Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
VLPD: Context-Aware Pedestrian Detection via Vision-Language Semantic Self-Supervision

Detecting pedestrians accurately in urban scenes is significant for realistic applications like autonomous driving or video surveillance. However, confusing human-like objects often lead to wrong detections, and small scale or heavily occluded pedestrians are easily missed due to their unusual appearances. To address these challenges, only object regions are inadequate, thus how to fully utilize more explicit and semantic contexts becomes a key problem. Meanwhile, previous context-aware pedestrian detectors either only learn latent contexts with visual clues, or need laborious annotations to obtain explicit and semantic contexts. Therefore, we propose in this paper a novel approach via Vision-Language semantic self-supervision for context-aware Pedestrian Detection (VLPD) to model explicitly semantic contexts without any extra annotations. Firstly, we propose a self-supervised Vision-Language Semantic (VLS) segmentation method, which learns both fully-supervised pedestrian detection and contextual segmentation via self-generated explicit labels of semantic classes by vision-language models. Furthermore, a self-supervised Prototypical Semantic Contrastive (PSC) learning method is proposed to better discriminate pedestrians and other classes, based on more explicit and semantic contexts obtained from VLS. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that our proposed VLPD achieves superior performances over the previous state-of-the-arts, particularly under challenging circumstances like small scale and heavy occlusion. Code is available at https://github.com/lmy98129/VLPD.
Context-Aware Pretraining for Efficient Blind Image Decomposition

In this paper, we study Blind Image Decomposition (BID), which is to uniformly remove multiple types of degradation at once without foreknowing the noise type. There remain two practical challenges: (1) Existing methods typically require massive data supervision, making them infeasible to real-world scenarios. (2) The conventional paradigm usually focuses on mining the abnormal pattern of a superimposed image to separate the noise, which de facto conflicts with the primary image restoration task. Therefore, such a pipeline compromises repairing efficiency and authenticity. In an attempt to solve the two challenges in one go, we propose an efficient and simplified paradigm, called Context-aware Pretraining (CP), with two pretext tasks: mixed image separation and masked image reconstruction. Such a paradigm reduces the annotation demands and explicitly facilitates context-aware feature learning. Assuming the restoration process follows a structure-to-texture manner, we also introduce a Context-aware Pretrained network (CPNet). In particular, CPNet contains two transformer-based parallel encoders, one information fusion module, and one multi-head prediction module. The information fusion module explicitly utilizes the mutual correlation in the spatial-channel dimension, while the multi-head prediction module facilitates texture-guided appearance flow. Moreover, a new sampling loss along with an attribute label constraint is also deployed to make use of the spatial context, leading to high-fidelity image restoration. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic benchmarks show that our method achieves competitive performance for various BID tasks.
Temporal Consistent 3D LiDAR Representation Learning for Semantic Perception in Autonomous Driving

Semantic perception is a core building block in autonomous driving, since it provides information about the drivable space and location of other traffic participants. For learning-based perception, often a large amount of diverse training data is necessary to achieve high performance. Data labeling is usually a bottleneck for developing such methods, especially for dense prediction tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation or panoptic segmentation. For 3D Li-DAR data, the annotation process demands even more effort than for images. Especially in autonomous driving, point clouds are sparse, and objects appearance depends on its distance from the sensor, making it harder to acquire large amounts of labeled training data. This paper aims at taking an alternative path proposing a self-supervised representation learning method for 3D LiDAR data. Our approach exploits the vehicle motion to match objects across time viewed in different scans. We then train a model to maximize the point-wise feature similarities from points of the associated object in different scans, which enables to learn a consistent representation across time. The experimental results show that our approach performs better than previous state-of-the-art self-supervised representation learning methods when fine-tuning to different downstream tasks. We furthermore show that with only 10% of labeled data, a network pre-trained with our approach can achieve better performance than the same network trained from scratch with all labels for semantic segmentation on SemanticKITTI. <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> Code: https://github.com/PRBonn/TARL
A Unified Spatial-Angular Structured Light for Single-View Acquisition of Shape and Reflectance

