GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Towards Better Gradient Consistency for Neural Signed Distance Functions via Level Set Alignment
Authors: Baorui Ma; Junsheng Zhou; Yu-Shen Liu; Zhizhong Han
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have shown remarkable capability in representing geometry with details. However, without signed distance supervision, it is still a challenge to infer SDFs from point clouds or multi-view images using neural networks. In this paper, we claim that gradient consistency in the field, indicated by the parallelism of level sets, is the key factor affecting the inference accuracy. Hence, we propose a level set alignment loss to evaluate the parallelism of level sets, which can be minimized to achieve better gradient consistency. Our novelty lies in that we can align all level sets to the zero level set by constraining gradients at queries and their projections on the zero level set in an adaptive way. Our insight is to propagate the zero level set to everywhere in the field through consistent gradients to eliminate uncertainty in the field that is caused by the discreteness of 3D point clouds or the lack of observations from multi-view images. Our proposed loss is a general term which can be used upon different methods to infer SDFs from 3D point clouds and multi-view images. Our numerical and visual comparisons demonstrate that our loss can significantly improve the accuracy of SDFs inferred from point clouds or multi-view images under various benchmarks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mabaorui/TowardsBetterGradient.
Zero-Shot Everything Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, and in Explainable Style
Authors: Fengyin Lin; Mingkang Li; Da Li; Timothy Hospedales; Yi-Zhe Song; Yonggang Qi
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of zero-short sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), however with two significant differentiators to prior art (i) we tackle all variants (inter-category, intra-category, and cross datasets) of ZS-SBIR with just one network ("everything"), and (ii) we would really like to understand how this sketch-photo matching operates ("explainable"). Our key innovation lies with the realization that such a cross-modal matching problem could be reduced to comparisons of groups of key local patches -- akin to the seasoned "bag-of-words" paradigm. Just with this change, we are able to achieve both of the aforementioned goals, with the added benefit of no longer requiring external semantic knowledge. Technically, ours is a transformer-based cross-modal network, with three novel components (i) a self-attention module with a learnable tokenizer to produce visual tokens that correspond to the most informative local regions, (ii) a cross-attention module to compute local correspondences between the visual tokens across two modalities, and finally (iii) a kernel-based relation network to assemble local putative matches and produce an overall similarity metric for a sketch-photo pair. Experiments show ours indeed delivers superior performances across all ZS-SBIR settings. The all important explainable goal is elegantly achieved by visualizing cross-modal token correspondences, and for the first time, via sketch to photo synthesis by universal replacement of all matched photo patches.
Graph Representation for Order-Aware Visual Transformation
Authors: Yue Qiu; Yanjun Sun; Fumiya Matsuzawa; Kenji Iwata; Hirokatsu Kataoka
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new visual reasoning formulation that aims at discovering changes between image pairs and their temporal orders. Recognizing scene dynamics and their chronological orders is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. The aforementioned abilities make it possible to follow step-by-step instructions, reason about and analyze events, recognize abnormal dynamics, and restore scenes to their previous states. However, it remains unclear how well current AI systems perform in these capabilities. Although a series of studies have focused on identifying and describing changes from image pairs, they mainly consider those changes that occur synchronously, thus neglecting potential orders within those changes. To address the above issue, we first propose a visual transformation graph structure for conveying order-aware changes. Then, we benchmarked previous methods on our newly generated dataset and identified the issues of existing methods for change order recognition. Finally, we show a significant improvement in order-aware change recognition by introducing a new model that explicitly associates different changes and then identifies changes and their orders in a graph representation.
StarCraftImage: A Dataset for Prototyping Spatial Reasoning Methods for Multi-Agent Environments
Authors: Sean Kulinski; Nicholas R. Waytowich; James Z. Hare; David I. Inouye
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com/.
Quality-Aware Pre-Trained Models for Blind Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Kai Zhao; Kun Yuan; Ming Sun; Mading Li; Xing Wen
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) aims to automatically evaluate the perceived quality of a single image, whose performance has been improved by deep learning-based methods in recent years. However, the paucity of labeled data somewhat restrains deep learning-based BIQA methods from unleashing their full potential. In this paper, we propose to solve the problem by a pretext task customized for BIQA in a self-supervised learning manner, which enables learning representations from orders of magnitude more data. To constrain the learning process, we propose a quality-aware contrastive loss based on a simple assumption: the quality of patches from a distorted image should be similar, but vary from patches from the same image with different degradations and patches from different images. Further, we improve the existing degradation process and form a degradation space with the size of roughly 2x10^7. After pre-trained on ImageNet using our method, models are more sensitive to image quality and perform significantly better on downstream BIQA tasks. Experimental results show that our method obtains remarkable improvements on popular BIQA datasets.
