OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Neurally-Guided Shape Parser: Grammar-Based Labeling of 3D Shape Regions With Approximate Inference
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We propose the Neurally-Guided Shape Parser (NGSP), a method that learns how to assign fine-grained semantic labels to regions of a 3D shape. NGSP solves this problem via MAP inference, modeling the posterior probability of a label assignment conditioned on an input shape with a learned likelihood function. To make this search tractable, NGSP employs a neural guide network that learns to approximate the posterior. NGSP finds high-probability label assignments by first sampling proposals with the guide network and then evaluating each proposal under the full likelihood. We evaluate NGSP on the task of fine-grained semantic segmentation of manufactured 3D shapes from PartNet, where shapes have been decomposed into regions that correspond to part instance over-segmentations. We find that NGSP delivers significant performance improvements over comparison methods that (i) use regions to group per-point predictions, (ii) use regions as a self-supervisory signal or (iii) assign labels to regions under alternative formulations. Further, we show that NGSP maintains strong performance even with limited labeled data or noisy input shape regions. Finally, we demonstrate that NGSP can be directly applied to CAD shapes found in online repositories and validate its effectiveness with a perceptual study.
Weakly-Supervised Online Action Segmentation in Multi-View Instructional Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper addresses a new problem of weakly-supervised online action segmentation in instructional videos. We present a framework to segment streaming videos online at test time using Dynamic Programming and show its advantages over greedy sliding window approach. We improve our framework by introducing the Online-Offline Discrepancy Loss (OODL) to encourage the segmentation results to have a higher temporal consistency. Furthermore, only during training, we exploit frame-wise correspondence between multiple views as supervision for training weakly-labeled instructional videos. In particular, we investigate three different multi-view inference techniques to generate more accurate frame-wise pseudo ground-truth with no additional annotation cost. We present results and ablation studies on two benchmark multi-view datasets, Breakfast and IKEA ASM. Experimental results show efficacy of the proposed methods both qualitatively and quantitatively in two domains of cooking and assembly.
Disentangling Visual Embeddings for Attributes and Objects
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of compositional zero-shot learning for object-attribute recognition. Prior works use visual features extracted with a backbone network, pre-trained for object classification and thus do not capture the subtly distinct features associated with attributes. To overcome this challenge, these studies employ supervision from the linguistic space, and use pre-trained word embeddings to better separate and compose attribute-object pairs for recognition. Analogous to linguistic embedding space, which already has unique and agnostic embeddings for object and attribute, we shift the focus back to the visual space and propose a novel architecture that can disentangle attribute and object features in the visual space. We use visual decomposed features to hallucinate embeddings that are representative for the seen and novel compositions to better regularize the learning of our model. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing work with significant margin on three datasets: MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and a new benchmark created based on VAW. The code, models, and dataset splits are publicly available at https://github.com/nirat1606/OADis.
MiniViT: Compressing Vision Transformers With Weight Multiplexing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have recently drawn much attention in computer vision due to their high model capability. However, ViT models suffer from huge number of parameters, restricting their applicability on devices with limited memory. To alleviate this problem, we propose MiniViT, a new compression framework, which achieves parameter reduction in vision transformers while retaining the same performance. The central idea of MiniViT is to multiplex the weights of consecutive transformer blocks. More specifically, we make the weights shared across layers, while imposing a transformation on the weights to increase diversity. Weight distillation over self-attention is also applied to transfer knowledge from large-scale ViT models to weight-multiplexed compact models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of MiniViT, showing that it can reduce the size of the pre-trained Swin-B transformer by 48\%, while achieving an increase of 1.0\% in Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Moreover, using a single-layer of parameters, MiniViT is able to compress DeiT-B by 9.7 times from 86M to 9M parameters, without seriously compromising the performance. Finally, we verify the transferability of MiniViT by reporting its performance on downstream benchmarks. Code and models are available at here.
