Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
JRDB-Pose: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking

Autonomous robotic systems operating in human environments must understand their surroundings to make accurate and safe decisions. In crowded human scenes with close-up human-robot interaction and robot navigation, a deep understanding of surrounding people requires reasoning about human motion and body dynamics over time with human body pose estimation and tracking. However, existing datasets captured from robot platforms either do not provide pose annotations or do not reflect the scene distribution of social robots. In this paper, we introduce JRDB-Pose, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for multi-person pose estimation and tracking. JRDB-Pose extends the existing JRDB which includes videos captured from a social navigation robot in a university campus environment, containing challenging scenes with crowded indoor and outdoor locations and a diverse range of scales and occlusion types. JRDB-Pose provides human pose annotations with per-keypoint occlusion labels and track IDs consistent across the scene and with existing annotations in JRDB. We conduct a thorough experimental study of state-of-the-art multi-person pose estimation and tracking methods on JRDB-Pose, showing that our dataset imposes new challenges for the existing methods. JRDB-Pose is available at https://jrdb.erc.monash.edu/.
DPF: Learning Dense Prediction Fields with Weak Supervision

Nowadays, many visual scene understanding problems are addressed by dense prediction networks. But pixel-wise dense annotations are very expensive (e.g., for scene parsing) or impossible (e.g., for intrinsic image decomposition), motivating us to leverage cheap point-level weak supervision. However, existing pointly-supervised methods still use the same architecture designed for full supervision. In stark contrast to them, we propose a new paradigm that makes predictions for point coordinate queries, as inspired by the recent success of implicit representations, like distance or radiance fields. As such, the method is named as dense prediction fields (DPFs). DPFs generate expressive intermediate features for continuous sub-pixel locations, thus allowing outputs of an arbitrary resolution. DPFs are naturally compatible with point-level supervision. We showcase the effectiveness of DPFs using two substantially different tasks: high-level semantic parsing and low-level intrinsic image decomposition. In these two cases, supervision comes in the form of single-point semantic category and two-point relative reflectance, respectively. As benchmarked by three large-scale public datasets PASCALContext, ADE20K and IIW, DPFs set new state-of-the-art performance on all of them with significant margins. Code can be accessed at https://github.com/cxx226/DPF.
Model Barrier: A Compact Un-Transferable Isolation Domain for Model Intellectual Property Protection

As scientific and technological advancements result from human intellectual labor and computational costs, protecting model intellectual property (IP) has become increasingly important to encourage model creators and owners. Model IP protection involves preventing the use of well-trained models on unauthorized domains. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Compact Un-Transferable Isolation Domain (CUTI-domain), which acts as a barrier to block illegal transfers from authorized to unauthorized domains. Specifically, CUTI-domain blocks crossdomain transfers by highlighting the private style features of the authorized domain, leading to recognition failure on unauthorized domains with irrelevant private style features. Moreover, we provide two solutions for using CUTI-domain depending on whether the unauthorized domain is known or not: target-specified CUTI-domain and target-free CUTI-domain. Our comprehensive experimental results on four digit datasets, CIFAR10 & STL10, and VisDA-2017 dataset demonstrate that CUTI-domain can be easily implemented as a plug-and-play module with different backbones, providing an efficient solution for model IP protection.
PDPP: Projected Diffusion for Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos

In this paper, we study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make goal-directed plans given the current visual observations in unstructured real-life videos. Previous works cast this problem as a sequence planning problem and leverage either heavy intermediate visual observations or natural language instructions as supervision, resulting in complex learning schemes and expensive annotation costs. In contrast, we treat this problem as a distribution fitting problem. In this sense, we model the whole intermediate action sequence distribution with a diffusion model (PDPP), and thus transform the planning problem to a sampling process from this distribution. In addition, we remove the expensive intermediate supervision, and simply use task labels from instructional videos as supervision instead. Our model is a U-Net based diffusion model, which directly samples action sequences from the learned distribution with the given start and end observations. Furthermore, we apply an efficient projection method to provide accurate conditional guides for our model during the learning and sampling process. Experiments on three datasets with different scales show that our PDPP model can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics, even without the task supervision. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/PDPP.
Learning Expressive Prompting With Residuals for Vision Transformers

