Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Evading Forensic Classifiers with Attribute-Conditioned Adversarial Faces

The ability of generative models to produce highly realistic synthetic face images has raised security and ethical concerns. As a first line of defense against such fake faces, deep learning based forensic classifiers have been developed. While these forensic models can detect whether a face image is synthetic or real with high accuracy, they are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although such attacks can be highly successful in evading detection by forensic classifiers, they introduce visible noise patterns that are detectable through careful human scrutiny. Additionally, these attacks assume access to the target model(s) which may not always be true. Attempts have been made to directly perturb the latent space of GANs to produce adversarial fake faces that can circumvent forensic classifiers. In this work, we go one step further and show that it is possible to successfully generate adversarial fake faces with a specified set of attributes (e.g., hair color, eye size, race, gender, etc.). To achieve this goal, we leverage the state-of-the-art generative model StyleGAN with disentangled representations, which enables a range of modifications without leaving the manifold of natural images. We propose a framework to search for adversarial latent codes within the feature space of StyleGAN, where the search can be guided either by a text prompt or a reference image. We also propose a meta-learning based optimization strategy to achieve transferable performance on unknown target models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can produce semantically manipulated adversarial fake faces, which are true to the specified attribute set and can successfully fool forensic face classifiers, while remaining undetectable by humans. Code: https://github.com/koushiksrivats/face_attribute_attack.
CrOC: Cross-View Online Clustering for Dense Visual Representation Learning

Learning dense visual representations without labels is an arduous task and more so from scene-centric data. We propose to tackle this challenging problem by proposing a Cross-view consistency objective with an Online Clustering mechanism (CrOC) to discover and segment the semantics of the views. In the absence of hand-crafted priors, the resulting method is more generalizable and does not require a cumbersome pre-processing step. More importantly, the clustering algorithm conjointly operates on the features of both views, thereby elegantly bypassing the issue of content not represented in both views and the ambiguous matching of objects from one crop to the other. We demonstrate excellent performance on linear and unsupervised segmentation transfer tasks on various datasets and similarly for video object segmentation. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/stegmuel/CrOC.
FIANCEE: Faster Inference of Adversarial Networks via Conditional Early Exits

Generative DNNs are a powerful tool for image synthesis, but they are limited by their computational load. On the other hand, given a trained model and a task, e.g. faces generation within a range of characteristics, the output image quality will be unevenly distributed among images with different characteristics. It follows, that we might restrain the model's complexity on some instances, maintaining a high quality. We propose a method for diminishing computations by adding so-called early exit branches to the original architecture, and dynamically switching the computational path depending on how difficult it will be to render the output. We apply our method on two different SOTA models performing generative tasks: generation from a semantic map, and cross-reenactment of face expressions; showing it is able to output images with custom lower-quality thresholds. For a threshold of LPIPS ≤ 0.1, we diminish their computations by up to a half. This is especially relevant for real-time applications such as synthesis of faces, when quality loss needs to be contained, but most of the inputs need fewer computations than the complex instances.
Accelerating Vision-Language Pretraining with Free Language Modeling

The state of the arts in vision-language pretraining (VLP) achieves exemplary performance but suffers from high training costs resulting from slow convergence and long training time, especially on large-scale web datasets. An essential obstacle to training efficiency lies in the entangled prediction rate (percentage of tokens for reconstruction) and corruption rate (percentage of corrupted tokens) in masked language modeling (MLM), that is, a proper corruption rate is achieved at the cost of a large portion of output tokens being excluded from prediction loss. To accelerate the convergence of VLP, we propose a new pretraining task, namely, free language modeling (FLM), that enables a 100% prediction rate with arbitrary corruption rates. FLM successfully frees the prediction rate from the tie-up with the corruption rate while allowing the corruption spans to be customized for each token to be predicted. FLM-trained models are encouraged to learn better and faster given the same GPU time by exploiting bidirectional contexts more flexibly. Extensive experiments show FLM could achieve an impressive 2.5 × pretraining time reduction in comparison to the MLM-based methods, while keeping competitive performance on both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. Code will be public at https://github.com/TencentARC/FLM.
DNF: Decouple and Feedback Network for Seeing in the Dark

