OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Contrastive Learning for Label Efficient Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Collecting labeled data for the task of semantic segmentation is expensive and time-consuming, as it requires dense pixel-level annotations. While recent Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based semantic segmentation approaches have achieved impressive results by using large amounts of labeled training data, their performance drops significantly as the amount of labeled data decreases. This happens because deep CNNs trained with the de facto cross-entropy loss can easily overfit to small amounts of labeled data. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective contrastive learning-based training strategy in which we first pretrain the network using a pixel-wise, label-based contrastive loss, and then fine-tune it using the cross-entropy loss. This approach increases intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, thereby resulting in a better pixel classifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training strategy using the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation datasets. Our results show that pretraining with the proposed contrastive loss results in large performance gains (more than 20% absolute improvement in some settings) when the amount of labeled data is limited. In many settings, the proposed contrastive pretraining strategy, which does not use any additional data, is able to match or outperform the widely-used ImageNet pretraining strategy that uses more than a million additional labeled images.
BiMaL: Bijective Maximum Likelihood Approach to Domain Adaptation in Semantic Scene Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Semantic segmentation aims to predict pixel-level labels. It has become a popular task in various computer vision applications. While fully supervised segmentation methods have achieved high accuracy on large-scale vision datasets, they are unable to generalize on a new test environment or a new domain well. In this work, we first introduce a new Un-aligned Domain Score to measure the efficiency of a learned model on a new target domain in unsupervised manner. Then, we present the new Bijective Maximum Likelihood(BiMaL) loss that is a generalized form of the Adversarial Entropy Minimization without any assumption about pixel independence. We have evaluated the proposed BiMaL on two domains. The proposed BiMaL approach consistently outperforms the SOTA methods on empirical experiments on "SYNTHIA to Cityscapes", "GTA5 to Cityscapes", and "SYNTHIA to Vistas".
GroupFormer: Group Activity Recognition With Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Group activity recognition is a crucial yet challenging problem, whose core lies in fully exploring spatial-temporal interactions among individuals and generating reasonable group representations. However, previous methods either model spatial and temporal information separately, or directly aggregate individual features to form group features. To address these issues, we propose a novel group activity recognition network termed GroupFormer. It captures spatial-temporal contextual information jointly to augment the individual and group representations effectively with a clustered spatial-temporal transformer. Specifically, our GroupFormer has three appealing advantages: (1) A tailor-modified Transformer, Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer, is proposed to enhance the individual representation and group representation. (2) It models the spatial and temporal dependencies integrally and utilizes decoders to build the bridge between the spatial and temporal information. (3) A clustered attention mechanism is utilized to dynamically divide individuals into multiple clusters for better learning activity-aware semantic representations. Moreover, experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Volleyball dataset and Collective Activity dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/xueyee/GroupFormer.
TRiPOD: Human Trajectory and Pose Dynamics Forecasting in the Wild
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Joint forecasting of human trajectory and pose dynamics is a fundamental building block of various applications ranging from robotics and autonomous driving to surveillance systems. Predicting body dynamics requires capturing subtle information embedded in the humans' interactions with each other and with the objects present in the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel TRajectory and POse Dynamics (nicknamed TRiPOD) method based on graph attentional networks to model the human-human and human-object interactions both in the input space and the output space (decoded future output). The model is supplemented by a message passing interface over the graphs to fuse these different levels of interactions efficiently. Furthermore, to incorporate a real-world challenge, we propound to learn an indicator representing whether an estimated body joint is visible/invisible at each frame, e.g. due to occlusion or being outside the sensor field of view. Finally, we introduce a new benchmark for this joint task based on two challenging datasets (PoseTrack and 3DPW) and propose evaluation metrics to measure the effectiveness of predictions in the global space, even when there are invisible cases of joints. Our evaluation shows that TRiPOD outperforms all prior work and state-of-the-art specifically designed for each of the trajectory and pose forecasting tasks.
A Hierarchical Transformation-Discriminating Generative Model for Few Shot Anomaly Detection
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Anomaly detection, the task of identifying unusual samples in data, often relies on a large set of training samples. In this work, we consider the setting of few-shot anomaly detection in images, where only a few images are given at training. We devise a hierarchical generative model that captures the multi-scale patch distribution of each training image. We further enhance the representation of our model by using image transformations and optimize scale-specific patch-discriminators to distinguish between real and fake patches of the image, as well as between different transformations applied to those patches. The anomaly score is obtained by aggregating the patch-based votes of the correct transformation across scales and image regions. We demonstrate the superiority of our method on both the one-shot and few-shot settings, on the datasets of Paris, CIFAR10, MNIST and FashionMNIST as well as in the setting of defect detection on MVTec. In all cases, our method outperforms the recent baseline methods.