We propose a unified structured light, consisting of an LED array and an LCD mask, for high-quality acquisition of both shape and reflectance from a single view. For geometry, one LED projects a set of learned mask patterns to accurately encode spatial information; the decoded results from multiple LEDs are then aggregated to produce a final depth map. For appearance, learned light patterns are cast through a transparent mask to efficiently probe angularly-varying reflectance. Per-point BRDF parameters are differentiably optimized with respect to corresponding measurements, and stored in texture maps as the final reflectance. We establish a differentiable pipeline for the joint capture to automatically optimize both the mask and light patterns towards optimal acquisition quality. The effectiveness of our light is demonstrated with a wide variety of physical objects. Our results compare favorably with state-of-the-art techniques.
MIANet: Aggregating Unbiased Instance and General Information for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Existing few-shot segmentation methods are based on the meta-learning strategy and extract instance knowledge from a support set and then apply the knowledge to segment target objects in a query set. However, the extracted knowledge is insufficient to cope with the variable intra-class differences since the knowledge is obtained from a few samples in the support set. To address the problem, we propose a multi-information aggregation network (MIANet) that effectively leverages the general knowledge, i.e., semantic word embeddings, and instance information for accurate segmentation. Specifically, in MIANet, a general information module (GIM) is proposed to extract a general class prototype from word embeddings as a supplement to instance information. To this end, we design a triplet loss that treats the general class prototype as an anchor and samples positive-negative pairs from local features in the support set. The calculated triplet loss can transfer semantic similarities among language identities from a word embedding space to a visual representation space. To alleviate the model biasing towards the seen training classes and to obtain multi-scale information, we then introduce a non-parametric hierarchical prior module (HPM) to generate unbiased instance-level information via calculating the pixel-level similarity between the support and query image features. Finally, an information fusion module (IFM) combines the general and instance information to make predictions for the query image. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> and COCO-20 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> show that MIANet yields superior performance and set a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at github.com/Aldrich2y/MIANet.
AltFreezing for More General Video Face Forgery Detection

Existing face forgery detection models try to discriminate fake images by detecting only spatial artifacts (e.g., generative artifacts, blending) or mainly temporal artifacts (e.g., flickering, discontinuity). They may experience significant performance degradation when facing out-domain artifacts. In this paper, we propose to capture both spatial and temporal artifacts in one model for face forgery detection. A simple idea is to leverage a spatiotemporal model (3D ConvNet). However, we find that it may easily rely on one type of artifact and ignore the other. To address this issue, we present a novel training strategy called AltFreezing for more general face forgery detection. The AltFreezing aims to encourage the model to detect both spatial and temporal artifacts. It divides the weights of a spatiotemporal network into two groups: spatial-related and temporal-related. Then the two groups of weights are alternately frozen during the training process so that the model can learn spatial and temporal features to distinguish real or fake videos. Furthermore, we introduce various video-level data augmentation methods to improve the generalization capability of the forgery detection model. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization to unseen manipulations and datasets.
Genie: Show Me the Data for Quantization

Zero-shot quantization is a promising approach for developing lightweight deep neural networks when data is inaccessible owing to various reasons, including cost and issues related to privacy. By exploiting the learned parameters ( <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mu$</tex> and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sigma$</tex> ) of batch normalization layers in an FP32-pretrained model, zero-shot quantization schemes focus on generating synthetic data. Subsequently, they distill knowledge from the pre-trained model (teacher) to the quantized model (student) such that the quantized model can be optimized with the synthetic dataset. However, thus far, zeroshot quantization has primarily been discussed in the context of quantization-aware training methods, which require task-specific losses and long-term optimization as much as retraining. We thus introduce a post-training quantization scheme for zero-shot quantization that produces high-quality quantized networks within a few hours. Furthermore, we propose a framework called Genie that generates data suited for quantization. With the data synthesized by Genie, we can produce robust quantized models without real datasets, which is comparable to few-shot quantization. We also propose a post-training quantization algorithm to enhance the performance of quantized models. By combining them, we can bridge the gap between zero-shot and few-shot quantization while significantly improving the quantization performance compared to that of existing approaches. In other words, we can obtain a unique state-of-the-art zero-shot quantization approach. The code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/Genie.
Neural Volumetric Memory for Visual Locomotion Control