The exclusive properties of RAW data have shown great potential for low-light image enhancement. Nevertheless, the performance is bottlenecked by the inherent limitations of existing architectures in both single-stage and multi-stage methods. Mixed mapping across two different domains, noise-to-clean and RAW-to-sRGB, misleads the single-stage methods due to the domain ambiguity. The multi-stage methods propagate the information merely through the resulting image of each stage, neglecting the abundant features in the lossy image-level dataflow. In this paper, we probe a generalized solution to these bottlenecks and propose a Decouple aNd Feedback framework, abbreviated as DNF. To mitigate the domain ambiguity, domain-specific subtasks are decoupled, along with fully utilizing the unique properties in RAW and sRGB domains. The feature propagation across stages with a feedback mechanism avoids the information loss caused by image-level dataflow. The two key insights of our method resolve the inherent limitations of RAW data-based low-light image enhancement satisfactorily, empowering our method to outperform the previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin with only 19% parameters, achieving 0.97dB and 1.30dB PSNR improvements on the Sony and Fuji subsets of SID.
ABCD : Arbitrary Bitwise Coefficient for De-Quantization

Modern displays and contents support more than 8bits image and video. However, bit-starving situations such as compression codecs make low bit-depth (LBD) images (<8bits), occurring banding and blurry artifacts. Previous bit depth expansion (BDE) methods still produce unsatisfactory high bit-depth (HBD) images. To this end, we propose an implicit neural function with a bit query to recover de-quantized images from arbitrarily quantized inputs. We develop a phasor estimator to exploit the information of the nearest pixels. Our method shows superior performance against prior BDE methods on natural and animation images. We also demonstrate our model on YouTube UGC datasets for de-banding. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WooKyoungHan/ABCD
Learning Action Changes by Measuring Verb-Adverb Textual Relationships

The goal of this work is to understand the way actions are performed in videos. That is, given a video, we aim to predict an adverb indicating a modification applied to the action (e.g. cut “finely”). We cast this problem as a regression task. We measure textual relationships between verbs and adverbs to generate a regression target representing the action change we aim to learn. We test our approach on a range of datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results on both adverb prediction and antonym classification. Furthermore, we outperform previous work when we lift two commonly assumed conditions: the availability of action labels during testing and the pairing of adverbs as antonyms. Existing datasets for adverb recognition are either noisy, which makes learning difficult, or contain actions whose appearance is not influenced by adverbs, which makes evaluation less reliable. To address this, we collect a new high quality dataset: Adverbs in Recipes (AIR). We focus on instructional recipes videos, curating a set of actions that exhibit meaningful visual changes when performed differently. Videos in AIR are more tightly trimmed and were manually reviewed by multiple annotators to ensure high labelling quality. Results show that models learn better from AIR given its cleaner videos. At the same time, adverb prediction on AIR is challenging, demonstrating that there is considerable room for improvement.
Heterogeneous Continual Learning

We propose a novel framework and a solution to tackle the continual learning (CL) problem with changing network architectures. Most CL methods focus on adapting a single architecture to a new task/class by modifying its weights. However, with rapid progress in architecture design, the problem of adapting existing solutions to novel architectures becomes relevant. To address this limitation, we propose Heterogeneous Continual Learning (HCL), where a wide range of evolving network architectures emerge continually together with novel data/tasks. As a solution, we build on top of the distillation family of techniques and modify it to a new setting where a weaker model takes the role of a teacher; meanwhile, a new stronger architecture acts as a student. Furthermore, we consider a setup of limited access to previous data and propose Quick Deep Inversion (QDI) to recover prior task visual features to support knowledge transfer. QDI significantly reduces computational costs compared to previous solutions and improves overall performance. In summary, we propose a new setup for CL with a modified knowledge distillation paradigm and design a quick data inversion method to enhance distillation. Our evaluation of various benchmarks shows a significant improvement on accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art methods over various networks architectures.
MAIR: Multi-View Attention Inverse Rendering with 3D Spatially-Varying Lighting Estimation

