OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Context Modeling in 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Unified Perspective
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Estimating 3D human pose from a single image suffers from severe ambiguity since multiple 3D joint configurations may have the same 2D projection. The state-of-the-art methods often rely on context modeling methods such as pictorial structure model (PSM) or graph neural network (GNN) to reduce ambiguity. However, there is no study that rigorously compares them side by side. So we first present a general formula for context modeling in which both PSM and GNN are its special cases. By comparing the two methods, we found that the end-to-end training scheme in GNN and the limb length constraints in PSM are two complementary factors to improve results. To combine their advantages, we propose ContextPose based on attention mechanism that allows enforcing soft limb length constraints in a deep network. The approach effectively reduces the chance of getting absurd 3D pose estimates with incorrect limb lengths and achieves state-of-the-art results on two benchmark datasets. More importantly, the introduction of limb length constraints into deep networks enables the approach to achieve much better generalization performance.
Consensus Maximisation Using Influences of Monotone Boolean Functions
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Consensus maximisation (MaxCon), which is widely used for robust fitting in computer vision, aims to find the largest subset of data that fits the model within some tolerance level. In this paper, we outline the connection between MaxCon problem and the abstract problem of finding the maximum upper zero of a Monotone Boolean Function (MBF) defined over the Boolean Cube. Then, we link the concept of influences (in a MBF) to the concept of outlier (in MaxCon) and show that influences of points belonging to the largest structure in data would generally be smaller under certain conditions. Based on this observation, we present an iterative algorithm to perform consensus maximisation. Results for both synthetic and real visual data experiments show that the MBF based algorithm is capable of generating a near optimal solution relatively quickly. This is particularly important where there are large number of outliers (gross or pseudo) in the observed data.
DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

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 (DGFont). 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
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

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 both 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.
HDMapGen: A Hierarchical Graph Generative Model of High Definition Maps
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

