OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multiclass Confidence and Localization Calibration for Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Albeit achieving high predictive accuracy across many challenging computer vision problems, recent studies suggest that deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to make overconfident predictions, rendering them poorly calibrated. Most of the existing attempts for improving DNN calibration are limited to classification tasks and restricted to calibrating in-domain predictions. Surprisingly, very little to no attempts have been made in studying the calibration of object detection methods, which occupy a pivotal space in vision-based security-sensitive, and safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a new train-time technique for calibrating modern object detection methods. It is capable of jointly calibrating multiclass confidence and box localization by leveraging their predictive uncertainties. We perform extensive experiments on several in-domain and out-of-domain detection benchmarks. Results demonstrate that our proposed train-time calibration method consistently outperforms several baselines in reducing calibration error for both in-domain and out-of-domain predictions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/bimsarapathiraja/MCCL.
Burstormer: Burst Image Restoration and Enhancement Transformer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

On a shutter press, modern handheld cameras capture multiple images in rapid succession and merge them to generate a single image. However, individual frames in a burst are misaligned due to inevitable motions and contain multiple degradations. The challenge is to properly align the successive image shots and merge their complimentary information to achieve high-quality outputs. Towards this direction, we propose Burstormer: a novel transformer-based architecture for burst image restoration and enhancement. In comparison to existing works, our approach exploits multi-scale local and non-local features to achieve improved alignment and feature fusion. Our key idea is to enable inter-frame communication in the burst neighborhoods for information aggregation and progressive fusion while modeling the burst-wide context. However, the input burst frames need to be properly aligned before fusing their information. Therefore, we propose an enhanced deformable alignment module for aligning burst features with regards to the reference frame. Unlike existing methods, the proposed alignment module not only aligns burst features but also exchanges feature information and maintains focused communication with the reference frame through the proposed reference-based feature enrichment mechanism, which facilitates handling complex motions. After multi-level alignment and enrichment, we re-emphasize on inter-frame communication within burst using a cyclic burst sampling module. Finally, the inter-frame information is aggregated using the proposed burst feature fusion module followed by progressive upsampling. Our Burstormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods on burst super-resolution, burst denoising and burst low-light enhancement. Our codes and pretrained models are available at https:// github.com/akshaydudhane16/Burstormer
Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, video moment retrieval and highlight detection (MR/HD) are being spotlighted as the demand for video understanding is drastically increased. The key objective of MR/HD is to localize the moment and estimate clip-wise accordance level, i.e., saliency score, to the given text query. Although the recent transformer-based models brought some advances, we found that these methods do not fully exploit the information of a given query. For example, the relevance between text query and video contents is sometimes neglected when predicting the moment and its saliency. To tackle this issue, we introduce Query-Dependent DETR (QD-DETR), a detection transformer tailored for MR/HD. As we observe the insignificant role of a given query in transformer architectures, our encoding module starts with cross-attention layers to explicitly inject the context of text query into video representation. Then, to enhance the model's capability of exploiting the query information, we manipulate the video-query pairs to produce irrelevant pairs. Such negative (irrelevant) video-query pairs are trained to yield low saliency scores, which in turn, encourages the model to estimate precise accordance between query-video pairs. Lastly, we present an input-adaptive saliency predictor which adaptively defines the criterion of saliency scores for the given video-query pairs. Our extensive studies verify the importance of building the query-dependent representation for MR/HD. Specifically, QD-DETR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on QVHighlights, TVSum, and Charades-STA datasets. Codes are available at github.com/wjun0830/QD-DETR.
X-Pruner: eXplainable Pruning for Vision Transformers
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently vision transformer models have become prominent models for a range of tasks. These models, however, usually suffer from intensive computational costs and heavy memory requirements, making them impractical for deployment on edge platforms. Recent studies have proposed to prune transformers in an unexplainable manner, which overlook the relationship between internal units of the model and the target class, thereby leading to inferior performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel explainable pruning framework dubbed X-Pruner, which is designed by considering the explainability of the pruning criterion. Specifically, to measure each prunable unit's contribution to predicting each target class, a novel explainability-aware mask is proposed and learned in an end-to-end manner. Then, to preserve the most informative units and learn the layer-wise pruning rate, we adaptively search the layer-wise threshold that differentiates between unpruned and pruned units based on their explainability-aware mask values. To verify and evaluate our method, we apply the X-Pruner on representative transformer models including the DeiT and Swin Transformer. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed X-Pruner outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box methods with significantly reduced computational costs and slight performance degradation.
