Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Anomaly Detection using Score-based Perturbation Resilience

Unsupervised anomaly detection is widely studied in industrial applications where anomalous data is difficult to obtain. In particular, reconstruction-based anomaly detection can be a feasible solution if there is no option to use external knowledge, such as extra datasets or pre-trained models. However, reconstruction-based methods have limited utility due to poor detection performance. A score-based model, also known as a denoising diffusion model, recently has shown a high sample quality in the generation task. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method leveraging the score-based model. The proposed method shows promising performance without requiring external knowledge. The score, a gradient of the log-likelihood, has a property that is available for anomaly detection. The samples on the data manifold can be restored instantly by the score, even if they are randomly perturbed. We call this score-based perturbation resilience. On the other hand, the samples that deviate from the manifold cannot be restored in the same way. The variation of resilience depending on the sample position can be an indicator to discriminate anomalies. We derive this statement from a geometric perspective. Our method shows superior performance on three benchmark datasets for industrial anomaly detection. Specifically, on MVTec AD, we achieve image-level AUROC of 97.7% and pixel-level AUROC of 97.4% outperforming previous works that do not use external knowledge.
Representation Disparity-aware Distillation for 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we focus on developing knowledge distillation (KD) for compact 3D detectors. We observe that off-the-shelf KD methods manifest their efficacy only when the teacher model and student counterpart share similar intermediate feature representations. This might explain why they are less effective in building extreme-compact 3D detectors where significant representation disparity arises due primarily to the intrinsic sparsity and irregularity in 3D point clouds. This paper presents a novel representation disparity-aware distillation (RDD) method to address the representation disparity issue and reduce performance gap between compact students and over-parameterized teachers. This is accomplished by building our RDD from an innovative perspective of information bottleneck (IB), which can effectively minimize the disparity of proposal region pairs from student and teacher in features and logits. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superiority of our RDD over existing KD methods. For example, our RDD increases mAP of CP-Voxel-S to 57.1% on nuScenes dataset, which even surpasses teacher performance while taking up only 42% FLOPs.
OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims at segmenting an object in a video following human instruction. Current state-of-the-art methods fall into an offline pattern, in which each clip independently interacts with text embedding for cross-modal understanding. They usually present that the offline pattern is necessary for RVOS, yet model limited temporal association within each clip. In this work, we break up the previous offline belief and propose a simple yet effective online model using explicit query propagation, named OnlineRefer. Specifically, our approach leverages target cues that gather semantic information and position prior to improve the accuracy and ease of referring predictions for the current frame. Furthermore, we generalize our online model into a semi-online framework to be compatible with video-based backbones. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate it on four benchmarks, i.e., Refer-Youtube-VOS, Refer-DAVIS <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">17</inf> , A2D-Sentences, and JHMDB-Sentences. Without bells and whistles, our OnlineRefer with a Swin-L backbone achieves 63.5 J&F and 64.8 J&F on Refer-Youtube-VOS and Refer-DAVIS <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">17</inf> , outperforming all other offline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wudongming97/OnlineRefer.
Efficient Controllable Multi-Task Architectures

We aim to train a multi-task model such that users can adjust the desired compute budget and relative importance of task performances after deployment, without retraining. This enables optimizing performance for dynamically varying user needs, without heavy computational overhead to train and save models for various scenarios. To this end, we propose a multi-task model consisting of a shared encoder and task-specific decoders where both encoder and decoder channel widths are slimmable. Our key idea is to control the task importance by varying the capacities of task-specific decoders, while controlling the total computational cost by jointly adjusting the encoder capacity. This improves overall accuracy by allowing a stronger encoder for a given budget, increases control over computational cost, and delivers high-quality slimmed sub-architectures based on user’s constraints. Our training strategy involves a novel ‘Configuration-Invariant Knowledge Distillation’ loss that enforces backbone representations to be invariant under different runtime width configurations to enhance accuracy. Further, we present a simple but effective search algorithm that translates user constraints to runtime width configurations of both the shared encoder and task decoders, for sampling the sub-architectures. The key rule for the search algorithm is to provide a larger computational budget to the higher preferred task decoder, while searching a shared encoder configuration that enhances the overall MTL performance. Various experiments on three multi-task benchmarks (PASCALContext, NYUDv2, and CIFAR100-MTL) with diverse backbone architectures demonstrate the advantage of our approach. For example, our method shows a higher controllability by ∼ 33.5% in the NYUD-v2 dataset over prior methods, while incurring much less compute cost.
Self-Supervised Object Detection from Egocentric Videos