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 scalability and efficiency.
View Generalization for Single Image Textured 3D Models
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Humans can easily infer the underlying 3D geometry and texture of an object only from a single 2D image. Current computer vision methods can do this, too, but suffer from view generalization problems - the models inferred tend to make poor predictions of appearance in novel views. As for generalization problems in machine learning, the difficulty is balancing single-view accuracy (cf. training error; bias) with novel view accuracy (cf. test error; variance). We describe a class of models whose geometric rigidity is easily controlled to manage this tradeoff. We describe a cycle consistency loss that improves view generalization (roughly, a model from a generated view should predict the original view well). View generalization of textures requires that models share texture information, so a car seen from the back still has headlights because other cars have headlights. We describe a cycle consistency loss that encourages model textures to be aligned, so as to encourage sharing. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art method and show both qualitative and quantitative improvements.
3D Human Action Representation Learning via Cross-View Consistency Pursuit
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we propose a Cross-view Contrastive Learning framework for unsupervised 3D skeleton-based action Representation (CrosSCLR), by leveraging multi-view complementary supervision signal. CrosSCLR consists of both single-view contrastive learning (SkeletonCLR) and cross-view consistent knowledge mining (CVC-KM) modules, integrated in a collaborative learning manner. It is noted that CVC-KM works in such a way that high-confidence positive/negative samples and their distributions are exchanged among views according to their embedding similarity, ensuring cross-view consistency in terms of contrastive context, i.e., similar distributions. Extensive experiments show that CrosSCLR achieves remarkable action recognition results on NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets under unsupervised settings, with observed higher-quality action representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/LinguoLi/CrosSCLR.
Deep Analysis of CNN-Based Spatio-Temporal Representations for Action Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, a number of approaches based on 2D or 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) have emerged for video action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large-scale benchmark datasets. In this paper, we carry out in-depth comparative analysis to better understand the differences between these approaches and the progress made by them. To this end, we develop an unified framework for both 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN action models, which enables us to remove bells and whistles and provides a common ground for fair comparison. We then conduct an effort towards a large-scale analysis involving over 300 action recognition models. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that a) a significant leap is made in efficiency for action recognition, but not in accuracy; b) 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN models behave similarly in terms of spatio-temporal representation abilities and transferability. Our codes are available at https://github.com/IBM/action-recognition-pytorch.
Part-Aware Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we introduce the new scene understanding task of Part-aware Panoptic Segmentation (PPS), which aims to understand a scene at multiple levels of abstraction, and unifies the tasks of scene parsing and part parsing. For this novel task, we provide consistent annotations on two commonly used datasets: Cityscapes and Pascal VOC. Moreover, we present a single metric to evaluate PPS, called Part-aware Panoptic Quality (PartPQ). For this new task, using the metric and annotations, we set multiple baselines by merging results of existing state-of-the-art methods for panoptic segmentation and part segmentation. Finally, we conduct several experiments that evaluate the importance of the different levels of abstraction in this single task.
Convolutional Hough Matching Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Despite advances in feature representation, leveraging geometric relations is crucial for establishing reliable visual correspondences under large variations of images. In this work we introduce a Hough transform perspective on convolutional matching and propose an effective geometric matching algorithm, dubbed Convolutional Hough Matching (CHM). The method distributes similarities of candidate matches over a geometric transformation space and evaluate them in a convolutional manner. We cast it into a trainable neural layer with a semi-isotropic high-dimensional kernel, which learns non-rigid matching with a small number of interpretable parameters. To validate the effect, we develop the neural network with CHM layers that perform convolutional matching in the space of translation and scaling. Our method sets a new state of the art on standard benchmarks for semantic visual correspondence, proving its strong robustness to challenging intra-class variations.
Dynamic Class Queue for Large Scale Face Recognition in the Wild
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Learning discriminative representation using large-scale face datasets in the wild is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains challenging. The difficulties lie in many aspects and this work focus on computing resource constraint and long-tailed class distribution. Recently, classification-based representation learning with deep neural networks and well-designed losses have demonstrated good recognition performance. However, the computing and memory cost linearly scales up to the number of identities (classes) in the training set, and the learning process suffers from unbalanced classes. In this work, we propose a dynamic class queue (DCQ) to tackle these two problems. Specifically, for each iteration during training, a subset of classes for recognition are dynamically selected and their class weights are dynamically generated on-the-fly which are stored in a queue. Since only a subset of classes is selected for each iteration, the computing requirement is reduced. By using a single server without model parallel, we empirically verify in large-scale datasets that 10% of classes are sufficient to achieve similar performance as using all classes. Moreover, the class weights are dynamically generated in a few-shot manner and therefore suitable for tail classes with only a few instances. We show clear improvement over a strong baseline in the largest public dataset Megaface Challenge2 (MF2) which has 672K identities and over 88% of them have less than 10 instances. Code is available at https://github.com/bilylee/DCQ
Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Coordinate-based neural representations have shown significant promise as an alternative to discrete, array-based representations for complex low dimensional signals. However, optimizing a coordinate-based network from randomly initialized weights for each new signal is inefficient. We propose applying standard meta-learning algorithms to learn the initial weight parameters for these fully-connected networks based on the underlying class of signals being represented (e.g., images of faces or 3D models of chairs). Despite requiring only a minor change in implementation, using these learned initial weights enables faster convergence during optimization and can serve as a strong prior over the signal class being modeled, resulting in better generalization when only partial observations of a given signal are available. We explore these benefits across a variety of tasks, including representing 2D images, reconstructing CT scans, and recovering 3D shapes and scenes from 2D image observations.
Towards Improving the Consistency, Efficiency, and Flexibility of Differentiable Neural Architecture Search
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Most differentiable neural architecture search methods construct a super-net for search and derive a target-net as its sub-graph for evaluation. There exists a significant gap between the architectures in search and evaluation. As a result, current methods suffer from an inconsistent, inefficient, and inflexible search process. In this paper, we introduce EnTranNAS that is composed of Engine-cells and Transit-cells. The Engine-cell is differentiable for architecture search, while the Transit-cell only transits a sub-graph by architecture derivation. Consequently, the gap between the architectures in search and evaluation is significantly reduced. Our method also spares much memory and computation cost, which speeds up the search process. A feature sharing strategy is introduced for more balanced optimization and more efficient search. Furthermore, we develop an architecture derivation method to replace the traditional one that is based on a hand-crafted rule. Our method enables differentiable sparsification, and keeps the derived architecture equivalent to that of Engine-cell, which further improves the consistency between search and evaluation. Besides, it supports the search for topology where a node can be connected to prior nodes with any number of connections, so that the searched architectures could be more flexible. For experiments on CIFAR-10, our search on the standard space requires only 0.06 GPU-day. We further have an error rate of 2.22% with 0.07 GPU-day for the search on an extended space. We can also directly perform the search on ImageNet with topology learnable and achieve a top-1 error rate of 23.8% in 2.1 GPU-day.
Collaborative Spatial-Temporal Modeling for Language-Queried Video Actor Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Language-queried video actor segmentation aims to predict the pixel-level mask of the actor which performs the actions described by a natural language query in the target frames. Existing methods adopt 3D CNNs over the video clip as a general encoder to extract a mixed spatio-temporal feature for the target frame. Though 3D convolutions are amenable to recognizing which actor is performing the queried actions, it also inevitably introduces misaligned spatial information from adjacent frames, which confuses features of the target frame and yields inaccurate segmentation. Therefore, we propose a collaborative spatial-temporal encoder-decoder framework which contains a 3D temporal encoder over the video clip to recognize the queried actions, and a 2D spatial encoder over the target frame to accurately segment the queried actors. In the decoder, a Language-Guided Feature Selection (LGFS) module is proposed to flexibly integrate spatial and temporal features from the two encoders. We also propose a Cross-Modal Adaptive Modulation (CMAM) module to dynamically recombine spatial- and temporal-relevant linguistic features for multimodal feature interaction in each stage of the two encoders. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks with less computational overhead than previous approaches.
Drafting and Revision: Laplacian Pyramid Network for Fast High-Quality Artistic Style Transfer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Artistic style transfer aims at migrating the style from an example image to a content image. Currently, optimization-based methods have achieved great stylization quality, but expensive time cost restricts their practical applications. Meanwhile, feed-forward methods still fail to synthesize complex style, especially when holistic global and local patterns exist. Inspired by the common painting process of drawing a draft and revising the details, we introduce a novel feed-forward method named Laplacian Pyramid Network (LapStyle). LapStyle first transfers global style patterns in low-resolution via a Drafting Network. It then revises the local details in high-resolution via a Revision Network, which hallucinates a residual image according to the draft and the image textures extracted by Laplacian filtering. Higher resolution details can be easily generated by stacking Revision Networks with multiple Laplacian pyramid levels. The final stylized image is obtained by aggregating outputs of all pyramid levels. %We also introduce a patch discriminator to better learn local patterns adversarially. Experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high quality stylized images in real time, where holistic style patterns are properly transferred.
Refer-It-in-RGBD: A Bottom-Up Approach for 3D Visual Grounding in RGBD Images
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Grounding referring expressions in RGBD image has been an emerging field. We present a novel task of 3D visual grounding in single-view RGBD image where the referred objects are often only partially scanned due to occlusion. In contrast to previous works that directly generate object proposals for grounding in the 3D scenes, we propose a bottom-up approach to gradually aggregate context-aware information, effectively addressing the challenge posed by the partial geometry. Our approach first fuses the language and the visual features at the bottom level to generate a heatmap that coarsely localizes the relevant regions in the RGBD image. Then our approach conducts an adaptive feature learning based on the heatmap and performs the object-level matching with another visio-linguistic fusion to finally ground the referred object. We evaluate the proposed method by comparing to the state-of-the-art methods on both the RGBD images extracted from the ScanRefer dataset and our newly collected SUNRefer dataset. Experiments show that our method outperforms the previous methods by a large margin (by 11.2% and 15.6% Acc@0.5) on both datasets.
NeuralFusion: Online Depth Fusion in Latent Space
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

