Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Human-Object Interaction Detection via Disentangled Transformer

Human-Object Interaction Detection tackles the problem of joint localization and classification of human object interactions. Existing HOI transformers either adopt a single decoder for triplet prediction, or utilize two parallel decoders to detect individual objects and interactions separately, and compose triplets by a matching process. In contrast, we decouple the triplet prediction into human-object pair detection and interaction classification. Our main motivation is that detecting the human-object instances and classifying interactions accurately needs to learn representations that focus on different regions. To this end, we present Disentangled Transformer, where both encoder and decoder are disentangled to facilitate learning of two sub-tasks. To associate the predictions of disentangled decoders, we first generate a unified representation for HOI triplets with a base decoder, and then utilize it as input feature of each disentangled decoder. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms prior work on two public HOI benchmarks by a sizeable margin. Code will be available.
OoD-Bench: Quantifying and Understanding Two Dimensions of Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Deep learning has achieved tremendous success with independent and identically distributed (i. i.d.) data. However, the performance of neural networks often degenerates drastically when encountering out-of-distribution (OoD) data, i.e., when training and test data are sampled from different distributions. While a plethora of algorithms have been proposed for OoD generalization, our understanding of the data used to train and evaluate these algorithms remains stagnant. In this work, we first identify and measure two distinct kinds of distribution shifts that are ubiquitous in various datasets. Next, through extensive experiments, we compare OoD generalization algorithms across two groups of benchmarks, each dominated by one of the distribution shifts, revealing their strengths on one shift as well as limitations on the other shift. Overall, we position existing datasets and algorithms from different research areas seemingly unconnected into the same coherent picture. It may serve as a foothold that can be resorted to by future OoD generalization research. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynysjtulood_bench.
DecoupleNet: Decoupled Network for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation alleviates the reliance on expensive pixel-wise annotation. It uses a labeled source domain dataset as well as unlabeled target domain images to learn a segmentation network. In this paper, we observe two main issues of existing domain-invariant learning framework. (1) Being distracted by the feature distribution alignment, the network cannot focus on the segmentation task. (2) Fitting source domain data well would compromise the target domain performance. To address these issues, we propose DecoupleNet to alleviate source domain overfitting and let the final model focus more on the segmentation task. Also, we put forward Self-Discrimination (SD) and introduce an auxiliary classifier to learn more discriminative target domain features with pseudo labels. Finally, we propose Online Enhanced Self-Training (OEST) to contextually enhance the quality of pseudo labels in an online manner. Experiments show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Extensive ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/DecoupleNet .
Structural and Statistical Texture Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation

Existing knowledge distillation works for semantic seg-mentation mainly focus on transfering high-level contextual knowledge from teacher to student. However, low-level texture knowledge is also of vital importance for characterizing the local structural pattern and global statistical prop-erty, such as boundary, smoothness, regularity and color contrast, which may not be well addressed by high-level deep features. In this paper, we are intended to take full advantage of both structural and statistical texture knowledge and propose a novel Structural and Statistical Texture Knowledge Distillation (SSTKD) framework for Semantic Segmentation. Specifically, for structural texture knowledge, we introduce a Contourlet Decomposition Module (CDM) that decomposes low-level features with iterative laplacian pyramid and directional filter bank to mine the structural texture knowledge. For statistical knowledge, we propose a Denoised Texture Intensity Equalization Module (DTIEM) to adaptively extract and enhance statistical texture knowledge through heuristics iterative quantization and denoised operation. Finally, each knowledge learning is supervised by an individual loss function, forcing the student network to mimic the teacher better from a broader perspective. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes, Pascal VOC 2012 and ADE20K datasets.
Unsupervised Pre-training for Temporal Action Localization Tasks