NeurMiPs: Neural Mixture of Planar Experts for View Synthesis
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We present Neural Mixtures of Planar Experts (NeurMiPs), a novel planar-based scene representation for modeling geometry and appearance. NeurMiPs leverages a collection of local planar experts in 3D space as the scene representation. Each planar expert consists of the parameters of the local rectangular shape representing geometry and a neural radiance field modeling the color and opacity. We render novel views by calculating ray-plane intersections and composite output colors and densities at intersected points to the image. NeurMiPs blends the efficiency of explicit mesh rendering and flexibility of the neural radiance field. Experiments demonstrate superior performance and speed of our proposed method, compared to other 3D representations in novel view synthesis.
SplitNets: Designing Neural Architectures for Efficient Distributed Computing on Head-Mounted Systems
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We design deep neural networks (DNNs) and corresponding networks' splittings to distribute DNNs' workload to camera sensors and a centralized aggregator on head mounted devices to meet system performance targets in inference accuracy and latency under the given hardware resource constraints. To achieve an optimal balance among computation, communication, and performance, a split-aware neural architecture search framework, SplitNets, is introduced to conduct model designing, splitting, and communication reduction simultaneously. We further extend the framework to multi-view systems for learning to fuse inputs from multiple camera sensors with optimal performance and systemic efficiency. We validate SplitNets for single-view system on ImageNet as well as multi-view system on 3D classification, and show that the SplitNets framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and system latency compared with existing approaches.
Boosting Robustness of Image Matting With Context Assembling and Strong Data Augmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Deep image matting methods have achieved increasingly better results on benchmarks (e.g., Composition-1k/alphamatting.com). However, the robustness, including robustness to trimaps and generalization to images from different domains, is still under-explored. Although some works propose to either refine the trimaps or adapt the algorithms to real-world images via extra data augmentation, none of them has taken both into consideration, not to mention the significant performance deterioration on benchmarks while using those data augmentation. To fill this gap, we propose an image matting method which achieves higher robustness (RMat) via multilevel context assembling and strong data augmentation targeting matting. Specifically, we first build a strong matting framework by modeling ample global information with transformer blocks in the encoder, and focusing on details in combination with convolution layers as well as a low-level feature assembling attention block in the decoder. Then, based on this strong baseline, we analyze current data augmentation and explore simple but effective strong data augmentation to boost the baseline model and contribute a more generalizable matting method. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method not only achieves state-of-the-art results on the Composition-1k benchmark (11% improvement on SAD and 27% improvement on Grad) with smaller model size, but also shows more robust generalization results on other benchmarks, on real-world images, and also on varying coarse-to-fine trimaps with our extensive experiments.
Self-Supervised Spatial Reasoning on Multi-View Line Drawings
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Spatial reasoning on multi-view line drawings by state-of-the-art supervised deep networks is recently shown with puzzling low performances on the SPARE3D dataset. Based on the fact that self-supervised learning is helpful when a large number of data are available, we propose two self-supervised learning approaches to improve the baseline performance for view consistency reasoning and camera pose reasoning tasks on the SPARE3D dataset. For the first task, we use a self-supervised binary classification network to contrast the line drawing differences between various views of any two similar 3D objects, enabling the trained networks to effectively learn detail-sensitive yet view-invariant line drawing representations of 3D objects. For the second type of task, we propose a self-supervised multi-class classification framework to train a model to select the correct corresponding view from which a line drawing is rendered. Our method is even helpful for the downstream tasks with unseen camera poses. Experiments show that our method could significantly increase the baseline performance in SPARE3D, while some popular self-supervised learning methods cannot.
Frame-Wise Action Representations for Long Videos via Sequence Contrastive Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Prior works on action representation learning mainly focus on designing various architectures to extract the global representations for short video clips. In contrast, many practical applications such as video alignment have strong demand for learning dense representations for long videos. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive action representation learning (CARL) framework to learn frame-wise action representations, especially for long videos, in a self-supervised manner. Concretely, we introduce a simple yet efficient video encoder that considers spatio-temporal context to extract frame-wise representations. Inspired by the recent progress of self-supervised learning, we present a novel sequence contrastive loss (SCL) applied on two correlated views obtained through a series of spatio-temporal data augmentations. SCL optimizes the embedding space by minimizing the KL-divergence between the sequence similarity of two augmented views and a prior Gaussian distribution of timestamp distance. Experiments on FineGym, PennAction and Pouring datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art by a large margin for downstream fine-grained action classification. Surprisingly, although without training on paired videos, our approach also shows outstanding performance on video alignment and fine-grained frame retrieval tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/minghchen/CARL_code.