Hard Sample Matters a Lot in Zero-Shot Quantization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) is promising for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks when the data for training full-precision models are inaccessible. In ZSQ, network quantization is performed using synthetic samples, thus, the performance of quantized models depends heavily on the quality of synthetic samples. Nonetheless, we find that the synthetic samples constructed in existing ZSQ methods can be easily fitted by models. Accordingly, quantized models obtained by these methods suffer from significant performance degradation on hard samples. To address this issue, we propose HArd sample Synthesizing and Training (HAST). Specifically, HAST pays more attention to hard samples when synthesizing samples and makes synthetic samples hard to fit when training quantized models. HAST aligns features extracted by full-precision and quantized models to ensure the similarity between features extracted by these two models. Extensive experiments show that HAST significantly outperforms existing ZSQ methods, achieving performance comparable to models that are quantized with real data.
Meta Compositional Referring Expression Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Referring expression segmentation aims to segment an object described by a language expression from an image. Despite the recent progress on this task, existing models tackling this task may not be able to fully capture semantics and visual representations of individual concepts, which limits their generalization capability, especially when handling novel compositions of learned concepts. In this work, through the lens of meta learning, we propose a Meta Compositional Referring Expression Segmentation (MCRES) framework to enhance model compositional generalization performance. Specifically, to handle various levels of novel compositions, our framework first uses training data to construct a virtual training set and multiple virtual testing sets, where data samples in each virtual testing set contain a level of novel compositions w.r.t. the virtual training set. Then, following a novel meta optimization scheme to optimize the model to obtain good testing performance on the virtual testing sets after training on the virtual training set, our framework can effectively drive the model to better capture semantics and visual representations of individual concepts, and thus obtain robust generalization performance even when handling novel compositions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
A Light Weight Model for Active Speaker Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Active speaker detection is a challenging task in audio-visual scenario understanding, which aims to detect who is speaking in one or more speakers scenarios. This task has received extensive attention as it is crucial in applications such as speaker diarization, speaker tracking, and automatic video editing. The existing studies try to improve performance by inputting multiple candidate information and designing complex models. Although these methods achieved outstanding performance, their high consumption of memory and computational power make them difficult to be applied in resource-limited scenarios. Therefore, we construct a lightweight active speaker detection architecture by reducing input candidates, splitting 2D and 3D convolutions for audio-visual feature extraction, and applying gated recurrent unit (GRU) with low computational complexity for cross-modal modeling. Experimental results on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset show that our framework achieves competitive mAP performance (94.1% vs. 94.2%), while the resource costs are significantly lower than the state-of-the-art method, especially in model parameters (1.0M vs. 22.5M, about 23x) and FLOPs (0.6G vs. 2.6G, about 4x). In addition, our framework also performs well on the Columbia dataset showing good robustness. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Junhua-Liao/Light-ASD.
GCFAgg: Global and Cross-View Feature Aggregation for Multi-View Clustering
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-view clustering can partition data samples into their categories by learning a consensus representation in unsupervised way and has received more and more attention in recent years. However, most existing deep clustering methods learn consensus representation or view-specific representations from multiple views via view-wise aggregation way, where they ignore structure relationship of all samples. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view clustering network to address these problems, called Global and Cross-view Feature Aggregation for Multi-View Clustering (GCFAggMVC). Specifically, the consensus data presentation from multiple views is obtained via cross-sample and cross-view feature aggregation, which fully explores the complementary ofsimilar samples. Moreover, we align the consensus representation and the view-specific representation by the structure-guided contrastive learning module, which makes the view-specific representations from different samples with high structure relationship similar. The proposed module is a flexible multi-view data representation module, which can be also embedded to the incomplete multi-view data clustering task via plugging our module into other frameworks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves excellent performance in both complete multi-view data clustering tasks and incomplete multi-view data clustering tasks.