Unsupervised video representation learning has made remarkable achievements in recent years. However, most existing methods are designed and optimized for video classification. These pretrained models can be sub-optimal for temporal localization tasks due to the inherent discrepancy between video-level classification and clip-level localization. To bridge this gap, we make the first attempt to propose a self-supervised pretext task, coined as Pseudo Action Localization (PAL) to Unsupervisedly Pre-train feature encoders for Temporal Action Localization tasks (UP-TAL). Specifically, we first randomly select temporal regions, each of which contains multiple clips, from one video as pseudo actions and then paste them onto different temporal positions of the other two videos. The pretext task is to align the features of pasted pseudo action regions from two synthetic videos and maximize the agreement between them. Compared to the existing unsupervised video representation learning approaches, our PAL adapts better to downstream TAL tasks by introducing a temporal equivariant contrastive learning paradigm in a temporally dense and scale-aware manner. Extensive experiments show that PAL can utilize large-scale unlabeled video data to significantly boost the performance of existing TAL methods. Our codes and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zhang-can/UP-TAL.
Revisiting the Transferability of Supervised Pretraining: an MLP Perspective

The pretrain-finetune paradigm is a classical pipeline in visual learning. Recent progress on unsupervised pretraining methods shows superior transfer performance to their supervised counterparts. This paper revisits this phenomenon and sheds new light on understanding the transferability gap between unsupervised and supervised pretraining from a multilayer perceptron (MLP) perspective. While previous works [6], [8], [17] focus on the effectiveness of MLP on unsupervised image classification where pretraining and evaluation are conducted on the same dataset, we reveal that the MLP projector is also the key factor to better transferability of unsupervised pretraining methods than supervised pretraining methods. Based on this observation, we attempt to close the transferability gap between supervised and unsupervised pretraining by adding an MLP projector before the classifier in supervised pretraining. Our analysis indicates that the MLP projector can help retain intra-class variation of visual features, decrease the feature distribution distance between pretraining and evaluation datasets, and reduce feature redundancy. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that the added MLP projector significantly boosts the transferability of supervised pretraining, e.g. +7.2% top-1 accuracy on the concept generalization task, +5.8% top-1 accuracy for linear evaluation on 12 -domain classification tasks, and +0.8% AP on COCO object detection task, making supervised pretraining comparable or even better than unsupervised pretraining.
Learning with Neighbor Consistency for Noisy Labels

Recent advances in deep learning have relied on large, labelled datasets to train high-capacity models. However, collecting large datasets in a time- and cost-efficient manner often results in label noise. We present a method for learning from noisy labels that leverages similarities between training examples in feature space, encouraging the prediction of each example to be similar to its nearest neighbours. Compared to training algorithms that use multiple models or distinct stages, our approach takes the form of a simple, additional regularization term. It can be interpreted as an inductive version of the classical, transductive label propagation algorithm. We thoroughly evaluate our method on datasets evaluating both synthetic (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) and realistic (mini-WebVision, WebVision, Clothing1M, mini-ImageNet-Red) noise, and achieve competitive or state-of-the-art accuracies across all of them.
TallFormer: Temporal Action Localization with a Long-Memory Transformer

Most modern approaches in temporal action localization divide this problem into two parts: (i) short-term feature extraction and (ii) long-range temporal boundary localization. Due to the high GPU memory cost caused by processing long untrimmed videos, many methods sacrifice the representational power of the short-term feature extractor by either freezing the backbone or using a small spatial video resolution. This issue becomes even worse with the recent video transformer models, many of which have quadratic memory complexity. To address these issues, we propose TallFormer, a memory-efficient and end-to-end trainable Temporal Action Localization transformer with Long-term memory. Our long-term memory mechanism eliminates the need for processing hundreds of redundant video frames during each training iteration, thus, significantly reducing the GPU memory consumption and training time. These efficiency savings allow us (i) to use a powerful video transformer feature extractor without freezing the backbone or reducing the spatial video resolution, while (ii) also maintaining long-range temporal boundary localization capability. With only RGB frames as input and no external action recognition classifier, TallFormer outperforms previous state-of-the-arts by a large margin, achieving an average mAP of 59.1% on THUMOS14 and 35.6% on ActivityNet-1.3. The code is public available ( https://github.com/klauscc/TALLFormer .)
DESTR: Object Detection with Split Transformer

Self- and cross-attention in Transformers provide for high model capacity, making them viable models for object detection. However, Transformers still lag in performance behind CNN-based detectors. This is, we believe, because: (a) Cross-attention is used for both classification and bounding-box regression tasks; (b) Transformer's decoder poorly initializes content queries; and (c) Self-attention poorly accounts for certain prior knowledge which could help improve inductive bias. These limitations are addressed with the corresponding three contributions. First, we propose a new Detection Split Transformer (DESTR) that separates estimation of cross-attention into two independent branches — one tailored for classification and the other for box regression. Second, we use a mini-detector to initialize the content queries in the decoder with classification and regression embeddings of the respective heads in the mini-detector. Third, we augment self-attention in the decoder to additionally account for pairs of adjacent object queries. Our experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that DESTR outperforms DETR and its successors.
Instance-Dependent Label-Noise Learning with Manifold-Regularized Transition Matrix Estimation