Mega-NERF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We use neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to build interactive 3D environments from large-scale visual captures spanning buildings or even multiple city blocks collected primarily from drones. In contrast to single object scenes (on which NeRFs are traditionally evaluated), our scale poses multiple challenges including (1) the need to model thousands of images with varying lighting conditions, each of which capture only a small subset of the scene, (2) prohibitively large model capacities that make it infeasible to train on a single GPU, and (3) significant challenges for fast rendering that would enable interactive fly-throughs. To address these challenges, we begin by analyzing visibility statistics for large-scale scenes, motivating a sparse network structure where parameters are specialized to different regions of the scene. We introduce a simple geometric clustering algorithm for data parallelism that partitions training images (or rather pixels) into different NeRF submodules that can be trained in parallel. We evaluate our approach on existing datasets (Quad 6k and UrbanScene3D) as well as against our own drone footage, improving training speed by 3x and PSNR by 12%. We also evaluate recent NeRF fast renderers on top of Mega-NeRF and introduce a novel method that exploits temporal coherence. Our technique achieves a 40x speedup over conventional NeRF rendering while remaining within 0.8 db in PSNR quality, exceeding the fidelity of existing fast renderers.
Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification From a Single Image With Gait Prediction and Regularization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Cloth-Changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims at matching the same person across different locations over a long-duration, e.g., over days, and therefore inevitably meets challenge of changing clothing. In this paper, we focus on handling well the CC-ReID problem under a more challenging setting, i.e., just from a single image, which enables high-efficiency and latency-free pedestrian identify for real-time surveillance applications. Specifically, we introduce Gait recognition as an auxiliary task to drive the Image ReID model to learn cloth-agnostic representations by leveraging personal unique and cloth-independent gait information, we name this framework as GI-ReID. GI-ReID adopts a two-stream architecture that consists of a image ReID-Stream and an auxiliary gait recognition stream (Gait-Stream). The Gait-Stream, that is discarded in the inference for high computational efficiency, acts as a regulator to encourage the ReID-Stream to capture cloth-invariant biometric motion features during the training. To get temporal continuous motion cues from a single image, we design a Gait Sequence Prediction (GSP) module for Gait-Stream to enrich gait information. Finally, a high-level semantics consistency over two streams is enforced for effective knowledge regularization. Experiments on multiple image-based Cloth-Changing ReID benchmarks, e.g., LTCC, PRCC, Real28, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate that GI-ReID performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts. Codes are available at https://github.com/jinx-USTC/GI-ReID.
Can Neural Nets Learn the Same Model Twice? Investigating Reproducibility and Double Descent From the Decision Boundary Perspective
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We discuss methods for visualizing neural network decision boundaries and decision regions. We use these visualizations to investigate issues related to reproducibility and generalization in neural network training. We observe that changes in model architecture (and its associate inductive bias) cause visible changes in decision boundaries, while multiple runs with the same architecture yield results with strong similarities, especially in the case of wide architectures. We also use decision boundary methods to visualize double descent phenomena. We see that decision boundary reproducibility depends strongly on model width. Near the threshold of interpolation, neural network decision boundaries become fragmented into many small decision regions, and these regions are non-reproducible. Meanwhile, very narrows and very wide networks have high levels of reproducibility in their decision boundaries with relatively few decision regions. We discuss how our observations relate to the theory of double descent phenomena in convex models. Code is available at https://github.com/somepago/dbViz
Multi-View Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

The 3D visual grounding task aims to ground a natural language description to the targeted object in a 3D scene, which is usually represented in 3D point clouds. Previous works studied visual grounding under specific views. The vision-language correspondence learned by this way can easily fail once the view changes. In this paper, we propose a Multi-View Transformer (MVT) for 3D visual grounding. We project the 3D scene to a multi-view space, in which the position information of the 3D scene under different views are modeled simultaneously and aggregated together. The multi-view space enables the network to learn a more robust multi-modal representation for 3D visual grounding and eliminates the dependence on specific views. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, on Nr3D and Sr3D datasets, our method outperforms the best competitor by 11.2% and 7.1% and even surpasses recent work with extra 2D assistance by 5.9% and 6.6%. Our code is available at https://github.com/sega-hsj/MVT-3DVG.
