GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
UCoL: Unsupervised Learning of Discriminative Facial Representations via Uncertainty-Aware Contrast
Authors: Hao Wang; Min Li; Yangyang Song; Youjian Zhang; Liying Chi
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: This paper presents Uncertainty-aware Contrastive Learning (UCoL): a fully unsupervised framework for discriminative facial representation learning. Our UCoL is built upon a momentum contrastive network, referred to as Dual-path Momentum Network. Specifically, two flows of pairwise contrastive training are conducted simultaneously:  one is formed with intra-instance self augmentation, and the other is to identify positive pairs collected by online pairwise prediction. We introduce a novel uncertainty-aware consistency K-nearest neighbors algorithm to generate predicted positive pairs, which enables efficient discriminative learning from large-scale open-world unlabeled data. Experiments show that UCoL significantly improves the baselines of unsupervised models and performs on par with the semi-supervised and supervised face representation learning methods.
Calibrated Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection
Authors: Haohan Wang; Liang Liu; Boshen Zhang; Jiangning Zhang; Wuhao Zhang; Zhenye Gan; Yabiao Wang; Chengjie Wang; Haoqian Wang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages and among different object detectors. Therefore, the current methods with fixed thresholds have sub-optimal performance, and are difficult to be applied to other detectors. In order to resolve this obstacle, we propose a Calibrated Teacher, of which the confidence estimation of the prediction is well calibrated to match its real precision. In this way, different detectors in different training stages would share a similar distribution of the output confidence, so that multiple detectors could share the same fixed threshold and achieve better performance. Furthermore, we present a simple but effective Focal IoU Weight (FIoU) for the classification loss. FIoU aims at reducing the loss weight of false negative samples caused by the missing annotation, and thus works as the complement of the teacher-student paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our methods set new state-of-the-art under all different sparse settings in COCO. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/CalibratedTeacher.
Towards Real-Time Panoptic Narrative Grounding by an End-to-End Grounding Network
Authors: Haowei Wang; Jiayi Ji; Yiyi Zhou; Yongjian Wu; Xiaoshuai Sun
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Panoptic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging cross-modal grounding task, which locates the target regions of an image corresponding to the text description.
Existing approaches for PNG are mainly based on a two-stage paradigm, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a one-stage network for real-time PNG, termed End-to-End Panoptic Narrative Grounding network (EPNG), which directly generates masks for referents. Specifically, we propose two innovative designs, i.e., Locality-Perceptive Attention (LPA) and a bidirectional Semantic Alignment Loss (SAL), to properly handle the many-to-many relationship between textual expressions and visual objects. LPA embeds the local spatial priors into attention modeling, i.e., a pixel may belong to multiple masks at different scales, thereby improving segmentation. To help understand the complex semantic relationships, SAL proposes a bidirectional contrastive objective to regularize the semantic consistency inter modalities. Extensive experiments on the PNG benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Compared to the single-stage baseline, our method achieves a significant improvement of up to 9.4% accuracy. More importantly, our EPNG is 10 times faster than the two-stage model. Meanwhile, the generalization ability of EPNG is also validated by zero-shot experiments on other grounding tasks. The source codes and trained models for all our experiments are publicly available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/EPNG.git.
LeNo: Adversarial Robust Salient Object Detection Networks with Learnable Noise
Authors: He Wang; Lin Wan; He Tang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Pixel-wise prediction with deep neural network has become an effective paradigm for salient object detection (SOD) and achieved remarkable performance. However, very few SOD models are robust against adversarial attacks which are visually imperceptible for human visual attention. The previous work robust saliency (ROSA) shuffles the pre-segmented superpixels and then refines the coarse saliency map by the densely connected conditional random field (CRF). Different from ROSA that rely on various pre- and post-processings, this paper proposes a light-weight Learnable Noise (LeNo) to defend adversarial attacks for SOD models. LeNo preserves accuracy of SOD models on both adversarial and clean images, as well as inference speed. In general, LeNo consists of a simple shallow noise and noise estimation that embedded in the encoder and decoder of arbitrary SOD networks respectively. Inspired by the center prior of human visual attention mechanism, we initialize the shallow noise with a cross-shaped gaussian distribution for better defense against adversarial attacks. Instead of adding additional network components for post-processing, the proposed noise estimation modifies only one channel of the decoder. With the deeply-supervised noise-decoupled training on state-of-the-art RGB and RGB-D SOD networks, LeNo outperforms previous works not only on adversarial images but also on clean images, which contributes stronger robustness for SOD. Our code is available at https://github.com/ssecv/LeNo.
