OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Always Be Dreaming: A New Approach for Data-Free Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Modern computer vision applications suffer from catastrophic forgetting when incrementally learning new concepts over time. The most successful approaches to alleviate this forgetting require extensive replay of previously seen data, which is problematic when memory constraints or data legality concerns exist. In this work, we consider the high-impact problem of Data-Free Class-Incremental Learning (DFCIL), where an incremental learning agent must learn new concepts over time without storing generators or training data from past tasks. One approach for DFCIL is to replay synthetic images produced by inverting a frozen copy of the learner's classification model, but we show this approach fails for common class-incremental benchmarks when using standard distillation strategies. We diagnose the cause of this failure and propose a novel incremental distillation strategy for DFCIL, contributing a modified cross-entropy training and importance-weighted feature distillation, and show that our method results in up to a 25.1% increase in final task accuracy (absolute difference) compared to SOTA DFCIL methods for common class-incremental benchmarks. Our method even outperforms several standard replay based methods which store a coreset of images.
Generative Compositional Augmentations for Scene Graph Prediction
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image in the form of a scene graph is useful in many applications at the intersection of vision and language. We consider a challenging problem of compositional generalization that emerges in this task due to a long tail data distribution. Current scene graph generation models are trained on a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions, e.g. <cup, on, table>. However, test images might contain zero- and few-shot compositions of objects and relationships, e.g. <cup, on, surfboard>. Despite each of the object categories and the predicate (e.g. 'on') being frequent in the training data, the models often fail to properly understand such unseen or rare compositions. To improve generalization, it is natural to attempt increasing the diversity of the training distribution. However, in the graph domain this is non-trivial. To that end, we propose a method to synthesize rare yet plausible scene graphs by perturbing real ones. We then propose and empirically study a model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) that allows us to generate visual features of perturbed scene graphs and learn from them in a joint fashion. When evaluated on the Visual Genome dataset, our approach yields marginal, but consistent improvements in zero- and few-shot metrics. We analyze the limitations of our approach indicating promising directions for future research.
Track Without Appearance: Learn Box and Tracklet Embedding With Local and Global Motion Patterns for Vehicle Tracking
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Vehicle tracking is an essential task in the multi-object tracking (MOT) field. A distinct characteristic in vehicle tracking is that the trajectories of vehicles are fairly smooth in both the world coordinate and the image coordinate. Hence, models that capture motion consistencies are of high necessity. However, tracking with the standalone motion-based trackers is quite challenging because targets could get lost easily due to limited information, detection error and occlusion. Leveraging appearance information to assist object re-identification could resolve this challenge to some extent. However, doing so requires extra computation while appearance information is sensitive to occlusion as well. In this paper, we try to explore the significance of motion patterns for vehicle tracking without appearance information. We propose a novel approach that tackles the association issue for long-term tracking with the exclusive fully-exploited motion information. We address the tracklet embedding issue with the proposed reconstruct-to-embed strategy based on deep graph convolutional neural networks (GCN). Comprehensive experiments on the KITTI-car tracking dataset and UA-Detrac dataset show that the proposed method, though without appearance information, could achieve competitive performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers. The source code will be available at https://github.com/GaoangW/LGMTracker.
PASS: Protected Attribute Suppression System for Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Face recognition networks encode information about sensitive attributes while being trained for identity classification. Such encoding has two major issues: (a) it makes the face representations susceptible to privacy leakage (b) it appears to contribute to bias in face recognition. However, existing bias mitigation approaches generally require end-to-end training and are unable to achieve high verification accuracy. Therefore, we present a descriptor-based adversarial de-biasing approach called `Protected Attribute Suppression System (PASS)'. PASS can be trained on top of descriptors obtained from any previously trained high-performing network to classify identities and simultaneously reduce encoding of sensitive attributes. This eliminates the need for end-to-end training. As a component of PASS, we present a novel discriminator training strategy that discourages a network from encoding protected attribute information. We show the efficacy of PASS to reduce gender and skintone information in descriptors from SOTA face recognition networks like Arcface. As a result, PASS descriptors outperform existing baselines in reducing gender and skintone bias on the IJB-C dataset, while maintaining a high verification accuracy.
Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation With Normalizing Flows
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

3D human pose estimation from monocular images is a highly ill-posed problem due to depth ambiguities and occlusions. Nonetheless, most existing works ignore these ambiguities and only estimate a single solution. In contrast, we generate a diverse set of hypotheses that represents the full posterior distribution of feasible 3D poses. To this end, we propose a normalizing flow based method that exploits the deterministic 3D-to-2D mapping to solve the ambiguous inverse 2D-to-3D problem. Additionally, uncertain detections and occlusions are effectively modeled by incorporating uncertainty information of the 2D detector as condition. Further keys to success are a learned 3D pose prior and a generalization of the best-of-M loss. We evaluate our approach on the two benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, outperforming all comparable methods in most metrics. The implementation is available on GitHub.
Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Uncertainty Reduction on Neural Representation and Self-Supervision on Neural Eigenspace
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Due to the lack of supervision, confident and consistent predictions are usually hard to obtain. Typically, people handle these problems to either adopt an auxiliary task with the well-labeled dataset or incorporate the graphical model with additional requirements on scribble annotations. Instead, this work aims to achieve semantic segmentation by scribble annotations directly without extra information and other limitations. Specifically, we propose holistic operations, including minimizing entropy and a network embedded random walk on neural representation to reduce uncertainty. Given the probabilistic transition matrix of a random walk, we further train the network with self-supervision on its neural eigenspace to impose consistency on predictions between related images. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies verify the proposed approach, which demonstrates superiority over others; it is even comparable to some full-label supervised ones and works well when scribbles are randomly shrunk or dropped.
From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer With Visual Language Modeling Network
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we abandon the dominant complex language model and rethink the linguistic learning process in the scene text recognition. Different from previous methods considering the visual and linguistic information in two separate structures, we propose a Visual Language Modeling Network (VisionLAN), which views the visual and linguistic information as a union by directly enduing the vision model with language capability. Specially, we introduce the text recognition of character-wise occluded feature maps in the training stage. Such operation guides the vision model to use not only the visual texture of characters, but also the linguistic information in visual context for recognition when the visual cues are confused (e.g. occlusion, noise, etc.). As the linguistic information is acquired along with visual features without the need of extra language model, VisionLAN significantly improves the speed by 39% and adaptively considers the linguistic information to enhance the visual features for accurate recognition. Furthermore, an Occlusion Scene Text (OST) dataset is proposed to evaluate the performance on the case of missing character-wise visual cues. The state of-the-art results on several benchmarks prove our effectiveness. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wangyuxin87/VisionLAN.
GRF: Learning a General Radiance Field for 3D Representation and Rendering
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a simple yet powerful neural network that implicitly represents and renders 3D objects and scenes only from 2D observations. The network models 3D geometries as a general radiance field, which takes a set of 2D images with camera poses and intrinsics as input, constructs an internal representation for each point of the 3D space, and then renders the corresponding appearance and geometry of that point viewed from an arbitrary position. The key to our approach is to learn local features for each pixel in 2D images and to then project these features to 3D points, thus yielding general and rich point representations. We additionally integrate an attention mechanism to aggregate pixel features from multiple 2D views, such that visual occlusions are implicitly taken into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality and realistic novel views for novel objects, unseen categories and challenging real-world scenes.
Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapes
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces a model for producing stylized line drawings from 3D shapes. The model takes a 3D shape and a viewpoint as input, and outputs a drawing with textured strokes, with variations in stroke thickness, deformation, and color learned from an artist's style. The model is fully differentiable. We train its parameters from a single training drawing of another 3D shape. We show that, in contrast to previous image-based methods, the use of a geometric representation of 3D shape and 2D strokes allows the model to transfer important aspects of shape and texture style while preserving contours. Our method outputs the resulting drawing in a vector representation, enabling richer downstream analysis or editing in interactive applications.
