Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Test of Time: Instilling Video-Language Models with a Sense of Time

Modelling and understanding time remains a challenge in contemporary video understanding models. With language emerging as a key driver towards powerful generalization, it is imperative for foundational video-language models to have a sense of time. In this paper, we consider a specific aspect of temporal understanding: consistency of time order as elicited by before/after relations. We establish that seven existing video-language models struggle to understand even such simple temporal relations. We then question whether it is feasible to equip these foundational models with temporal awareness without re-training them from scratch. Towards this, we propose a temporal adaptation recipe on top of one such model, VideoCLIp, based on post-pretraining on a small amount of video-text data. We conduct a zero-shot evaluation of the adapted models on six datasets for three downstream tasks which require varying degrees of time awareness. We observe encouraging performance gains especially when the task needs higher time awareness. Our work serves as a first step towards probing and instilling a sense of time in existing video-language models without the need for data and compute-intense training from scratch.
CAP: Robust Point Cloud Classification via Semantic and Structural Modeling

Recently, deep neural networks have shown great success on 3D point cloud classification tasks, which simultaneously raises the concern of adversarial attacks that cause severe damage to real-world applications. Moreover, defending against adversarial examples in point cloud data is extremely difficult due to the emergence of various attack strategies. In this work, with the insight of the fact that the adversarial examples in this task still preserve the same semantic and structural information as the original input, we design a novel defense framework for improving the robustness of existing classification models, which consists of two main modules: the attention-based pooling and the dynamic contrastive learning. In addition, we also develop an algorithm to theoretically certify the robustness of the proposed framework. Extensive empirical results on two datasets and three classification models show the robustness of our approach against various attacks, e.g., the averaged attack success rate of PointNet decreases from 70.2% to 2.7% on the ModelNet40 dataset under 9 common attacks.
itKD: Interchange Transfer-based Knowledge Distillation for 3D Object Detection

Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compressed representation loss that binds the channel-wised compression knowledge from both student and teacher networks as a kind of regularization. The decompressed features are transferred in opposite directions to reduce the gap in the interchange reconstructions. Lastly, we present an head attention loss to match the 3D object detection information drawn by the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our method can train the lightweight model that is well-aligned with the 3D point cloud detection task and we demonstrate its superiority using the well-known public datasets; e.g., Waymo and nuScenes. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Our code is available at https://github.com/hyeon-jo/interchange-transfer-KD.
Dealing with Cross-Task Class Discrimination in Online Continual Learning

Existing continual learning (CL) research regards catastrophic forgetting (CF) as almost the only challenge. This paper argues for another challenge in class-incremental learning (CIL), which we call cross-task class discrimination (CTCD), i.e., how to establish decision boundaries between the classes of the new task and old tasks with no (or limited) access to the old task data. CTCD is implicitly and partially dealt with by replay-based methods. A replay method saves a small amount of data (replay data) from previous tasks. When a batch of current task data arrives, the system jointly trains the new data and some sampled replay data. The replay data enables the system to partially learn the decision boundaries between the new classes and the old classes as the amount of the saved data is small. However, this paper argues that the replay approach also has a dynamic training bias issue which reduces the effectiveness of the replay data in solving the CTCD problem. A novel optimization objective with a gradient-based adaptive method is proposed to dynamically deal with the problem in the online CL process. Experimental results show that the new method achieves much better results in online CL.
Modeling Video as Stochastic Processes for Fine-Grained Video Representation Learning

A meaningful video is semantically coherent and changes smoothly. However, most existing fine-grained video representation learning methods learn frame-wise features by aligning frames across videos or exploring relevance between multiple views, neglecting the inherent dynamic process of each video. In this paper, we propose to learn video representations by modeling Video as Stochastic Processes (VSP) via a novel process-based contrastive learning framework, which aims to discriminate between video processes and simultaneously capture the temporal dynamics in the processes. Specifically, we enforce the embeddings of the frame sequence of interest to approximate a goal-oriented stochastic process, i.e., Brownian bridge, in the latent space via a process-based contrastive loss. To construct the Brownian bridge, we adapt specialized sampling strategies under different annotations for both self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning. Experimental results on four datasets show that VSP stands as a state-of-the-art method for various video understanding tasks, including phase progression, phase classification, and frame retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/hengRUC/VSP.
Neural Residual Radiance Fields for Streamably Free-Viewpoint Videos

