OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CoCoNets: Continuous Contrastive 3D Scene Representations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper explores self-supervised learning of amodal 3D feature representations from RGB and RGB-D posed images and videos, agnostic to object and scene semantic content, and evaluates the resulting scene representations in the downstream tasks of visual correspondence, object tracking, and object detection. The model infers a latent3D representation of the scene in the form of 3D feature points, where each continuous world 3D point is mapped to its corresponding feature vector. The model is trained for contrastive view prediction by rendering 3D feature clouds in queried viewpoints and matching against the 3D feature point cloud predicted from the query view. Notably, the representation can be queried for any 3D location, even if it is not visible from the input view. Our model brings together three powerful ideas of recent exciting research work: 3D feature grids as a neural bottleneck for view prediction, implicit functions for handling resolution limitations of 3D grids, and contrastive learning for unsupervised training of feature representations. We show the resulting 3D visual feature representations effectively scale across objects and scenes, imagine information occluded or missing from the input viewpoints, track objects over time, align semantically related objects in 3D, and improve 3D object detection. We outperform many existing state-of-the-art methods for 3D feature learning and view prediction, which are either limited by 3D grid spatial resolution, do not attempt to build amodal 3D representations, or do not handle combinatorial scene variability due to their non-convolutional bottlenecks.
FESTA: Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention for Scene Point Clouds
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Scene flow depicts the dynamics of a 3D scene, which is critical for various applications such as autonomous driving, robot navigation, AR/VR, etc. Conventionally, scene flow is estimated from dense/regular RGB video frames. With the development of depth-sensing technologies, precise 3D measurements are available via point clouds which have sparked new research in 3D scene flow. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract scene flow from point clouds due to the sparsity and irregularity in typical point cloud sampling patterns. One major issue related to irregular sampling is identified as the randomness during point set abstraction/feature extraction -- an elementary process in many flow estimation scenarios. A novel Spatial Abstraction with Attention (SA^2) layer is accordingly proposed to alleviate the unstable abstraction problem. Moreover, a Temporal Abstraction with Attention (TA^2) layer is proposed to rectify attention in temporal domain, leading to benefits with motions scaled in a larger range. Extensive analysis and experiments verified the motivation and significant performance gains of our method, dubbed as Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention (FESTA), when compared to several state-of-the-art benchmarks of scene flow estimation.
You Only Look One-Level Feature
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper revisits feature pyramids networks (FPN) for one-stage detectors and points out that the success of FPN is due to its divide-and-conquer solution to the optimization problem in object detection rather than multi-scale feature fusion. From the perspective of optimization, we introduce an alternative way to address the problem instead of adopting the complex feature pyramids - {\em utilizing only one-level feature for detection}. Based on the simple and efficient solution, we present You Only Look One-level Feature (YOLOF). In our method, two key components, Dilated Encoder and Uniform Matching, are proposed and bring considerable improvements. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our YOLOF achieves comparable results with its feature pyramids counterpart RetinaNet while being $2.5\times$ faster. Without transformer layers, YOLOF can match the performance of DETR in a single-level feature manner with $7\times$ less training epochs. With an image size of $608\times608$, YOLOF achieves 44.3 mAP running at 60 fps on 2080Ti, which is $13\%$ faster than YOLOv4. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/megvii-model/YOLOF}.
Transferable Semantic Augmentation for Domain Adaptation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Domain adaptation has been widely explored by transferring the knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. Most existing domain adaptation algorithms attend to adapting feature representations across two domains with the guidance of a shared source-supervised classifier. However, such classifier limits the generalization ability towards unlabeled target recognition. To remedy this, we propose a Transferable Semantic Augmentation (TSA) approach to enhance the classifier adaptation ability through implicitly generating source features towards target semantics. Specifically, TSA is inspired by the fact that deep feature transformation towards a certain direction can be represented as meaningful semantic altering in the original input space. Thus, source features can be augmented to effectively equip with target semantics to train a more transferable classifier. To achieve this, for each class, we first use the inter-domain feature mean difference and target intra-class feature covariance to construct a multivariate normal distribution. Then we augment source features with random directions sampled from the distribution class-wisely. Interestingly, such source augmentation is implicitly implemented through an expected transferable cross-entropy loss over the augmented source distribution, where an upper bound of the expected loss is derived and minimized, introducing negligible computational overhead. As a light-weight and general technique, TSA can be easily plugged into various domain adaptation methods, bringing remarkable improvements. Comprehensive experiments on cross-domain benchmarks validate the efficacy of TSA.
