GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Deep Feature Deblurring Diffusion for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Objects
Authors: Aming Wu; Da Chen; Cheng Deng
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: To promote the safe application of detectors, a task of unsupervised out-of-distribution object detection (OOD-OD) is recently proposed, whose goal is to detect unseen OOD objects without accessing any auxiliary OOD data. For this task, the challenge mainly lies in how to only leverage the known in-distribution (ID) data to detect OOD objects accurately without affecting the detection of ID objects, which can be framed as the diffusion problem for deep feature synthesis. Accordingly, such challenge could be addressed by the forward and reverse processes in the diffusion model. In this paper, we propose a new approach of Deep Feature Deblurring Diffusion (DFDD), consisting of forward blurring and reverse deblurring processes. Specifically, the forward process gradually performs Gaussian Blur on the extracted features, which is instrumental in retaining sufficient input-relevant information. By this way, the forward process could synthesize virtual OOD features that are close to the classification boundary between ID and OOD objects, which improves the performance of detecting OOD objects. During the reverse process, based on the blurred features, a dedicated deblurring model is designed to continually recover the lost details in the forward process. Both the deblurred features and original features are taken as the input for training, strengthening the discrimination ability. In the experiments, our method is evaluated on OOD-OD, open-set object detection, and incremental object detection. The significant performance gains over baselines demonstrate the superiorities of our method. The source code will be made available at: https://github.com/AmingWu/DFDD-OOD.
Fast Full-frame Video Stabilization with Iterative Optimization
Authors: Weiyue Zhao; Xin Li; Zhan Peng; Xianrui Luo; Xinyi Ye; Hao Lu; Zhiguo Cao
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Video stabilization refers to the problem of transforming a shaky video into a visually pleasing one. The question of how to strike a good trade-off between visual quality and computational speed has remained one of the open challenges in video stabilization. Inspired by the analogy between wobbly frames and jigsaw puzzles, we propose an iterative optimization-based learning approach using synthetic datasets for video stabilization, which consists of two interacting submodules: motion trajectory smoothing and full-frame outpainting. First, we develop a two-level (coarse-to-fine) stabilizing algorithm based on the probabilistic flow field. The confidence map associated with the estimated optical flow is exploited to guide the search for shared regions through backpropagation. Second, we take a divide-and-conquer approach and propose a novel multiframe fusion strategy to render full-frame stabilized views. An important new insight brought about by our iterative optimization approach is that the target video can be interpreted as the fixed point of nonlinear mapping for video stabilization. We formulate video stabilization as a problem of minimizing the amount of jerkiness in motion trajectories, which guarantees convergence with the help of fixed-point theory. Extensive experimental results are reported to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of computational speed and visual quality. The code will be available on GitHub.
Gender Artifacts in Visual Datasets
Authors: Nicole Meister; Dora Zhao; Angelina Wang; Vikram V. Ramaswamy; Ruth Fong; Olga Russakovsky
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Gender biases are known to exist within large-scale visual datasets and can be reflected or even amplified in downstream models. Many prior works have proposed methods for mitigating gender biases, often by attempting to remove gender expression information from images. To understand the feasibility and practicality of these approaches, we investigate what "gender artifacts" exist in large-scale visual datasets. We define a "gender artifact" as a visual cue correlated with gender , focusing specifically on cues that are learnable by a modern image classifier and have an interpretable human corollary. Through our analyses, we find that gender artifacts are ubiquitous in the COCO and OpenImages datasets, occurring everywhere from low-level information (e.g., the mean value of the color channels) to higher-level image composition (e.g., pose and location of people). Further, bias mitigation methods that attempt to remove gender actually remove more information from the scene than the person. Given the prevalence of gender artifacts, we claim that attempts to remove these artifacts from such datasets are largely infeasible as certain removed artifacts may be necessary for the downstream task of object recognition. Instead, the responsibility lies with researchers and practitioners to be aware that the distribution of images within datasets is highly gendered and hence develop fairness-aware methods which are robust to these distributional shifts across groups.
Learning Semi-supervised Gaussian Mixture Models for Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Bingchen Zhao; Xin Wen; Kai Han
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of generalized category discovery (GCD), i.e., given a set of images where part of them are labelled and the rest are not, the task is to automatically cluster the images in the unlabelled data, leveraging the information from the labelled data, while the unlabelled data contain images from the labelled classes and also new ones. GCD is similar to semi-supervised learning (SSL) but is more realistic and challenging, as SSL assumes all the unlabelled images are from the same classes as the labelled ones. 
 We also do not assume the class number in the unlabelled data is known a-priori, making the GCD problem even harder. 
