DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Learning To Predict Visual Attributes in the Wild
Authors: Khoi Pham, Kushal Kafle, Zhe Lin, Zhihong Ding, Scott Cohen, Quan Tran, Abhinav Shrivastava

Abstract: Visual attributes constitute a large portion of information contained in a scene. Objects can be described using a wide variety of attributes which portray their visual appearance (color, texture), geometry (shape, size, posture), and other intrinsic properties (state, action). Existing work is mostly limited to study of attribute prediction in specific domains. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale in-the-wild visual attribute prediction dataset consisting of over 927K attribute annotations for over 260K object instances. Formally, object attribute prediction is a multi-label classification problem where all attributes that apply to an object must be predicted. Our dataset poses significant challenges to existing methods due to large number of attributes, label sparsity, data imbalance, and object occlusion. To this end, we propose several techniques that systematically tackle these challenges, including a base model that utilizes both low- and high-level CNN features with multi-hop attention, reweighting and resampling techniques, a novel negative label expansion scheme, and a novel supervised attribute-aware contrastive learning algorithm. Using these techniques, we achieve near 3.7 mAP and 5.7 overall F1 points improvement over the current state of the art. Further details about the VAW dataset can be found at https://vawdataset.com/.
Animating Pictures With Eulerian Motion Fields
Authors: Aleksander Holynski, Brian L. Curless, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski

Abstract: In this paper, we demonstrate a fully automatic method for converting a still image into a realistic animated looping video. We target scenes with continuous fluid motion, such as flowing water and billowing smoke. Our method relies on the observation that this type of natural motion can be convincingly reproduced from a static Eulerian motion description, i.e. a single, temporally constant flow field that defines the immediate motion of a particle at a given 2D location. We use an image-to-image translation network to encode motion priors of natural scenes collected from online videos, so that for a new photo, we can synthesize a corresponding motion field. The image is then animated using the generated motion through a deep warping technique: pixels are encoded as deep features, those features are warped via Eulerian motion, and the resulting warped feature maps are decoded as images. In order to produce continuous, seamlessly looping video textures, we propose a novel video looping technique that flows features both forward and backward in time and then blends the results. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method by applying it to a large collection of examples including beaches, waterfalls, and flowing rivers.
Generalized Focal Loss V2: Learning Reliable Localization Quality Estimation for Dense Object Detection
Authors: Xiang Li, Wenhai Wang, Xiaolin Hu, Jun Li, Jinhui Tang, Jian Yang

Abstract: Localization Quality Estimation (LQE) is crucial and popular in the recent advancement of dense object detectors since it can provide accurate ranking scores that benefit the Non-Maximum Suppression processing and improve detection performance. As a common practice, most existing methods predict LQE scores through vanilla convolutional features shared with object classification or bounding box regression. In this paper, we explore a completely novel and different perspective to perform LQE -- based on the learned distributions of the four parameters of the bounding box. The bounding box distributions are inspired and introduced as "General Distribution" in GFLV1, which describes the uncertainty of the predicted bounding boxes well. Such a property makes the distribution statistics of a bounding box highly correlated to its real localization quality. Specifically, a bounding box distribution with a sharp peak usually corresponds to high localization quality, and vice versa. By leveraging the close correlation between distribution statistics and the real localization quality, we develop a considerably lightweight Distribution-Guided Quality Predictor (DGQP) for reliable LQE based on GFLV1, thus producing GFLV2. To our best knowledge, it is the first attempt in object detection to use a highly relevant, statistical representation to facilitate LQE. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, GFLV2 (ResNet-101) achieves 46.2 AP at 14.6 FPS, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art ATSS baseline (43.6 AP at 14.6 FPS) by absolute 2.6 AP on COCO  \tt test-dev , without sacrificing the efficiency both in training and inference.
Cross-Domain Adaptive Clustering for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jichang Li, Guanbin Li, Yemin Shi, Yizhou Yu

Abstract: In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of "labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
ST3D: Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jihan Yang, Shaoshuai Shi, Zhe Wang, Hongsheng Li, Xiaojuan Qi

