterns within a few seconds. These systems understand the present, but fail to contextualize it in past or future events. In this paper, we study long-form video understanding. We introduce a framework for modeling long-form videos and develop evaluation protocols on large-scale datasets. We show that existing state-of-the-art short-term models are limited for long-form tasks. A novel object-centric transformer-based video recognition architecture performs significantly better on 7 diverse tasks. It also outperforms comparable state-of-the-art on the AVA dataset.
Shape and Material Capture at Home
Authors: Daniel Lichy, Jiaye Wu, Soumyadip Sengupta, David W. Jacobs

Abstract: In this paper, we present a technique for estimating the geometry and reflectance of objects using only a camera, flashlight, and optionally a tripod. We propose a simple data capture technique in which the user goes around the object, illuminating it with a flashlight and capturing only a few images. Our main technical contribution is the introduction of a recursive neural architecture, which can predict geometry and reflectance at 2^kx2^k resolution given an input image at 2^kx2^k and estimated geometry and reflectance from the previous step at 2^(k-1)x2^(k-1). This recursive architecture, termed RecNet, is trained with 256x256 resolution but can easily operate on 1024x1024 images during inference. We show that our method produces more accurate surface normal and albedo, especially in regions of specular highlights and cast shadows, compared to previous approaches, given three or fewer input images.
Deep Polarization Imaging for 3D Shape and SVBRDF Acquisition
Authors: Valentin Deschaintre, Yiming Lin, Abhijeet Ghosh

Abstract: We present a novel method for efficient acquisition of shape and spatially varying reflectance of 3D objects using polarization cues. Unlike previous works that have exploited polarization to estimate material or object appearance under certain constraints (known shape or multiview acquisition), we lift such restrictions by coupling polarization imaging with deep learning to achieve high quality estimate of 3D object shape (surface normals and depth) and SVBRDF using single-view polarization imaging under frontal flash illumination. In addition to acquired polarization images, we provide our deep network with strong novel cues related to shape and reflectance, in the form of a normalized Stokes map and an estimate of diffuse color. We additionally describe modifications to network architecture and training loss which provide further qualitative improvements. We demonstrate our approach to achieve superior results compared to recent works employing deep learning in conjunction with flash illumination.
Convolutional Neural Network Pruning With Structural Redundancy Reduction
Authors: Zi Wang, Chengcheng Li, Xiangyang Wang

Abstract: Convolutional neural network (CNN) pruning has become one of the most successful network compression approaches in recent years. Existing works on network pruning usually focus on removing the least important filters in the network to achieve compact architectures. In this study, we claim that identifying structural redundancy plays a more essential role than finding unimportant filters, theoretically and empirically. We first statistically model the network pruning problem in a redundancy reduction perspective and find that pruning in the layer(s) with the most structural redundancy outperforms pruning the least important filters across all layers. Based on this finding, we then propose a network pruning approach that identifies structural redundancy of a CNN and prunes filers in the selected layer(s) with the most redundancy. Experiments on various benchmark network architectures and datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.
T-vMF Similarity for Regularizing Intra-Class Feature Distribution
Authors: Takumi Kobayashi

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) leverage large-scale training dataset to produce remarkable performance on various image classification tasks. It, however, is difficult to effectively train the CNNs on some realistic learning situations such as regarding class imbalance, small-scale and label noises. Regularizing CNNs works well on learning with such deteriorated training datasets by mitigating overfitting issues. In this work, we propose a method to effectively impose regularization on feature representation learning. By focusing on the angle between a feature and a classifier which is embedded in cosine similarity at the classification layer, we formulate a novel similarity beyond the cosine based on von Mises-Fisher distribution of directional statistics. In contrast to the cosine similarity, our similarity is compact while having heavy tail, which contributes to regularizing intra-class feature distribution to improve generalization performance. Through the experiments on some realistic learning situations such as of imbalance, small-scale and noisy labels, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for training CNNs, in comparison to the other regularization methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/tk1980/tvMF.