OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Class-Balancing Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Diffusion-based models have shown the merits of generating high-quality visual data while preserving better diversity in recent studies. However, such observation is only justified with curated data distribution, where the data samples are nicely pre-processed to be uniformly distributed in terms of their labels. In practice, a long-tailed data distribution appears more common and how diffusion models perform on such class-imbalanced data remains unknown. In this work, we first investigate this problem and observe significant degradation in both diversity and fidelity when the diffusion model is trained on datasets with class-imbalanced distributions. Especially in tail classes, the generations largely lose diversity and we observe severe mode-collapse issues. To tackle this problem, we set from the hypothesis that the data distribution is not class-balanced, and propose Class-Balancing Diffusion Models (CBDM) that are trained with a distribution adjustment regularizer as a solution. Experiments show that images generated by CBDM exhibit higher diversity and quality in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Our method benchmarked the generation results on CIFAR100/CIFAR100LT dataset and shows outstanding performance on the downstream recognition task.
Feature Alignment and Uniformity for Test Time Adaptation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Test time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt deep neural networks when receiving out of distribution test domain samples. In this setting, the model can only access online unlabeled test samples and pre-trained models on the training domains. We first address TTA as a feature revision problem due to the domain gap between source domains and target domains. After that, we follow the two measurements alignment and uniformity to discuss the test time feature revision. For test time feature uniformity, we propose a test time self-distillation strategy to guarantee the consistency of uniformity between representations of the current batch and all the previous batches. For test time feature alignment, we propose a memorized spatial local clustering strategy to align the representations among the neighborhood samples for the upcoming batch. To deal with the common noisy label problem, we propound the entropy and consistency filters to select and drop the possible noisy labels. To prove the scalability and efficacy of our method, we conduct experiments on four domain generalization benchmarks and four medical image segmentation tasks with various backbones. Experiment results show that our method not only improves baseline stably but also outperforms existing state-of-the-art test time adaptation methods. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}.
Balanced Product of Calibrated Experts for Long-Tailed Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Many real-world recognition problems are characterized by long-tailed label distributions. These distributions make representation learning highly challenging due to limited generalization over the tail classes. If the test distribution differs from the training distribution, e.g. uniform versus long-tailed, the problem of the distribution shift needs to be addressed. A recent line of work proposes learning multiple diverse experts to tackle this issue. Ensemble diversity is encouraged by various techniques, e.g. by specializing different experts in the head and the tail classes. In this work, we take an analytical approach and extend the notion of logit adjustment to ensembles to form a Balanced Product of Experts (BalPoE). BalPoE combines a family of experts with different test-time target distributions, generalizing several previous approaches. We show how to properly define these distributions and combine the experts in order to achieve unbiased predictions, by proving that the ensemble is Fisher-consistent for minimizing the balanced error. Our theoretical analysis shows that our balanced ensemble requires calibrated experts, which we achieve in practice using mixup. We conduct extensive experiments and our method obtains new state-of-the-art results on three long-tailed datasets: CIFAR-100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist-2018. Our code is available at https://github.com/emasa/BalPoE-CalibratedLT.
PanoSwin: A Pano-Style Swin Transformer for Panorama Understanding
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

In panorama understanding, the widely used equirectangular projection (ERP) entails boundary discontinuity and spatial distortion. It severely deteriorates the conventional CNNs and vision Transformers on panoramas. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PanoSwin to learn panorama representations with ERP. To deal with the challenges brought by equirectangular projection, we explore a pano-style shift windowing scheme and novel pitch attention to address the boundary discontinuity and the spatial distortion, respectively. Besides, based on spherical distance and Cartesian coordinates, we adapt absolute positional embeddings and relative positional biases for panoramas to enhance panoramic geometry information. Realizing that planar image understanding might share some common knowledge with panorama understanding, we devise a novel two-stage learning framework to facilitate knowledge transfer from the planar images to panoramas. We conduct experiments against the state-of-the-art on various panoramic tasks, i.e., panoramic object detection, panoramic classification, and panoramic layout estimation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PanoSwin in panorama understanding.