Continual Predictive Learning From Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Predictive learning ideally builds the world model of physical processes in one or more given environments. Typical setups assume that we can collect data from all environments at all times. In practice, however, different prediction tasks may arrive sequentially so that the environments may change persistently throughout the training procedure. Can we develop predictive learning algorithms that can deal with more realistic, non-stationary physical environments? In this paper, we study a new continual learning problem in the context of video prediction, and observe that most existing methods suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in this setup. To tackle this problem, we propose the continual predictive learning (CPL) approach, which learns a mixture world model via predictive experience replay and performs test-time adaptation with non-parametric task inference. We construct two new benchmarks based on RoboNet and KTH, in which different tasks correspond to different physical robotic environments or human actions. Our approach is shown to effectively mitigate forgetting and remarkably outperform the naïve combinations of previous art in video prediction and continual learning.
Knowledge Distillation: A Good Teacher Is Patient and Consistent
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

There is a growing discrepancy in computer vision between large-scale models that achieve state-of-the-art performance and models that are affordable in practical applications. In this paper we address this issue and significantly bridge the gap between these two types of models. Throughout our empirical investigation we do not aim to necessarily propose a new method, but strive to identify a robust and effective recipe for making state-of-the-art large scale models affordable in practice. We demonstrate that, when performed correctly, knowledge distillation can be a powerful tool for reducing the size of large models without compromising their performance. In particular, we uncover that there are certain implicit design choices, which may drastically affect the effectiveness of distillation. Our key contribution is the explicit identification of these design choices, which were not previously articulated in the literature. We back up our findings by a comprehensive empirical study, demonstrate compelling results on a wide range of vision datasets and, in particular, obtain a state-of-the-art ResNet-50 model for ImageNet, which achieves 82.8% top-1 accuracy.
Towards Practical Certifiable Patch Defense With Vision Transformer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Patch attacks, one of the most threatening forms of physical attack in adversarial examples, can lead networks to induce misclassification by modifying pixels arbitrarily in a continuous region. Certifiable patch defense can guarantee robustness that the classifier is not affected by patch attacks. Existing certifiable patch defenses sacrifice the clean accuracy of classifiers and only obtain a low certified accuracy on toy datasets. Furthermore, the clean and certified accuracy of these methods is still significantly lower than the accuracy of normal classification networks, which limits their application in practice. To move towards a practical certifiable patch defense, we introduce Vision Transformer (ViT) into the framework of Derandomized Smoothing (DS). Specifically, we propose a progressive smoothed image modeling task to train Vision Transformer, which can capture the more discriminable local context of an image while preserving the global semantic information. For efficient inference and deployment in the real world, we innovatively reconstruct the global self-attention structure of the original ViT into isolated band unit self-attention. On ImageNet, under 2% area patch attacks our method achieves 41.70% certified accuracy, a nearly 1-fold increase over the previous best method (26.00%). Simultaneously, our method achieves 78.58% clean accuracy, which is quite close to the normal ResNet-101 accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method obtains state-of-the-art clean and certified accuracy with inferring efficiently on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.
Label, Verify, Correct: A Simple Few Shot Object Detection Method
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

The objective of this paper is few-shot object detection (FSOD) -- the task of expanding an object detector for a new category given only a few instances for training. We introduce a simple pseudo-labelling method to source high-quality pseudo-annotations from the training set, for each new category, vastly increasing the number of training instances and reducing class imbalance; our method finds previously unlabelled instances. Naïvely training with model predictions yields sub-optimal performance; we present two novel methods to improve the precision of the pseudo-labelling process: first, we introduce a verification technique to remove candidate detections with incorrect class labels; second, we train a specialised model to correct poor quality bounding boxes. After these two novel steps, we obtain a large set of high-quality pseudo-annotations that allow our final detector to be trained end-to-end. Additionally, we demonstrate our method maintains base class performance, and the utility of simple augmentations in FSOD. While benchmarking on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, our method achieves state-of-the-art or second-best performance compared to existing approaches across all number of shots.