OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Models that Can See and Read
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Image Captioning (CAP), which are among the most popular vision-language tasks, have analogous scene-text versions that require reasoning from the text in the image. Despite their obvious resemblance, the two are treated independently and, as we show, yield task-specific methods that can either see or read, but not both. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and propose UniTNT, a Unified Text-Non-Text approach, which grants existing multimodal architectures scene-text understanding capabilities. Specifically, we treat scene-text information as an additional modality, fusing it with any pretrained encoder-decoder-based architecture via designated modules. Thorough experiments reveal that UniTNT leads to the first single model that successfully handles both task types. Moreover, we show that scene-text understanding capabilities can boost vision-language models' performance on general VQA and CAP by up to 2.69% and 0.6 CIDEr, respectively.
Domain-Specificity Inducing Transformers for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Conventional Domain Adaptation (DA) methods aim to learn domain-invariant feature representations to improve the target adaptation performance. However, we motivate that domain-specificity is equally important since in-domain trained models hold crucial domain-specific properties that are beneficial for adaptation. Hence, we propose to build a framework that supports disentanglement and learning of domain-specific factors and task-specific factors in a unified model. Motivated by the success of vision transformers in several multi-modal vision problems, we find that queries could be leveraged to extract the domain-specific factors. Hence, we propose a novel Domain-specificity-inducing Transformer (DSiT) framework for disentangling and learning both domain-specific and task-specific factors. To achieve disentanglement, we propose to construct novel Domain-Representative Inputs (DRI) with domain-specific information to train a domain classifier with a novel domain token. We are the first to utilize vision transformers for domain adaptation in a privacy-oriented source-free setting, and our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-source, multi-source, and multi-target benchmarks
Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Audio-driven talking-head synthesis is a popular research topic for virtual human-related applications. However, the inflexibility and inefficiency of existing methods, which necessitate expensive end-to-end training to transfer emotions from guidance videos to talking-head predictions, are significant limitations. In this work, we propose the Emotional Adaptation for Audio-driven Talking-head (EAT) method, which transforms emotion-agnostic talking-head models into emotion-controllable ones in a cost-effective and efficient manner through parameter-efficient adaptations. Our approach utilizes a pretrained emotion-agnostic talking-head transformer and introduces three lightweight adaptations (the Deep Emotional Prompts, Emotional Deformation Network, and Emotional Adaptation Module) from different perspectives to enable precise and realistic emotion controls. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks, including LRW and MEAD. Additionally, our parameter-efficient adaptations exhibit remarkable generalization ability, even in scenarios where emotional training videos are scarce or nonexistent. Project website: https://yuangan.github.io/eat/
Object-aware Gaze Target Detection
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Gaze target detection aims to predict the image location where the person is looking and the probability that a gaze is out of the scene. Several works have tackled this task by regressing a gaze heatmap centered on the gaze location, however, they overlooked decoding the relationship between the people and the gazed objects. This paper proposes a Transformer-based architecture that automatically detects objects (including heads) in the scene to build associations between every head and the gazed-head/object, resulting in a comprehensive, explainable gaze analysis composed of: gaze target area, gaze pixel point, the class and the image location of the gazed-object. Upon evaluation of the in-the-wild benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics (up to 2.91% gain in AUC, 50% reduction in gaze distance, and 9% gain in out-of-frame average precision) for gaze target detection and 11-13% improvement in average precision for the classification and the localization of the gazed-objects. The code of the proposed method is publicly available.
VADER: Video Alignment Differencing and Retrieval
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose VADER, a spatio-temporal matching, alignment, and change summarization method to help fight misinformation spread via manipulated videos. VADER matches and coarsely aligns partial video fragments to candidate videos using a robust visual descriptor and scalable search over adaptively chunked video content. A transformer-based alignment module then refines the temporal localization of the query fragment within the matched video. A space-time comparator module identifies regions of manipulation between aligned content, invariant to any changes due to any residual temporal misalignments or artifacts arising from non-editorial changes of the content. Robustly matching video to a trusted source enables conclusions to be drawn on video provenance, enabling informed trust decisions on content encountered.