Defending Black-Box Skeleton-Based Human Activity Classifiers
Authors: He Wang; Yunfeng Diao; Zichang Tan; Guodong Guo
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Skeletal motions have been heavily relied upon for human activity recognition (HAR). Recently, a universal vulnerability of skeleton-based HAR has been identified across a variety of classifiers and data, calling for mitigation. To this end, we propose the first black-box defense method for skeleton-based HAR to our best knowledge. Our method is featured by full Bayesian treatments of the clean data, the adversaries and the classifier, leading to (1) a new Bayesian Energy-based formulation of robust discriminative classifiers, (2) a new adversary sampling scheme based on natural motion manifolds, and (3) a new post-train Bayesian strategy for black-box defense. We name our framework Bayesian Energy-based Adversarial Training or BEAT. BEAT is straightforward but elegant, which turns vulnerable black-box classifiers into robust ones without sacrificing accuracy. It demonstrates surprising and universal effectiveness across a wide range of skeletal HAR classifiers and datasets, under various attacks. Appendix and code are available.
Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images
Authors: Jianyi Wang; Kelvin C.K. Chan; Chen Change Loy
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images without explicit task-specific training. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments.
Robust Video Portrait Reenactment via Personalized Representation Quantization
Authors: Kaisiyuan Wang; Changcheng Liang; Hang Zhou; Jiaxiang Tang; Qianyi Wu; Dongliang He; Zhibin Hong; Jingtuo Liu; Errui Ding; Ziwei Liu; Jingdong Wang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: While progress has been made in the field of portrait reenactment, the problem of how to produce high-fidelity and robust videos remains. Recent studies normally find it challenging to handle rarely seen target poses due to the limitation of source data. This paper proposes the Video Portrait via Non-local Quantization Modeling (VPNQ) framework, which produces pose- and disturbance-robust reenactable video portraits. Our key insight is to learn position-invariant quantized local patch representations and build a mapping between simple driving signals and local textures with non-local spatial-temporal modeling. Specifically, instead of learning a universal quantized codebook, we identify that a personalized one can be trained to preserve desired position-invariant local details better. Then, a simple representation of projected landmarks can be used as sufficient driving signals to avoid 3D rendering. Following, we employ a carefully designed Spatio-Temporal Transformer to predict reasonable and temporally consistent quantized tokens from the driving signal. The predicted codes can be decoded back to robust and high-quality videos. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach.
De-biased Teacher: Rethinking IoU Matching for Semi-supervised Object Detection
Authors: Kuo Wang; Jingyu Zhuang; Guanbin Li; Chaowei Fang; Lechao Cheng; Liang Lin; Fan Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Most of the recent research in semi-supervised object detection follows the pseudo-labeling paradigm evolved from the semi-supervised image classification task. However, the training paradigm of the two-stage object detector inevitably makes the pseudo-label learning process for unlabeled images full of bias. Specifically, the IoU matching scheme used for selecting and labeling candidate boxes is based on the assumption that the matching source~(ground truth) is accurate enough in terms of the number of objects, object position and object category. Obviously, pseudo-labels generated for unlabeled images cannot satisfy such a strong assumption, which makes the produced training proposals extremely unreliable and thus severely spoil the follow-up training. To de-bias the training proposals generated by the pseudo-label-based IoU matching, we propose a general framework -- De-biased Teacher, which abandons both the IoU matching and pseudo labeling processes by directly generating favorable training proposals for consistency regularization between the weak/strong augmented image pairs. Moreover, a distribution-based refinement scheme is designed to eliminate the scattered class predictions of significantly low values for higher efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed De-biased Teacher consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Source codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/De-biased-Teracher.