Understanding the visual world from human perspectives has been a long-standing challenge in computer vision. Egocentric videos exhibit high scene complexity and irregular motion flows compared to typical video understanding tasks. With the egocentric domain in mind, we address the problem of self-supervised, class-agnostic object detection, aiming to locate all objects in a given view, without any annotations or pre-trained weights. Our method, self-supervised object detection from egocentric videos (DEVI), generalizes appearance-based methods to learn features end-to-end that are category-specific and invariant to viewing angle and illumination. Our approach leverages natural human behavior in egocentric perception to sample diverse views of objects for our multi-view and scale-regression losses, and our cluster residual module learns multi-category patches for complex scene understanding. DEVI results in gains up to 4.11% AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">50</inf> , 0.11% AR <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</inf> , 1.32% AR <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</inf> , and 5.03% AR <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">100</inf> on recent egocentric datasets, while significantly reducing model complexity. We also demonstrate competitive performance on out-of-domain datasets without additional training or fine-tuning.
Learning Rain Location Prior for Nighttime Deraining

Rain can significantly degrade image quality and visibility, making deraining a critical area of research in computer vision. Despite recent progress in learning-based deraining methods, there is a lack of focus on nighttime deraining due to the unique challenges posed by non-uniform local illuminations from artificial light sources. Rain streaks in these scenes have diverse appearances that are tightly related to their relative positions to light sources, making it difficult for existing deraining methods to effectively handle them. In this paper, we highlight the importance of rain streak location information in nighttime deraining. Specifically, we propose a Rain Location Prior (RLP) that is learned implicitly from rainy images using a recurrent residual model. This learned prior contains location information of rain streaks and, when injected into deraining models, can significantly improve their performance. To further improve the effectiveness of the learned prior, we also propose a Rain Prior Injection Module (RPIM) to modulate the prior before injection, increasing the importance of features within rain streak areas. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by about 1dB and effectively improves the performance of deraining models. We also evaluate our method on real night rainy images to show the capability to handle real scenes with fully synthetic data for training. Our method represents a significant step forward in the area of nighttime deraining and highlights the importance of location information in this challenging problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zkawfanx/RLP.
Beating Backdoor Attack at Its Own Game

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attack, which does not affect the network’s performance on clean data but would manipulate the network behavior once a trigger pattern is added. Existing defense methods have greatly reduced attack success rate, but their prediction accuracy on clean data still lags behind a clean model by a large margin. Inspired by the stealthiness and effectiveness of backdoor attack, we propose a simple but highly effective defense framework which injects non-adversarial backdoors targeting poisoned samples. Following the general steps in backdoor attack, we detect a small set of suspected samples and then apply a poisoning strategy to them. The non-adversarial backdoor, once triggered, suppresses the attacker’s backdoor on poisoned data, but has limited influence on clean data. The defense can be carried out during data preprocessing, without any modification to the standard end-to-end training pipeline. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks with different architectures and representative attacks. Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense effectiveness with by far the lowest performance drop on clean data. Considering the surprising defense ability displayed by our framework, we call for more attention to utilizing backdoor for backdoor defense. Code is available at https://github.com/damianliumin/non-adversarial_backdoor.
Diffusion in Style

We present Diffusion in Style, a simple method to adapt Stable Diffusion to any desired style, using only a small set of target images. It is based on the key observation that the style of the images generated by Stable Diffusion is tied to the initial latent tensor. Not adapting this initial latent tensor to the style makes fine-tuning slow, expensive, and impractical, especially when only a few target style images are available. In contrast, fine-tuning is much easier if this initial latent tensor is also adapted. Our Diffusion in Style is orders of magnitude more sample-efficient and faster. It also generates more pleasing images than existing approaches, as shown qualitatively and with quantitative comparisons.
Few-Shot Dataset Distillation via Translative Pre-Training