No Frame Left Behind: Full Video Action Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Not all video frames are equally informative for recognizing an action. It is computationally infeasible to train deep networks on all video frames when actions develop over hundreds of frames. A common heuristic is uniformly sampling a small number of video frames and using these to recognize the action. Instead, here we propose full video action recognition and consider all video frames. To make this computational tractable, we first cluster all frame activations along the temporal dimension based on their similarity with respect to the classification task, and then temporally aggregate the frames in the clusters into a smaller number of representations. Our method is end-to-end trainable and computationally efficient as it relies on temporally localized clustering in combination with fast Hamming distances in feature space. We evaluate on UCF101, HMDB51, Breakfast, and Something-Something V1 and V2, where we compare favorably to existing heuristic frame sampling methods.
Watching You: Global-Guided Reciprocal Learning for Video-Based Person Re-Identification
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to automatically retrieve video sequences of the same person under non-overlapping cameras. To achieve this goal, it is the key to fully utilize abundant spatial and temporal cues in videos. Existing methods usually focus on the most conspicuous image regions, thus they may easily miss out fine-grained clues due to the person varieties in image sequences. To address above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Global-guided Reciprocal Learning (GRL) framework for video-based person Re-ID. Specifically, we first propose a Global-guided Correlation Estimation (GCE) to generate feature correlation maps of local features and global features, which help to localize the high- and low-correlation regions for identifying the same person. After that, the discriminative features are disentangled into high-correlation features and low-correlation features under the guidance of the global representations. Moreover, a novel Temporal Reciprocal Learning (TRL) mechanism is designed to sequentially enhance the high-correlation semantic information and accumulate the low-correlation sub-critical clues. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that our approach can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released at https://github.com/flysnowtiger/GRL.
PU-GCN: Point Cloud Upsampling Using Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

The effectiveness of learning-based point cloud upsampling pipelines heavily relies on the upsampling modules and feature extractors used therein. For the point upsampling module, we propose a novel model called NodeShuffle, which uses a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to better encode local point information from point neighborhoods. NodeShuffle is versatile and can be incorporated into any point cloud upsampling pipeline. Extensive experiments show how NodeShuffle consistently improves state-of-the-art upsampling methods. For feature extraction, we also propose a new multi-scale point feature extractor, called Inception DenseGCN. By aggregating features at multiple scales, this feature extractor enables further performance gain in the final upsampled point clouds. We combine Inception DenseGCN with NodeShuffle into a new point upsampling pipeline called PU-GCN. PU-GCN sets new state-of-art performance with much fewer parameters and more efficient inference.
Improving Transferability of Adversarial Patches on Face Recognition With Generative Models
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Face recognition is greatly improved by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Recently, these face recognition models have been used for identity authentication in security sensitive applications. However, deep CNNs are vulnerable to adversarial patches, which are physically realizable and stealthy, raising new security concerns on the real-world applications of these models. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of face recognition models using adversarial patches based on transferability, where the attacker has limited accessibility to the target models. First, we extend the existing transfer-based attack techniques to generate transferable adversarial patches. However, we observe that the transferability is sensitive to initialization and degrades when the perturbation magnitude is large, indicating the overfitting to the substitute models. Second, we propose to regularize the adversarial patches on the low dimensional data manifold. The manifold is represented by generative models pre-trained on legitimate human face images. Using face-like features as adversarial perturbations through optimization on the manifold, we show that the gaps between the responses of substitute models and the target models dramatically decrease, exhibiting a better transferability. Extensive digital world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in the black-box setting. We apply the proposed method in the physical world as well.
Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

VQA models may tend to rely on language bias as a shortcut and thus fail to sufficiently learn the multi-modal knowledge from both vision and language. Recent debiasing methods proposed to exclude the language prior during inference. However, they fail to disentangle the "good" language context and "bad" language bias from the whole. In this paper, we investigate how to mitigate language bias in VQA. Motivated by causal effects, we proposed a novel counterfactual inference framework, which enables us to capture the language bias as the direct causal effect of questions on answers and reduce the language bias by subtracting the direct language effect from the total causal effect. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed counterfactual inference framework 1) is general to various VQA backbones and fusion strategies, 2) achieves competitive performance on the language-bias sensitive VQA-CP dataset while performs robustly on the balanced VQA v2 dataset without any augmented data. The code is available at https://github.com/yuleiniu/cfvqa.
