Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Aligning Bag of Regions for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) learn to align vision and language representations on large-scale datasets, where each image-text pair usually contains a bag of semantic concepts. However, existing open-vocabulary object detectors only align region embeddings individually with the corresponding features extracted from the VLMs. Such a design leaves the compositional structure of semantic concepts in a scene under-exploited, although the structure may be implicitly learned by the VLMs. In this work, we propose to align the embedding of bag of regions beyond individual regions. The proposed method groups contextually interrelated regions as a bag. The embeddings of regions in a bag are treated as embeddings of words in a sentence, and they are sent to the text encoder of a VLM to obtain the bag-of-regions embedding, which is learned to be aligned to the corresponding features extracted by a frozen VLM. Applied to the commonly used Faster R-CNN, our approach surpasses the previous best results by 4.6 box AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">50</inf> and 2.8 mask AP on novel categories of open-vocabulary COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wusize/ovdet.
Adaptive Spot-Guided Transformer for Consistent Local Feature Matching

Local feature matching aims at finding correspondences between a pair of images. Although current detector-free methods leverage Transformer architecture to obtain an impressive performance, few works consider maintaining local consistency. Meanwhile, most methods struggle with large scale variations. To deal with the above issues, we propose Adaptive Spot-Guided Transformer (ASTR) for local feature matching, which jointly models the local consistency and scale variations in a unified coarse-to-fine architecture. The proposed ASTR enjoys several merits. First, we design a spot-guided aggregation module to avoid interfering with irrelevant areas during feature aggregation. Second, we design an adaptive scaling module to adjust the size of grids according to the calculated depth information at fine stage. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our ASTR performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released on https://astr2023.github.io.
Towards Effective Adversarial Textured 3D Meshes on Physical Face Recognition

Face recognition is a prevailing authentication solution in numerous biometric applications. Physical adversarial attacks, as an important surrogate, can identify the weak-nesses of face recognition systems and evaluate their ro-bustness before deployed. However, most existing physical attacks are either detectable readily or ineffective against commercial recognition systems. The goal of this work is to develop a more reliable technique that can carry out an end-to-end evaluation of adversarial robustness for commercial systems. It requires that this technique can simultaneously deceive black-box recognition models and evade defensive mechanisms. To fulfill this, we design adversarial textured 3D meshes (AT3D) with an elaborate topology on a human face, which can be 3D-printed and pasted on the attacker's face to evade the defenses. However, the mesh-based op-timization regime calculates gradients in high-dimensional mesh space, and can be trapped into local optima with un-satisfactory transferability. To deviate from the mesh-based space, we propose to perturb the low-dimensional coefficient space based on 3D Morphable Model, which signifi-cantly improves black-box transferability meanwhile enjoying faster search efficiency and better visual quality. Exten-sive experiments in digital and physical scenarios show that our method effectively explores the security vulnerabilities of multiple popular commercial services, including three recognition A PIs, four anti-spoofing A PIs, two prevailing mobile phones and two automated access control systems.
Computationally Budgeted Continual Learning: What Does Matter?

Continual Learning (CL) aims to sequentially train models on streams of incoming data that vary in distribution by preserving previous knowledge while adapting to new data. Current CL literature focuses on restricted access to previously seen data, while imposing no constraints on the computational budget for training. This is unreasonable for applications in-the-wild, where systems are primarily constrained by computational and time budgets, not storage. We revisit this problem with a large-scale benchmark and analyze the performance of traditional CL approaches in a compute-constrained setting, where effective memory samples used in training can be implicitly restricted as a consequence of limited computation. We conduct experiments evaluating various CL sampling strategies, distillation losses, and partial fine-tuning on two large-scale datasets, namely ImageNet2K and Continual Google Landmarks V2 in data incremental, class incremental, and time incremental settings. Through extensive experiments amounting to a total of over 1500 GPU-hours, we find that, under compute-constrained setting, traditional CL approaches, with no exception, fail to outperform a simple minimal baseline that samples uniformly from memory. Our conclusions are consistent in a different number of stream time steps, e.g., 20 to 200, and under several computational budgets. This suggests that most existing CL methods are particularly too computationally expensive for realistic budgeted deployment. Code for this project is available at: https://github.com/drimpossible/BudgetCL.
Delving StyleGAN Inversion for Image Editing: A Foundation Latent Space Viewpoint