DeGPR: Deep Guided Posterior Regularization for Multi-Class Cell Detection and Counting
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-class cell detection and counting is an essential task for many pathological diagnoses. Manual counting is tedious and often leads to inter-observer variations among pathologists. While there exist multiple, general-purpose, deep learning-based object detection and counting methods, they may not readily transfer to detecting and counting cells in medical images, due to the limited data, presence of tiny overlapping objects, multiple cell types, severe class-imbalance, minute differences in size/shape of cells, etc. In response, we propose guided posterior regularization (DeGPR), which assists an object detector by guiding it to exploit discriminative features among cells. The features may be pathologist-provided or inferred directly from visual data. We validate our model on two publicly available datasets (CoNSeP and MoNuSAC), and on MuCeD, a novel dataset that we contribute. MuCeD consists of 55 biopsy images of the human duodenum for predicting celiac disease. We perform extensive experimentation with three object detection baselines on three datasets to show that DeGPR is model-agnostic, and consistently improves baselines obtaining up to 9% (absolute) mAP gains.
SliceMatch: Geometry-Guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved using precomputed masks. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. Compared to the state-of-the-art, SliceMatch achieves a 19% lower median localization error on the VIGOR benchmark using the same VGG16 backbone at 150 frames per second, and a 50% lower error when using a ResNet50 backbone.
Progressive Transformation Learning for Leveraging Virtual Images in Training
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

To effectively interrogate UAV-based images for detecting objects of interest, such as humans, it is essential to acquire large-scale UAV-based datasets that include human instances with various poses captured from widely varying viewing angles. As a viable alternative to laborious and costly data curation, we introduce Progressive Transformation Learning (PTL), which gradually augments a training dataset by adding transformed virtual images with enhanced realism. Generally, a virtual2real transformation generator in the conditional GAN framework suffers from quality degradation when a large domain gap exists between real and virtual images. To deal with the domain gap, PTL takes a novel approach that progressively iterates the following three steps: 1) select a subset from a pool of virtual images according to the domain gap, 2) transform the selected virtual images to enhance realism, and 3) add the transformed virtual images to the training set while removing them from the pool. In PTL, accurately quantifying the domain gap is critical. To do that, we theoretically demonstrate that the feature representation space of a given object detector can be modeled as a multivariate Gaussian distribution from which the Mahalanobis distance between a virtual object and the Gaussian distribution of each object category in the representation space can be readily computed. Experiments show that PTL results in a substantial performance increase over the baseline, especially in the small data and the cross-domain regime.
Generating Features With Increased Crop-Related Diversity for Few-Shot Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Two-stage object detectors generate object proposals and classify them to detect objects in images. These proposals often do not contain the objects perfectly but overlap with them in many possible ways, exhibiting great variability in the difficulty levels of the proposals. Training a robust classifier against this crop-related variability requires abundant training data, which is not available in few-shot settings. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel variational autoencoder (VAE) based data generation model, which is capable of generating data with increased crop-related diversity. The main idea is to transform the latent space such latent codes with different norms represent different crop-related variations. This allows us to generate features with increased crop-related diversity in difficulty levels by simply varying the latent norm. In particular, each latent code is rescaled such that its norm linearly correlates with the IoU score of the input crop w.r.t. the ground-truth box. Here the IoU score is a proxy that represents the difficulty level of the crop. We train this VAE model on base classes conditioned on the semantic code of each class and then use the trained model to generate features for novel classes. In our experiments our generated features consistently improve state-of-the-art few-shot object detection methods on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.