Parameter Efficient Local Implicit Image Function Network for Face Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Face parsing is defined as the per-pixel labeling of images containing human faces. The labels are defined to identify key facial regions like eyes, lips, nose, hair, etc. In this work, we make use of the structural consistency of the human face to propose a lightweight face-parsing method using a Local Implicit Function network, FP-LIIF. We propose a simple architecture having a convolutional encoder and a pixel MLP decoder that uses 1/26th number of parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models and yet matches or outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets, like CelebAMask-HQ and LaPa. We do not use any pretraining, and compared to other works, our network can also generate segmentation at different resolutions without any changes in the input resolution. This work enables the use of facial segmentation on low-compute or low-bandwidth devices because of its higher FPS and smaller model size.
Modality-Invariant Visual Odometry for Embodied Vision
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Effectively localizing an agent in a realistic, noisy setting is crucial for many embodied vision tasks. Visual Odometry (VO) is a practical substitute for unreliable GPS and compass sensors, especially in indoor environments. While SLAM-based methods show a solid performance without large data requirements, they are less flexible and robust w.r.t. to noise and changes in the sensor suite compared to learning-based approaches. Recent deep VO models, however, limit themselves to a fixed set of input modalities, e.g., RGB and depth, while training on millions of samples. When sensors fail, sensor suites change, or modalities are intentionally looped out due to available resources, e.g., power consumption, the models fail catastrophically. Furthermore, training these models from scratch is even more expensive without simulator access or suitable existing models that can be fine-tuned. While such scenarios get mostly ignored in simulation, they commonly hinder a model's reusability in real-world applications. We propose a Transformer-based modality-invariant VO approach that can deal with diverse or changing sensor suites of navigation agents. Our model outperforms previous methods while training on only a fraction of the data. We hope this method opens the door to a broader range of real-world applications that can benefit from flexible and learned VO models.
Lite DETR: An Interleaved Multi-Scale Encoder for Efficient DETR
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Recent DEtection TRansformer-based (DETR) models have obtained remarkable performance. Its success cannot be achieved without the re-introduction of multi-scale feature fusion in the encoder. However, the excessively increased tokens in multi-scale features, especially for about 75\% of low-level features, are quite computationally inefficient, which hinders real applications of DETR models. In this paper, we present Lite DETR, a simple yet efficient end-to-end object detection framework that can effectively reduce the GFLOPs of the detection head by 60\% while keeping 99\% of the original performance. Specifically, we design an efficient encoder block to update high-level features (corresponding to small-resolution feature maps) and low-level features (corresponding to large-resolution feature maps) in an interleaved way. In addition, to better fuse cross-scale features, we develop a key-aware deformable attention to predict more reliable attention weights. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed Lite DETR, and the efficient encoder strategy can generalize well across existing DETR-based models. The code will be available in \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Lite-DETR}.
Relational Context Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Recent state-of-the-art methods for HOI detection typically build on transformer architectures with two decoder branches, one for human-object pair detection and the other for interaction classification. Such disentangled transformers, however, may suffer from insufficient context exchange between the branches and lead to a lack of context information for relational reasoning, which is critical in discovering HOI instances. In this work, we propose the multiplex relation network (MUREN) that performs rich context exchange between three decoder branches using unary, pairwise, and ternary relations of human, object, and interaction tokens. The proposed method learns comprehensive relational contexts for discovering HOI instances, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks for HOI detection, HICO-DET and V-COCO.
MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated amazing ability to synthesize images of 3D scenes from novel views. However, they rely upon specialized volumetric rendering algorithms based on ray marching that are mismatched to the capabilities of widely deployed graphics hardware. This paper introduces a new NeRF representation based on textured polygons that can synthesize novel images efficiently with standard rendering pipelines. The NeRF is represented as a set of polygons with textures representing binary opacities and feature vectors. Traditional rendering of the polygons with a z-buffer yields an image with features at every pixel, which are interpreted by a small, view-dependent MLP running in a fragment shader to produce a final pixel color. This approach enables NeRFs to be rendered with the traditional polygon rasterization pipeline, which provides massive pixel-level parallelism, achieving interactive frame rates on a wide range of compute platforms, including mobile phones.