 To tackle the problem of GCD without knowing the class number, we propose an EM-like framework that alternates between representation learning and class number estimation. We propose a semi-supervised variant of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with a stochastic splitting and merging mechanism to dynamically determine the prototypes by examining the cluster compactness and separability. With these prototypes, we leverage prototypical contrastive learning for representation learning on the partially labelled data subject to the constraints imposed by the labelled data. Our framework alternates between these two steps until convergence. The cluster assignment for an unlabelled instance can then be retrieved by identifying its nearest prototype. We comprehensively evaluate our framework on both generic image classification datasets and challenging fine-grained object recognition datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
SuS-X: Training-Free Name-Only Transfer of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Vishaal Udandarao; Ankush Gupta; Samuel Albanie
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has emerged as a simple yet effective way to train large-scale vision-language models. CLIP demonstrates impressive zero-shot classification and retrieval performance on diverse downstream tasks. However, to leverage its full potential, fine-tuning still appears to be necessary. Fine-tuning the entire CLIP model can be resource-intensive and unstable. Moreover, recent methods that aim to circumvent this need for fine-tuning still require access to images from the target distribution. In this paper, we pursue a different approach and explore the regime of training-free "name-only transfer" in which the only knowledge we possess about downstream tasks comprises the names of downstream target categories. We propose a novel method, SuS-X, consisting of two key building blocks--"SuS" and "TIP-X", that requires neither intensive fine-tuning nor costly labelled data. SuS-X achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) zero-shot classification results on 19 benchmark datasets. We further show the utility of TIP-X in the training-free few-shot setting, where we again achieve SoTA results over strong training-free baselines.
Rethinking Point Cloud Registration as Masking and Reconstruction
Authors: Guangyan Chen; Meiling Wang; Li Yuan; Yi Yang; Yufeng Yue
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Point cloud registration is essential in computer vision and robotics. In this paper, a critical observation is made that the invisible parts of each point cloud can be directly utilized as inherent masks, and the aligned point cloud pair can be regarded as the reconstruction target. Motivated by this observation, we rethink the point cloud registration problem as a masking and reconstruction task. To this end, a generic and concise auxiliary training network, the Masked Reconstruction Auxiliary Network (MRA), is proposed. The MRA reconstructs the complete point cloud by separately using the encoded features of each point cloud obtained from the backbone, guiding the contextual features in the backbone to capture fine-grained geometric details and the overall structures of point cloud pairs. Unlike recently developed high-performing methods that incorporate specific encoding methods into transformer models, which sacrifice versatility and introduce significant computational complexity during the inference process, our MRA can be easily inserted into other methods to further improve registration accuracy. Additionally, the MRA is detached after training, thereby avoiding extra computational complexity during the inference process. Building upon the MRA, we present a novel transformer-based method, the Masked Reconstruction Transformer (MRT), which achieves both precise and efficient alignment using standard transformers. Extensive experiments conducted on the 3DMatch, ModelNet40, and KITTI datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our MRT over state-of-the-art methods, and the efficiency of the MRA in improving registration accuracy.
Beating Backdoor Attack at Its Own Game
Authors: Min Liu; Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli; Xiangyu Yue
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attack, which does not affect the network's performance on clean data but would manipulate the network behavior once a trigger pattern is added. 
 Existing defense methods have greatly reduced attack success rate, but their prediction accuracy on clean data still lags behind a clean model by a large margin. 
 Inspired by the stealthiness and effectiveness of backdoor attack, we propose a simple but highly effective defense framework which injects non-adversarial backdoors targeting poisoned samples.
 Following the general steps in backdoor attack, we detect a small set of suspected samples and then apply a poisoning strategy to them. 
 The non-adversarial backdoor, once triggered, suppresses the attacker's backdoor on poisoned data, but has limited influence on clean data.
 The defense can be carried out during data preprocessing, without any modification to the standard end-to-end training pipeline.
 We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks with different architectures and representative attacks. 
 Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense effectiveness with by far the lowest performance drop on clean data. 
 Considering the surprising defense ability displayed by our framework, we call for more attention to utilizing backdoor for backdoor defense. 
 Code is available at https://github.com/damianliumin/non-adversarial_backdoor.