SPG: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Semantic Point Generation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

In autonomous driving, a LiDAR-based object detector should perform reliably at different geographic locations and under various weather conditions. While recent 3D detection research focuses on improving performance within a single domain, our study reveals that the performance of modern detectors can drop drastically cross-domain. In this paper, we investigate unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. On the Waymo Domain Adaptation dataset, we identify the deteriorating point cloud quality as the root cause of the performance drop. To address this issue, we present Semantic Point Generation (SPG), a general approach to enhance the reliability of LiDAR detectors against domain shifts. Specifically, SPG generates semantic points at the predicted foreground regions and faithfully recovers missing parts of the foreground objects, which are caused by phenomena such as occlusions, low reflectance or weather interference. By merging the semantic points with the original points, we obtain an augmented point cloud, which can be directly consumed by modern LiDAR-based detectors. To validate the wide applicability of SPG, we experiment with two representative detectors, PointPillars and PV-RCNN. On the UDA task, SPG significantly improves both detectors across all object categories of interest and at all difficulty levels. SPG can also benefit object detection in the original domain. On the Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI, SPG improves 3D detection results of these two methods across all categories. Combined with PV-RCNN, SPG achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection results on KITTI.
Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Data augmentation has been an indispensable tool to improve the performance of deep neural networks, however the augmentation can hardly transfer among different tasks and datasets. Consequently, a recent trend is to adopt AutoML technique to learn proper augmentation policy without extensive hand-crafted tuning. In this paper, we propose an efficient differentiable search algorithm called Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search (DDAS). It exploits meta-learning with one-step gradient update and continuous relaxation to the expected training loss for efficient search. Our DDAS can achieve efficient augmentation search without relying on approximations such as Gumbel Softmax or second order gradient approximation. To further reduce the adverse effect of improper augmentations, we organize the search space into a two level hierarchy, in which we first decide whether to apply augmentation, and then determine the specific augmentation policy. On standard image classification benchmarks, our DDAS achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency tradeoff while reducing the search cost dramatically, e.g. 0.15 GPU hours for CIFAR-10. In addition, we also use DDAS to search augmentation for object detection task and achieve comparable performance with AutoAugment, while being 1000x faster.
The Functional Correspondence Problem
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

The ability to find correspondences in visual data is the essence of most computer vision tasks. But what are the right correspondences? The task of visual correspondence is well defined for two different images of same object instance. In case of two images of objects belonging to same category, visual correspondence is reasonably well-defined in most cases. But what about correspondence between two objects of completely different category -- e.g., a shoe and a bottle? Does there exist any correspondence? Inspired by humans' ability to: (a) generalize beyond semantic categories and; (b) infer functional affordances, we introduce the problem of functional correspondences in this paper. Given images of two objects, we ask a simple question: what is the set of correspondences between these two images for a given task? For example, what are the correspondences between a bottle and shoe for the task of pounding or the task of pouring. We introduce a new dataset: FunKPoint that has ground truth correspondences for 10 tasks and 20 object categories. We also introduce a modular task-driven representation for attacking this problem and demonstrate that our learned representation is effective for this task. But most importantly, because our supervision signal is not bound by semantics, we show that our learned representation can generalize better on few-shot classification problem. We hope this paper will inspire our community to think beyond semantics and focus more on cross-category generalization and learning representations for robotics tasks.
Detection and Continual Learning of Novel Face Presentation Attacks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Advances in deep learning, combined with availability of large datasets, have led to impressive improvements in face presentation attack detection research. However, state-of-the-art face antispoofing systems are still vulnerable to novel types of attacks that are never seen during training. Moreover, even if such attacks are correctly detected, these systems lack the ability to adapt to newly encountered attacks. The post-training ability of continually detecting new types of attacks and self-adaptation to identify these attack types, after the initial detection phase, is highly appealing. In this paper, we enable a deep neural network to detect anomalies in the observed input data points as potential new types of attacks by suppressing the confidence-level of the network outside the training samples' distribution. We then use experience replay to update the model to incorporate knowledge about new types of attacks without forgetting the past learned attack types. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on two benchmark datasets as well as a newly introduced dataset which exhibits a large variety of attack types.