POEM: Reconstructing Hand in a Point Embedded Multi-View Stereo
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Enable neural networks to capture 3D geometrical-aware features is essential in multi-view based vision tasks. Previous methods usually encode the 3D information of multi-view stereo into the 2D features. In contrast, we present a novel method, named POEM, that directly operates on the 3D POints Embedded in the Multi-view stereo for reconstructing hand mesh in it. Point is a natural form of 3D information and an ideal medium for fusing features across views, as it has different projections on different views. Our method is thus in light of a simple yet effective idea, that a complex 3D hand mesh can be represented by a set of 3D points that 1) are embedded in the multi-view stereo, 2) carry features from the multi-view images, and 3) encircle the hand. To leverage the power of points, we design two operations: point-based feature fusion and cross-set point attention mechanism. Evaluation on three challenging multi-view datasets shows that POEM outperforms the state-of-the-art in hand mesh reconstruction. Code and models are available for research at https://github.com/lixiny/POEM.
Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

We present an algorithm for reconstructing the radiance field of a large-scale scene from a single casually captured video. The task poses two core challenges. First, most existing radiance field reconstruction approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses from Structure-from-Motion algorithms, which frequently fail on in-the-wild videos. Second, using a single, global radiance field with finite representational capacity does not scale to longer trajectories in an unbounded scene. For handling unknown poses, we jointly estimate the camera poses with radiance field in a progressive manner. We show that progressive optimization significantly improves the robustness of the reconstruction. For handling large unbounded scenes, we dynamically allocate new local radiance fields trained with frames within a temporal window. This further improves robustness (e.g., performs well even under moderate pose drifts) and allows us to scale to large scenes. Our extensive evaluation on the Tanks and Temples dataset and our collected outdoor dataset, Static Hikes, show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.
TeSLA: Test-Time Self-Learning With Automatic Adversarial Augmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Most recent test-time adaptation methods focus on only classification tasks, use specialized network architectures, destroy model calibration or rely on lightweight information from the source domain. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a novel Test-time Self-Learning method with automatic Adversarial augmentation dubbed TeSLA for adapting a pre-trained source model to the unlabeled streaming test data. In contrast to conventional self-learning methods based on cross-entropy, we introduce a new test-time loss function through an implicitly tight connection with the mutual information and online knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we propose a learnable efficient adversarial augmentation module that further enhances online knowledge distillation by simulating high entropy augmented images. Our method achieves state-of-the-art classification and segmentation results on several benchmarks and types of domain shifts, particularly on challenging measurement shifts of medical images. TeSLA also benefits from several desirable properties compared to competing methods in terms of calibration, uncertainty metrics, insensitivity to model architectures, and source training strategies, all supported by extensive ablations. Our code and models are available on GitHub.
Handwritten Text Generation From Visual Archetypes
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Generating synthetic images of handwritten text in a writer-specific style is a challenging task, especially in the case of unseen styles and new words, and even more when these latter contain characters that are rarely encountered during training. While emulating a writer's style has been recently addressed by generative models, the generalization towards rare characters has been disregarded. In this work, we devise a Transformer-based model for Few-Shot styled handwritten text generation and focus on obtaining a robust and informative representation of both the text and the style. In particular, we propose a novel representation of the textual content as a sequence of dense vectors obtained from images of symbols written as standard GNU Unifont glyphs, which can be considered their visual archetypes. This strategy is more suitable for generating characters that, despite having been seen rarely during training, possibly share visual details with the frequently observed ones. As for the style, we obtain a robust representation of unseen writers' calligraphy by exploiting specific pre-training on a large synthetic dataset. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in generating words in unseen styles and with rare characters more faithfully than existing approaches relying on independent one-hot encodings of the characters.