Vis2Mesh: Efficient Mesh Reconstruction From Unstructured Point Clouds of Large Scenes With Learned Virtual View Visibility
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a novel framework for mesh reconstruction from unstructured point clouds by taking advantage of the learned visibility of the 3D points in the virtual views and traditional graph-cut based mesh generation. Specifically, we first propose a three-step network that explicitly employs depth completion for visibility prediction. Then the visibility information of multiple views is aggregated to generate a 3D mesh model by solving an optimization problem considering visibility in which a novel adaptive visibility weighting in surface determination is also introduced to suppress line of sight with a large incident angle. Compared to other learning-based approaches, our pipeline only exercises the learning on a 2D binary classification task, \ie, points visible or not in a view, which is much more generalizable and practically more efficient and capable to deal with a large number of points. Experiments demonstrate that our method with favorable transferability and robustness, and achieve competing performances \wrt state-of-the-art learning-based approaches on small complex objects and outperforms on large indoor and outdoor scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/GDAOSU/vis2mesh.
Learning Specialized Activation Functions With the Piecewise Linear Unit
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

The choice of activation functions is crucial for modern deep neural networks. Popular hand-designed activation functions like Rectified Linear Unit(ReLU) and its variants show promising performance in various tasks and models. Swish, the automatically discovered activation function, has been proposed and outperforms ReLU on many challenging datasets. However, it has two main drawbacks. First, the tree-based search space is highly discrete and restricted, which is difficult for searching. Second, the sample-based searching method is inefficient, making it infeasible to find specialized activation functions for each dataset or neural architecture. To tackle these drawbacks, we propose a new activation function called Piecewise Linear Unit(PWLU), which incorporates a carefully designed formulation and learning method. It can learn specialized activation functions and achieves SOTA performance on large-scale datasets like ImageNet and COCO. For example, on ImageNet classification dataset, PWLU improves 0.9%/0.53%/1.0%/1.7%/1.0% top-1 accuracy over Swish for ResNet-18/ResNet-50/MobileNet-V2/MobileNet-V3/EfficientNet-B0. PWLU is also easy to implement and efficient at inference, which can be widely applied in real-world applications.
Viewpoint Invariant Dense Matching for Visual Geolocalization
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we propose a novel method for image matching based on dense local features and tailored for visual geolocalization. Dense local features matching is robust against changes in illumination and occlusions, but not against viewpoint shifts which are a fundamental aspect of geolocalization. Our method, called GeoWarp, directly embeds invariance to viewpoint shifts in the process of extracting dense features. This is achieved via a trainable module which learns from the data an invariance that is meaningful for the task of recognizing places. We also devise a new self-supervised loss and two new weakly supervised losses to train this module using only unlabeled data and weak labels. GeoWarp is implemented efficiently as a re-ranking method that can be easily embedded into pre-existing visual geolocalization pipelines. Experimental validation on standard geolocalization benchmarks demonstrates that GeoWarp boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art retrieval architectures. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/gmberton/geo_warp
Video Autoencoder: Self-Supervised Disentanglement of Static 3D Structure and Motion
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

A video autoencoder is proposed for learning disentan- gled representations of 3D structure and camera pose from videos in a self-supervised manner. Relying on temporal continuity in videos, our work assumes that the 3D scene structure in nearby video frames remains static. Given a sequence of video frames as input, the video autoencoder extracts a disentangled representation of the scene includ- ing: (i) a temporally-consistent deep voxel feature to represent the 3D structure and (ii) a 3D trajectory of camera pose for each frame. These two representations will then be re-entangled for rendering the input video frames. This video autoencoder can be trained directly using a pixel reconstruction loss, without any ground truth 3D or camera pose annotations. The disentangled representation can be applied to a range of tasks, including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and video generation by motion following. We evaluate our method on several large- scale natural video datasets, and show generalization results on out-of-domain images.