Topology-Guided Multi-Class Cell Context Generation for Digital Pathology
Authors: Shahira Abousamra; Rajarsi Gupta; Tahsin Kurc; Dimitris Samaras; Joel Saltz; Chao Chen
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: In digital pathology, the spatial context of cells is important for cell classification, cancer diagnosis and prognosis. To model such complex cell context, however, is challenging. Cells form different mixtures, lineages, clusters and holes. To model such structural patterns in a learnable fashion, we introduce several mathematical tools from spatial statistics and topological data analysis. We incorporate such structural descriptors into a deep generative model as both conditional inputs and a differentiable loss. This way, we are able to generate high quality multi-class cell layouts for the first time. We show that the topology-rich cell layouts can be used for data augmentation and improve the performance of downstream tasks such as cell classification.
Bi-LRFusion: Bi-Directional LiDAR-Radar Fusion for 3D Dynamic Object Detection
Authors: Yingjie Wang; Jiajun Deng; Yao Li; Jinshui Hu; Cong Liu; Yu Zhang; Jianmin Ji; Wanli Ouyang; Yanyong Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: LiDAR and Radar are two complementary sensing approaches in that LiDAR specializes in capturing an object's 3D shape while Radar provides longer detection ranges as well as velocity hints. Though seemingly natural, how to efficiently combine them for improved feature representation is still unclear. The main challenge arises from that Radar data are extremely sparse and lack height information. Therefore, directly integrating Radar features into LiDAR-centric detection networks is not optimal. In this work, we introduce a bi-directional LiDAR-Radar fusion framework, termed Bi-LRFusion, to tackle the challenges and improve 3D detection for dynamic objects. Technically, Bi-LRFusion involves two steps: first, it enriches Radar's local features by learning important details from the LiDAR branch to alleviate the problems caused by the absence of height information and extreme sparsity; second, it combines LiDAR features with the enhanced Radar features in a unified bird's-eye-view representation. We conduct extensive experiments on nuScenes and ORR datasets, and show that our Bi-LRFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for detecting dynamic objects. Notably, Radar data in these two datasets have different formats, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method. Codes will be published.
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Subspace Clustering
Authors: Lai Wei; Zhengwei Chen; Jun Yin; Changming Zhu; Rigui Zhou; Jin Liu
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Spectral-type subspace clustering algorithms have shown excellent performance in many subspace clustering applications. The existing spectral-type subspace clustering algorithms either focus on designing constraints for the reconstruction coefficient matrix or feature extraction methods for finding latent features of original data samples. In this paper, inspired by graph convolutional networks, we use the graph convolution technique to develop a feature extraction method and a coefficient matrix constraint simultaneously. And the graph-convolutional operator is updated iteratively and adaptively in our proposed algorithm. Hence, we call the proposed method adaptive graph convolutional subspace clustering (AGCSC). We claim that, by using AGCSC, the aggregated feature representation of original data samples is suitable for subspace clustering, and the coefficient matrix could reveal the subspace structure of the original data set more faithfully. Finally, plenty of subspace clustering experiments prove our conclusions and show that AGCSC outperforms some related methods as well as some deep models.
LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding
Authors: Gen Li; Varun Jampani; Deqing Sun; Laura Sevilla-Lara
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Humans excel at acquiring knowledge through observation. For example, we can learn to use new tools by watching demonstrations. This skill is fundamental for intelligent systems to interact with the world. A key step to acquire this skill is to identify what part of the object affords each action, which is called affordance grounding. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a framework called LOCATE that can identify matching object parts across images, to transfer knowledge from images where an object is being used (exocentric images used for learning), to images where the object is inactive (egocentric ones used to test). To this end, we first find interaction areas and extract their feature embeddings. Then we learn to aggregate the embeddings into compact prototypes (human, object part, and background), and select the one representing the object part. Finally, we use the selected prototype to guide affordance grounding. We do this in a weakly supervised manner, learning only from image-level affordance and object labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on both seen and unseen objects.