Dataset distillation aims at a small synthetic dataset to mimic the training performance on neural networks of a given large dataset. Existing approaches heavily rely on an iterative optimization to update synthetic data and multiple forward-backward passes over thousands of neural network spaces, which introduce significant overhead for computation and are inconvenient in scenarios requiring high efficiency. In this paper, we focus on few-shot dataset distillation, where a distilled dataset is synthesized with only a few or even a single network. To this end, we introduce the notion of distillation space, such that synthetic data optimized only in this specific space can achieve the effect of those optimized through numerous neural networks, with dramatically accelerated training and reduced computational cost. To learn such a distillation space, we first formulate the problem as a quad-level optimization framework and propose a bi-level algorithm. Nevertheless, the algorithm in its original form has a large memory footprint in practice due to the back-propagation through an unrolled computational graph. We then convert the problem of learning the distillation space to a first-order one based on image translation. Specifically, the synthetic images are optimized in an arbitrary but fixed neural space and then translated to those in the targeted distillation space. We pre-train the translator on some large datasets like ImageNet so that it requires only a limited number of adaptation steps on the target dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the translator after pre-training and a limited number of adaptation steps achieves comparable distillation performance with state of the arts, with ∼ 15× acceleration. It also exerts satisfactory generalization performance across different datasets, storage budgets, and numbers of classes.
ChartReader: A Unified Framework for Chart Derendering and Comprehension without Heuristic Rules

Charts are a powerful tool for visually conveying complex data, but their comprehension poses a challenge due to the diverse chart types and intricate components. Existing chart comprehension methods suffer from either heuristic rules or an over-reliance on OCR systems, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we present ChartReader, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates chart derendering and comprehension tasks. Our approach includes a transformer-based chart component detection module and an extended pre-trained vision-language model for chart-to-X tasks. By learning the rules of charts automatically from annotated datasets, our approach eliminates the need for manual rule-making, reducing effort and enhancing accuracy. We also introduce a data variable replacement technique and extend the input and position embeddings of the pre-trained model for cross-task training. We evaluate ChartReader on Chart-to-Table, ChartQA, and Chart-to-Text tasks, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. Our proposed framework can significantly reduce the manual effort involved in chart analysis, providing a step towards a universal chart understanding model. Moreover, our approach offers opportunities for plug-and-play integration with mainstream LLMs such as T5 and TaPas, extending their capability to chart comprehension tasks. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
OmniLabel: A Challenging Benchmark for Language-Based Object Detection

Language-based object detection is a promising direction towards building a natural interface to describe objects in images that goes far beyond plain category names. While recent methods show great progress in that direction, proper evaluation is lacking. With OmniLabel, we propose a novel task definition, dataset, and evaluation metric. The task subsumes standard- and open-vocabulary detection as well as referring expressions. With more than 28K unique object descriptions on over 25K images, OmniLabel provides a challenging benchmark with diverse and complex object descriptions in a naturally open-vocabulary setting. Moreover, a key differentiation to existing benchmarks is that our object descriptions can refer to one, multiple or even no object, hence, providing negative examples in free-form text. The proposed evaluation handles the large label space and judges performance via a modified average precision metric, which we validate by evaluating strong language-based baselines. OmniLabel indeed provides a challenging test bed for future research on language-based detection. Visit the project website at https://www.omnilabel.org
PoseDiffusion: Solving Pose Estimation via Diffusion-aided Bundle Adjustment

Camera pose estimation is a long-standing computer vision problem that to date often relies on classical methods, such as handcrafted keypoint matching, RANSAC and bundle adjustment. In this paper, we propose to formulate the Structure from Motion (SfM) problem inside a probabilistic diffusion framework, modelling the conditional distribution of camera poses given input images. This novel view of an old problem has several advantages. (i) The nature of the diffusion framework mirrors the iterative procedure of bundle adjustment. (ii) The formulation allows a seamless integration of geometric constraints from epipolar geometry. (iii) It excels in typically difficult scenarios such as sparse views with wide baselines. (iv) The method can predict intrinsics and extrinsics for an arbitrary amount of images. We demonstrate that our method PoseDiffusion significantly improves over the classic SfM pipelines and the learned approaches on two real-world datasets. Finally, it is observed that our method can generalize across datasets without further training. Project page: https://posediffusion.github.io/
Learning Depth Estimation for Transparent and Mirror Surfaces