The success of the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for modeling and free-view rendering static objects has in-spired numerous attempts on dynamic scenes. Current techniques that utilize neural rendering for facilitating free-view videos (FVVs) are restricted to either offline rendering or are capable of processing only brief sequences with minimal motion. In this paper, we present a novel technique, Residual Radiance Field or ReRF, as a highly com-pact neural representation to achieve real-time FVV ren-dering on long-duration dynamic scenes. ReRF explicitly models the residual information between adjacent times-tamps in the spatial-temporal feature space, with a global coordinate-based tiny MLP as the feature decoder. Specif-ically, ReRF employs a compact motion grid along with a residual feature grid to exploit inter-frame feature similar-ities. We show such a strategy can handle large motions without sacrificing quality. We further present a sequential training scheme to maintain the smoothness and the spar-sity of the motion/residual grids. Based on ReRF, we design a special FVV codec that achieves three orders of magni-tudes compression rate and provides a companion ReRF player to support online streaming of long-duration FVVs of dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ReRF for compactly representing dynamic radiance fields, enabling an unprecedented free-viewpoint viewing experience in speed and quality.
Deep Semi-Supervised Metric Learning with Mixed Label Propagation

Metric learning requires the identification of far-apart similar pairs and close dissimilar pairs during training, and this is difficult to achieve with unlabeled data because pairs are typically assumed to be similar if they are close. We present a novel metric learning method which circumvents this issue by identifying hard negative pairs as those which obtain dissimilar labels via label propagation (LP), when the edge linking the pair of data is removed in the affinity matrix. In so doing, the negative pairs can be identified despite their proximity, and we are able to utilize this information to significantly improve LP’ s ability to identify far-apart positive pairs and close negative pairs. This results in a considerable improvement in semi-supervised metric learning performance as evidenced by recall, precision and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) performance metrics on Content-based Information Retrieval (CBIR) applications.
MAP: Multimodal Uncertainty-Aware Vision-Language Pre-training Model

Multimodal semantic understanding often has to deal with uncertainty, which means the obtained messages tend to refer to multiple targets. Such uncertainty is problematic for our interpretation, including inter- and intra-modal uncertainty. Little effort has studied the modeling of this uncertainty, particularly in pretraining on unlabeled datasets and fine-tuning in task-specific downstream datasets. In this paper, we project the representations of all modalities as probabilistic distributions via a Probability Distribution Encoder (PDE) by utilizing sequence-level interactions. Compared to the existing deterministic methods, such uncertainty modeling can convey richer multimodal semantic information and more complex relationships. Furthermore, we integrate uncertainty modeling with popular pretraining frameworks and propose suitable pretraining tasks: Distribution-based Vision-Language Contrastive learning (D-VLC), Distribution-based Masked Language Modeling (D-MLM), and Distribution-based Image-Text Matching (D-ITM). The fine-tuned models are applied to challenging downstream tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment, and achieve state-of-the-art results.
GFIE: A Dataset and Baseline for Gaze-Following from 2D to 3D in Indoor Environments

Gaze-following is a kind of research that requires locating where the person in the scene is looking automatically under the topic of gaze estimation. It is an important clue for understanding human intention, such as identifying objects or regions of interest to humans. However, a survey of datasets used for gaze-following tasks reveals defects in the way they collect gaze point labels. Manual labeling may introduce subjective bias and is labor-intensive, while automatic labeling with an eye-tracking device would alter the person's appearance. In this work, we introduce GFIE, a novel dataset recorded by a gaze data collection system we developed. The system is constructed with two devices, an Azure Kinect and a laser rangefinder, which generate the laser spot to steer the subject's attention as they perform in front of the camera. And an algorithm is developed to locate laser spots in images for annotating 2D/3D gaze targets and removing ground truth introduced by the spots. The whole procedure of collecting gaze behavior allows us to obtain unbiased labels in unconstrained environments semi-automatically. We also propose a baseline method with stereo field-of-view (FoV) perception for establishing a 2D/3D gaze-following benchmark on the GFIE dataset. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/gfie.
Learning to Generate Image Embeddings with User-Level Differential Privacy