Introducing Language Guidance in Prompt-based Continual Learning
Authors: Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan; Muhammad Ferjad Naeem; Luc Van Gool; Didier Stricker; Federico Tombari; Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Continual Learning aims to learn a single model on a sequence of tasks without having access to data from previous tasks. The biggest challenge in the domain still remains catastrophic forgetting: a loss in performance on seen classes of earlier tasks. Some existing methods rely on an expensive replay buffer to store a chunk of data from previous tasks. This, while promising, becomes expensive when the number of tasks becomes large or data can not be stored for privacy reasons. As an alternative, prompt-based methods have been proposed that store the task information in a learnable prompt pool. This prompt pool instructs a frozen image encoder on how to solve each task. While the model faces a disjoint set of classes in each task in this setting, we argue that these classes can be encoded to the same embedding space of a pre-trained language encoder. In this work, we propose Language Guidance for Prompt-based Continual Learning (LGCL) as a plug-in for prompt-based methods. LGCL is model agnostic and introduces language guidance at the task level in the prompt pool and at the class level on the output feature of the vision encoder. We show with extensive experimentation that LGCL consistently improves the performance of prompt-based continual learning methods to set a new state-of-the-art. LGCL achieves these performance improvements without needing any additional learnable parameters.
Invariant Training 2D-3D Joint Hard Samples for Few-Shot Point Cloud Recognition
Authors: Xuanyu Yi; Jiajun Deng; Qianru Sun; Xian-Sheng Hua; Joo-Hwee Lim; Hanwang Zhang
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: We tackle the data scarcity challenge in few-shot point cloud recognition of 3D objects by using a joint prediction from a conventional 3D model and a well-pretrained 2D model. Surprisingly, such an ensemble, though seems trivial, has hardly been shown effective in recent 2D-3D models. We find out the crux is the less effective training for the "joint hard samples", which have high confidence prediction on different wrong labels, implying that the 2D and 3D models do not collaborate well. To this end, our proposed invariant training strategy, called INVJOINT, does not only emphasize the training more on the hard samples, but also seeks the invariance between the conflicting 2D and 3D ambiguous predictions. INVJOINT can learn more collaborative 2D and 3D representations for better ensemble. Extensive experiments on 3D shape classification with widely-adopted ModelNet10/40, ScanObjectNN and Toys4K, and shape retrieval with ShapeNet-Core validate the superiority of our INVJOINT.
EigenPlaces: Training Viewpoint Robust Models for Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Gabriele Berton; Gabriele Trivigno; Barbara Caputo; Carlo Masone
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Visual Place Recognition is a task that aims to predict the place of an image (called query) based solely on its visual features.
 This is typically done through image retrieval, where the query is matched to the most similar images from a large database of geotagged photos, using learned global descriptors.
 A major challenge in this task is recognizing places seen from different viewpoints. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method, called EigenPlaces, to train our neural network on images from different point of views, which embeds viewpoint robustness into the learned global descriptors. The underlying idea is to cluster the training data so as to explicitly present the model with different views of the same points of interest. The selection of this points of interest is done without the need for extra supervision.
 We then present experiments on the most comprehensive set of datasets in literature, finding that EigenPlaces is able to outperform previous state of the art on the majority of datasets, while requiring 60% less GPU memory for training and using 50% smaller descriptors.
 The code and trained models for EigenPlaces are available at https://github.com/gmberton/EigenPlaces, while results with any other baseline can be computed with the codebase at https://github.com/gmberton/auto_VPR.
Do DALL-E and Flamingo Understand Each Other?
Authors: Hang Li; Jindong Gu; Rajat Koner; Sahand Sharifzadeh; Volker Tresp
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: The field of multimodal research focusing on the comprehension and creation of both images and text has witnessed significant strides. This progress is exemplified by the emergence of sophisticated models dedicated to image captioning at scale, such as the notable Flamingo model and text-to-image generative models, with DALL-E serving as a prominent example. An interesting question worth exploring in this domain is whether Flamingo and DALL-E understand each other. To study this question, we propose a reconstruction task where Flamingo generates a description for a given image and DALL-E uses this description as input to synthesize a new image. We argue that these models understand each other if the generated image is similar to the given image. Specifically, we study the relationship between the quality of the image reconstruction and that of the text generation. We find that an optimal description of an image is one that gives rise to a generated image similar to the original one. The finding motivates us to propose a unified framework to finetune the text-to-image and image-to-text models. Concretely, the reconstruction part forms a regularization loss to guide the tuning of the models. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with different image captioning and image generation models validate our findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed unified framework. As DALL-E and Flamingo are not publicly available, we use Stable Diffusion and BLIP in the remaining work. Project website: https://dalleflamingo.github.io.
