OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Comprehending and Ordering Semantics for Image Captioning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Comprehending the rich semantics in an image and ordering them in linguistic order are essential to compose a visually-grounded and linguistically coherent description for image captioning. Modern techniques commonly capitalize on a pre-trained object detector/classifier to mine the semantics in an image, while leaving the inherent linguistic ordering of semantics under-exploited. In this paper, we propose a new recipe of Transformer-style structure, namely Comprehending and Ordering Semantics Networks (COS-Net), that novelly unifies an enriched semantic comprehending and a learnable semantic ordering processes into a single architecture. Technically, we initially utilize a cross-modal retrieval model to search the relevant sentences of each image, and all words in the searched sentences are taken as primary semantic cues. Next, a novel semantic comprehender is devised to filter out the irrelevant semantic words in primary semantic cues, and meanwhile infer the missing relevant semantic words visually grounded in the image. After that, we feed all the screened and enriched semantic words into a semantic ranker, which learns to allocate all semantic words in linguistic order as humans. Such sequence of ordered semantic words are further integrated with visual tokens of images to trigger sentence generation. Empirical evidences show that COS-Net clearly surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches on COCO and achieves to-date the best CIDEr score of 141.1% on Karpathy test split. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/YehLi/xmodaler/tree/master/configs/image_caption/cosnet}.
A Large-Scale Comprehensive Dataset and Copy-Overlap Aware Evaluation Protocol for Segment-Level Video Copy Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we introduce VCSL (Video Copy Segment Localization), a new comprehensive segment-level annotated video copy dataset. Compared with existing copy detection datasets restricted by either video-level annotation or small-scale, VCSL not only has two orders of magnitude more segment-level labelled data, with 160k realistic video copy pairs containing more than 280k localized copied segment pairs, but also covers a variety of video categories and a wide range of video duration. All the copied segments inside each collected video pair are manually extracted and accompanied by precisely annotated starting and ending timestamps. Alongside the dataset, we also propose a novel evaluation protocol that better measures the prediction accuracy of copy overlapping segments between a video pair and shows improved adaptability in different scenarios. By benchmarking several baseline and state-of-the-art segment-level video copy detection methods with the proposed dataset and evaluation metric, we provide a comprehensive analysis that uncovers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, hoping to open up promising directions for future works. The VCSL dataset, metric and benchmark codes are all publicly available at https://github.com/alipay/VCSL.
HeadNeRF: A Real-Time NeRF-Based Parametric Head Model
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose HeadNeRF, a novel NeRF-based parametric head model that integrates the neural radiance field to the parametric representation of the human head. It can render high fidelity head images in real-time on modern GPUs, and supports directly controlling the generated images' rendering pose and various semantic attributes. Different from existing related parametric models, we use the neural radiance fields as a novel 3D proxy instead of the traditional 3D textured mesh, which makes that HeadNeRF is able to generate high fidelity images. However, the computationally expensive rendering process of the original NeRF hinders the construction of the parametric NeRF model. To address this issue, we adopt the strategy of integrating 2D neural rendering to the rendering process of NeRF and design novel loss terms. As a result, the rendering speed of HeadNeRF can be significantly accelerated, and the rendering time of one frame is reduced from 5s to 25ms. The well designed loss terms also improve the rendering accuracy, and the fine-level details of the human head, such as the gaps between teeth, wrinkles, and beards, can be represented and synthesized by HeadNeRF. Extensive experimental results and several applications demonstrate its effectiveness. The trained parametric model is available at https://github.com/CrisHY1995/headnerf.
WebQA: Multihop and Multimodal QA
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Scaling Visual Question Answering (VQA) to the open-domain and multi-hop nature of web searches, requires fundamental advances in visual representation learning, knowledge aggregation, and language generation. In this work, we introduce WebQA, a challenging new benchmark that proves difficult for large-scale state-of-the-art models which lack language groundable visual representations for novel objects and the ability to reason, yet trivial for humans. WebQA mirrors the way humans use the web: 1) Ask a question, 2) Choose sources to aggregate, and 3) Produce a fluent language response. This is the behavior we should be expecting from IoT devices and digital assistants. Existing work prefers to assume that a model can either reason about knowledge in images or in text. WebQA includes a secondary text-only QA task to ensure improved visual performance does not come at the cost of language understanding. Our challenge for the community is to create unified multimodal reasoning models that answer questions regardless of the source modality, moving us closer to digital assistants that not only query language knowledge, but also the richer visual online world.