Adaptive Convolutions With Per-Pixel Dynamic Filter Atom
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Applying feature dependent network weights have been proved to be effective in many fields. However, in practice, restricted by the enormous size of model parameters and memory footprints, scalable and versatile dynamic convolutions with per-pixel adapted filters are yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we address this challenge by decomposing filters, adapted to each spatial position, over dynamic filter atoms generated by a light-weight network from local features. Adaptive receptive fields can be supported by further representing each filter atom over sets of pre-fixed multi-scale bases. As plug-and-play replacements to convolutional layers, the introduced adaptive convolutions with per-pixel dynamic atoms enable explicit modeling of intra-image variance, while avoiding heavy computation, parameters, and memory cost. Our method preserves the appealing properties of conventional convolutions as being translation-equivariant and parametrically efficient. We present experiments to show that, the proposed method delivers comparable or even better performance across tasks, and are particularly effective on handling tasks with significant intra-image variance.
Video Pose Distillation for Few-Shot, Fine-Grained Sports Action Recognition
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Human pose is a useful feature for fine-grained sports action understanding. However, pose estimators are often unreliable when run on sports video due to domain shift and factors such as motion blur and occlusions. This leads to poor accuracy when downstream tasks, such as action recognition, depend on pose. End-to-end learning circumvents pose, but requires more labels to generalize. We introduce Video Pose Distillation (VPD), a weakly-supervised technique to learn features for new video domains, such as individual sports that challenge pose estimation. Under VPD, a student network learns to extract robust pose features from RGB frames in the sports video, such that, whenever pose is considered reliable, the features match the output of a pretrained teacher pose detector. Our strategy retains the best of both pose and end-to-end worlds, exploiting the rich visual patterns in raw video frames, while learning features that agree with the athletes' pose and motion in the target video domain to avoid over-fitting to patterns unrelated to athletes' motion. VPD features improve performance on few-shot, fine-grained action recognition, retrieval, and detection tasks in four real-world sports video datasets, without requiring additional ground-truth pose annotations.
Low-Shot Validation: Active Importance Sampling for Estimating Classifier Performance on Rare Categories
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

For machine learning models trained with limited labeled training data, validation stands to become the main bottleneck to reducing overall annotation costs. We propose a statistical validation algorithm that accurately estimates the F-score of binary classifiers for rare categories, where finding relevant examples to evaluate on is particularly challenging. Our key insight is that simultaneous calibration and importance sampling enables accurate estimates even in the low-sample regime (< 300 samples). Critically, we also derive an accurate single-trial estimator of the variance of our method and demonstrate that this estimator is empirically accurate at low sample counts, enabling a practitioner to know how well they can trust a given low-sample estimate. When validating state-of-the-art semi-supervised models on ImageNet and iNaturalist2017, our method achieves the same estimates of model performance with up to 10x fewer labels than competing approaches. In particular, we can estimate model F1 scores with a variance of 0.005 using as few as 100 labels.
Deep Matching Prior: Test-Time Optimization for Dense Correspondence
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Conventional techniques to establish dense correspondences across visually or semantically similar images focused on designing a task-specific matching prior, which is difficult to model. To overcome this, recent learning-based methods have attempted to learn a good matching prior within a model itself on large training data. The performance improvement was apparent, but the need for sufficient training data and intensive learning hinders their applicability. Moreover, using the fixed model at test time does not account for the fact that a pair of images may require their own prior, thus providing limited performance and poor generalization to unseen images. In this paper, we show that an image pair-specific prior can be captured by solely optimizing the untrained matching networks on an input pair of images. Tailored for such test-time optimization for dense correspondence, we present a residual matching network and a confidence-aware contrastive loss to guarantee a meaningful convergence. Experiments demonstrate that our framework, dubbed Deep Matching Prior (DMP), is competitive, or even outperforms, against the latest learning-based methods on several benchmarks for geometric matching and semantic matching, even though it requires neither large training data nor intensive learning. With the networks pre-trained, DMP attains state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks.
The Spatio-Temporal Poisson Point Process: A Simple Model for the Alignment of Event Camera Data
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Event cameras, inspired by biological vision systems, provide a natural and data efficient representation of visual information. Visual information is acquired in the form of events that are triggered by local brightness changes. Each pixel location of the camera's sensor records events asynchronously and independently with very high temporal resolution. However, because most brightness changes are triggered by relative motion of the camera and the scene, the events recorded at a single sensor location seldom correspond to the same world point. To extract meaningful information from event cameras, it is helpful to register events that were triggered by the same underlying world point. In this work we propose a new model of event data that captures its natural spatio-temporal structure. We start by developing a model for aligned event data. That is, we develop a model for the data as though it has been perfectly registered already. In particular, we model the aligned data as a spatio-temporal Poisson point process. Based on this model, we develop a maximum likelihood approach to registering events that are not yet aligned. That is, we find transformations of the observed events that make them as likely as possible under our model. In particular we extract the camera rotation that leads to the best event alignment. We show new state of the art accuracy for rotational velocity estimation on the DAVIS 240C dataset. In addition, our method is also faster and has lower computational complexity than several competing methods.
