OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robust Dynamic Radiance Fields
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Dynamic radiance field reconstruction methods aim to model the time-varying structure and appearance of a dynamic scene. Existing methods, however, assume that accurate camera poses can be reliably estimated by Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms. These methods, thus, are unreliable as SfM algorithms often fail or produce erroneous poses on challenging videos with highly dynamic objects, poorly textured surfaces, and rotating camera motion. We address this robustness issue by jointly estimating the static and dynamic radiance fields along with the camera parameters (poses and focal length). We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our results show favorable performance over the state-of-the-art dynamic view synthesis methods.
PLIKS: A Pseudo-Linear Inverse Kinematic Solver for 3D Human Body Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce PLIKS (Pseudo-Linear Inverse Kinematic Solver) for reconstruction of a 3D mesh of the human body from a single 2D image. Current techniques directly regress the shape, pose, and translation of a parametric model from an input image through a non-linear mapping with minimal flexibility to any external influences. We approach the task as a model-in-the-loop optimization problem. PLIKS is built on a linearized formulation of the parametric SMPL model. Using PLIKS, we can analytically reconstruct the human model via 2D pixel-aligned vertices. This enables us with the flexibility to use accurate camera calibration information when available. PLIKS offers an easy way to introduce additional constraints such as shape and translation. We present quantitative evaluations which confirm that PLIKS achieves more accurate reconstruction with greater than 10% improvement compared to other state-of-the-art methods with respect to the standard 3D human pose and shape benchmarks while also obtaining a reconstruction error improvement of 12.9 mm on the newer AGORA dataset.
Interactive Segmentation of Radiance Fields
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Radiance Fields (RF) are popular to represent casually-captured scenes for new view synthesis and several applications beyond it. Mixed reality on personal spaces needs understanding and manipulating scenes represented as RFs, with semantic segmentation of objects as an important step. Prior segmentation efforts show promise but don't scale to complex objects with diverse appearance. We present the ISRF method to interactively segment objects with fine structure and appearance. Nearest neighbor feature matching using distilled semantic features identifies high-confidence seed regions. Bilateral search in a joint spatio-semantic space grows the region to recover accurate segmentation. We show state-of-the-art results of segmenting objects from RFs and compositing them to another scene, changing appearance, etc., and an interactive segmentation tool that others can use. Project Page: https://rahul-goel.github.io/isrf/
Are Data-Driven Explanations Robust Against Out-of-Distribution Data?
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

As black-box models increasingly power high-stakes applications, a variety of data-driven explanation methods have been introduced. Meanwhile, machine learning models are constantly challenged by distributional shifts. A question naturally arises: Are data-driven explanations robust against out-of-distribution data? Our empirical results show that even though predict correctly, the model might still yield unreliable explanations under distributional shifts. How to develop robust explanations against out-of-distribution data? To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end model-agnostic learning framework Distributionally Robust Explanations (DRE). The key idea is, inspired by self-supervised learning, to fully utilizes the inter-distribution information to provide supervisory signals for the learning of explanations without human annotation. Can robust explanations benefit the model's generalization capability? We conduct extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks and data types, including classification and regression on image and scientific tabular data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the model's performance in terms of explanation and prediction robustness against distributional shifts.
Top-Down Visual Attention From Analysis by Synthesis
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Current attention algorithms (e.g., self-attention) are stimulus-driven and highlight all the salient objects in an image. However, intelligent agents like humans often guide their attention based on the high-level task at hand, focusing only on task-related objects. This ability of task-guided top-down attention provides task-adaptive representation and helps the model generalize to various tasks. In this paper, we consider top-down attention from a classic Analysis-by-Synthesis (AbS) perspective of vision. Prior work indicates a functional equivalence between visual attention and sparse reconstruction; we show that an AbS visual system that optimizes a similar sparse reconstruction objective modulated by a goal-directed top-down signal naturally simulates top-down attention. We further propose Analysis-by-Synthesis Vision Transformer (AbSViT), which is a top-down modulated ViT model that variationally approximates AbS, and achieves controllable top-down attention. For real-world applications, AbSViT consistently improves over baselines on Vision-Language tasks such as VQA and zero-shot retrieval where language guides the top-down attention. AbSViT can also serve as a general backbone, improving performance on classification, semantic segmentation, and model robustness.