Small on-device models have been successfully trained with user-level differential privacy (DP) for next word prediction and image classification tasks in the past. However, existing methods can fail when directly applied to learn embedding models using supervised training data with a large class space. To achieve user-level DP for large image-to-embedding feature extractors, we propose DP-FedEmb, a variant of federated learning algorithms with per-user sensitivity control and noise addition, to train from user-partitioned data centralized in the datacenter. DP-FedEmb combines virtual clients, partial aggregation, private local fine-tuning, and public Pre-training to achieve strong privacy utility trade-offs. We apply DP-FedEmb to train image embedding models for faces, landmarks and natural species, and demonstrate its superior utility under same privacy budget on benchmark datasets DigiFace. EMNIST, GLD and iNaturalist. We further illustrate it is possible to achieve strong user-level DP guarantees of ∊ < 2 while controlling the utility drop within 5%, when millions of users can participate in training.
VQACL: A Novel Visual Question Answering Continual Learning Setting

Research on continual learning has recently led to a variety of work in unimodal community, however little attention has been paid to multimodal tasks like visual question answering (VQA). In this paper, we establish a novel VQA Continual Learning setting named VQACL, which contains two key components: a dual-level task sequence where visual and linguistic data are nested, and a novel composition testing containing new skill-concept combinations. The former devotes to simulating the ever-changing multimodal datastream in real world and the latter aims at measuring models' generalizability for cognitive reasoning. Based on our VQACL, we perform in-depth evaluations of five well-established continual learning methods, and observe that they suffer from catastrophic forgetting and have weak generalizability. To address above issues, we propose a novel representation learning method, which leverages a sample-specific and a sample-invariant feature to learn representations that are both discriminative and generalizable for VQA. Furthermore, by respectively extracting such representation for visual and textual input, our method can explicitly disentangle the skill and concept. Extensive experimental results illustrate that our method significantly outperforms existing models, demonstrating the effectiveness and compositionality of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangxi1997/VQACL.
Learning to Render Novel Views from Wide-Baseline Stereo Pairs

We introduce a method for novel view synthesis given only a single wide-baseline stereo image pair. In this challenging regime, 3D scene points are regularly observed only once, requiring prior-based reconstruction of scene geometry and appearance. We find that existing approaches to novel view synthesis from sparse observations fail due to recovering incorrect 3D geometry and due to the high cost of differentiable rendering that precludes their scaling to large-scale training. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by formulating a multi-view transformer encoder, proposing an efficient, image-space epipolar line sampling scheme to assemble image features for a target ray, and a lightweight cross-attention-based renderer. Our contributions enable training of our method on a large-scale real-world dataset of indoor and outdoor scenes. We demonstrate that our method learns powerful multi-view geometry priors while reducing the rendering time. We conduct extensive comparisons on held-out test scenes across two real-world datasets, significantly outperforming prior work on novel view synthesis from sparse image observations and achieving multi-viewconsistent novel view synthesis.
Listening Human Behavior: 3D Human Pose Estimation with Acoustic Signals

Given only acoustic signals without any high-level information, such as voices or sounds of scenes/actions, how much can we infer about the behavior of humans? Unlike existing methods, which suffer from privacy issues because they use signals that include human speech or the sounds of specific actions, we explore how low-level acoustic signals can provide enough clues to estimate 3D human poses by active acoustic sensing with a single pair of microphones and loudspeakers (see Fig. 1). This is a challenging task since sound is much more diffractive than other signals and therefore covers up the shape of objects in a scene. Accordingly, we introduce a framework that encodes multichannel audio features into 3D human poses. Aiming to capture subtle sound changes to reveal detailed pose information, we explicitly extract phase features from the acoustic signals together with typical spectrum features and feed them into our human pose estimation network. Also, we show that reflected or diffracted sounds are easily influenced by subjects' physique differences e.g., height and muscularity, which deteriorates prediction accuracy. We reduce these gaps by using a subject discriminator to improve accuracy. Our experiments suggest that with the use of only low-dimensional acoustic information, our method outperforms baseline methods. The datasets and codes used in this project will be publicly available.
Depth Estimation from Indoor Panoramas with Neural Scene Representation

Depth estimation from indoor panoramas is challenging due to the equirectangular distortions of panoramas and inaccurate matching. In this paper, we propose a practical framework to improve the accuracy and efficiency of depth estimation from multi-view indoor panoramic images with the Neural Radiance Field technology. Specifically, we develop two networks to implicitly learn the Signed Distance Function for depth measurements and the radiance field from panoramas. We also introduce a novel spherical position embedding scheme to achieve high accuracy. For better convergence, we propose an initialization method for the network weights based on the Manhattan World Assumption. Furthermore, we devise a geometric consistency loss, leveraging the surface normal, to further refine the depth estimation. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art works by a large margin in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WJ-Chang-42/IndoorPanoDepth.
Masked Images Are Counterfactual Samples for Robust Fine-Tuning

