OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Unified Objective for Novel Class Discovery
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we study the problem of Novel Class Discovery (NCD). NCD aims at inferring novel object categories in an unlabeled set by leveraging from prior knowledge of a labeled set containing different, but related classes. Existing approaches tackle this problem by considering multiple objective functions, usually involving specialized loss terms for the labeled and the unlabeled samples respectively, and often requiring auxiliary regularization terms. In this paper, we depart from this traditional scheme and introduce a UNified Objective function (UNO) for discovering novel classes, with the explicit purpose of favoring synergy between supervised and unsupervised learning. Using a multi-view self-labeling strategy, we generate pseudo-labels that can be treated homogeneously with ground truth labels. This leads to a single classification objective operating on both known and unknown classes. Despite its simplicity, UNO outperforms the state of the art by a significant margin on several benchmarks (~+10% on CIFAR-100 and +8% on ImageNet). The project page is available at: https://ncd-uno.github.io.
Invisible Backdoor Attack With Sample-Specific Triggers
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, backdoor attacks pose a new security threat to the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs). Attackers intend to inject hidden backdoors into DNNs, such that the attacked model performs well on benign samples, whereas its prediction will be maliciously changed if hidden backdoors are activated by the attacker-defined trigger. Existing backdoor attacks usually adopt the setting that triggers are sample-agnostic, $i.e.,$ different poisoned samples contain the same trigger, resulting in that the attacks could be easily mitigated by current backdoor defenses. In this work, we explore a novel attack paradigm, where backdoor triggers are sample-specific. In our attack, we only need to modify certain training samples with invisible perturbation, while not need to manipulate other training components ($e.g.$, training loss, and model structure) as required in many existing attacks. Specifically, inspired by the recent advance in DNN-based image steganography, we generate sample-specific invisible additive noises as backdoor triggers by encoding an attacker-specified string into benign images through an encoder-decoder network. The mapping from the string to the target label will be generated when DNNs are trained on the poisoned dataset. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method in attacking models with or without defenses.
SurfaceNet: Adversarial SVBRDF Estimation From a Single Image
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we present SurfaceNet, an approach for estimating spatially-varying bidirectional reflectance distribution function (SVBRDF) material properties from a single image. We pose the problem as an image translation task and propose a novel patch-based generative adversarial network (GAN) that is able to produce high-quality, high-resolution surface reflectance maps. The employment of the GAN paradigm has a twofold objective: 1) allowing the model to recover finer details than standard translation models; 2) reducing the domain shift between synthetic and real data distributions in an unsupervised way. An extensive evaluation, carried out on a public benchmark of synthetic and real images under different illumination conditions, shows that SurfaceNet largely outperforms existing SVBRDF reconstruction methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, SurfaceNet exhibits a remarkable ability in generating high-quality maps from real samples without any supervision at training time.
FloorPlanCAD: A Large-Scale CAD Drawing Dataset for Panoptic Symbol Spotting
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Access to large and diverse computer-aided design (CAD) drawings is critical for developing symbol spotting algorithms. In this paper, we present FloorPlanCAD, a large-scale real-world CAD drawing dataset containing over 10,000 floor plans, ranging from residential to commercial buildings. CAD drawings in the dataset are all represented as vector graphics, which enable us to provide line-grained annotations of 30 object categories. Equipped by such annotations, we introduce the task of panoptic symbol spotting, which requires to spot not only instances of countable things, but also the semantic of uncountable stuff. Aiming to solve this task, we propose a novel method by combining Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which captures both non-Euclidean and Euclidean features and can be trained end-to-end. The proposed CNN-GCN method achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the task of semantic symbol spotting, and help us build a baseline network for the panoptic symbol spotting task. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) to the best of our knowledge, the presented CAD drawing dataset is the first of its kind; 2) the panoptic symbol spotting task considers the spotting of both thing instances and stuff semantic as one recognition problem; and 3) we presented a baseline solution to the panoptic symbol spotting task based on a novel CNN-GCN method, which achieved SOTA performance on semantic symbol spotting. We believe that these contributions will boost research in related areas.