Learning to Generate an Unbiased Scene Graph by Using Attribute-Guided Predicate Features
Authors: Lei Wang; Zejian Yuan; Badong Chen
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to capture the semantic information in an image and build a structured representation, which facilitates downstream tasks. The current challenge in SGG is to tackle the biased predictions caused by the long-tailed distribution of predicates. Since multiple predicates in SGG are coupled in an image, existing data re-balancing methods cannot completely balance the head and tail predicates. In this work, a decoupled learning framework is proposed for unbiased scene graph generation by using attribute-guided predicate features to construct a balanced training set. Specifically, the predicate recognition is decoupled into Predicate Feature Representation Learning (PFRL) and predicate classifier training with a class-balanced predicate feature set, which is constructed by our proposed Attribute-guided Predicate Feature Generation (A-PFG) model. In the A-PFG model, we first define the class labels of  and corresponding visual feature as attributes to describe a predicate. Then the predicate feature and the attribute embedding are mapped into a shared hidden space by a dual Variational Auto-encoder (VAE), and finally the synthetic predicate features are forced to learn the contextual information in the attributes via cross reconstruction and distribution alignment. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, our decoupled learning framework and A-PFG model are applied to various SGG models. The empirical results show that our method is substantially improved on all benchmarks and achieves new state-of-the-art performance for unbiased scene graph generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanglei0618/A-PFG.
Alignment-Enriched Tuning for Patch-Level Pre-trained Document Image Models
Authors: Lei Wang; Jiabang He; Xing Xu; Ning Liu; Hui Liu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Alignment between image and text has shown promising improvements on patch-level pre-trained document image models. However, investigating more effective or finer-grained alignment techniques during pre-training requires a large amount of computation cost and time. Thus, a question naturally arises: Could we fine-tune the pre-trained models adaptive to downstream tasks with alignment objectives and achieve comparable or better performance? In this paper, we propose a new model architecture with alignment-enriched tuning (dubbed AETNet) upon pre-trained document image models, to adapt downstream tasks with the joint task-specific supervised and alignment-aware contrastive objective. Specifically, we introduce an extra visual transformer as the alignment-ware image encoder and an extra text transformer as the alignment-ware text encoder before multimodal fusion. We consider alignment in the following three aspects: 1) document-level alignment by leveraging the cross-modal and intra-modal contrastive loss; 2) global-local alignment for modeling localized and structural information in document images; and 3) local-level alignment for more accurate patch-level information. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that AETNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks. Notably, AETNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained models, such as LayoutLMv3 with fine-tuning techniques, on three different downstream tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/MAEHCM/AET.
Flora: Dual-Frequency LOss-Compensated ReAl-Time Monocular 3D Video Reconstruction
Authors: Likang Wang; Yue Gong; Qirui Wang; Kaixuan Zhou; Lei Chen
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this work, we propose a real-time monocular 3D video reconstruction approach named Flora for reconstructing delicate and complete 3D scenes from RGB video sequences in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we introduce a novel method with two main contributions. Firstly, the proposed feature aggregation module retains both color and reliability in a dual-frequency form. Secondly, the loss compensation module solves missing structure by correcting losses for falsely pruned voxels. The dual-frequency feature aggregation module enhances reconstruction quality in both precision and recall, and the loss compensation module benefits the recall. Notably, both proposed contributions achieve great results with negligible inferencing overhead. Our state-of-the-art experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate Flora's leading performance in both effectiveness and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/NoOneUST/Flora.
Efficient Image Captioning for Edge Devices
Authors: Ning Wang; Jiangrong Xie; Hang Luo; Qinglin Cheng; Jihao Wu; Mingbo Jia; Linlin Li
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of image captioning. However, the demands for large memory storage and heavy computational burden prevent these captioning models from being deployed on mobile devices. The main obstacles lie in the heavyweight visual feature extractors (i.e., object detectors) and complicated cross-modal fusion networks. To this end, we propose LightCap, a lightweight image captioner for resource-limited devices. The core design is built on the recent CLIP model for efficient image captioning. To be specific, on the one hand, we leverage the CLIP model to extract the compact grid features without relying on the time-consuming object detectors. On the other hand, we transfer the image-text retrieval design of CLIP to image captioning scenarios by devising a novel visual concept extractor and a cross-modal modulator. We further optimize the cross-modal fusion model and parallel prediction heads via sequential and ensemble distillations. With the carefully designed architecture, our model merely contains 40M parameters, saving the model size by more than 75% and the FLOPs by more than 98% in comparison with the current state-of-the-art methods. In spite of the low capacity, our model still exhibits state-of-the-art performance on prevalent datasets, e.g., 136.6 CIDEr on COCO Karpathy test split. Testing on the smartphone with only a single CPU, the proposed LightCap exhibits a fast inference speed of 188ms per image, which is ready for practical applications.