Deep learning models are challenged by the distribution shift between the training data and test data. Recently, the large models pre-trained on diverse data have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to various distribution shifts. However, fine-tuning these models can lead to a trade-off between in-distribution (ID) performance and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Existing methods for tackling this trade-off do not explicitly address the OOD robustness problem. In this paper, based on causal analysis of the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel fine-tuning method, which uses masked images as counterfactual samples that help improve the robustness of the fine-tuning model. Specifically, we mask either the semantics-related or semantics-unrelated patches of the images based on class activation map to break the spurious correlation, and refill the masked patches with patches from other images. The resulting counterfactual samples are used in feature-based distillation with the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments verify that regularizing the fine-tuning with the proposed masked images can achieve a better trade-off between ID and OOD performance, surpassing previous methods on the OOD performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Coxy7/robust-finetuning.
Two-shot Video Object Segmentation

Previous works on video object segmentation (VOS) are trained on densely annotated videos. Nevertheless, acquiring annotations in pixel level is expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of training a satisfactory VOS model on sparsely annotated videos—we merely require two labeled frames per training video while the performance is sustained. We term this novel training paradigm as two-shot video object segmentation, or two-shot VOS for short. The underlying idea is to generate pseudo labels for unlabeled frames during training and to optimize the model on the combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data. Our approach is extremely simple and can be applied to a majority of existing frameworks. We first pre-train a VOS model on sparsely annotated videos in a semi-supervised manner, with the first frame always being a labeled one. Then, we adopt the pretrained VOS model to generate pseudo labels for all unlabeled frames, which are subsequently stored in a pseudo-label bank. Finally, we retrain a VOS model on both labeled and pseudo-labeled data without any restrictions on the first frame. For the first time, we present a general way to train VOS models on two-shot VOS datasets. By using 7.3% and 2.9% labeled data of YouTube-VOS and DAVIS benchmarks, our approach achieves comparable results in contrast to the counterparts trained on fully labeled set. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yk-pku/Two-shot-Video-Object-Segmentation.
Improving Fairness in Facial Albedo Estimation via Visual-Textual Cues

Recent 3D face reconstruction methods have made significant advances in geometry prediction, yet further cosmetic improvements are limited by lagged albedo because inferring albedo from appearance is an ill-posed problem. Although some existing methods consider prior knowledge from illumination to improve albedo estimation, they still produce a light-skin bias due to racially biased albedo models and limited light constraints. In this paper, we reconsider the relationship between albedo and face attributes and propose a ID2Albedo to directly estimate albedo without constraining illumination. Our key insight is that intrinsic semantic attributes such as race, skin color, and age can be used to constrain the albedo map. We first introduce visual-textual cues and design a semantic loss to supervise facial albedo estimation. Specifically, we pre-define text labels such as race, skin color, age, and wrinkles. Then, we employ the text-image model (CLIP) to compute the similarity between the text and the input image, and assign a pseudo-label to each facial image. We constrain generated albedos in the training phase to have the same attributes as the inputs. In addition, we train a high-quality, unbiased facial albedo generator and utilize the semantic loss to learn the mapping from illumination-robust identity features to the albedo latent codes. Finally, our ID2Albedo is trained in a self-supervised way and outperforms state-of-the-art albedo estimation methods in terms of accuracy and fidelity. It is worth mentioning that our approach has excellent generalizability and fairness, especially on in-the- wild data.
Demystifying Causal Features on Adversarial Examples and Causal Inoculation for Robust Network by Adversarial Instrumental Variable Regression

The origin of adversarial examples is still inexplicable in research fields, and it arouses arguments from various view-points, albeit comprehensive investigations. In this paper, we propose a way of delving into the unexpected vulnerability in adversarially trained networks from a causal perspective, namely adversarial instrumental variable (IV) regression. By deploying it, we estimate the causal relation of adversarial prediction under an unbiased environment dissociated from unknown confounders. Our approach aims to demystify inherent causal features on adversarial examples by leveraging a zero-sum optimization game between a casual feature estimator (i.e., hypothesis model) and worst-case counterfactuals (i.e., test function) disturbing to find causal features. Through extensive analyses, we demonstrate that the estimated causal features are highly related to the correct prediction for adversarial robustness, and the counterfactuals exhibit extreme features significantly deviating from the correct prediction. In addition, we present how to effectively inoculate CAusal FEatures (CAFE) into defense networks for improving adversarial robustness.