Abstract: We present a new domain adaptive self-training pipeline, named ST3D, for unsupervised domain adaptation on 3D object detection from point clouds. First, we pre-train the 3D detector on the source domain with our proposed random object scaling strategy for mitigating the negative effects of source domain bias. Then, the detector is iteratively improved on the target domain by alternatively conducting two steps, which are the pseudo label updating with the developed quality-aware triplet memory bank and the model training with curriculum data augmentation. These specific designs for 3D object detection enable the detector to be trained with consistent and high-quality pseudo labels and to avoid overfitting to the large number of easy examples in pseudo labeled data. Our ST3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on all evaluated datasets and even surpasses fully supervised results on KITTI 3D object detection benchmark. Code will be available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/ST3D.
HITNet: Hierarchical Iterative Tile Refinement Network for Real-time Stereo Matching
Authors: Vladimir Tankovich, Christian Hane, Yinda Zhang, Adarsh Kowdle, Sean Fanello, Sofien Bouaziz

Abstract: This paper presents HITNet, a novel neural network architecture for real-time stereo matching. Contrary to many recent neural network approaches that operate on a full costvolume and rely on 3D convolutions, our approach does not explicitly build a volume and instead relies on a fast multi-resolution initialization step, differentiable 2D geometric propagation and warping mechanisms to infer disparity hypotheses. To achieve a high level of accuracy, our network not only geometrically reasons about disparities but also infers slanted plane hypotheses allowing to more accurately perform geometric warping and upsampling operations. Our architecture is inherently multi-resolution allowing the propagation of information across different levels. Multiple experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach at a fraction of the computation required by the state-of-the-art methods. At the time of writing, HITNet ranks 1st-3rd on all the metrics published on the ETH3D website for two view stereo, ranks 1st on most of the metrics amongst all the end-to-end learning approaches on Middleburyv3, ranks 1st on the popular KITTI 2012 and 2015 benchmarks among the published methods faster than 100ms.
VaB-AL: Incorporating Class Imbalance and Difficulty With Variational Bayes for Active Learning
Authors: Jongwon Choi, Kwang Moo Yi, Jihoon Kim, Jinho Choo, Byoungjip Kim, Jinyeop Chang, Youngjune Gwon, Hyung Jin Chang

Abstract: Active Learning for discriminative models has largely been studied with the focus on individual samples, with less emphasis on how classes are distributed or which classes are hard to deal with. In this work, we show that this is harmful. We propose a method based on the Bayes' rule, that can naturally incorporate class imbalance into the Active Learning framework. We derive that three terms should be considered together when estimating the probability of a classifier making a mistake for a given sample; i) probability of mislabelling a class, ii) likelihood of the data given a predicted class, and iii) the prior probability on the abundance of a predicted class. Implementing these terms requires a generative model and an intractable likelihood estimation. Therefore, we train a Variational Auto Encoder (VAE) for this purpose. To further tie the VAE with the classifier and facilitate VAE training, we use the classifiers' deep feature representations as input to the VAE. By considering all three probabilities, among them especially the data imbalance, we can substantially improve the potential of existing methods under limited data budget. We show that our method can be applied to classification tasks on multiple different datasets -- including one that is a real-world dataset with heavy data imbalance -- significantly outperforming the state of the art.
Exploiting & Refining Depth Distributions With Triangulation Light Curtains
Authors: Yaadhav Raaj, Siddharth Ancha, Robert Tamburo, David Held, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan

Abstract: Active sensing through the use of Adaptive Depth Sensors is a nascent field, with potential in areas such as Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). They do however require dynamically driving a laser / light-source to a specific location to capture information, with one such class of sensor being the Triangulation Light Curtains (LC). In this work, we introduce a novel approach that exploits prior depth distributions from RGB cameras to drive a Light Curtain's laser line to regions of uncertainty to get new measurements. These measurements are utilized such that depth uncertainty is reduced and errors get corrected recursively. We show real-world experiments that validate our approach in outdoor and driving settings, and demonstrate qualitative and quantitative improvements in depth RMSE when RGB cameras are used in tandem with a Light Curtain.
DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation
Authors: Yangchen Xie, Xinyuan Chen, Li Sun, Yue Lu