HiLo: Exploiting High Low Frequency Relations for Unbiased Panoptic Scene Graph Generation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Panoptic Scene Graph generation (PSG) is a recently proposed task in image scene understanding that aims to segment the image and extract triplets of subjects, objects and their relations to build a scene graph. This task is particularly challenging for two reasons. First, it suffers from a long-tail problem in its relation categories, making naive biased methods more inclined to high-frequency relations. Existing unbiased methods tackle the long-tail problem by data/loss rebalancing to favor low-frequency relations. Second, a subject-object pair can have two or more semantically overlapping relations. While existing methods favor one over the other, our proposed HiLo framework lets different network branches specialize on low and high frequency relations, enforce their consistency and fuse the results. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to propose an explicitly unbiased PSG method. In extensive experiments we show that our HiLo framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the PSG task. We also apply our method to the Scene Graph Generation task that predicts boxes instead of masks and see improvements over all baseline methods. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/HiLo.
Chop & Learn: Recognizing and Generating Object-State Compositions
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Recognizing and generating object-state compositions has been a challenging task, especially when generalizing to unseen compositions. In this paper, we study the task of cutting objects in different styles and the resulting object state changes. We propose a new benchmark suite Chop & Learn, to accommodate the needs of learning objects and different cut styles using multiple viewpoints. We also propose a new task of Compositional Image Generation, which can transfer learned cut styles to different objects, by generating novel object-state images. Moreover, we also use the videos for Compositional Action Recognition, and show valuable uses of this dataset for multiple video tasks. Project website: https://chopnlearn.github.io.
Fast Adversarial Training with Smooth Convergence
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Fast adversarial training (FAT) is beneficial for improving the adversarial robustness of neural networks. However, previous FAT work has encountered a significant issue known as catastrophic overfitting when dealing with large perturbation budgets, \ie the adversarial robustness of models declines to near zero during training. To address this, we analyze the training process of prior FAT work and observe that catastrophic overfitting is accompanied by the appearance of loss convergence outliers. Therefore, we argue a moderately smooth loss convergence process will be a stable FAT process that solves catastrophic overfitting. To obtain a smooth loss convergence process, we propose a novel oscillatory constraint (dubbed ConvergeSmooth) to limit the loss difference between adjacent epochs. The convergence stride of ConvergeSmooth is introduced to balance convergence and smoothing. Likewise, we design weight centralization without introducing additional hyperparameters other than the loss balance coefficient. Our proposed methods are attack-agnostic and thus can improve the training stability of various FAT techniques. Extensive experiments on popular datasets show that the proposed methods efficiently avoid catastrophic overfitting and outperform all previous FAT methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/FAT-CS/ConvergeSmooth}.
Automatic Animation of Hair Blowing in Still Portrait Photos
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel approach to animate human hair in a still portrait photo. Existing work has largely studied the animation of fluid elements such as water and fire. However, hair animation for a real image remains underexplored, which is a challenging problem, due to the high complexity of hair structure and dynamics. Considering the complexity of hair structure, we innovatively treat hair wisp extraction as an instance segmentation problem, where a hair wisp is referred to as an instance. With advanced instance segmentation networks, our method extracts meaningful and natural hair wisps. Furthermore, we propose a wisp-aware animation module that animates hair wisps with pleasing motions without noticeable artifacts. The extensive experiments show the superiority of our method. Our method provides the most pleasing and compelling viewing experience in the qualitative experiments and outperforms state-of-the-art still-image animation methods by a large margin in the quantitative evaluation. Project url: \url{https://nevergiveu.github.io/AutomaticHairBlowing/}
4D Panoptic Segmentation as Invariant and Equivariant Field Prediction
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we develop rotation-equivariant neural networks for 4D panoptic segmentation. 4D panoptic segmentation is a benchmark task for autonomous driving that requires recognizing semantic classes and object instances on the road based on LiDAR scans, as well as assigning temporally consistent IDs to instances across time. We observe that the driving scenario is symmetric to rotations on the ground plane. Therefore, rotation-equivariance could provide better generalization and more robust feature learning. Specifically, we review the object instance clustering strategies and restate the centerness-based approach and the offset-based approach as the prediction of invariant scalar fields and equivariant vector fields. Other sub-tasks are also unified from this perspective, and different invariant and equivariant layers are designed to facilitate their predictions. Through evaluation on the standard 4D panoptic segmentation benchmark of SemanticKITTI, we show that our equivariant models achieve higher accuracy with lower computational costs compared to their non-equivariant counterparts. Moreover, our method sets the new state-of-the-art performance and achieves 1st place on the SemanticKITTI 4D Panoptic Segmentation leaderboard.
Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural Radiance Field training can be accelerated through the use of grid-based representations in NeRF's learned mapping from spatial coordinates to colors and volumetric density. However, these grid-based approaches lack an explicit understanding of scale and therefore often introduce aliasing, usually in the form of jaggies or missing scene content. Anti-aliasing has previously been addressed by mip-NeRF 360, which reasons about sub-volumes along a cone rather than points along a ray, but this approach is not natively compatible with current grid-based techniques. We show how ideas from rendering and signal processing can be used to construct a technique that combines mip-NeRF 360 and grid-based models such as Instant NGP to yield error rates that are 8% - 77% lower than either prior technique, and that trains 24x faster than mip-NeRF 360.
Fg-T2M: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Human Motion Generation via Diffusion Model
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-driven human motion generation in computer vision is both significant and challenging. However, current methods are limited to producing either deterministic or imprecise motion sequences, failing to effectively control the temporal and spatial relationships required to conform to a given text description. In this work, we propose a fine-grained method for generating high-quality, conditional human motion sequences supporting precise text description. Our approach consists of two key components: 1) a linguistics-structure assisted module that constructs accurate and complete language feature to fully utilize text information; and 2) a context-aware progressive reasoning module that learns neighborhood and overall semantic linguistics features from shallow and deep graph neural networks to achieve a multi-step inference. Experiments show that our approach outperforms text-driven motion generation methods on HumanML3D and KIT test sets and generates better visually confirmed motion to the text conditions.
Hallucination Improves the Performance of Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive learning models based on Siamese structure have demonstrated remarkable performance in self-supervised learning. Such a success of contrastive learning relies on two conditions, a sufficient number of positive pairs and adequate variations between them. If the conditions are not met, these frameworks will lack semantic contrast and be fragile on overfitting. To address these two issues, we propose Hallucinator that could efficiently generate additional positive samples for further contrast. The Hallucinator is differentiable and creates new data in the feature space. Thus, it is optimized directly with the pre-training task and introduces nearly negligible computation. Moreover, we reduce the mutual information of hallucinated pairs and smooth them through non-linear operations. This process helps avoid over-confident contrastive learning models during the training and achieves more transformation-invariant feature embeddings. Remarkably, we empirically prove that the proposed Hallucinator generalizes well to various contrastive learning models, including MoCoV1&V2, SimCLR and SimSiam. Under the linear classification protocol, a stable accuracy gain is achieved, ranging from 0.3% to 3.0% on CIFAR10&100, Tiny ImageNet, STL-10 and ImageNet. The improvement is also observed in transferring pre-train encoders to the downstream tasks, including object detection and segmentation.
S3IM: Stochastic Structural SIMilarity and Its Unreasonable Effectiveness for Neural Fields
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown great success in rendering novel-view images of a given scene by learning an implicit representation with only posed RGB images. NeRF and relevant neural field methods (e.g., neural surface representation) typically optimize a point-wise loss and make point-wise predictions, where one data point corresponds to one pixel. Unfortunately, this line of research failed to use the collective supervision of distant pixels, although it is known that pixels in an image or scene can provide rich structural information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a nonlocal multiplex training paradigm for NeRF and relevant neural field methods via a novel Stochastic Structural SIMilarity (S3IM) loss that processes multiple data points as a whole set instead of process multiple inputs independently. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the unreasonable effectiveness of S3IM in improving NeRF and neural surface representation for nearly free. The improvements of quality metrics can be particularly significant for those relatively difficult tasks: e.g., the test MSE loss unexpectedly drops by more than 90% for TensoRF and DVGO over eight novel view synthesis tasks; a 198% F-score gain and a 64% Chamfer $L_{1}$ distance reduction for NeuS over eight surface reconstruction tasks. Moreover, S3IM is consistently robust even with sparse inputs, corrupted images, and dynamic scenes.