In label-noise learning, estimating the transition matrix has attracted more and more attention as the matrix plays an important role in building statistically consistent classifiers. However, it is very challenging to estimate the transition matrix T(x), where x denotes the instance, because it is unidentifiable under the instance-dependent noise (IDN). To address this problem, we have noticed that, there are psychological and physiological evidences showing that we humans are more likely to annotate instances of similar appearances to the same classes, and thus poor-quality or ambiguous instances of similar appearances are easier to be mislabeled to the correlated or same noisy classes. Therefore, we propose assumption on the geometry of T(x) that “the closer two instances are, the more similar their corresponding transition matrices should be”. More specifically, we formulate above assumption into the manifold embedding, to effectively reduce the degree of freedom of T(x) and make it stably estimable in practice. The proposed manifold-regularized technique works by directly reducing the estimation error without hurting the approximation error about the estimation problem of T(x). Experimental evaluations on four synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches for label-noise learning under the challenging IDN.
Source-Free Object Detection by Learning to Overlook Domain Style

Source-free object detection (SFOD) needs to adapt a detector pre-trained on a labeled source domain to a tar-get domain, with only unlabeled training data from the tar-get domain. Existing SFOD methods typically adopt the pseudo labeling paradigm with model adaption alternating between predicting pseudo labels and fine-tuning the model. This approach suffers from both unsatisfactory accuracy of pseudo labels due to the presence of domain shift and lim-ited use of target domain training data. In this work, we present a novel Learning to Overlook Domain Style (LODS) method with such limitations solved in a principled man-ner. Our idea is to reduce the domain shift effect by en-forcing the model to overlook the target domain style, such that model adaptation is simplified and becomes easier to carry on. To that end, we enhance the style of each tar-get domain image and leverage the style degree difference between the original image and the enhanced image as a self-supervised signal for model adaptation. By treating the enhanced image as an auxiliary view, we exploit a student- teacher architecture for learning to overlook the style de-gree difference against the original image, also character-ized with a novel style enhancement algorithm and graph alignment constraint. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LODS yields new state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks.
Show Me What and Tell Me How: Video Synthesis via Multimodal Conditioning

Most methods for conditional video synthesis use a single modality as the condition. This comes with major limitations. For example, it is problematic for a model conditioned on an image to generate a specific motion trajectory desired by the user since there is no means to provide motion information. Conversely, language information can describe the desired motion, while not precisely defining the content of the video. This work presents a multimodal video generation framework that benefits from text and images provided jointly or separately. We leverage the recent progress in quantized representations for videos and apply a bidirectional transformer with multiple modalities as inputs to predict a discrete video representation. To improve video quality and consistency, we propose a new video token trained with self-learning and an improved mask-prediction algorithm for sampling video tokens. We introduce text augmentation to improve the robustness of the textual representation and diversity of generated videos. Our framework can incorporate various visual modalities, such as segmentation masks, drawings, and partially occluded images. It can generate much longer sequences than the one used for training. In addition, our model can extract visual information as suggested by the text prompt, e.g., “an object in image one is moving northeast”, and generate corresponding videos. We run evaluations on three public datasets and a newly collected dataset labeled with facial attributes, achieving state-of-the-art generation results on all four <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/snap-research/MMVID and Webpage..
Conversational AI and Knowledge Graphs for Social Robot Interaction

The paper describes an approach that combines work from three fields with previously separate research commu-nities: social robotics, conversational AI, and graph databases. The aim is to develop a generic framework in which a variety of social robots can provide high-quality information to users by accessing semantically-rich knowledge graphs about multiple different domains. An example implementation uses a Furhat robot with Rasa open source conversational AI and knowledge graphs in Neo4j graph databases.
Counterfactual Cycle-Consistent Learning for Instruction Following and Generation in Vision-Language Navigation