Prompt learning is an efficient approach to adapt transformers by inserting learnable set of parameters into the input and intermediate representations of a pre-trained model. In this work, we present Expressive Prompts with Residuals (EXPRES) which modifies the prompt learning paradigm specifically for effective adaptation of vision transformers (ViT). Our method constructs downstream representations via learnable “output” tokens (shal-low prompts), that are akin to the learned class tokens of the ViT. Further for better steering of the downstream representation processed by the frozen transformer, we introduce residual learnable tokens that are added to the output of various computations. We apply EXPRES for image classification and few-shot semantic segmentation, and show our method is capable of achieving state of the art prompt tuning on 3/3 categories of the VTAB benchmark. In addition to strong performance, we observe that our approach is an order of magnitude more prompt efficient than existing visual prompting baselines. We analytically show the computational benefits of our approach over weight space adaptation techniques like finetuning. Lastly we systematically corroborate the architectural design of our method via a series of ablation experiments.
expOSE: Accurate Initialization-Free Projective Factorization using Exponential Regularization

Bundle adjustment is a key component in practically all available Structure from Motion systems. While it is crucial for achieving accurate reconstruction, convergence to the right solution hinges on good initialization. The recently introduced factorization-based pOSE methods formulate a surrogate for the bundle adjustment error without reliance on good initialization. In this paper, we show that pOSE has an undesirable penalization of large depths. To address this we propose expOSE which has an exponential regularization that is negligible for positive depths. To achieve efficient inference we use a quadratic approximation that allows an iterative solution with VarPro. Furthermore, we extend the method with radial distortion robustness by decomposing the Object Space Error into radial and tangential components. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method is robust to initialization and improves reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods even without bundle adjustment refinement. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
Learning to Exploit the Sequence-Specific Prior Knowledge for Image Processing Pipelines Optimization

The hardware image signal processing (ISP) pipeline is the intermediate layer between the imaging sensor and the downstream application, processing the sensor signal into an RGB image. The ISP is less programmable and consists of a series of processing modules. Each processing module handles a subtask and contains a set of tunable hyperparameters. A large number of hyperparameters form a complex mapping with the ISP output. The industry typically relies on manual and time-consuming hyperparameter tuning by image experts, biased towards human perception. Recently, several automatic ISP hyperparameter optimization methods using downstream evaluation metrics come into sight. However, existing methods for ISP tuning treat the high-dimensional parameter space as a global space for optimization and prediction all at once without inducing the structure knowledge of ISP. To this end, we propose a sequential ISP hyperparameter prediction framework that utilizes the sequential relationship within ISP modules and the similarity among parameters to guide the model sequence process. We validate the proposed method on object detection, image segmentation, and image quality tasks.
MELTR: Meta Loss Transformer for Learning to Fine-tune Video Foundation Models

Foundation models have shown outstanding performance and generalization capabilities across domains. Since most studies on foundation models mainly focus on the pretraining phase, a naive strategy to minimize a single task-specific loss is adopted for fine-tuning. However, such fine-tuning methods do not fully leverage other losses that are potentially beneficial for the target task. Therefore, we propose MEta Loss TRansformer (MELTR), a plug-in module that automatically and non-linearly combines various loss functions to aid learning the target task via auxiliary learning. We formulate the auxiliary learning as a bi-level optimization problem and present an efficient optimization algorithm based on Approximate Implicit Differentiation (AID). For evaluation, we apply our framework to various video foundation models (UniVL, Violet and All-in-one), and show significant performance gain on all four downstream tasks: text-to-video retrieval, video question answering, video captioning, and multimodal sentiment analysis. Our qualitative analyses demonstrate that MELTR adequately 'transforms' individual loss functions and 'melts' them into an effective unified loss. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/MELTR.
Improving Commonsense in Vision-Language Models via Knowledge Graph Riddles

This paper focuses on analyzing and improving the commonsense ability of recent popular vision-language (VL) models. Despite the great success, we observe that existing VL-models still lack commonsense knowledge/reasoning ability (e.g., “Lemons are sour”), which is a vital component towards artificial general intelligence. Through our analysis, we find one important reason is that existing large-scale VL datasets do not contain much commonsense knowledge, which motivates us to improve the commonsense of VL-models from the data perspective. Rather than collecting a new VL training dataset, we propose a more scalable strategy, i.e., “Data Augmentation with kNowledge graph linearization for CommonsensE capability” (DANCE). It can be viewed as one type of data augmentation technique, which can inject commonsense knowledge into existing VL datasets on the fly during training. More specifically, we leverage the commonsense knowledge graph (e.g., ConceptNet) and create variants of text description in VL datasets via bidirectional sub-graph sequentialization. For better commonsense evaluation, we further propose the first retrieval-based commonsense diagnostic benchmark. By conducting extensive experiments on some representative VL-models, we demonstrate that our DANCE technique is able to significantly improve the commonsense ability while maintaining the performance on vanilla retrieval tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/pleaseconnectwifi/DANCE.
Learning Articulated Shape with Keypoint Pseudo-Labels from Web Images