Learning Affinity From Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation With Transformers
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels is an important and challenging task. Due to the high training efficiency, end-to-end solutions for WSSS have received increasing attention from the community. However, current methods are mainly based on convolutional neural networks and fail to explore the global information properly, thus usually resulting in incomplete object regions. In this paper, to address the aforementioned problem, we introduce Transformers, which naturally integrate global information, to generate more integral initial pseudo labels for end-to-end WSSS. Motivated by the inherent consistency between the self-attention in Transformers and the semantic affinity, we propose an Affinity from Attention (AFA) module to learn semantic affinity from the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) in Transformers. The learned affinity is then leveraged to refine the initial pseudo labels for segmentation. In addition, to efficiently derive reliable affinity labels for supervising AFA and ensure the local consistency of pseudo labels, we devise a Pixel-Adaptive Refinement module that incorporates low-level image appearance information to refine the pseudo labels. We perform extensive experiments and our method achieves 66.0% and 38.9% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets, respectively, significantly outperforming recent end-to-end methods and several multi-stage competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/rulixiang/afa.
FERV39k: A Large-Scale Multi-Scene Dataset for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Current benchmarks for facial expression recognition (FER) mainly focus on static images, while there are limited datasets for FER in videos. It is still ambiguous to evaluate whether performances of existing methods remain satisfactory in real-world application-oriented scenes. For example, the "Happy" expression with high intensity in Talk-Show is more discriminating than the same expression with low intensity in Official-Event. To fill this gap, we build a large-scale multi-scene dataset, coined as FERV39k. We analyze the important ingredients of constructing such a novel dataset in three aspects: (1) multi-scene hierarchy and expression class, (2) generation of candidate video clips, (3) trusted manual labelling process. Based on these guidelines, we select 4 scenarios subdivided into 22 scenes, annotate 86k samples automatically obtained from 4k videos based on the well-designed workflow, and finally build 38,935 video clips labeled with 7 classic expressions. Experiment benchmarks on four kinds of baseline frameworks were also provided and further analysis on their performance across different scenes and some challenges for future research were given. Besides, we systematically investigate key components of DFER by ablation studies. The baseline framework and our project will be available.
Graph-Based Spatial Transformer With Memory Replay for Multi-Future Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an essential and challenging task for a variety of real-life applications such as autonomous driving and robotic motion planning. Besides generating a single future path, predicting multiple plausible future paths is becoming popular in some recent work on trajectory prediction. However, existing methods typically emphasize spatial interactions between pedestrians and surrounding areas but ignore the smoothness and temporal consistency of predictions. Our model aims to forecast multiple paths based on a historical trajectory by modeling multi-scale graph-based spatial transformers combined with a trajectory smoothing algorithm named ``Memory Replay'' utilizing a memory graph. Our method can comprehensively exploit the spatial information as well as correct the temporally inconsistent trajectories (e.g., sharp turns). We also propose a new evaluation metric named ``Percentage of Trajectory Usage'' to evaluate the comprehensiveness of diverse multi-future predictions. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-future prediction and competitive results for single-future prediction. Code released at https://github.com/Jacobieee/ST-MR.
Omnivore: A Single Model for Many Visual Modalities
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Prior work has studied different visual modalities in isolation and developed separate architectures for recognition of images, videos, and 3D data. Instead, in this paper, we propose a single model which excels at classifying images, videos, and single-view 3D data using exactly the same model parameters. Our 'Omnivore' model leverages the flexibility of transformer-based architectures and is trained jointly on classification tasks from different modalities. Omnivore is simple to train, uses off-the-shelf standard datasets, and performs at-par or better than modality-specific models of the same size. A single Omnivore model obtains 86.0% on ImageNet, 84.1% on Kinetics, and 67.1% on SUN RGB-D. After finetuning, our models outperform prior work on a variety of vision tasks and generalize across modalities. Omnivore's shared visual representation naturally enables cross-modal recognition without access to correspondences between modalities. We hope our results motivate researchers to model visual modalities together.
DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous driving faces great safety challenges for a lack of global perspective and the limitation of long-range perception capabilities. It has been widely agreed that vehicle-infrastructure cooperation is required to achieve Level 5 autonomy. However, there is still NO dataset from real scenarios available for computer vision researchers to work on vehicle-infrastructure cooperation-related problems. To accelerate computer vision research and innovation for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Autonomous Driving (VICAD), we release DAIR-V2X Dataset, which is the first large-scale, multi-modality, multi-view dataset from real scenarios for VICAD. DAIR-V2X comprises 71254 LiDAR frames and 71254 Camera frames, and all frames are captured from real scenes with 3D annotations. The Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection problem (VIC3D) is introduced, formulating the problem of collaboratively locating and identifying 3D objects using sensory inputs from both vehicle and infrastructure. In addition to solving traditional 3D object detection problems, the solution of VIC3D needs to consider the temporal asynchrony problem between vehicle and infrastructure sensors and the data transmission cost between them. Furthermore, we propose Time Compensation Late Fusion (TCLF), a late fusion framework for the VIC3D task as a benchmark based on DAIR-V2X. Find data, code, and more up-to-date information at https://thudair.baai.ac.cn/index and https://github.com/AIR-THU/DAIR-V2X.
Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation for Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

The advances in monocular 3D human pose estimation are dominated by supervised techniques that require large-scale 2D/3D pose annotations. Such methods often behave erratically in the absence of any provision to discard unfamiliar out-of-distribution data. To this end, we cast the 3D human pose learning as an unsupervised domain adaptation problem. We introduce MRP-Net that constitutes a common deep network backbone with two output heads subscribing to two diverse configurations; a) model-free joint localization and b) model-based parametric regression. Such a design allows us to derive suitable measures to quantify prediction uncertainty at both pose and joint level granularity. While supervising only on labeled synthetic samples, the adaptation process aims to minimize the uncertainty for the unlabeled target images while maximizing the same for an extreme out-of-distribution dataset (backgrounds). Alongside synthetic-to-real 3D pose adaptation, the joint-uncertainties allow expanding the adaptation to work on in-the-wild images even in the presence of occlusion and truncation scenarios. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
Semi-Supervised Wide-Angle Portraits Correction by Multi-Scale Transformer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a semi-supervised network for wide-angle portraits correction. Wide-angle images often suffer from skew and distortion affected by perspective distortion, especially noticeable at the face regions. Previous deep learning based approaches need the ground-truth correction flow maps for training guidance. However, such labels are expensive, which can only be obtained manually. In this work, we design a semi-supervised scheme and build a high-quality unlabeled dataset with rich scenarios, allowing us to simultaneously use labeled and unlabeled data to improve performance. Specifically, our semi-supervised scheme takes advantage of the consistency mechanism, with several novel components such as direction and range consistency (DRC) and regression consistency (RC). Furthermore, different from the existing methods, we propose the Multi-Scale Swin-Unet (MS-Unet) based on the multi-scale swin transformer block (MSTB), which can simultaneously learn short-distance and long-distance information to avoid artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and other representative baselines. The source code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/megvii-research/Portraits_Correction.
Is Mapping Necessary for Realistic PointGoal Navigation?
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Can an autonomous agent navigate in a new environment without building an explicit map? For the task of PointGoal navigation ('Go to $Δx$, $Δy$') under idealized settings (no RGB-D and actuation noise, perfect GPS+Compass), the answer is a clear 'yes' - map-less neural models composed of task-agnostic components (CNNs and RNNs) trained with large-scale reinforcement learning achieve 100% Success on a standard dataset (Gibson). However, for PointNav in a realistic setting (RGB-D and actuation noise, no GPS+Compass), this is an open question; one we tackle in this paper. The strongest published result for this task is 71.7% Success. First, we identify the main (perhaps, only) cause of the drop in performance: the absence of GPS+Compass. An agent with perfect GPS+Compass faced with RGB-D sensing and actuation noise achieves 99.8% Success (Gibson-v2 val). This suggests that (to paraphrase a meme) robust visual odometry is all we need for realistic PointNav; if we can achieve that, we can ignore the sensing and actuation noise. With that as our operating hypothesis, we scale the dataset and model size, and develop human-annotation-free data-augmentation techniques to train models for visual odometry. We advance the state of art on the Habitat Realistic PointNav Challenge from 71% to 94% Success (+23, 31% relative) and 53% to 74% SPL (+21, 40% relative). While our approach does not saturate or 'solve' this dataset, this strong improvement combined with promising zero-shot sim2real transfer (to a LoCoBot) provides evidence consistent with the hypothesis that explicit mapping may not be necessary for navigation, even in a realistic setting.