Controllable Image Captioning via Prompting
Authors: Ning Wang; Jiahao Xie; Jihao Wu; Mingbo Jia; Linlin Li
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress of image captioning, existing captioners typically lack the controllable capability to generate desired image captions, e.g., describing the image in a rough or detailed manner, in a factual or emotional view, etc. In this paper, we show that a unified model is qualified to perform well in diverse domains and freely switch among multiple styles. Such a controllable capability is achieved by embedding the prompt learning into the image captioning framework. To be specific, we design a set of prompts to fine-tune the pre-trained image captioner. These prompts allow the model to absorb stylized data from different domains for joint training, without performance degradation in each domain. Furthermore, we optimize the prompts with learnable vectors in the continuous word embedding space, avoiding the heuristic prompt engineering and meanwhile exhibiting superior performance. In the inference stage, our model is able to generate desired stylized captions by choosing the corresponding prompts. Extensive experiments verify the controllable capability of the proposed method. Notably, we achieve outstanding performance on two diverse image captioning benchmarks including COCO Karpathy split and TextCaps using a unified model.
ECO-3D: Equivariant Contrastive Learning for Pre-training on Perturbed 3D Point Cloud
Authors: Ruibin Wang; Xianghua Ying; Bowei Xing; Jinfa Yang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this work, we investigate contrastive learning on perturbed point clouds and find that the contrasting process may widen the domain gap caused by random perturbations, making the pre-trained network fail to generalize on testing data. To this end, we propose the Equivariant COntrastive framework which closes the domain gap before contrasting, further introduces the equivariance property, and enables pre-training networks under more perturbation types to obtain meaningful features. Specifically, to close the domain gap, a pre-trained VAE is adopted to convert perturbed point clouds into less perturbed point embedding of similar domains and separated perturbation embedding. The contrastive pairs can then be generated by mixing the point embedding with different perturbation embedding. Moreover, to pursue the equivariance property, a Vector Quantizer is adopted during VAE training, discretizing the perturbation embedding into one-hot tokens which indicate the perturbation labels. By correctly predicting the perturbation labels from the perturbed point cloud, the property of equivariance can be encouraged in the learned features. Experiments on synthesized and real-world perturbed datasets show that ECO-3D outperforms most existing pre-training strategies under various downstream tasks, achieving SOTA performance for lots of perturbations.
Global-Local Characteristic Excited Cross-Modal Attacks from Images to Videos
Authors: Ruikui Wang; Yuanfang Guo; Yunhong Wang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: The transferability of adversarial examples is the key property in practical black-box scenarios. Currently, numerous methods improve the transferability across different models trained on the same modality of data. The investigation of generating video adversarial examples with imagebased substitute models to attack the target video models, i.e., cross-modal transferability of adversarial examples, is rarely explored. A few works on cross-modal transferability directly apply image attack methods for each frame and no factors especial for video data are considered, which limits the cross-modal transferability of adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose an effective cross-modal attack method which considers both the global and local characteristics of video data. Firstly, from the global perspective, we introduce inter-frame interaction into attack process to induce more diverse and stronger gradients rather than perturb each frame separately. Secondly, from the local perspective, we disrupt the inherently local correlation of frames within a video, which prevents black-box video model from capturing valuable temporal clues. Extensive experiments on the UCF-101 and Kinetics-400 validate the proposed method significantly improves cross-modal transferability and even surpasses strong baseline using video models as substitute model. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/lwmming/Cross-Modal-Attack.