Hierarchical Fine-Grained Image Forgery Detection and Localization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Differences in forgery attributes of images generated in CNN-synthesized and image-editing domains are large, and such differences make a unified image forgery detection and localization (IFDL) challenging. To this end, we present a hierarchical fine-grained formulation for IFDL representation learning. Specifically, we first represent forgery attributes of a manipulated image with multiple labels at different levels. Then we perform fine-grained classification at these levels using the hierarchical dependency between them. As a result, the algorithm is encouraged to learn both comprehensive features and inherent hierarchical nature of different forgery attributes, thereby improving the IFDL representation. Our proposed IFDL framework contains three components: multi-branch feature extractor, localization and classification modules. Each branch of the feature extractor learns to classify forgery attributes at one level, while localization and classification modules segment the pixel-level forgery region and detect image-level forgery, respectively. Lastly, we construct a hierarchical fine-grained dataset to facilitate our study. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on $7$ different benchmarks, for both tasks of IFDL and forgery attribute classification. Our source code and dataset can be found: \href{https://github.com/CHELSEA234/HiFi_IFDL}{github.com/CHELSEA234/HiFi-IFDL}.
Fantastic Breaks: A Dataset of Paired 3D Scans of Real-World Broken Objects and Their Complete Counterparts
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Automated shape repair approaches currently lack access to datasets that describe real-world damaged geometry. We present Fantastic Breaks (and Where to Find Them: https://terascale-all-sensing-research-studio.github.io/FantasticBreaks), a dataset containing scanned, waterproofed, and cleaned 3D meshes for 150 broken objects, paired and geometrically aligned with complete counterparts. Fantastic Breaks contains class and material labels, proxy repair parts that join to broken meshes to generate complete meshes, and manually annotated fracture boundaries. Through a detailed analysis of fracture geometry, we reveal differences between Fantastic Breaks and synthetic fracture datasets generated using geometric and physics-based methods. We show experimental shape repair evaluation with Fantastic Breaks using multiple learning-based approaches pre-trained with synthetic datasets and re-trained with subset of Fantastic Breaks.
Deep Frequency Filtering for Domain Generalization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is critical for their practical uses, which has been a longstanding challenge. Some theoretical studies have uncovered that DNNs have preferences for some frequency components in the learning process and indicated that this may affect the robustness of learned features. In this paper, we propose Deep Frequency Filtering (DFF) for learning domain-generalizable features, which is the first endeavour to explicitly modulate the frequency components of different transfer difficulties across domains in the latent space during training. To achieve this, we perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for the feature maps at different layers, then adopt a light-weight module to learn attention masks from the frequency representations after FFT to enhance transferable components while suppressing the components not conducive to generalization. Further, we empirically compare the effectiveness of adopting different types of attention designs for implementing DFF. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DFF and show that applying our DFF on a plain baseline outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different domain generalization tasks, including close-set classification and open-set retrieval.
Unsupervised Cumulative Domain Adaptation for Foggy Scene Optical Flow
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Optical flow has achieved great success under clean scenes, but suffers from restricted performance under foggy scenes. To bridge the clean-to-foggy domain gap, the existing methods typically adopt the domain adaptation to transfer the motion knowledge from clean to synthetic foggy domain. However, these methods unexpectedly neglect the synthetic-to-real domain gap, and thus are erroneous when applied to real-world scenes. To handle the practical optical flow under real foggy scenes, in this work, we propose a novel unsupervised cumulative domain adaptation optical flow (UCDA-Flow) framework: depth-association motion adaptation and correlation-alignment motion adaptation. Specifically, we discover that depth is a key ingredient to influence the optical flow: the deeper depth, the inferior optical flow, which motivates us to design a depth-association motion adaptation module to bridge the clean-to-foggy domain gap. Moreover, we figure out that the cost volume correlation shares similar distribution of the synthetic and real foggy images, which enlightens us to devise a correlation-alignment motion adaptation module to distill motion knowledge of the synthetic foggy domain to the real foggy domain. Note that synthetic fog is designed as the intermediate domain. Under this unified framework, the proposed cumulative adaptation progressively transfers knowledge from clean scenes to real foggy scenes. Extensive experiments have been performed to verify the superiority of the proposed method.