A-STAR: Test-time Attention Segregation and Retention for Text-to-image Synthesis
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

While recent developments in text-to-image generative models have led to a suite of high-performing methods capable of producing creative imagery from free-form text, there are several limitations. By analyzing the cross-attention representations of these models, we notice two key issues. First, for text prompts that contain multiple concepts, there is a significant amount of pixel-space overlap (i.e., same spatial regions) among pairs of different concepts. This eventually leads to the model being unable to distinguish between the two concepts and one of them being ignored in the final generation. Next, while these models attempt to capture all such concepts during the beginning of denoising (e.g., first few steps) as evidenced by cross-attention maps, this knowledge is not retained by the end of denoising (e.g., last few steps). Such loss of knowledge eventually leads to inaccurate generation outputs. To address these issues, our key innovations include two test-time attention-based loss functions that substantially improve the performance of pretrained baseline text-to-image diffusion models. First, our attention segregation loss reduces the cross-attention overlap between attention maps of different concepts in the text prompt, thereby reducing the confusion/conflict among various concepts and the eventual capture of all concepts in the generated output. Next, our attention retention loss explicitly forces text-to-image diffusion models to retain cross-attention information for all concepts across all denoising time steps, thereby leading to reduced information loss and the preservation of all concepts in the generated output.
Membrane Potential Batch Normalization for Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

As one of the energy-efficient alternatives of conventional neural networks (CNNs), spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained more and more interest recently. To train the deep models, some effective batch normalization (BN) techniques are proposed in SNNs. All these BNs are suggested to be used after the convolution layer as usually doing in CNNs. However, the spiking neuron is much more complex with the spatio-temporal dynamics. The regulated data flow after the BN layer will be disturbed again by the membrane potential updating operation before the firing function, i.e., the nonlinear activation. Therefore, we advocate adding another BN layer before the firing function to normalize the membrane potential again, called MPBN. To eliminate the induced time cost of MPBN, we also propose a training-inference-decoupled re-parameterization technique to fold the trained MPBN into the firing threshold. With the re-parameterization technique, the MPBN will not introduce any extra time burden in the inference. Furthermore, the MPBN can also adopt the element-wised form, while these BNs after the convolution layer can only use the channel-wised form. Experimental results show that the proposed MPBN performs well on both popular non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets. Our code is open-sourced at \href{https://github.com/yfguo91/MPBN}{MPBN}.
Enhancing Sample Utilization through Sample Adaptive Augmentation in Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

In semi-supervised learning, unlabeled samples can be utilized through augmentation and consistency regularization. However, we observed certain samples, even undergoing strong augmentation, are still correctly classified with high confidence, resulting in a loss close to zero. It indicates that these samples have been already learned well and do not provide any additional optimization benefits to the model. We refer to these samples as ``naive samples". Unfortunately, existing SSL models overlook the characteristics of naive samples, and they just apply the same learning strategy to all samples. To further optimize the SSL model, we emphasize the importance of giving attention to naive samples and augmenting them in a more diverse manner. Sample adaptive augmentation (SAA) is proposed for this stated purpose and consists of two modules: 1) sample selection module; 2) sample augmentation module. Specifically, the sample selection module picks out {naive samples} based on historical training information at each epoch, then the naive samples will be augmented in a more diverse manner in the sample augmentation module. Thanks to the extreme ease of implementation of the above modules, SAA is advantageous for being simple and lightweight. We add SAA on top of FixMatch and FlexMatch respectively, and experiments demonstrate SAA can significantly improve the models. For example, SAA helped improve the accuracy of FixMatch from 92.50% to 94.76% and that of FlexMatch from 95.01% to 95.31% on CIFAR-10 with 40 labels.
Seeing Beyond the Patch: Scale-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of High-resolution Remote Sensing Imagery based on Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2023
Year: 2023

In remote sensing imagery analysis, patch-based methods have limitations in capturing information beyond the sliding window. This shortcoming poses a significant challenge in processing complex and variable geo-objects, which results in semantic inconsistency in segmentation results. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic scale perception framework, named GeoAgent, which adaptively captures appropriate scale context information outside the image patch based on the different geo-objects. In GeoAgent, each image patch's states are represented by a global thumbnail and a location mask. The global thumbnail provides context beyond the patch, and the location mask guides the perceived spatial relationships. The scale-selection actions are performed through a Scale Control Agent (SCA). A feature indexing module is proposed to enhance the ability of the agent to distinguish the current image patch's location. The action switches the patch scale and context branch of a dual-branch segmentation network that extracts and fuses the features of multi-scale patches. The GeoAgent adjusts the network parameters to perform the appropriate scale-selection action based on the reward received for the selected scale. The experimental results, using two publicly available datasets and our newly constructed dataset WUSU, demonstrate that GeoAgent outperforms previous segmentation methods, particularly for large-scale mapping applications.