Legged robots have the potential to expand the reach of autonomy beyond paved roads. In this work, we consider the difficult problem of locomotion on challenging terrains using a single forward-facing depth camera. Due to the partial observability of the problem, the robot has to rely on past observations to infer the terrain currently beneath it. To solve this problem, we follow the paradigm in computer vision that explicitly models the 3D geometry of the scene and propose Neural Volumetric Memory (NVM), a geometric memory architecture that explicitly accounts for the SE(3) equivariance of the 3D world. NVM aggregates feature volumes from multiple camera views by first bringing them back to the ego-centric frame of the robot. We test the learned visual-locomotion policy on a physical robot and show that our approach, which explicitly introduces geometric priors during training, offers superior performance than more naïve methods. We also include ablation studies and show that the representations stored in the neural volumetric memory capture sufficient geometric information to reconstruct the scene. Our project page with videos is https://rchalyang.github.io/NVM
AVFace: Towards Detailed Audio-Visual 4D Face Reconstruction

In this work, we present a multimodal solution to the problem of 4D face reconstruction from monocular videos. 3D face reconstruction from 2D images is an under-constrained problem due to the ambiguity of depth. State-of-the-art methods try to solve this problem by leveraging visual information from a single image or video, whereas 3D mesh animation approaches rely more on audio. However, in most cases (e.g. AR/VR applications), videos include both visual and speech information. We propose AV-Face that incorporates both modalities and accurately re-constructs the 4D facial and lip motion of any speaker, without requiring any 3D ground truth for training. A coarse stage estimates the per-frame parameters of a 3D mor-phable model, followed by a lip refinement, and then a fine stage recovers facial geometric details. Due to the temporal audio and video information captured by transformer-based modules, our method is robust in cases when either modality is insufficient (e.g. face occlusions). Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our method over the current state-of-the-art.
Range-nullspace Video Frame Interpolation with Focalized Motion Estimation

Continuous-time video frame interpolation is a fundamental technique in computer vision for its flexibility in synthesizing motion trajectories and novel video frames at arbitrary intermediate time steps. Yet, how to infer accurate intermediate motion and synthesize high-quality video frames are two critical challenges. In this paper, we present a novel VFI framework with improved treatment for these challenges. To address the former, we propose focalized trajectory fitting, which performs confidence-aware motion trajectory estimation by learning to pay focus to reliable optical flow candidates while suppressing the outliers. The second is range-nullspace synthesis, a novel frame renderer cast as solving an ill-posed problem addressed by learning decoupled components in orthogonal subspaces. The proposed framework sets new records on 7 of 10 public VFI benchmarks.
An Erudite Fine-Grained Visual Classification Model

Current fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) models are isolated.In practice, we first need to identify the coarse-grained label of an object, then select the corresponding FGVC model for recognition.This hinders the application of FGVC algorithms in real-life scenarios.In this paper, we propose an erudite FGVC model jointly trained by several different datasets 1 , which can efficiently and accurately predict an object's fine-grained label across the combined label space.We found through a pilot study that positive and negative transfers co-occur when different datasets are mixed for training, i.e., the knowledge from other datasets is not always useful.Therefore, we first propose a feature disentanglement module and a feature re-fusion module to reduce negative transfer and boost positive transfer between different datasets.In detail, we reduce negative transfer by decoupling the deep features through many dataset-specific feature extractors.Subsequently, these are channel-wise re-fused to facilitate positive transfer.Finally, we propose a meta-learning based dataset-agnostic spatial attention layer to take full advantage of the multi-dataset training data, given that localisation is dataset-agnostic between different datasets.Experimental results across 11 different mixed-datasets built on four different FGVC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Furthermore, the proposed method can be easily combined with existing FGVC methods to obtain state-of-the-art results.Our code is available at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/An-Erudite-FGVC-Model.* indicates the corresponding author. 1 In this paper, different datasets mean different fine-grained visual classification datasets.
Style Projected Clustering for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Existing semantic segmentation methods improve generalization capability, by regularizing various images to a canonical feature space. While this process contributes to generalization, it weakens the representation inevitably. In contrast to existing methods, we instead utilize the difference between images to build a better representation space, where the distinct style features are extracted and stored as the bases of representation. Then, the generalization to unseen image styles is achieved by projecting features to this known space. Specifically, we realize the style projection as a weighted combination of stored bases, where the similarity distances are adopted as the weighting factors. Based on the same concept, we extend this process to the decision part of model and promote the generalization of semantic prediction. By measuring the similarity distances to semantic bases (i.e., prototypes), we replace the common deterministic prediction with semantic clustering. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of proposed method to the state of the art, up to 3.6% mIoU improvement in average on unseen scenarios. Code and models are available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/SPC-Net.
Efficient Mask Correction for Click-Based Interactive Image Segmentation