We propose a scene-level inverse rendering framework that uses multi-view images to decompose the scene into geometry, a SVBRDF, and 3D spatially-varying lighting. Because multi-view images provide a variety of information about the scene, multi-view images in object-level inverse rendering have been taken for granted. However, owing to the absence of multi-view HDR synthetic dataset, scene-level inverse rendering has mainly been studied using single-view image. We were able to successfully perform scene-level inverse rendering using multi-view images by expanding OpenRooms dataset and designing efficient pipelines to handle multi-view images, and splitting spatially-varying lighting. Our experiments show that the proposed method not only achieves better performance than single-view-based methods, but also achieves robust performance on unseen real-world scene. Also, our sophisticated 3D spatially-varying lighting volume allows for photorealistic object insertion in any 3D location.
Counterfactual Root Cause Analysis via Anomaly Detection and Causal Graphs

Anomalies in production processes can cause expensive standstills, damages to the production equipment, waste of materials and flaws in the final product. In production, finding anomalies is usually accomplished by machine learning methods. But to avert anomalies and to automatically recover, actually the detection of the root causes is required. We developed an approach that detects anomalies and then deduces root causes by combining an anomaly detector with a novel Root Cause Analysis (RCA) method based on a causal graph. This specific combination of methods allows causally justified, explainable and counterfactual RCA. The developed algorithm was applied to a simulated gripping process using robotic arms. It found the two root causes of the detected anomalies in the simulated scenarios.
FashionSAP: Symbols and Attributes Prompt for Fine-Grained Fashion Vision-Language Pre-Training

Fashion vision-language pre-training models have shown efficacy for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, general vision-language pre-training models pay less attention to fine-grained domain features, while these features are important in distinguishing the specific domain tasks from general tasks. We propose a method for fine-grained fashion vision-language pre-training based on fashion Symbols and Attributes Prompt (FashionSAP) to model fine-grained multi-modalities fashion attributes and characteristics. Firstly, we propose the fashion symbols, a novel abstract fashion concept layer, to represent different fashion items and to generalize various kinds of fine- grained fashion features, making modelling fine-grained attributes more effective. Secondly, the attributes prompt method is proposed to make the model learn specific attributes of fashion items explicitly. We design proper prompt templates according to the format of fashion data. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two public fashion benchmarks, i.e., FashionGen and FashionIQ, and FashionSAP gets SOTA performances for four popular fashion tasks. The ablation study also shows the proposed abstract fashion symbols, and the attribute prompt method enables the model to acquire fine-grained semantics in the fashion domain effectively. The obvious performance gains from FashionSAP provide a new baseline for future fashion task research. <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> The source code is available at https://github.com/hssip/FashionSAP
Rethinking Gradient Projection Continual Learning: Stability/Plasticity Feature Space Decoupling

Continual learning aims to incrementally learn novel classes over time, while not forgetting the learned knowledge. Recent studies have found that learning would not forget if the updated gradient is orthogonal to the feature space. However, previous approaches require the gradient to be fully orthogonal to the whole feature space, leading to poor plasticity, as the feasible gradient direction becomes narrow when the tasks continually come, i.e., feature space is unlimitedly expanded. In this paper, we propose a space decoupling (SD) algorithm to decouple the feature space into a pair of complementary subspaces, i.e., the stability space <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{I}$</tex> and the plasticity space <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{R}. \mathcal{I}$</tex> is established by conducting space intersection between the historic and current feature space, and thus <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{I}$</tex> contains more task-shared bases. <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{R}$</tex> is constructed by seeking the orthogonal complementary subspace of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$T$</tex> and thus <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{R}$</tex> mainly contains task-specific bases. By putting distinguishing constraints on <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{R}$</tex> and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathcal{I}$</tex> , our method achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments are conducted by applying SD to gradient projection baselines, and show SD is model-agnostic and achieves SOTA results on publicly available datasets.
Rethinking Feature-based Knowledge Distillation for Face Recognition

With the continual expansion of face datasets, feature-based distillation prevails for large-scale face recognition. In this work, we attempt to remove identity supervision in student training, to spare the GPU memory from saving massive class centers. However, this naive removal leads to inferior distillation result. We carefully inspect the performance degradation from the perspective of intrinsic dimension, and argue that the gap in intrinsic dimension, namely the intrinsic gap, is intimately connected to the infamous capacity gap problem. By constraining the teacher's search space with reverse distillation, we narrow the intrinsic gap and unleash the potential of feature-only distillation. Remarkably, the proposed reverse distillation creates universally student-friendly teacher that demonstrates outstanding student improvement. We further enhance its effectiveness by designing a student proxy to better bridge the intrinsic gap. As a result, the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art distillation techniques with identity supervision on various face recognition benchmarks, and the improvements are consistent across different teacher-student pairs.
No One Left Behind: Improving the Worst Categories in Long-Tailed Learning