Towards Compositional Adversarial Robustness: Generalizing Adversarial Training to Composite Semantic Perturbations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Model robustness against adversarial examples of single perturbation type such as the $\ell_{p}$-norm has been widely studied, yet its generalization to more realistic scenarios involving multiple semantic perturbations and their composition remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we first propose a novel method for generating composite adversarial examples. Our method can find the optimal attack composition by utilizing component-wise projected gradient descent and automatic attack-order scheduling. We then propose generalized adversarial training (GAT) to extend model robustness from $\ell_{p}$-ball to composite semantic perturbations, such as the combination of Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, and Rotation. Results obtained using ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets indicate that GAT can be robust not only to all the tested types of a single attack, but also to any combination of such attacks. GAT also outperforms baseline $\ell_{\infty}$-norm bounded adversarial training approaches by a significant margin.
CVT-SLR: Contrastive Visual-Textual Transformation for Sign Language Recognition With Variational Alignment
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Sign language recognition (SLR) is a weakly supervised task that annotates sign videos as textual glosses. Recent studies show that insufficient training caused by the lack of large-scale available sign datasets becomes the main bottleneck for SLR. Most SLR works thereby adopt pretrained visual modules and develop two mainstream solutions. The multi-stream architectures extend multi-cue visual features, yielding the current SOTA performances but requiring complex designs and might introduce potential noise. Alternatively, the advanced single-cue SLR frameworks using explicit cross-modal alignment between visual and textual modalities are simple and effective, potentially competitive with the multi-cue framework. In this work, we propose a novel contrastive visual-textual transformation for SLR, CVT-SLR, to fully explore the pretrained knowledge of both the visual and language modalities. Based on the single-cue cross-modal alignment framework, we propose a variational autoencoder (VAE) for pretrained contextual knowledge while introducing the complete pretrained language module. The VAE implicitly aligns visual and textual modalities while benefiting from pretrained contextual knowledge as the traditional contextual module. Meanwhile, a contrastive cross-modal alignment algorithm is designed to explicitly enhance the consistency constraints. Extensive experiments on public datasets (PHOENIX-2014 and PHOENIX-2014T) demonstrate that our proposed CVT-SLR consistently outperforms existing single-cue methods and even outperforms SOTA multi-cue methods.
Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Estimating 3D human motion from an egocentric video sequence plays a critical role in human behavior understanding and has various applications in VR/AR. However, naively learning a mapping between egocentric videos and human motions is challenging, because the user's body is often unobserved by the front-facing camera placed on the head of the user. In addition, collecting large-scale, high-quality datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motions requires accurate motion capture devices, which often limit the variety of scenes in the videos to lab-like environments. To eliminate the need for paired egocentric video and human motions, we propose a new method, Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation (EgoEgo), which decomposes the problem into two stages, connected by the head motion as an intermediate representation. EgoEgo first integrates SLAM and a learning approach to estimate accurate head motion. Subsequently, leveraging the estimated head pose as input, EgoEgo utilizes conditional diffusion to generate multiple plausible full-body motions. This disentanglement of head and body pose eliminates the need for training datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motion, enabling us to leverage large-scale egocentric video datasets and motion capture datasets separately. Moreover, for systematic benchmarking, we develop a synthetic dataset, AMASS-Replica-Ego-Syn (ARES), with paired egocentric videos and human motion. On both ARES and real data, our EgoEgo model performs significantly better than the current state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Rotation-Equivariant Features for Visual Correspondence
Venue: Conference CVPR 2023
Year: 2023

Extracting discriminative local features that are invariant to imaging variations is an integral part of establishing correspondences between images. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework to extract discriminative rotation-invariant descriptors using group-equivariant CNNs. Thanks to employing group-equivariant CNNs, our method effectively learns to obtain rotation-equivariant features and their orientations explicitly, without having to perform sophisticated data augmentations. The resultant features and their orientations are further processed by group aligning, a novel invariant mapping technique that shifts the group-equivariant features by their orientations along the group dimension. Our group aligning technique achieves rotation-invariance without any collapse of the group dimension and thus eschews loss of discriminability. The proposed method is trained end-to-end in a self-supervised manner, where we use an orientation alignment loss for the orientation estimation and a contrastive descriptor loss for robust local descriptors to geometric/photometric variations. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art matching accuracy among existing rotation-invariant descriptors under varying rotation and also shows competitive results when transferred to the task of keypoint matching and camera pose estimation.