Align Your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis With Latent Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable high-quality image synthesis while avoiding excessive compute demands by training a diffusion model in a compressed lower-dimensional latent space. Here, we apply the LDM paradigm to high-resolution video generation, a particularly resource-intensive task. We first pre-train an LDM on images only; then, we turn the image generator into a video generator by introducing a temporal dimension to the latent space diffusion model and fine-tuning on encoded image sequences, i.e., videos. Similarly, we temporally align diffusion model upsamplers, turning them into temporally consistent video super resolution models. We focus on two relevant real-world applications: Simulation of in-the-wild driving data and creative content creation with text-to-video modeling. In particular, we validate our Video LDM on real driving videos of resolution 512 x 1024, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, our approach can easily leverage off-the-shelf pre-trained image LDMs, as we only need to train a temporal alignment model in that case. Doing so, we turn the publicly available, state-of-the-art text-to-image LDM Stable Diffusion into an efficient and expressive text-to-video model with resolution up to 1280 x 2048. We show that the temporal layers trained in this way generalize to different fine-tuned text-to-image LDMs. Utilizing this property, we show the first results for personalized text-to-video generation, opening exciting directions for future content creation. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/VideoLDM/
Implicit 3D Human Mesh Recovery Using Consistency With Pose and Shape From Unseen-View
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

From an image of a person, we can easily infer the natural 3D pose and shape of the person even if ambiguity exists. This is because we have a mental model that allows us to imagine a person's appearance at different viewing directions from a given image and utilize the consistency between them for inference. However, existing human mesh recovery methods only consider the direction in which the image was taken due to their structural limitations. Hence, we propose "Implicit 3D Human Mesh Recovery (ImpHMR)" that can implicitly imagine a person in 3D space at the feature-level via Neural Feature Fields. In ImpHMR, feature fields are generated by CNN-based image encoder for a given image. Then, the 2D feature map is volume-rendered from the feature field for a given viewing direction, and the pose and shape parameters are regressed from the feature. To utilize consistency with pose and shape from unseen-view, if there are 3D labels, the model predicts results including the silhouette from an arbitrary direction and makes it equal to the rotated ground-truth. In the case of only 2D labels, we perform self-supervised learning through the constraint that the pose and shape parameters inferred from different directions should be the same. Extensive evaluations show the efficacy of the proposed method.
UV Volumes for Real-Time Rendering of Editable Free-View Human Performance
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Neural volume rendering enables photo-realistic renderings of a human performer in free-view, a critical task in immersive VR/AR applications. But the practice is severely limited by high computational costs in the rendering process. To solve this problem, we propose the UV Volumes, a new approach that can render an editable free-view video of a human performer in real-time. It separates the high-frequency (i.e., non-smooth) human appearance from the 3D volume, and encodes them into 2D neural texture stacks (NTS). The smooth UV volumes allow much smaller and shallower neural networks to obtain densities and texture coordinates in 3D while capturing detailed appearance in 2D NTS. For editability, the mapping between the parameterized human model and the smooth texture coordinates allows us a better generalization on novel poses and shapes. Furthermore, the use of NTS enables interesting applications, e.g., retexturing. Extensive experiments on CMU Panoptic, ZJU Mocap, and H36M datasets show that our model can render 960 x 540 images in 30FPS on average with comparable photo-realism to state-of-the-art methods. The project and supplementary materials are available at https://fanegg.github.io/UV-Volumes.
JacobiNeRF: NeRF Shaping With Mutual Information Gradients
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a method that trains a neural radiance field (NeRF) to encode not only the appearance of the scene but also semantic correlations between scene points, regions, or entities -- aiming to capture their mutual co-variation patterns. In contrast to the traditional first-order photometric reconstruction objective, our method explicitly regularizes the learning dynamics to align the Jacobians of highly-correlated entities, which proves to maximize the mutual information between them under random scene perturbations. By paying attention to this second-order information, we can shape a NeRF to express semantically meaningful synergies when the network weights are changed by a delta along the gradient of a single entity, region, or even a point. To demonstrate the merit of this mutual information modeling, we leverage the coordinated behavior of scene entities that emerges from our shaping to perform label propagation for semantic and instance segmentation. Our experiments show that a JacobiNeRF is more efficient in propagating annotations among 2D pixels and 3D points compared to NeRFs without mutual information shaping, especially in extremely sparse label regimes -- thus reducing annotation burden. The same machinery can further be used for entity selection or scene modifications.
Open-Set Representation Learning Through Combinatorial Embedding
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Visual recognition tasks are often limited to dealing with a small subset of classes simply because the labels for the remaining classes are unavailable. We are interested in identifying novel concepts in a dataset through representation learning based on both labeled and unlabeled examples, and extending the horizon of recognition to both known and novel classes. To address this challenging task, we propose a combinatorial learning approach, which naturally clusters the examples in unseen classes using the compositional knowledge given by multiple supervised meta-classifiers on heterogeneous label spaces. The representations given by the combinatorial embedding are made more robust by unsupervised pairwise relation learning. The proposed algorithm discovers novel concepts via a joint optimization for enhancing the discrimitiveness of unseen classes as well as learning the representations of known classes generalizable to novel ones. Our extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable performance gains by the proposed approach on public datasets for image retrieval and image categorization with novel class discovery.