This paper shows that it is possible to learn models for monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated objects (e.g. horses, cows, sheep), using as few as 50–150 images labeled with 2D keypoints. Our proposed approach involves training category-specific keypoint estimators, generating 2D keypoint pseudo-labels on unlabeled web images, and using both the labeled and self-labeled sets to train 3D reconstruction models. It is based on two key insights: (1) 2D keypoint estimation networks trained on as few as 50– 150 images of a given object category generalize well and generate reliable pseudo-labels; (2) a data selection mechanism can automatically create a “curated” subset of the unlabeled web images that can be used for training - we evaluate four data selection methods. Coupling these two insights enables us to train models that effectively utilize web images, resulting in improved 3D reconstruction performance for several articulated object categories beyond the fully-supervised baseline. Our approach can quickly bootstrap a model and requires only a few images labeled with 2D keypoints. This requirement can be easily satisfied for any new object category. To showcase the practicality of our approach for predicting the 3D shape of arbitrary object categories, we annotate 2D keypoints on 250 giraffe and bear images from COCO in just 2.5 hours per category.
Bayesian Posterior Approximation With Stochastic Ensembles

We introduce ensembles of stochastic neural networks to approximate the Bayesian posterior, combining stochastic methods such as dropout with deep ensembles. The stochas-tic ensembles are formulated as families of distributions and trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior with variational inference. We implement stochastic ensembles based on Monte Carlo dropout, DropConnect and a novel non-parametric version of dropout and evaluate them on a toy problem and CIFAR image classification. For both tasks, we test the quality of the posteriors directly against Hamil-tonian Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that stochastic ensembles provide more accurate posterior esti-mates than other popular baselines for Bayesian inference.
LinK: Linear Kernel for LiDAR-based 3D Perception

Extending the success of 2D Large Kernel to 3D perception is challenging due to: 1. the cubically-increasing overhead in processing 3D data; 2. the optimization difficulties from data scarcity and sparsity. Previous work has taken the first step to scale up the kernel size from 3 × 3 × 3 to 7 × 7 × 7 by introducing block-shared weights. However, to reduce the feature variations within a block, it only employs modest block size and fails to achieve larger kernels like the 21 × 21 × 21. To address this issue, we propose a new method, called LinK, to achieve a wider-range perception receptive field in a convolution-like manner with two core designs. The first is to replace the static kernel matrix with a linear kernel generator, which adaptively provides weights only for non-empty voxels. The second is to reuse the pre-computed aggregation results in the overlapped blocks to reduce computation complexity. The proposed method successfully enables each voxel to perceive context within a range of 21 × 21 × 21. Extensive experiments on two basic perception tasks, 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, we rank 1st on the public leaderboard of the 3D detection benchmark of nuScenes (LiDAR track), by simply incorporating a LinK-based backbone into the basic detector, CenterPoint. We also boost the strong segmentation baseline's mIoU with 2.7% in the SemanticKITTI test set. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/LinK.
A General Regret Bound of Preconditioned Gradient Method for DNN Training

While adaptive learning rate methods, such as Adam, have achieved remarkable improvement in optimizing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), they consider only the diagonal elements of the full preconditioned matrix. Though the full-matrix preconditioned gradient methods theoretically have a lower regret bound, they are impractical for use to train DNNs because of the high complexity. In this paper, we present a general regret bound with a constrained full-matrix preconditioned gradient, and show that the updating formula of the preconditioner can be derived by solving a cone-constrained optimization problem. With the block-diagonal and Kronecker-factorized constraints, a specific guide function can be obtained. By minimizing the upper bound of the guide function, we develop a new DNN optimizer, termed AdaBK. A series of techniques, including statistics updating, dampening, efficient matrix inverse root computation, and gradient amplitude preservation, are developed to make AdaBK effective and efficient to implement. The proposed AdaBK can be readily embedded into many existing DNN optimizers, e.g., SGDM and Adam W, and the corresponding SGDM _BK and Adam W _BK algorithms demonstrate significant improvements over existing DNN optimizers on benchmark vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yonghongwei/AdaBK.
UniDAformer: Unified Domain Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation Transformer via Hierarchical Mask Calibration