CIRI: Curricular Inactivation for Residue-aware One-shot Video Inpainting
Authors: Weiying Zheng; Cheng Xu; Xuemiao Xu; Wenxi Liu; Shengfeng He
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Video inpainting aims at filling in missing regions of a video. However, when dealing with dynamic scenes with camera or object movements, annotating the inpainting target becomes laborious and impractical. In this paper, we resolve the one-shot video inpainting problem in which only one annotated first frame is provided. A naive solution is to propagate the initial target to the other frames with techniques like object tracking. In this context, the main obstacles are the unreliable propagation and the partially inpainted artifacts due to the inaccurate mask. For the former problem, we propose curricular inactivation to replace the hard masking mechanism for indicating the inpainting target, which is robust to erroneous predictions in long-term video inpainting. For the latter, we explore the properties of inpainting residue and present an online residue removal method in an iterative detect-and-refine manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative superiorities of our proposed method in one-shot video inpainting. More importantly, our method is extremely flexible that can be integrated with arbitrary traditional inpainting models, activating them to perform the reliable one-shot video inpainting task. Video demonstrations can be found in our supplement, and our code can be found at https://github.com/Arise-zwy/CIRI.
Prototype-based Dataset Comparison
Authors: Nanne van Noord
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Dataset summarisation is a fruitful approach to dataset inspection. However, when applied to a single dataset the discovery of visual concepts is restricted to those most prominent. We argue that a comparative approach can expand upon this paradigm to enable richer forms of dataset inspection that go beyond the most prominent concepts. To enable dataset comparison we present a module that learns concept-level prototypes across datasets. We leverage self-supervised learning to discover these prototypes without supervision, and we demonstrate the benefits of our approach in two case-studies. Our findings show that dataset comparison extends dataset inspection and we hope to encourage more works in this direction. Code and usage instructions available at https://github.com/Nanne/ProtoSim
FreeCOS: Self-Supervised Learning from Fractals and Unlabeled Images for Curvilinear Object Segmentation
Authors: Tianyi Shi; Xiaohuan Ding; Liang Zhang; Xin Yang
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: Curvilinear object segmentation is critical for many applications. However, manually annotating curvilinear objects is very time-consuming and error-prone, yielding insufficiently available annotated datasets for existing supervised methods and domain adaptation methods. This paper proposes a self-supervised curvilinear object segmentation method (FreeCOS) that learns robust and distinctive features from fractals and unlabeled images. The key contributions include a novel Fractal-FDA synthesis (FFS) module and a geometric information alignment (GIA) approach. FFS generates curvilinear structures based on the parametric Fractal L-system and integrates the generated structures into unlabeled images to obtain synthetic training images via Fourier Domain Adaptation. GIA reduces the intensity differences between the synthetic and unlabeled images by comparing the intensity order of a given pixel to the values of its nearby neighbors. Such image alignment can explicitly remove the dependency on absolute intensity values and enhance the inherent geometric characteristics which are common in both synthetic and real images. In addition, GIA aligns features of synthetic and real images via the prediction space adaptation loss (PSAL) and the curvilinear mask contrastive loss (CMCL). Extensive experimental results on four public datasets, i.e., XCAD, DRIVE, STARE and CrackTree demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, self-supervised methods and traditional methods by a large margin. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/TY-Shi/FreeCOS.
Generating Dynamic Kernels via Transformers for Lane Detection
Authors: Ziye Chen; Yu Liu; Mingming Gong; Bo Du; Guoqi Qian; Kate Smith-Miles
Venue: ICCV 2023 (main)

Abstract: State-of-the-art lane detection methods often rely on specific knowledge about lanes -- such as straight lines and parametric curves -- to detect lane lines. While the specific knowledge can ease the modeling process, it poses challenges in handling lane lines with complex topologies (e.g., dense, forked, curved, etc.). Recently, dynamic convolution-based methods have shown promising performance by utilizing the features from some key locations of a lane line, such as the starting point, as convolutional kernels, and convoluting them with the whole feature map to detect lane lines. While such methods reduce the reliance on specific knowledge, the kernels computed from the key locations fail to capture the lane line's global structure due to its long and thin structure, leading to inaccurate detection of lane lines with complex topologies. In addition, the kernels resulting from the key locations are sensitive to occlusion and lane intersections. To overcome these limitations, we propose a transformer-based dynamic kernel generation architecture for lane detection. It utilizes a transformer to generate dynamic convolutional kernels for each lane line in the input image, and then detect these lane lines with dynamic convolution. Compared to the kernels generated from the key locations of a lane line, the kernels generated with the transformer can capture the lane line's global structure from the whole feature map, enabling them to effectively handle occlusions and lane lines with complex topologies. We evaluate our method on three lane detection benchmarks, and the results demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our method achieves an F1 score of 63.40 on OpenLane and 88.47 on CurveLanes, surpassing the state of the art by 4.30 and 2.37 points, respectively.