Learning Steerable Function for Efficient Image Resampling
Authors: Jiacheng Li; Chang Chen; Wei Huang; Zhiqiang Lang; Fenglong Song; Youliang Yan; Zhiwei Xiong
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Image resampling is a basic technique that is widely employed in daily applications. Existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have made impressive progress in resampling performance. Yet these methods are still not the perfect substitute for interpolation, due to the issues of efficiency and continuous resampling. In this work, we propose a novel method of Learning Resampling Function (termed LeRF), which takes advantage of both the structural priors learned by DNNs and the locally continuous assumption of interpolation methods. Specifically, LeRF assigns spatially-varying steerable resampling functions to input image pixels and learns to predict the hyper-parameters that determine the orientations of these resampling functions with a neural network. To achieve highly efficient inference, we adopt look-up tables (LUTs) to accelerate the inference of the learned neural network. Furthermore, we design a directional ensemble strategy and edge-sensitive indexing patterns to better capture local structures. Extensive experiments show that our method runs as fast as interpolation, generalizes well to arbitrary transformations, and outperforms interpolation significantly, e.g., up to 3dB PSNR gain over bicubic for x2 upsampling on Manga109.
TokenHPE: Learning Orientation Tokens for Efficient Head Pose Estimation via Transformers
Authors: Cheng Zhang; Hai Liu; Yongjian Deng; Bochen Xie; Youfu Li
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Head pose estimation (HPE) has been widely used in the fields of human machine interaction, self-driving, and attention estimation. However, existing methods cannot deal with extreme head pose randomness and serious occlusions. To address these challenges, we identify three cues from head images, namely, neighborhood similarities, significant facial changes, and critical minority relationships. To leverage the observed findings, we propose a novel critical minority relationship-aware method based on the Transformer architecture in which the facial part relationships can be learned. Specifically, we design several orientation tokens to explicitly encode the basic orientation regions. Meanwhile, a novel token guide multi-loss function is designed to guide the orientation tokens as they learn the desired regional similarities and relationships. We evaluate the proposed method on three challenging benchmark HPE datasets. Experiments show that our method achieves better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zc2023/TokenHPE.
BioNet: A Biologically-Inspired Network for Face Recognition
Authors: Pengyu Li
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Recently, whether and how cutting-edge Neuroscience findings can inspire Artificial Intelligence (AI) confuse both communities and draw much discussion. As one of the most critical fields in AI, Computer Vision (CV) also pays much attention to the discussion. To show our ideas and experimental evidence to the discussion, we focus on one of the most broadly researched topics both in Neuroscience and CV fields, i.e., Face Recognition (FR). Neuroscience studies show that face attributes are essential to the human face-recognizing system. How the attributes contribute also be explained by the Neuroscience community. Even though a few CV works improved the FR performance with attribute enhancement, none of them are inspired by the human face-recognizing mechanism nor boosted performance significantly. To show our idea experimentally, we model the biological characteristics of the human face-recognizing system with classical Convolutional Neural Network Operators (CNN Ops) purposely. We name the proposed Biologically-inspired Network as BioNet. Our BioNet consists of two cascade sub-networks, i.e., the Visual Cortex Network (VCN) and the Inferotemporal Cortex Network (ICN). The VCN is modeled with a classical CNN backbone. The proposed ICN comprises three biologically-inspired modules, i.e., the Cortex Functional Compartmentalization, the Compartment Response Transform, and the Response Intensity Modulation. The experiments prove that: 1) The cutting-edge findings about the human face-recognizing system can further boost the CNN-based FR network. 2) With the biological mechanism, both identity-related attributes (e.g., gender) and identity-unrelated attributes (e.g., expression) can benefit the deep FR models. Surprisingly, the identity-unrelated ones contribute even more than the identity-related ones. 3) The proposed BioNet significantly boosts state-of-the-art on standard FR benchmark datasets. For example, BioNet boosts IJB-B@1e-6 from 52.12% to 68.28% and MegaFace from 98.74% to 99.19%. The source code will be released.