Episodic Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Interaction and navigation defined by natural language instructions in dynamic environments pose significant challenges for neural agents. This paper focuses on addressing two challenges: handling long sequence of subtasks, and understanding complex human instructions. We propose Episodic Transformer (E.T.), a multimodal transformer that encodes language inputs and the full episode history of visual observations and actions. To improve training, we leverage synthetic instructions as an intermediate representation that decouples understanding the visual appearance of an environment from the variations of natural language instructions. We demonstrate that encoding the history with a transformer is critical to solve compositional tasks, and that pretraining and joint training with synthetic instructions further improve the performance. Our approach sets a new state of the art on the challenging ALFRED benchmark, achieving 38.4% and 8.5% task success rates on seen and unseen test splits.
Architecture Disentanglement for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Understanding the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs) is essential to provide trustworthy artificial intelligence techniques for practical applications. Existing studies typically involve linking semantic concepts to units or layers of DNNs, but fail to explain the inference process. In this paper, we introduce neural architecture disentanglement (NAD) to fill the gap. Specifically, NAD learns to disentangle a pre-trained DNN into sub-architectures according to independent tasks, forming information flows that describe the inference processes. We investigate whether, where, and how the disentanglement occurs through experiments conducted with handcrafted and automatically-searched network architectures, on both object-based and scene-based datasets. Based on the experimental results, we present three new findings that provide fresh insights into the inner logic of DNNs. First, DNNs can be divided into sub-architectures for independent tasks. Second, deeper layers do not always correspond to higher semantics. Third, the connection type in a DNN affects how the information flows across layers, leading to different disentanglement behaviors. With NAD, we further explain why DNNs sometimes give wrong predictions. Experimental results show that misclassified images have a high probability of being assigned to task sub-architectures similar to the correct ones. Code will be available at: https://github.com/hujiecpp/NAD.
Clustering by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a novel framework for image clustering that incorporates joint representation learning and clustering. Our method consists of two heads that share the same backbone network - a "representation learning" head and a "clustering" head. The "representation learning" head captures fine-grained patterns of objects at the instance level which serve as clues for the "clustering" head to extract coarse-grain information that separates objects into clusters. The whole model is trained in an end-to-end manner by minimizing the weighted sum of two sample-oriented contrastive losses applied to the outputs of the two heads. To ensure that the contrastive loss corresponding to the "clustering" head is optimal, we introduce a novel critic function called "log-of-dot-product". Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-stage clustering methods across a variety of image datasets, improving over the best baseline by about 5-7% in accuracy on CIFAR10/20, STL10, and ImageNet-Dogs. Further, the "two-stage" variant of our method also achieves better results than baselines on three challenging ImageNet subsets.
SIGN: Spatial-Information Incorporated Generative Network for Generalized Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Unlike conventional zero-shot classification, zero-shot semantic segmentation predicts a class label at the pixel level instead of the image level. When solving zero-shot semantic segmentation problems, the need for pixel-level prediction with surrounding context motivates us to incorporate spatial information using positional encoding. We improve standard positional encoding by introducing the concept of Relative Positional Encoding, which integrates spatial information at the feature level and can handle arbitrary image sizes. Furthermore, while self-training is widely used in zero-shot semantic segmentation to generate pseudo-labels, we propose a new knowledge-distillation-inspired self-training strategy, namely Annealed Self-Training, which can automatically assign different importance to pseudo-labels to improve performance. We systematically study the proposed Relative Positional Encoding and Annealed Self-Training in a comprehensive experimental evaluation, and our empirical results confirm the effectiveness of our method on three benchmark datasets.
Modelling Neighbor Relation in Joint Space-Time Graph for Video Correspondence Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a self-supervised method for learning reliable visual correspondence from unlabeled videos. We formulate the correspondence as finding paths in a joint space-time graph, where nodes are grid patches sampled from frames, and are linked by two types of edges: (i) neighbor relations that determine the aggregation strength from intra-frame neighbors in space, and (ii) similarity relations that indicate the transition probability of inter-frame paths across time. Leveraging the cycle-consistency in videos, our contrastive learning objective discriminates dynamic objects from both their neighboring views and temporal views. Compared with prior works, our approach actively explores the neighbor relations of central instances to learn a latent association between center-neighbor pairs (e.g., "hand -- arm") across time, thus improving the instance discrimination. Without fine-tuning, our learned representation outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual tasks including video object propagation, part propagation, and pose keypoint tracking. Our self-supervised method also surpasses some fully supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks.