We present a novel online depth map fusion approach that learns depth map aggregation in a latent feature space. While previous fusion methods use an explicit scene representation like signed distance functions (SDFs), we propose a learned feature representation for the fusion. The key idea is a separation between the scene representation used for the fusion and the output scene representation, via an additional translator network. Our neural network architecture consists of two main parts: a depth and feature fusion sub-network, which is followed by a translator sub-network to produce the final surface representation (e.g. TSDF) for visualization or other tasks. Our approach is an online process, handles high noise levels, and is particularly able to deal with gross outliers common for photometric stereo-based depth maps. Experiments on real and synthetic data demonstrate improved results compared to the state of the art, especially in challenging scenarios with large amounts of noise and outliers.
Towards Good Practices for Efficiently Annotating Large-Scale Image Classification Datasets
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Data is the engine of modern computer vision, which necessitates collecting large-scale datasets. This is expensive, and guaranteeing the quality of the labels is a major challenge. In this paper, we investigate efficient annotation strategies for collecting multi-class classification labels for a large collection of images. While methods that exploit learnt models for labeling exist, a surprisingly prevalent approach is to query humans for a fixed number of labels per datum and aggregate them, which is expensive. Building on prior work on online joint probabilistic modeling of human annotations and machine-generated beliefs, we propose modifications and best practices aimed at minimizing human labeling effort. Specifically, we make use of advances in self-supervised learning, view annotation as a semi-supervised learning problem, identify and mitigate pitfalls and ablate several key design choices to propose effective guidelines for labeling. Our analysis is done in a more realistic simulation that involves querying human labelers, which uncovers issues with evaluation using existing worker simulation methods. Simulated experiments on a 125k image subset of the ImageNet100 show that it can be annotated to 80% top-1 accuracy with 0.35 annotations per image on average, a 2.7x and 6.7x improvement over prior work and manual annotation, respectively. Project page: https://fidler-lab.github.io/efficient-annotation-cookbook
MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation With Mask Transformers
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

We present MaX-DeepLab, the first end-to-end model for panoptic segmentation. Our approach simplifies the current pipeline that depends heavily on surrogate sub-tasks and hand-designed components, such as box detection, non-maximum suppression, thing-stuff merging, etc. Although these sub-tasks are tackled by area experts, they fail to comprehensively solve the target task. By contrast, our MaX-DeepLab directly predicts class-labeled masks with a mask transformer, and is trained with a panoptic quality inspired loss via bipartite matching. Our mask transformer employs a dual-path architecture that introduces a global memory path in addition to a CNN path, allowing direct communication with any CNN layers. As a result, MaX-DeepLab shows a significant 7.1% PQ gain in the box-free regime on the challenging COCO dataset, closing the gap between box-based and box-free methods for the first time. A small variant of MaX-DeepLab improves 3.0% PQ over DETR with similar parameters and M-Adds. Furthermore, MaX-DeepLab, without test time augmentation, achieves new state-of-the-art 51.3% PQ on COCO test-dev set. Code is available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2.