MarS3D: A Plug-and-Play Motion-Aware Model for Semantic Segmentation on Multi-Scan 3D Point Clouds
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

3D semantic segmentation on multi-scan large-scale point clouds plays an important role in autonomous systems. Unlike the single-scan-based semantic segmentation task, this task requires distinguishing the motion states of points in addition to their semantic categories. However, methods designed for single-scan-based segmentation tasks perform poorly on the multi-scan task due to the lacking of an effective way to integrate temporal information. We propose MarS3D, a plug-and-play motion-aware module for semantic segmentation on multi-scan 3D point clouds. This module can be flexibly combined with single-scan models to allow them to have multi-scan perception abilities. The model encompasses two key designs: the Cross-Frame Feature Embedding module for enriching representation learning and the Motion-Aware Feature Learning module for enhancing motion awareness. Extensive experiments show that MarS3D can improve the performance of the baseline model by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/MarS3D.
An Image Quality Assessment Dataset for Portraits
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Year after year, the demand for ever-better smartphone photos continues to grow, in particular in the domain of portrait photography. Manufacturers thus use perceptual quality criteria throughout the development of smartphone cameras. This costly procedure can be partially replaced by automated learning-based methods for image quality assessment (IQA). Due to its subjective nature, it is necessary to estimate and guarantee the consistency of the IQA process, a characteristic lacking in the mean opinion scores (MOS) widely used for crowdsourcing IQA. In addition, existing blind IQA (BIQA) datasets pay little attention to the difficulty of cross-content assessment, which may degrade the quality of annotations. This paper introduces PIQ23, a portrait-specific IQA dataset of 5116 images of 50 predefined scenarios acquired by 100 smartphones, covering a high variety of brands, models, and use cases. The dataset includes individuals of various genders and ethnicities who have given explicit and informed consent for their photographs to be used in public research. It is annotated by pairwise comparisons (PWC) collected from over 30 image quality experts for three image attributes: face detail preservation, face target exposure, and overall image quality. An in-depth statistical analysis of these annotations allows us to evaluate their consistency over PIQ23. Finally, we show through an extensive comparison with existing baselines that semantic information (image context) can be used to improve IQA predictions. The dataset along with the proposed statistical analysis and BIQA algorithms are available: https://github.com/DXOMARK-Research/PIQ2023
Achieving a Better Stability-Plasticity Trade-Off via Auxiliary Networks in Continual Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

In contrast to the natural capabilities of humans to learn new tasks in a sequential fashion, neural networks are known to suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where the model's performances on old tasks drop dramatically after being optimized for a new task. Since then, the continual learning (CL) community has proposed several solutions aiming to equip the neural network with the ability to learn the current task (plasticity) while still achieving high accuracy on the previous tasks (stability). Despite remarkable improvements, the plasticity-stability trade-off is still far from being solved and its underlying mechanism is poorly understood. In this work, we propose Auxiliary Network Continual Learning (ANCL), a novel method that applies an additional auxiliary network which promotes plasticity to the continually learned model which mainly focuses on stability. More concretely, the proposed framework materializes in a regularizer that naturally interpolates between plasticity and stability, surpassing strong baselines on task incremental and class incremental scenarios. Through extensive analyses on ANCL solutions, we identify some essential principles beneath the stability-plasticity trade-off.
Video Event Restoration Based on Keyframes for Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a significant computer vision problem. Existing deep neural network (DNN) based VAD methods mostly follow the route of frame reconstruction or frame prediction. However, the lack of mining and learning of higher-level visual features and temporal context relationships in videos limits the further performance of these two approaches. Inspired by video codec theory, we introduce a brand-new VAD paradigm to break through these limitations: First, we propose a new task of video event restoration based on keyframes. Encouraging DNN to infer missing multiple frames based on video keyframes so as to restore a video event, which can more effectively motivate DNN to mine and learn potential higher-level visual features and comprehensive temporal context relationships in the video. To this end, we propose a novel U-shaped Swin Transformer Network with Dual Skip Connections (USTN-DSC) for video event restoration, where a cross-attention and a temporal upsampling residual skip connection are introduced to further assist in restoring complex static and dynamic motion object features in the video. In addition, we propose a simple and effective adjacent frame difference loss to constrain the motion consistency of the video sequence. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that USTN-DSC outperforms most existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our method.