Domain adaptive panoptic segmentation aims to miti-gate data annotation challenge by leveraging off-the-shelf annotated data in one or multiple related source domains. However, existing studies employ two separate networks for instance segmentation and semantic segmentation which lead to excessive network parameters as well as complicated and computationally intensive training and inference processes. We design UniDAformer, a unified domain adaptive panoptic segmentation transformer that is simple but can achieve domain adaptive instance segmentation and semantic segmentation simultaneously within a single network. UniDAformer introduces Hierarchical Mask Calibration (HMC) that rectifies inaccurate predictions at the level of regions, superpixels and pixels via online self-training on the fly. It has three unique features: 1) it enables unified domain adaptive panoptic adaptation; 2) it mitigates false predictions and improves domain adaptive panoptic segmentation effectively; 3) it is end-to-end trainable with a much simpler training and inference pipeline. Exten-sive experiments over multiple public benchmarks show that UniDAformer achieves superior domain adaptive panoptic segmentation as compared with the state-of-the-art.
Probing Sentiment-Oriented PreTraining Inspired by Human Sentiment Perception Mechanism

Pre-training of deep convolutional neural networks (DC-NNs) plays a crucial role in the field of visual sentiment analysis (VSA). Most proposed methods employ the off-the-shelf backbones pre-trained on large-scale object classification datasets (i.e., ImageNet). While it boosts performance for a big margin against initializing model states from random, we argue that DCNNs simply pre-trained on ImageNet may excessively focus on recognizing objects, but failed to provide high-level concepts in terms of sentiment. To address this long-term overlooked problem, we propose a sentiment-oriented pre-training method that is built upon human visual sentiment perception (VSP) mechanism. Specifically, we factorize the process of VSP into three steps, namely stimuli taking, holistic organizing, and high-level perceiving. From imitating each VSP step, a total of three models are separately pre-trained via our devised sentiment-aware tasks that contribute to excavating sentiment-discriminated representations. Moreover, along with our elaborated multi-model amalgamation strategy, the prior knowledge learned from each perception step can be effectively transferred into a single target model, yielding substantial performance gains. Finally, we verify the superiorities of our proposed method over extensive experiments, covering mainstream VSA tasks from single-label learning (SLL), multi-label learning (MLL), to label distribution learning (LDL). Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method leads to unanimous improvements in these downstream tasks. Our code is released on https://github.com/tinglyfeng/sentiment_pretraining.
BAD-NeRF: Bundle Adjusted Deblur Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have received considerable attention recently, due to its impressive capability in photo-realistic 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis, given a set of posed camera images. Earlier work usually assumes the input images are of good quality. However, image degradation (e.g. image motion blur in low-light conditions) can easily happen in real-world scenarios, which would further affect the rendering quality of NeRF. In this paper, we present a novel bundle adjusted deblur Neural Radiance Fields (BAD-NeRF), which can be robust to severe motion blurred images and inaccurate camera poses. Our approach models the physical image formation process of a motion blurred image, and jointly learns the parameters of NeRF and recovers the camera motion trajectories during exposure time. In experiments, we show that by directly modeling the real physical image formation process, BADNeRF achieves superior performance over prior works on both synthetic and real datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WU-CVGL/BAD-NeRF.
Learning Situation Hyper-Graphs for Video Question Answering

Answering questions about complex situations in videos requires not only capturing the presence of actors, objects, and their relations but also the evolution of these relationships over time. A situation hyper-graph is a representation that describes situations as scene sub-graphs for video frames and hyper-edges for connected sub-graphs and has been proposed to capture all such information in a compact structured form. In this work, we propose an architecture for Video Question Answering (VQA) that enables answering questions related to video content by predicting situation hyper-graphs, coined Situation Hyper-Graph based Video Question Answering (SHG- VQA). To this end, we train a situation hyper-graph decoder to implicitly identify graph representations with actions and object/human-object relationships from the input video clip. and to use cross-attention between the predicted situation hyper-graphs and the question embedding to predict the correct answer. The proposed method is trained in an end-to-end manner and optimized by a VQA loss with the cross-entropy function and a Hungarian matching loss for the situation graph prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is extensively evaluated on two challenging benchmarks: AGQA and STAR. Our results show that learning the underlying situation hyper-graphs helps the system to significantly improve its performance for novel challenges of video question-answering tasks <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 will be available at https://github.com/aurooj/SHG-VQA.