Predicting With Confidence on Unseen Distributions
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work has shown that the performance of machine learning models can vary substantially when models are evaluated on data drawn from a distribution that is close to but different from the training distribution. As a result, predicting model performance on unseen distributions is an important challenge. Our work connects techniques from domain adaptation and predictive uncertainty literature, and allows us to predict model accuracy on challenging unseen distributions without access to labeled data. In the context of distribution shift, distributional distances are often used to adapt models and improve their performance on new domains, however accuracy estimation, or other forms of predictive uncertainty, are often neglected in these investigations. Through investigating a wide range of established distributional distances, such as Frechet distance or Maximum Mean Discrepancy, we determine that they fail to induce reliable estimates of performance under distribution shift. On the other hand, we find that the difference of confidences (DoC) of a classifier's predictions successfully estimates the classifier's performance change over a variety of shifts. We specifically investigate the distinction between synthetic and natural distribution shifts and observe that despite its simplicity DoC consistently outperforms other quantifications of distributional difference. $DoC$ reduces predictive error by almost half ($46\%$) on several realistic and challenging distribution shifts, e.g., on the ImageNet-Vid-Robust and ImageNet-Rendition datasets.
MT-ORL: Multi-Task Occlusion Relationship Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Retrieving occlusion relation among objects in a single image is challenging due to sparsity of boundaries in image. We observe two key issues in existing works: firstly, lack of an architecture which can exploit the limited amount of coupling in the decoder stage between the two subtasks, namely occlusion boundary extraction and occlusion orientation prediction, and secondly, improper representation of occlusion orientation. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Occlusion-shared and Path-separated Network (OPNet), which solves the first issue by exploiting rich occlusion cues in shared high-level features and structured spatial information in task-specific low-level features. We then design a simple but effective orthogonal occlusion representation (OOR) to tackle the second issue. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by 6.1%/8.3% Boundary-AP and 6.5%/10% Orientation-AP on standard PIOD/BSDS ownership datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/fengpanhe/MT-ORL.
Unidentified Video Objects: A Benchmark for Dense, Open-World Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Current state-of-the-art object detection and segmentation methods work well under the closed-world assumption. This closed-world setting assumes that the list of object categories is available during training and deployment. However, many real-world applications require detecting or segmenting novel objects, i.e., object categories never seen during training. In this paper, we present, UVO (Unidentified Video Objects), a new benchmark for open-world class-agnostic object segmentation in videos. Besides shifting the problem focus to the open-world setup, UVO is significantly larger, providing approximately 8 times more videos compared with DAVIS, and 7 times more mask (instance) annotations per video compared with YouTube-VOS and YouTube-VIS. UVO is also more challenging as it includes many videos with crowded scenes and complex background motions. We demonstrated that UVO can be used for other applications, such as object tracking and super-voxel segmentation, besides open-world object segmentation. We believe that UVo is a versatile testbed for researchers to develop novel approaches for open-world class-agnostic object segmentation, and inspires new research directions towards a more comprehensive video understanding beyond classification and detection.
Geometric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Simulators can efficiently generate large amounts of labeled synthetic data with perfect supervision for hard-to-label tasks like semantic segmentation. However, they introduce a domain gap that severely hurts real-world performance. We propose to use self-supervised monocular depth estimation as a proxy task to bridge this gap and improve sim-to-real unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Our Geometric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation method (GUDA) learns a domain-invariant representation via a multi-task objective combining synthetic semantic supervision with real-world geometric constraints on videos. GUDA establishes a new state of the art in UDA for semantic segmentation on three benchmarks, outperforming methods that use domain adversarial learning, self-training, or other self-supervised proxy tasks. Furthermore, we show that our method scales well with the quality and quantity of synthetic data while also improving depth prediction.
A Hierarchical Variational Neural Uncertainty Model for Stochastic Video Prediction
Venue: Conference ICCV 2021
Year: 2021

Predicting the future frames of a video is a challenging task, in part due to the underlying stochastic real-world phenomena. Prior approaches to solve this task typically estimate a latent prior characterizing this stochasticity, however do not account for the predictive uncertainty of the (deep learning) model. Such approaches often derive the training signal from the mean-squared error (MSE) between the generated frame and the ground truth, which can lead to sub-optimal training, especially when the predictive uncertainty is high. Towards this end, we introduce Neural Uncertainty Quantifier (NUQ) - a stochastic quantification of the model's predictive uncertainty, and use it to weigh the MSE loss. We propose a hierarchical, variational framework to derive NUQ in a principled manner using a deep, Bayesian graphical model. Our experiments on four benchmark stochastic video prediction datasets show that our proposed framework trains more effectively compared to the state-of-the-art models (especially when the training sets are small), while demonstrating better video generation quality and diversity against several evaluation metrics.