Relating Adversarially Robust Generalization to Flat Minima
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Adversarial training (AT) has become the de-facto standard to obtain models robust against adversarial examples. However, AT exhibits severe robust overfitting: cross-entropy loss on adversarial examples, so-called robust loss, decreases continuously on training examples, while eventually increasing on test examples. In practice, this leads to poor robust generalization, i.e., adversarial robustness does not generalize well to new examples. In this paper, we study the relationship between robust generalization and flatness of the robust loss landscape in weight space, i.e., whether robust loss changes significantly when perturbing weights. To this end, we propose average- and worst-case metrics to measure flatness in the robust loss landscape and show a correlation between good robust generalization and flatness. For example, throughout training, flatness reduces significantly during overfitting such that early stopping effectively finds flatter minima in the robust loss landscape. Similarly, AT variants achieving higher adversarial robustness also correspond to flatter minima. This holds for many popular choices, e.g., AT-AWP, TRADES, MART, AT with self-supervision or additional unlabeled examples, as well as simple regularization techniques, e.g., AutoAugment, weight decay or label noise. For fair comparison across these approaches, our flatness measures are specifically designed to be scale-invariant and we conduct extensive experiments to validate our findings.
Learning Self-Similarity in Space and Time As Generalized Motion for Video Action Recognition
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Spatio-temporal convolution often fails to learn motion dynamics in videos and thus an effective motion representation is required for video understanding in the wild. In this paper, we propose a rich and robust motion representation based on spatio-temporal self-similarity (STSS). Given a sequence of frames, STSS represents each local region as similarities to its neighbors in space and time. By converting appearance features into relational values, it enables the learner to better recognize structural patterns in space and time. We leverage the whole volume of STSS and let our model learn to extract an effective motion representation from it. The proposed neural block, dubbed SELFY, can be easily inserted into neural architectures and trained end-to-end without additional supervision. With a sufficient volume of the neighborhood in space and time, it effectively captures long-term interaction and fast motion in the video, leading to robust action recognition. Our experimental analysis demonstrates its superiority over previous methods for motion modeling as well as its complementarity to spatio-temporal features from direct convolution. On the standard action recognition benchmarks, Something-Something-V1 & V2, Diving-48, and FineGym, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results.
LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present LookOut, a novel autonomy system that perceives the environment, predicts a diverse set of futures of how the scene might unroll and estimates the trajectory of the SDV by optimizing a set of contingency plans over these future realizations. In particular, we learn a diverse joint distribution over multi-agent future trajectories in a traffic scene that covers a wide range of future modes with high sample efficiency while leveraging the expressive power of generative models. Unlike previous work in diverse motion forecasting, our diversity objective explicitly rewards sampling future scenarios that require distinct reactions from the self-driving vehicle for improved safety. Our contingency planner then finds comfortable and non-conservative trajectories that ensure safe reactions to a wide range of future scenarios. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our model demonstrates significantly more diverse and sample-efficient motion forecasting in a large-scale self-driving dataset as well as safer and less-conservative motion plans in long-term closed-loop simulations when compared to current state-of-the-art models.
Warp-Refine Propagation: Semi-Supervised Auto-Labeling via Cycle-Consistency
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning models for semantic segmentation rely on expensive, large-scale, manually annotated datasets. Labelling is a tedious process that can take hours per image. Automatically annotating video sequences by propagating sparsely labeled frames through time is a more scalable alternative. In this work, we propose a novel label propagation method, termed Warp-Refine Propagation, that combines semantic cues with geometric cues to efficiently auto-label videos. Our method learns to refine geometrically-warped labels and infuse them with learned semantic priors in a semi-supervised setting by leveraging cycle consistency across time. We quantitatively show that our method improves label-propagation by a noteworthy margin of 13.1 mIoU on the ApolloScape dataset. Furthermore, by training with the auto-labelled frames, we achieve competitive results on three semantic-segmentation benchmarks, improving the state-of-the-art by a large margin of 1.8 and 3.61 mIoU on NYU-V2 and KITTI, while matching the current best results on Cityscapes.