Unlike the case when using a balanced training dataset, the per-class recall (i.e., accuracy) of neural networks trained with an imbalanced dataset are known to vary a lot from category to category. The convention in long-tailed recognition is to manually split all categories into three subsets and report the average accuracy within each subset. We argue that under such an evaluation setting, some categories are inevitably sacrificed. On one hand, focusing on the average accuracy on a balanced test set incurs little penalty even if some worst performing categories have zero accuracy. On the other hand, classes in the “Few” subset do not necessarily perform worse than those in the “Many” or “Medium” subsets. We therefore advocate to focus more on improving the lowest recall among all categories and the harmonic mean of all recall values. Specifically, we propose a simple plug-in method that is applicable to a wide range of methods. By simply retraining the classifier of an existing pretrained model with our proposed loss function and using an optional ensemble trick that combines the predictions of the two classifiers, we achieve a more uniform distribution of recall values across categories, which leads to a higher harmonic mean accuracy while the (arithmetic) average accuracy is still high. The effectiveness of our method is justified on widely used benchmark datasets.
Network Pruning and Fine-tuning for Few-shot Industrial Image Anomaly Detection

This paper focuses on industrial image anomaly detection and localization under few-shot settings. Since acquiring sufficient anomalous data is difficult, unsupervised learning that uses only normal data is commonly used, but even obtaining enough anomaly-free training samples can be challenging. Moreover, applying data augmentations, which is a common strategy for few-shot learning to alleviate the lack of data, is limited to use for some industrial product images. To address the above issues, we propose a network pruning and fine-tuning (PF) framework that leverages the knowledge of a deep pre-trained model. Our approach distills the knowledge of normal samples into a pruned student network, followed by fine-tuning to restore its representation ability for normal data. During inference, discrepancies between features extracted by the teacher and student are used to determine the anomaly score. The proposed method could better utilize the strong representation ability of deep models and benefit the student training with limited data by network pruning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MVTec AD benchmark and is not limited to specific network pruning methods.
Similarity Maps for Self-Training Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding

A phrase grounding model receives an input image and a text phrase and outputs a suitable localization map. We present an effective way to refine a phrase ground model by considering self-similarity maps extracted from the latent representation of the model's image encoder. Our main insights are that these maps resemble localization maps and that by combining such maps, one can obtain useful pseudo-labels for performing self-training. Our results surpass, by a large margin, the state of the art in weakly supervised phrase grounding. A similar gap in performance is obtained for a recently proposed downstream task called WWbL, in which only the image is input, without any text. Our code is available at https://github.com/talshaharabany/Similarity-Maps-for-Self-Training-Weakly-Supervised-Phrase-Grounding
Auto-CARD: Efficient and Robust Codec Avatar Driving for Real-time Mobile Telepresence

Real-time and robust photorealistic avatars for telepresence in AR/VR have been highly desired for enabling im-mersive photorealistic telepresence. However, there still exists one key bottleneck: the considerable computational expense needed to accurately infer facial expressions captured from headset-mounted cameras with a quality level that can match the realism of the avatar's human appearance. To this end, we propose a framework called Auto-CARD, which for the first time enables realtime and robust driving of Codec Avatars when exclusively using merely on-device computing resources. This is achieved by minimizing two sources of redundancy. First, we develop a dedicated neural architecture search technique called AVE-NAS for avatar encoding in AR/VR, which explicitly boosts both the searched architectures' robustness in the presence of extreme facial ex-pressions and hardware friendliness on fast evolving AR/VR headsets. Second, we leverage the temporal redundancy in consecutively captured images during continuous rendering and develop a mechanism dubbed LATEX to skip the computation of redundant frames. Specifically, we first identify an opportunity from the linearity of the latent space derived by the avatar decoder and then propose to perform adaptive latent extrapolation for redundant frames. For evaluation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our Auto-CARD framework in realtime Codec Avatar driving settings, where we achieve a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$5.05\times$</tex> speedup on Meta Quest 2 while maintaining a compa-rable or even better animation quality than state-of-the-art avatar encoder designs.