Inferring the depth of transparent or mirror (ToM) surfaces represents a hard challenge for either sensors, algorithms, or deep networks. We propose a simple pipeline for learning to estimate depth properly for such surfaces with neural networks, without requiring any ground-truth annotation. We unveil how to obtain reliable pseudo labels by in-painting ToM objects in images and processing them with a monocular depth estimation model. These labels can be used to fine-tune existing monocular or stereo networks, to let them learn how to deal with ToM surfaces. Experimental results on the Booster dataset show the dramatic improvements enabled by our remarkably simple proposal.
CBA: Improving Online Continual Learning via Continual Bias Adaptor

Online continual learning (CL) aims to learn new knowledge and consolidate previously learned knowledge from non-stationary data streams. Due to the time-varying training setting, the model learned from a changing distribution easily forgets the previously learned knowledge and biases toward the newly received task. To address this problem, we propose a Continual Bias Adaptor (CBA) module to augment the classifier network to adapt to catastrophic distribution change during training, such that the classifier network is able to learn a stable consolidation of previously learned tasks. In the testing stage, CBA can be removed which introduces no additional computation cost and memory overhead. We theoretically reveal the reason why the proposed method can effectively alleviate catastrophic distribution shifts, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments based on four rehearsal-based baselines and three public continual learning benchmarks <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
PHRIT: Parametric Hand Representation with Implicit Template

We propose PHRIT, a novel approach for parametric hand mesh modeling with an implicit template that combines the advantages of both parametric meshes and implicit representations. Our method represents deformable hand shapes using signed distance fields (SDFs) with part-based shape priors, utilizing a deformation field to execute the deformation. The model offers efficient high-fidelity hand reconstruction by deforming the canonical template at infinite resolution. Additionally, it is fully differentiable and can be easily used in hand modeling since it can be driven by the skeleton and shape latent codes. We evaluate PHRIT on multiple downstream tasks, including skeleton-driven hand reconstruction, shapes from point clouds, and singleview 3D reconstruction, demonstrating that our approach achieves realistic and immersive hand modeling with state- of-the-art performance.
COPILOT: Human-Environment Collision Prediction and Localization from Egocentric Videos

The ability to forecast human-environment collisions from egocentric observations is vital to enable collision avoidance in applications such as VR, AR, and wearable assistive robotics. In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of predicting collisions in diverse environments from multi-view egocentric videos captured from body-mounted cameras. Solving this problem requires a generalizable perception system that can classify which human body joints will collide and estimate a collision region heatmap to localize collisions in the environment. To achieve this, we propose a transformer-based model called COPILOT to perform collision prediction and localization simultaneously, which accumulates information across multi-view inputs through a novel 4D space-time-viewpoint attention mechanism. To train our model and enable future research on this task, we develop a synthetic data generation framework that produces egocentric videos of virtual humans moving and colliding within diverse 3D environments. This framework is then used to establish a large-scale dataset consisting of 8.6M egocentric RGBD frames. Extensive experiments show that COPILOT generalizes to unseen synthetic as well as real-world scenes. We further demonstrate COPILOT outputs are useful for downstream collision avoidance through simple closed-loop control. Please visit our project webpage at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/copilot.
DiffRate : Differentiable Compression Rate for Efficient Vision Transformers

Token compression aims to speed up large-scale vision transformers (e.g. ViTs) by pruning (dropping) or merging tokens. It is an important but challenging task. Although recent advanced approaches achieved great success, they need to carefully handcraft a compression rate (i.e. number of tokens to remove), which is tedious and leads to sub-optimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose Differentiable Compression Rate (DiffRate), a novel token compression method that has several appealing properties prior arts do not have. First, DiffRate enables propagating the loss function’s gradient onto the compression ratio, which is considered as a non-differentiable hyperparameter in previous work. In this case, different layers can automatically learn different compression rates layer-wisely without extra overhead. Second, token pruning and merging can be naturally performed simultaneously in DiffRate, while they were isolated in previous works. Third, extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffRate achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, by applying the learned layer-wise compression rates to an off-the-shelf ViT-H (MAE) model, we achieve a 40% FLOPs reduction and a 1.5× throughput improvement, with a minor accuracy drop of 0.16% on ImageNet without fine-tuning, even outperforming previous methods with fine-tuning. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/DiffRate.