Indoor Panorama Planar 3D Reconstruction via Divide and Conquer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Indoor panorama typically consists of human-made structures parallel or perpendicular to gravity. We leverage this phenomenon to approximate the scene in a 360-degree image with (H)orizontal-planes and (V)ertical-planes. To this end, we propose an effective divide-and-conquer strategy that divides pixels based on their plane orientation estimation; then, the succeeding instance segmentation module conquers the task of planes clustering more easily in each plane orientation group. Besides, parameters of V-planes depend on camera yaw rotation, but translation-invariant CNNs are less aware of the yaw change. We thus propose a yaw-invariant V-planar reparameterization for CNNs to learn. We create a benchmark for indoor panorama planar reconstruction by extending existing 360 depth datasets with ground truth H\&V-planes (referred to as PanoH&V dataset) and adopt state-of-the-art planar reconstruction methods to predict H\&V-planes as our baselines. Our method outperforms the baselines by a large margin on the proposed dataset.
Semantic-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) portrays the problem of learning new concepts gradually, where only a few examples per concept are available to the learner. Due to the limited number of examples for training, the techniques developed for standard incremental learning cannot be applied verbatim to FSCIL. In this work, we introduce a distillation algorithm to address the problem of FSCIL and propose to make use of semantic information during training. To this end, we make use of word embeddings as semantic information which is cheap to obtain and which facilitate the distillation process. Furthermore, we propose a method based on an attention mechanism on multiple parallel embeddings of visual data to align visual and semantic vectors, which reduces issues related to catastrophic forgetting. Via experiments on MiniImageNet, CUB200, and CIFAR100 dataset, we establish new state-of-the-art results by outperforming existing approaches.
Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbones
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Self-attention has the promise of improving computer vision systems due to parameter-independent scaling of receptive fields and content-dependent interactions, in contrast to parameter-dependent scaling and content-independent interactions of convolutions. Self-attention models have recently been shown to have encouraging improvements on accuracy-parameter trade-offs compared to baseline convolutional models such as ResNet-50. In this work, we aim to develop self-attention models that can outperform not just the canonical baseline models, but even the high-performing convolutional models. We propose two extensions to self-attention that, in conjunction with a more efficient implementation of self-attention, improve the speed, memory usage, and accuracy of these models. We leverage these improvements to develop a new self-attention model family, HaloNets, which reach state-of-the-art accuracies on the parameter-limited setting of the ImageNet classification benchmark. In preliminary transfer learning experiments, we find that HaloNet models outperform much larger models and have better inference performance. On harder tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation, our simple local self-attention and convolutional hybrids show improvements over very strong baselines. These results mark another step in demonstrating the efficacy of self-attention models on settings traditionally dominated by convolutional models.
Positive-Congruent Training: Towards Regression-Free Model Updates
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Reducing inconsistencies in the behavior of different versions of an AI system can be as important in practice as reducing its overall error. In image classification, sample-wise inconsistencies appear as "negative flips": A new model incorrectly predicts the output for a test sample that was correctly classified by the old (reference) model. Positive-congruent (PC) training aims at reducing error rate while at the same time reducing negative flips, thus maximizing congruency with the reference model only on positive predictions, unlike model distillation. We propose a simple approach for PC training, Focal Distillation, which enforces congruence with the reference model by giving more weights to samples that were correctly classified. We also found that, if the reference model itself can be chosen as an ensemble of multiple deep neural networks, negative flips can be further reduced without affecting the new model's accuracy.
Dynamic Weighted Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve the classification performance on an unlabeled target domain by leveraging information from a fully labeled source domain. Recent approaches explore domain-invariant and class-discriminant representations to tackle this task. These methods, however, ignore the interaction between domain alignment learning and class discrimination learning. As a result, the missing or inadequate tradeoff between domain alignment and class discrimination are prone to the problem of negative transfer. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Weighted Learning (DWL) to avoid the discriminability vanishing problem caused by excessive alignment learning and domain misalignment problem caused by excessive discriminant learning. Technically, DWL dynamically weights the learning losses of alignment and discriminability by introducing the degree of alignment and discriminability. Besides, the problem of sample imbalance across domains is first considered in our work, and we solve the problem by weighing the samples to guarantee information balance across domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DWL has an excellent performance in several benchmark datasets.