The goal of click-based interactive image segmentation is to extract target masks with the input of positive/negative clicks. Every time a new click is placed, existing methods run the whole segmentation network to obtain a corrected mask, which is inefficient since several clicks may be needed to reach satisfactory accuracy. To this end, we propose an efficient method to correct the mask with a lightweight mask correction network. The whole network remains a low computational cost from the second click, even if we have a large backbone. However, a simple correction network with limited capacity is not likely to achieve comparable performance with a classic segmentation network. Thus, we propose a click-guided self-attention module and a click-guided correlation module to effectively exploits the click information to boost performance. First, several tem-plates are selected based on the semantic similarity with click features. Then the self-attention module propagates the template information to other pixels, while the correlation module directly uses the templates to obtain target out-lines. With the efficient architecture and two click-guided modules, our method shows preferable performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/feiaxyt/EMC-Click.
Where is My Spot? Few-shot Image Generation via Latent Subspace Optimization

Image generation relies on massive training data that can hardly produce diverse images of an unseen category according to a few examples. In this paper, we address this dilemma by projecting sparse few-shot samples into a continuous latent space that can potentially generate infinite unseen samples. The rationale behind is that we aim to locate a centroid latent position in a conditional StyleGAN, where the corresponding output image on that centroid can maximize the similarity with the given samples. Although the given samples are unseen for the conditional StyleGAN, we assume the neighboring latent subspace around the centroid belongs to the novel category, and therefore introduce two latent subspace optimization objectives. In the first one we use few-shot samples as positive anchors of the novel class, and adjust the StyleGAN to produce the corresponding results with the new class label condition. The second objective is to govern the generation process from the other way around, by altering the centroid and its surrounding latent subspace for a more precise generation of the novel class. These reciprocal optimization objectives inject a novel class into the StyleGAN latent subspace, and therefore new unseen samples can be easily produced by sampling images from it. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior few-shot generation performances compared with state-of-the-art methods, especially in terms of diversity and generation quality. Code is available at https://github.com/chansey0529/LSO.
Recognizability Embedding Enhancement for Very Low-Resolution Face Recognition and Quality Estimation

Very low-resolution face recognition (VLRFR) poses unique challenges, such as tiny regions of interest and poor resolution due to extreme standoff distance or wide viewing angle of the acquisition devices. In this paper, we study principled approaches to elevate the recognizability of a face in the embedding space instead of the visual quality. We first formulate a robust learning-based face recognizability measure, namely recognizability index (RI), based on two criteria: (i) proximity of each face embedding against the unrecognizable faces cluster center and (ii) closeness of each face embedding against its positive and negative class prototypes. We then devise an index diversion loss to push the hard-to-recognize face embedding with low RI away from unrecognizable faces cluster to boost the RI, which reflects better recognizability. Additionally, a perceptibility attention mechanism is introduced to attend to the most recognizable face regions, which offers better explanatory and discriminative traits for embedding learning. Our proposed model is trained end-to-end and simultaneously serves recognizability-aware embedding learning and face quality estimation. To address VLRFR, our extensive evaluations on three challenging low-resolution datasets and face quality assessment demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.
Adapting Shortcut with Normalizing Flow: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Visual Recognition

Pretraining followed by fine-tuning has proven to be effective in visual recognition tasks. However, fine-tuning all parameters can be computationally expensive, particularly for large-scale models. To mitigate the computational and storage demands, recent research has explored Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which focuses on tuning a minimal number of parameters for efficient adaptation. Existing methods, however, fail to analyze the impact of the additional parameters on the model, resulting in an unclear and suboptimal tuning process. In this paper, we introduce a novel and effective PEFT paradigm, named SNF (Shortcut adaptation via Normalization Flow), which utilizes normalizing flows to adjust the shortcut layers. We highlight that layers without Lipschitz constraints can lead to error propagation when adapting to downstream datasets. Since modifying the over-parameterized residual connections in these layers is expensive, we focus on adjusting the cheap yet crucial shortcuts. Moreover, learning new information with few parameters in PEFT can be challenging, and information loss can result in label information degradation. To address this issue, we propose an information-preserving normalizing flow. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SNF. Specifically, with only 0.036M parameters, SNF surpasses previous approaches on both the FGVC and VTAB-1k benchmarks using ViT/B-16 as the backbone. The code is available at https://github.com/Wang-Yaoming/SNF