DiagViB-6: A Diagnostic Benchmark Suite for Vision Models in the Presence of Shortcut and Generalization Opportunities
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Common deep neural networks (DNNs) for image classification have been shown to rely on shortcut opportunities (SO) in the form of predictive and easy-to-represent visual factors. This is known as shortcut learning and leads to impaired generalization. In this work, we show that common DNNs also suffer from shortcut learning when predicting only basic visual object factors of variation (FoV) such as shape, color, or texture. We argue that besides shortcut opportunities, generalization opportunities (GO) are also an inherent part of real-world vision data and arise from partial independence between predicted classes and FoVs. We also argue that it is necessary for DNNs to exploit GO to overcome shortcut learning. Our core contribution is to introduce the Diagnostic Vision Benchmark suite DiagViB-6, which includes datasets and metrics to study a network's shortcut vulnerability and generalization capability for six independent FoV. In particular, DiagViB-6 allows controlling the type and degree of SO and GO in a dataset. We benchmark a wide range of popular vision architectures and show that they can exploit GO only to a limited extent.
ASMR: Learning Attribute-Based Person Search With Adaptive Semantic Margin Regularizer
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Attribute-based person search is the task of finding person images that are best matched with a set of text attributes given as query. The main challenge of this task is the large modality gap between attributes and images. To reduce the gap, we present a new loss for learning cross-modal embeddings in the context of attribute-based person search. We regard a set of attributes as a category of people sharing the same traits. In a joint embedding space of the two modalities, our loss pulls images close to their person categories for modality alignment. More importantly, it pushes apart a pair of person categories by a margin determined adaptively by their semantic distance, where the distance metric is learned end-to-end so that the loss considers importance of each attribute when relating person categories. Our loss guided by the adaptive semantic margin leads to more discriminative and semantically well-arranged distributions of person images. As a consequence, it enables a simple embedding model to achieve state-of-the-art records on public benchmarks without bells and whistles.
Learning Inner-Group Relations on Point Clouds
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

The prevalence of relation networks in computer vision is in stark contrast to underexplored point-based methods. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of local relation operators and survey their feasibility. We propose a scalable and efficient module, called group relation aggregator. The module computes a feature of a group based on the aggregation of the features of the inner-group points weighted by geometric relations and semantic relations. We adopt this module to design our RPNet. We further verify the expandability of RPNet, in terms of both depth and width, on the tasks of classification and segmentation. Surprisingly, empirical results show that wider RPNet fits for classification, while deeper RPNet works better on segmentation. RPNet achieves state-of-the-art for classification and segmentation on challenging benchmarks. We also compare our local aggregator with PointNet++, with around 30% parameters and 50% computation saving. Finally, we conduct experiments to reveal the robustness of RPNet with regard to rigid transformation and noises.
Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer Using Shifted Windows
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, called Swin Transformer, that capably serves as a general-purpose backbone for computer vision. Challenges in adapting Transformer from language to vision arise from differences between the two domains, such as large variations in the scale of visual entities and the high resolution of pixels in images compared to words in text. To address these differences, we propose a hierarchical Transformer whose representation is computed with \textbf{S}hifted \textbf{win}dows. The shifted windowing scheme brings greater efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows while also allowing for cross-window connection. This hierarchical architecture has the flexibility to model at various scales and has linear computational complexity with respect to image size. These qualities of Swin Transformer make it compatible with a broad range of vision tasks, including image classification (87.3 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K) and dense prediction tasks such as object detection (58.7 box AP and 51.1 mask AP on COCO test-dev) and semantic segmentation (53.5 mIoU on ADE20K val). Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +2.7 box AP and +2.6 mask AP on COCO, and +3.2 mIoU on ADE20K, demonstrating the potential of Transformer-based models as vision backbones. The hierarchical design and the shifted window approach also prove beneficial for all-MLP architectures. The code and models are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/microsoft/Swin-Transformer}.