Abstract: Font generation is a challenging problem especially for some writing systems that consist of a large number of characters and has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, existing methods for font generation are often in supervised learning. They require a large number of paired data, which is labor-intensive and expensive to collect. Besides, common image-to-image translation models often define style as the set of textures and colors, which cannot be directly applied to font generation. To address these problems, we propose novel deformable generative networks for unsupervised font generation (DG-Font). We introduce a feature deformation skip connection (FDSC) which predicts pairs of displacement maps and employs the predicted maps to apply deformable convolution to the low-level feature maps from the content encoder. The outputs of FDSC are fed into a mixer to generate the final results. Taking advantage of FDSC, the mixer outputs a high-quality character with a complete structure. To further improve the quality of generated images, we use three deformable convolution layers in the content encoder to learn style-invariant feature representations. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates characters in higher quality than state-of-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ecnuycxie/DG-Font.
Deep Multi-Task Learning for Joint Localization, Perception, and Prediction
Authors: John Phillips, Julieta Martinez, Ioan Andrei Barsan, Sergio Casas, Abbas Sadat, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: Over the last few years, we have witnessed tremendous progress on many subtasks of autonomous driving including perception, motion forecasting, and motion planning. However, these systems often assume that the car is accurately localized against a high-definition map. In this paper we question this assumption, and investigate the issues that arise in state-of-the-art autonomy stacks under localization error. Based on our observations, we design a system that jointly performs perception, prediction, and localization. Our architecture is able to reuse computation between the three tasks, and is thus able to correct localization errors efficiently. We show experiments on a large-scale autonomy dataset, demonstrating the efficiency and accuracy of our proposed approach.
Deeply Shape-Guided Cascade for Instance Segmentation
Authors: Hao Ding, Siyuan Qiao, Alan Yuille, Wei Shen

Abstract: The key to a successful cascade architecture for precise instance segmentation is to fully leverage the relationship between bounding box detection and mask segmentation across multiple stages. Although modern instance segmentation cascades achieve leading performance, they mainly make use of a unidirectional relationship, i.e., mask segmentation can benefit from iteratively refined bounding box detection. In this paper, we investigate an alternative direction, i.e., how to take the advantage of precise mask segmentation for bounding box detection in a cascade architecture. We propose a Deeply Shape-guided Cascade (DSC) for instance segmentation, which iteratively imposes the shape guidances extracted from mask prediction at previous stage on bounding box detection at current stage. It forms a bi-directional relationship between the two tasks by introducing three key components: (1) Initial shape guidance: A mask-supervised Region Proposal Network (mPRN) with the ability to generate class-agnostic masks; (2) Explicit shape guidance: A mask-guided region-of-interest (RoI) feature extractor, which employs mask segmentation at previous stage to focus feature extraction at current stage within a region aligned well with the shape of the instance-of-interest rather than a rectangular RoI; (3) Implicit shape guidance: A feature fusion operation which feeds intermediate mask features at previous stage to the bounding box head at current stage. Experimental results show that DSC outperforms the state-of-the-art instance segmentation cascade, Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC), by a large margin and achieves 51.8 box AP and 45.5 mask AP on COCO test-dev. The code is released at: https://github.com/hding2455/DSC.
MetricOpt: Learning To Optimize Black-Box Evaluation Metrics
Authors: Chen Huang, Shuangfei Zhai, Pengsheng Guo, Josh Susskind

Abstract: We study the problem of directly optimizing arbitrary non-differentiable task evaluation metrics such as misclassification rate and recall. Our method, named MetricOpt, operates in a black-box setting where the computational details of the target metric are unknown. We achieve this by learning a differentiable value function, which maps compact task-specific model parameters to metric observations. The learned value function is easily pluggable into existing optimizers like SGD and Adam, and is effective for rapidly finetuning a pre-trained model. This leads to consistent improvements since the value function provides effective metric supervision during finetuning, and helps to correct the potential bias of loss-only supervision. MetricOpt achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of metrics for (image) classification, image retrieval and object detection. Solid benefits are found over competing methods, which often involve complex loss design or adaptation. MetricOpt also generalizes well to new tasks and model architectures.
Multispectral Photometric Stereo for Spatially-Varying Spectral Reflectances: A Well Posed Problem?
Authors: Heng Guo, Fumio Okura, Boxin Shi, Takuya Funatomi, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Abstract: Multispectral photometric stereo (MPS) aims at recovering the surface normal of a scene from a single-shot multispectral image, which is known as an ill-posed problem. To make the problem well-posed, existing MPS methods rely on restrictive assumptions, such as shape prior, surfaces having a monochromatic with uniform albedo. This paper alleviates the restrictive assumptions in existing methods. We show that the problem becomes well-posed for a surface with a uniform chromaticity but spatially-varying albedos based on our new formulation. Specifically, if at least three (or two) scene points share the same chromaticity, the proposed method uniquely recovers their surface normals and spectral reflectance with the illumination of more than or equal to four (or five) spectral lights. Besides, our method can be made robust by having many (i.e., 4 or more) spectral bands using robust estimation techniques for conventional photometric stereo. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our data and result can be found at https://github.com/GH-HOME/MultispectralPS.git.
Fashion IQ: A New Dataset Towards Retrieving Images by Natural Language Feedback
Authors: Hui Wu, Yupeng Gao, Xiaoxiao Guo, Ziad Al-Halah, Steven Rennie, Kristen Grauman, Rogerio Feris