Since the rise of vision-language navigation (VLN), great progress has been made in instruction following - building a follower to navigate environments under the guidance of instructions. However, far less attention has been paid to the inverse task: instruction generation - learning a speaker to generate grounded descriptions for navigation routes. Existing VLN methods train a speaker independently and often treat it as a data augmentation tool to strengthen the follower, while ignoring rich cross-task relations. Here we describe an approach that learns the two tasks simultaneously and exploits their intrinsic correlations to boost the training of each: the follower judges whether the speaker-created instruction explains the original navigation route correctly, and vice versa. Without the need of aligned instruction-path pairs, such cycle-consistent learning scheme is complementary to task-specific training targets defined on labeled data, and can also be applied over unlabeled paths (sampled without paired instructions). Another agent, called creator is added to generate counterfactual environments. It greatly changes current scenes yet leaves novel items - which are vital for the execution of original instructions - unchanged. Thus more informative training scenes are synthesized and the three agents compose a powerful VLN learning system. Extensive experiments on a standard benchmark show that our approach improves the performance of various follower models and produces accurate navigation instructions.
Disentangled Multimodal Representation Learning for Recommendation

Many multimodal recommender systems have been proposed to exploit the rich side information associated with users or items (e.g., user reviews and item images) for learning better user and item representations to improve the recommendation performance. Studies from psychology show that users have individual differences in the utilization of various modalities for organizing information. Therefore, for a certain factor of an item (such as <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">appearance</i> or <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">quality</i> ), the features of different modalities are of varying importance to a user. However, existing methods ignore the fact that different modalities contribute differently towards a user's preference on various factors of an item. In light of this, in this paper, we propose a novel <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Disentangled Multimodal Representation Learning</i> (DMRL) recommendation model, which can capture users' attention to different modalities on each factor in user preference modeling. In particular, we employ a disentangled representation technique to ensure the features of different factors in each modality are independent of each other. A multimodal attention mechanism is then designed to capture users' modality preference for each factor. Based on the estimated weights obtained by the attention mechanism, we make recommendations by combining the preference scores of a user's preferences to each factor of the target item over different modalities. Extensive evaluation on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with existing methods.
Video K-Net: A Simple, Strong, and Unified Baseline for Video Segmentation

This paper presents Video K-Net, a simple, strong, and unified framework for fully end-to-end video panoptic seg-mentation. The method is built upon K-Net, a method that unifies image segmentation via a group of learnable ker-nels. We observe that these learnable kernels from K-Net, which encode object appearances and contexts, can naturally associate identical instances across video frames. Motivated by this observation, Video K-Net learns to simultaneously segment and track “things” and “stuff” in a video with simple kernel-based appearance modeling and cross-temporal kernel interaction. Despite the simplicity, it achieves state-of-the-art video panoptic segmentation results on Citscapes-VPS and KITTI-STEP without bells and whistles. In particular on KITTI-STEP, the simple method can boost almost 12% relative improvements over previous methods. We also validate its generalization on video semantic segmentation, where we boost various baselines by 2% on the VSPW dataset. Moreover, we extend K-Net into clip-level video framework for video instance segmentation where we obtain 40.5% for ResNet50 backbone and 51.5% mAP for Swin-base on YouTube-2019 validation set. We hope this simple yet effective method can serve as a new flexible baseline in video segmentation. <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> Both code and models are released at here.
FocusCut: Diving into a Focus View in Interactive Segmentation

Interactive image segmentation is an essential tool in pixel-level annotation and image editing. To obtain a high-precision binary segmentation mask, users tend to add interaction clicks around the object details, such as edges and holes, for efficient refinement. Current methods regard these repair clicks as the guidance to jointly determine the global prediction. However, the global view makes the model lose focus from later clicks, and is not in line with user intentions. In this paper, we dive into the view of clicks' eyes to endow them with the decisive role in object details again. To verify the necessity of focus view, we design a simple yet effective pipeline, named FocusCut, which integrates the functions of object segmentation and local refinement. After obtaining the global prediction, it crops click-centered patches from the original image with adaptive scopes to refine the local predictions progressively. Without user perception and parameters increase, our method has achieved state-of-the-art results. Extensive experiments and visualized results demonstrate that FocusCut makes hyper-fine segmentation possible for interactive image segmentation.