FaceSec: A Fine-Grained Robustness Evaluation Framework for Face Recognition Systems
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

We present FACESEC, a framework for fine-grained robustness evaluation of face recognition systems. FACESEC evaluation is performed along four dimensions of adversarial modeling: the nature of perturbation (e.g., pixel-level or face accessories), the attacker's system knowledge (about training data and learning architecture), goals (dodging or impersonation), and capability (tailored to individual inputs or across sets of these). We use FACESEC to study five face recognition systems in both closed-set and open-set settings, and to evaluate the state-of-the-art approach for defending against physically realizable attacks on these. We find that accurate knowledge of neural architecture is significantly more important than knowledge of the training data in black-box attacks. Moreover, we observe that open-set face recognition systems are more vulnerable than closed-set systems under different types of attacks. The efficacy of attacks for other threat model variations, however, appears highly dependent on both the nature of perturbation and the neural network architecture. For example, attacks that involve adversarial face masks are usually more potent, even against adversarially trained models, and the ArcFace architecture tends to be more robust than the others.
Masksembles for Uncertainty Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks have amply demonstrated their prowess but estimating the reliability of their predictions remains challenging. Deep Ensembles are widely considered as being one of the best methods for generating uncertainty estimates but are very expensive to train and evaluate. MC-Dropout is another popular alternative, which is less expensive, but also less reliable. Our central intuition is that there is a continuous spectrum of ensemble-like models of which MC-Dropout and Deep Ensembles are extreme examples. The first uses an effectively infinite number of highly correlated models while the second relies on a finite number of independent models. To combine the benefits of both, we introduce Masksembles. Instead of randomly dropping parts of the network as in MC-dropout, Masksemble relies on a fixed number of binary masks, which are parameterized in a way that allows to change correlations between individual models. Namely, by controlling the overlap between the masks and their density one can choose the optimal configuration for the task at hand. This leads to a simple and easy to implement method with performance on par with Ensembles at a fraction of the cost. We experimentally validate Masksembles on two widely used datasets, CIFAR10 and ImageNet.
ACTION-Net: Multipath Excitation for Action Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Spatial-temporal, channel-wise, and motion patterns are three complementary and crucial types of information for video action recognition. Conventional 2D CNNs are computationally cheap but cannot catch temporal relationships; 3D CNNs can achieve good performance but are computationally intensive. In this work, we tackle this dilemma by designing a generic and effective module that can be embedded into 2D CNNs. To this end, we propose a spAtio-temporal, Channel and moTion excitatION (ACTION) module consisting of three paths: Spatio-Temporal Excitation (STE) path, Channel Excitation (CE) path, and Motion Excitation (ME) path. The STE path employs one channel 3D convolution to characterize spatio-temporal representation. The CE path adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modeling interdependencies between channels in terms of the temporal aspect. The ME path calculates feature-level temporal differences, which is then utilized to excite motion-sensitive channels. We equip 2D CNNs with the proposed ACTION module to form a simple yet effective ACTION-Net with very limited extra computational cost. ACTION-Net is demonstrated by consistently outperforming 2D CNN counterparts on three backbones (i.e., ResNet-50, MobileNet V2 and BNInception) employing three datasets (i.e., Something-Something V2, Jester, and EgoGesture). Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/V-Sense/ACTION-Net}.
CoCosNet v2: Full-Resolution Correspondence Learning for Image Translation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

We present the full-resolution correspondence learning for cross-domain images, which aids image translation. We adopt a hierarchical strategy that uses the correspondence from coarse level to guide the fine levels. At each hierarchy, the correspondence can be efficiently computed via PatchMatch that iteratively leverages the matchings from the neighborhood. Within each PatchMatch iteration, the ConvGRU module is employed to refine the current correspondence considering not only the matchings of larger context but also the historic estimates. The proposed CoCosNet v2, a GRU-assisted PatchMatch approach, is fully differentiable and highly efficient. When jointly trained with image translation, full-resolution semantic correspondence can be established in an unsupervised manner, which in turn facilitates the exemplar-based image translation. Experiments on diverse translation tasks show that CoCosNet v2 performs considerably better than state-of-the-art literature on producing high-resolution images.