Abstract: Conversational interfaces for the detail-oriented retail fashion domain are more natural, expressive, and user friendly than classical keyword-based search interfaces. In this paper, we introduce the Fashion IQ dataset to support and advance research on interactive fashion image retrieval. Fashion IQ is the first fashion dataset to provide human-generated captions that distinguish similar pairs of garment images together with side-information consisting of real-world product descriptions and derived visual attribute labels for these images. We provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the Fashion IQ data, and present a transformer-based user simulator and interactive image retriever that can seamlessly integrate visual attributes with image features, user feedback, and dialog history, leading to improved performance over the state of the art in dialog-based image retrieval. We believe that our dataset will encourage further work on developing more natural and real-world applicable conversational shopping assistants.
Few-Shot Human Motion Transfer by Personalized Geometry and Texture Modeling
Authors: Zhichao Huang, Xintong Han, Jia Xu, Tong Zhang

Abstract: We present a new method for few-shot human motion transfer that achieves realistic human image generation with only a small number of appearance inputs. Despite recent advances in single person motion transfer, prior methods often require a large number of training images and take long training time. One promising direction is to perform few-shot human motion transfer, which only needs a few of source images for appearance transfer. However, it is particularly challenging to obtain satisfactory transfer results. In this paper, we address this issue by rendering a human texture map to a surface geometry (represented as a UV map), which is personalized to the source person. Our geometry generator combines the shape information from source images, and the pose information from 2D keypoints to synthesize the personalized UV map. A texture generator then generates the texture map conditioned on the texture of source images to fill out invisible parts. Furthermore, we may fine-tune the texture map on the manifold of the texture generator from a few source images at the test time, which improves the quality of the texture map without over-fitting or artifacts. Extensive experiments show the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuangZhiChao95/FewShotMotionTransfer.
HDMapGen: A Hierarchical Graph Generative Model of High Definition Maps
Authors: Lu Mi, Hang Zhao, Charlie Nash, Xiaohan Jin, Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Cordelia Schmid, Nir Shavit, Yuning Chai, Dragomir Anguelov

Abstract: High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce a new challenging task to generate HD maps. In this work, we explore several autoregressive models using different data representations, including sequence, plain graph, and hierarchical graph. We propose HDMapGen, a hierarchical graph generation model capable of producing high-quality and diverse HD maps through a coarse-to-fine approach. Experiments on the Argoverse dataset and an in-house dataset show that HDMapGen significantly outperforms baseline methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that HDMapGen achieves high efficiency and scalability.
GeoSim: Realistic Video Simulation via Geometry-Aware Composition for Self-Driving
Authors: Yun Chen, Frieda Rong, Shivam Duggal, Shenlong Wang, Xinchen Yan, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Shangjie Xue, Ersin Yumer, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: Scalable sensor simulation is an important yet challenging open problem for safety-critical domains such as self-driving. Current works in image simulation either fail to be photorealistic or do not model the 3D environment and the dynamic objects within, losing high-level control and physical realism. In this paper, we present GeoSim, a geometry-aware image composition process which synthesizes novel urban driving scenarios by augmenting existing images with dynamic objects extracted from other scenes and rendered at novel poses. Towards this goal, we first build a diverse bank of 3D objects with both realistic geometry and appearance from sensor data. During simulation, we perform a novel geometry-aware simulation-by-composition procedure which 1) proposes plausible and realistic object placements into a given scene, 2) render novel views of dynamic objects from the asset bank, and 3) composes and blends the rendered image segments. The resulting synthetic images are realistic, traffic-aware, and geometrically consistent, allowing our approach to scale to complex use cases. We demonstrate two such important applications: long-range realistic video simulation across multiple camera sensors, and synthetic data generation for data augmentation on downstream segmentation tasks. Please check https://tmux.top/publication/geosim/ for high-resolution video results.