Scaling Up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Minguk Kang; Jun-Yan Zhu; Richard Zhang; Jaesik Park; Eli Shechtman; Sylvain Paris; Taesung Park
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: The recent success of text-to-image synthesis has taken the world by storm and captured the general public's imagination. From a technical standpoint, it also marked a drastic change in the favored architecture to design generative image models. GANs used to be the de facto choice, with techniques like StyleGAN. With DALL-E 2, auto-regressive and diffusion models became the new standard for large-scale generative models overnight. This rapid shift raises a fundamental question: can we scale up GANs to benefit from large datasets like LAION? We find that naively increasing the capacity of the StyleGAN architecture quickly becomes unstable. We introduce GigaGAN, a new GAN architecture that far exceeds this limit, demonstrating GANs as a viable option for text-to-image synthesis. GigaGAN offers three major advantages. First, it is orders of magnitude faster at inference time, taking only 0.13 seconds to synthesize a 512px image. Second, it can synthesize high-resolution images, for example, 16-megapixel images in 3.66 seconds. Finally, GigaGAN supports various latent space editing applications such as latent interpolation, style mixing, and vector arithmetic operations.
DepGraph: Towards Any Structural Pruning
Authors: Gongfan Fang; Xinyin Ma; Mingli Song; Michael Bi Mi; Xinchao Wang
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Structural pruning enables model acceleration by removing structurally-grouped parameters from neural networks. However, the parameter-grouping patterns vary widely across different models, making architecture-specific pruners, which rely on manually-designed grouping schemes, non-generalizable to new architectures. In this work, we study a highly-challenging yet barely-explored task, any structural pruning, to tackle general structural pruning of arbitrary architecture like CNNs, RNNs, GNNs and Transformers. The most prominent obstacle towards this goal lies in the structural coupling, which not only forces different layers to be pruned simultaneously, but also expects all removed parameters to be consistently unimportant, thereby avoiding structural issues and significant performance degradation after pruning. To address this problem, we propose a general and  fully automatic  method, Dependency Graph (DepGraph), to explicitly model the dependency between layers and comprehensively group coupled parameters for pruning. In this work, we extensively evaluate our method on several architectures and tasks, including ResNe(X)t, DenseNet, MobileNet and Vision transformer for images, GAT for graph, DGCNN for 3D point cloud, alongside LSTM for language, and demonstrate that, even with a simple norm-based criterion, the proposed method consistently yields gratifying performances.
Exploring Discontinuity for Video Frame Interpolation
Authors: Sangjin Lee; Hyeongmin Lee; Chajin Shin; Hanbin Son; Sangyoun Lee
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Video frame interpolation (VFI) is the task that synthesizes the intermediate frame given two consecutive frames. Most of the previous studies have focused on appropriate frame warping operations and refinement modules for the warped frames. These studies have been conducted on natural videos containing only continuous motions. However, many practical videos contain various unnatural objects with discontinuous motions such as logos, user interfaces and subtitles. We propose three techniques that can make the existing deep learning-based VFI architectures robust to these elements. First is a novel data augmentation strategy called figure-text mixing (FTM) which can make the models learn discontinuous motions during training stage without any extra dataset. Second, we propose a simple but effective module that predicts a map called discontinuity map (D-map), which densely distinguishes between areas of continuous and discontinuous motions. Lastly, we propose loss functions to give supervisions of the discontinuous motion areas which can be applied along with FTM and D-map. We additionally collect a special test benchmark called Graphical Discontinuous Motion (GDM) dataset consisting of some mobile games and chatting videos. Applied to the various state-of-the-art VFI networks, our method significantly improves the interpolation qualities on the videos from not only GDM dataset, but also the existing benchmarks containing only continuous motions such as Vimeo90K, UCF101, and DAVIS.
DynamicStereo: Consistent Dynamic Depth From Stereo Videos
Authors: Nikita Karaev; Ignacio Rocco; Benjamin Graham; Natalia Neverova; Andrea Vedaldi; Christian Rupprecht
Venue: CVPR 2023 (main)

Abstract: We consider the problem of reconstructing a dynamic scene observed from a stereo camera. Most existing methods for depth from stereo treat different stereo frames independently, leading to temporally inconsistent depth predictions. Temporal consistency is especially important for immersive AR or VR scenarios, where flickering greatly diminishes the user experience. We propose DynamicStereo, a novel transformer-based architecture to estimate disparity for stereo videos. The network learns to pool information from neighboring frames to improve the temporal consistency of its predictions. Our architecture is designed to process stereo videos efficiently through divided attention layers. We also introduce Dynamic Replica, a new benchmark dataset containing synthetic videos of people and animals in scanned environments, which provides complementary training and evaluation data for dynamic stereo closer to real applications than existing datasets. Training with this dataset further improves the quality of predictions of our proposed DynamicStereo as well as prior methods. Finally, it acts as a benchmark for consistent stereo methods.