EcoTTA: Memory-Efficient Continual Test-Time Adaptation via Self-Distilled Regularization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach that improves continual test-time adaptation (TTA) in a memory-efficient manner. TTA may primarily be conducted on edge devices with limited memory, so reducing memory is crucial but has been overlooked in previous TTA studies. In addition, long-term adaptation often leads to catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation, which hinders applying TTA in real-world deployments. Our approach consists of two components to address these issues. First, we present lightweight meta networks that can adapt the frozen original networks to the target domain. This novel architecture minimizes memory consumption by decreasing the size of intermediate activations required for backpropagation. Second, our novel self-distilled regularization controls the output of the meta networks not to deviate significantly from the output of the frozen original networks, thereby preserving well-trained knowledge from the source domain. Without additional memory, this regularization prevents error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting, resulting in stable performance even in long-term test-time adaptation. We demonstrate that our simple yet effective strategy outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Notably, our proposed method with ResNet-50 and WideResNet-40 takes 86% and 80% less memory than the recent state-of-the-art method, CoTTA.
Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Modern methods for vision-centric autonomous driving perception widely adopt the bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation to describe a 3D scene. Despite its better efficiency than voxel representation, it has difficulty describing the fine-grained 3D structure of a scene with a single plane. To address this, we propose a tri-perspective view (TPV) representation which accompanies BEV with two additional perpendicular planes. We model each point in the 3D space by summing its projected features on the three planes. To lift image features to the 3D TPV space, we further propose a transformer-based TPV encoder (TPVFormer) to obtain the TPV features effectively. We employ the attention mechanism to aggregate the image features corresponding to each query in each TPV plane. Experiments show that our model trained with sparse supervision effectively predicts the semantic occupancy for all voxels. We demonstrate for the first time that using only camera inputs can achieve comparable performance with LiDAR-based methods on the LiDAR segmentation task on nuScenes. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/TPVFormer.
HGFormer: Hierarchical Grouping Transformer for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Current semantic segmentation models have achieved great success under the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) condition. However, in real-world applications, test data might come from a different domain than training data. Therefore, it is important to improve model robustness against domain differences. This work studies semantic segmentation under the domain generalization setting, where a model is trained only on the source domain and tested on the unseen target domain. Existing works show that Vision Transformers are more robust than CNNs and show that this is related to the visual grouping property of self-attention. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical grouping transformer (HGFormer) to explicitly group pixels to form part-level masks and then whole-level masks. The masks at different scales aim to segment out both parts and a whole of classes. HGFormer combines mask classification results at both scales for class label prediction. We assemble multiple interesting cross-domain settings by using seven public semantic segmentation datasets. Experiments show that HGFormer yields more robust semantic segmentation results than per-pixel classification methods and flat grouping transformers, and outperforms previous methods significantly. Code will be available at https://github.com/dingjiansw101/HGFormer.
Boosting Verified Training for Robust Image Classifications via Abstraction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a novel, abstraction-based, certified training method for robust image classifiers. Via abstraction, all perturbed images are mapped into intervals before feeding into neural networks for training. By training on intervals, all the perturbed images that are mapped to the same interval are classified as the same label, rendering the variance of training sets to be small and the loss landscape of the models to be smooth. Consequently, our approach significantly improves the robustness of trained models. For the abstraction, our training method also enables a sound and complete black-box verification approach, which is orthogonal and scalable to arbitrary types of neural networks regardless of their sizes and architectures. We evaluate our method on a wide range of benchmarks in different scales. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state of the art by (i) reducing the verified errors of trained models up to 95.64%; (ii) totally achieving up to 602.50x speedup; and (iii) scaling up to larger models with up to 138 million trainable parameters. The demo is available at https://github.com/zhangzhaodi233/ABSCERT.git.
3D Shape Reconstruction of Semi-Transparent Worms
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

3D shape reconstruction typically requires identifying object features or textures in multiple images of a subject. This approach is not viable when the subject is semi-transparent and moving in and out of focus. Here we overcome these challenges by rendering a candidate shape with adaptive blurring and transparency for comparison with the images. We use the microscopic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a case study as it freely explores a 3D complex fluid with constantly changing optical properties. We model the slender worm as a 3D curve using an intrinsic parametrisation that naturally admits biologically-informed constraints and regularisation. To account for the changing optics we develop a novel differentiable renderer to construct images from 2D projections and compare against raw images to generate a pixel-wise error to jointly update the curve, camera and renderer parameters using gradient descent. The method is robust to interference such as bubbles and dirt trapped in the fluid, stays consistent through complex sequences of postures, recovers reliable estimates from blurry images and provides a significant improvement on previous attempts to track C. elegans in 3D. Our results demonstrate the potential of direct approaches to shape estimation in complex physical environments in the absence of ground-truth data.