RobustNav: Towards Benchmarking Robustness in Embodied Navigation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

As an attempt towards assessing the robustness of embodied navigation agents, we propose RobustNav, a framework to quantify the performance of embodied navigation agents when exposed to a wide variety of visual - affecting RGB inputs - and dynamics - affecting transition dynamics - corruptions. Most recent efforts in visual navigation have typically focused on generalizing to novel target environments with similar appearance and dynamics characteristics. With RobustNav, we find that some standard embodied navigation agents significantly underperform (or fail) in the presence of visual or dynamics corruptions. We systematically analyze the kind of idiosyncrasies that emerge in the behavior of such agents when operating under corruptions. Finally, for visual corruptions in RobustNav, we show that while standard techniques to improve robustness such as data-augmentation and self-supervised adaptation offer some zero-shot resistance and improvements in navigation performance, there is still a long way to go in terms of recovering lost performance relative to clean "non-corrupt" settings, warranting more research in this direction. Our code is available at https://github.com/allenai/robustnav
3DStyleNet: Creating 3D Shapes With Geometric and Texture Style Variations
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a method to create plausible geometric and texture style variations of 3D objects in the quest to democratize 3D content creation. Given a pair of textured source and target objects, our method predicts a part-aware affine transformation field that naturally warps the source shape to imitate the overall geometric style of the target. In addition, the texture style of the target is transferred to the warped source object with the help of a multi-view differentiable renderer. Our model, 3DStyleNet, is composed of two sub-networks trained in two stages. First, the geometric style network is trained on a large set of untextured 3D shapes. Second, we jointly optimize our geometric style network and a pre-trained image style transfer network with losses defined over both the geometry and the rendering of the result. Given a small set of high-quality textured objects, our method can create many novel stylized shapes, resulting in effortless 3D content creation and style-ware data augmentation. We showcase our approach qualitatively on 3D content stylization, and provide user studies to validate the quality of our results. In addition, our method can serve as a valuable tool to create 3D data augmentations for computer vision tasks. Extensive quantitative analysis shows that 3DStyleNet outperforms alternative data augmentation techniques for the downstream task of single-image 3D reconstruction.
NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition From Image Collections
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Decomposing a scene into its shape, reflectance, and illumination is a challenging but important problem in computer vision and graphics. This problem is inherently more challenging when the illumination is not a single light source under laboratory conditions but is instead an unconstrained environmental illumination. Though recent work has shown that implicit representations can be used to model the radiance field of an object, most of these techniques only enable view synthesis and not relighting. Additionally, evaluating these radiance fields is resource and time-intensive. We propose a neural reflectance decomposition (NeRD) technique that uses physically-based rendering to decompose the scene into spatially varying BRDF material properties. In contrast to existing techniques, our input images can be captured under different illumination conditions. In addition, we also propose techniques to convert the learned reflectance volume into a relightable textured mesh enabling fast real-time rendering with novel illuminations. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach with experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, where we are able to obtain high-quality relightable 3D assets from image collections. The datasets and code is available on the project page: https://markboss.me/publication/2021-nerd/
MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Human motion prediction is a challenging task due to the stochasticity and aperiodicity of future poses. Recently, graph convolutional network has been proven to be very effective to learn dynamic relations among pose joints, which is helpful for pose prediction. On the other hand, one can abstract a human pose recursively to obtain a set of poses at multiple scales. With the increase of the abstraction level, the motion of the pose becomes more stable, which benefits pose prediction too. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Network (MSR-GCN) for human pose prediction task in the manner of end-to-end. The GCNs are used to extract features from fine to coarse scale and then from coarse to fine scale. The extracted features at each scale are then combined and decoded to obtain the residuals between the input and target poses. Intermediate supervisions are imposed on all the predicted poses, which enforces the network to learn more representative features. Our proposed approach is evaluated on two standard benchmark datasets, i.e., the Human3.6M dataset and the CMU Mocap dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Droliven/MSRGCN.