FaceVerse: A Fine-Grained and Detail-Controllable 3D Face Morphable Model From a Hybrid Dataset
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

We present FaceVerse, a fine-grained 3D Neural Face Model, which is built from hybrid East Asian face datasets containing 60K fused RGB-D images and 2K high-fidelity 3D head scan models. A novel coarse-to-fine structure is proposed to take better advantage of our hybrid dataset. In the coarse module, we generate a base parametric model from large-scale RGB-D images, which is able to predict accurate rough 3D face models in different genders, ages, etc. Then in the fine module, a conditional StyleGAN architecture trained with high-fidelity scan models is introduced to enrich elaborate facial geometric and texture details. Note that different from previous methods, our base and detailed modules are both changeable, which enables an innovative application of adjusting both the basic attributes and the facial details of 3D face models. Furthermore, we propose a single-image fitting framework based on differentiable rendering. Rich experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Look Back and Forth: Video Super-Resolution With Explicit Temporal Difference Modeling
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Temporal modeling is crucial for video super-resolution. Most of the video super-resolution methods adopt the optical flow or deformable convolution for explicitly motion compensation. However, such temporal modeling techniques increase the model complexity and might fail in case of occlusion or complex motion, resulting in serious distortion and artifacts. In this paper, we propose to explore the role of explicit temporal difference modeling in both LR and HR space. Instead of directly feeding consecutive frames into a VSR model, we propose to compute the temporal difference between frames and divide those pixels into two subsets according to the level of difference. They are separately processed with two branches of different receptive fields in order to better extract complementary information. To further enhance the super-resolution result, not only spatial residual features are extracted, but the difference between consecutive frames in high-frequency domain is also computed. It allows the model to exploit intermediate SR results in both future and past to refine the current SR output. The difference at different time steps could be cached such that information from further distance in time could be propagated to the current frame for refinement. Experiments on several video super-resolution benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.
TableFormer: Table Structure Understanding With Transformers
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Tables organize valuable content in a concise and compact representation. This content is extremely valuable for systems such as search engines, Knowledge Graph's, etc, since they enhance their predictive capabilities. Unfortunately, tables come in a large variety of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, they can have complex column/row-header configurations, multiline rows, different variety of separation lines, missing entries, etc. As such, the correct identification of the table-structure from an image is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present a new table-structure identification model. The latter improves the latest end-to-end deep learning model (i.e. encoder-dual-decoder from PubTabNet) in two significant ways. First, we introduce a new object detection decoder for table-cells. In this way, we can obtain the content of the table-cells from programmatic PDF's directly from the PDF source and avoid the training of the custom OCR decoders. This architectural change leads to more accurate table-content extraction and allows us to tackle non-english tables. Second, we replace the LSTM decoders with transformer based decoders. This upgrade improves significantly the previous state-of-the-art tree-editing-distance-score (TEDS) from 91% to 98.5% on simple tables and from 88.7% to 95% on complex tables.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: A Train-Time Regularizing Loss for Improved Neural Network Calibration
Venue: Conference CVPR 2022
Year: 2022

Deep Neural Networks ( DNN s) are known to make overconfident mistakes, which makes their use problematic in safety-critical applications. State-of-the-art ( SOTA ) calibration techniques improve on the confidence of predicted labels alone and leave the confidence of non-max classes (e.g. top-2, top-5) uncalibrated. Such calibration is not suitable for label refinement using post-processing. Further, most SOTA techniques learn a few hyper-parameters post-hoc, leaving out the scope for image, or pixel specific calibration. This makes them unsuitable for calibration under domain shift, or for dense prediction tasks like semantic segmentation. In this paper, we argue for intervening at the train time itself, so as to directly produce calibrated DNN models. We propose a novel auxiliary loss function: Multi-class Difference in Confidence and Accuracy ( MDCA ), to achieve the same MDCA can be used in conjunction with other application/task-specific loss functions. We show that training with MDCA leads to better-calibrated models in terms of Expected Calibration Error ( ECE ), and Static Calibration Error ( SCE ) on image classification, and segmentation tasks. We report ECE ( SCE ) score of 0.72 (1.60) on the CIFAR 100 dataset, in comparison to 1.90 (1.71) by the SOTA. Under domain shift, a ResNet-18 model trained on PACS dataset using MDCA gives an average ECE ( SCE ) score of 19.7 (9.7) across all domains, compared to 24.2 (11.8) by the SOTA. For the segmentation task, we report a 2X reduction in calibration error on PASCAL - VOC dataset in comparison to Focal Loss. Finally, MDCA training improves calibration even on imbalanced data, and for natural language classification tasks. We have released the code here: code is available at https://github.com/mdca-loss