GAN inversion and editing via StyleGAN maps an input image into the embedding spaces (W, W+, and F) to simultaneously maintain image fidelity and meaningful manipulation. From latent space W to extended latent space W+ to feature space F in StyleGAN, the editability of GAN inversion decreases while its reconstruction quality increases. Recent GAN inversion methods typically explore W+ and F rather than W to improve reconstruction fidelity while maintaining editability. As W+ and F are derived from W that is essentially the foundation latent space of StyleGAN, these GAN inversion methods focusing on W+ and F spaces could be improved by stepping back to W. In this work, we propose to first obtain the proper latent code in foundation latent space W. We introduce contrastive learning to align W and the image space for proper latent code discovery. Then, we leverage a cross-attention encoder to transform the obtained latent code in W into W+ and F, accordingly. Our experiments show that our exploration of the foundation latent space W improves the representation ability of latent codes in W+ and features in F, which yields state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity and editability results on the standard benchmarks. Project page: https://kumapowerliu.github.io/CLCAE.
Exploring and Exploiting Uncertainty for Incomplete Multi-View Classification

Classifying incomplete multi-view data is inevitable since arbitrary view missing widely exists in real-world applications. Although great progress has been achieved, existing incomplete multi-view methods are still difficult to obtain a trustworthy prediction due to the relatively high uncertainty nature of missing views. First, the missing view is of high uncertainty, and thus it is not reasonable to provide a single deterministic imputation. Second, the quality of the imputed data itself is of high uncertainty. To explore and exploit the uncertainty, we propose an Uncertainty-induced Incomplete Multi-View Data Classification (UIMC) model to classify the incomplete multi-view data under a stable and reliable framework. We construct a distribution and sample multiple times to characterize the uncertainty of missing views, and adaptively utilize them according to the sampling quality. Accordingly, the proposed method realizes more perceivable imputation and controllable fusion. Specifically, we model each missing data with a distribution conditioning on the available views and thus introducing uncertainty. Then an evidence-based fusion strategy is employed to guarantee the trustworthy integration of the imputed views. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark data sets and our method establishes a state-of-the-art performance in terms of both performance and trustworthiness.
LipFormer: High-fidelity and Generalizable Talking Face Generation with A Pre-learned Facial Codebook

Generating a talking face video from the input audio sequence is a practical yet challenging task. Most existing methods either fail to capture fine facial details or need to train a specific model for each identity. We argue that a codebook pre-learned on high-quality face images can serve as a useful prior that facilitates high-fidelity and generalizable talking head synthesis. Thanks to the strong capability of the codebook in representing face textures, we simplify the talking face generation task as finding proper lip-codes to characterize the variation of lips during portrait talking. To this end, we propose LipFormer, a Transformer-based framework to model the audio-visual coherence and predict the lip-codes sequence based on input audio features. We further introduce an adaptive face warping module, which helps warp the reference face to the target pose in the feature space, to alleviate the difficulty of lip-code prediction under different poses. By this means, LipFormer can make better use of prelearned priors in images and is robust to posture change. Extensive experiments show that LipFormer can produce more realistic talking face videos compared to previous methods and faithfully generalize to unseen identities.
Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis with Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning

Graph-based methods have been extensively applied to whole slide histopathology image (WSI) analysis due to the advantage of modeling the spatial relationships among different entities. However, most of the existing methods focus on modeling WSIs with homogeneous graphs (e.g., with homogeneous node type). Despite their successes, these works are incapable of mining the complex structural relations between biological entities (e.g., the diverse interaction among different cell types) in the WSI. We propose a novel heterogeneous graph-based framework to leverage the inter-relationships among different types of nuclei for WSI analysis. Specifically, we formulate the WSI as a heterogeneous graph with “nucleus-type” attribute to each node and a semantic similarity attribute to each edge. We then present a new heterogeneous-graph edge attribute transformer (HEAT) to take advantage of the edge and node heterogeneity during massage aggregating. Further, we design a new pseudo-label-based semantic-consistent pooling mechanism to obtain graph-level features, which can mitigate the over-parameterization issue of conventional cluster-based pooling. Additionally, observing the limitations of existing association-based localization methods, we propose a causal-driven approach attributing the contribution of each node to improve the interpretability of our framework. Extensive experiments on three public TCGA benchmark datasets demonstrate that our frame-work outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with considerable margins on various tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/WSI-HGNN.
Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation

Estimating 3D human motion from an egocentric video sequence plays a critical role in human behavior understanding and has various applications in VR/AR. However, naively learning a mapping between egocentric videos and human motions is challenging, because the user's body is often unobserved by the front-facing camera placed on the head of the user. In addition, collecting large-scale, high-quality datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motions requires accurate motion capture devices, which often limit the variety of scenes in the videos to lab-like environments. To eliminate the need for paired egocentric video and human motions, we propose a new method, Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation (EgoEgo), which decomposes the problem into two stages, connected by the head motion as an intermediate representation. EgoEgo first integrates SLAM and a learning approach to estimate accurate head motion. Subsequently, leveraging the estimated head pose as input, EgoEgo utilizes conditional diffusion to generate multiple plausible full-body motions. This disentanglement of head and body pose eliminates the need for training datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motion, enabling us to leverage large-scale egocentric video datasets and motion capture datasets separately. Moreover, for systematic benchmarking, we develop a synthetic dataset, AMASS-Replica-Ego-Syn (ARES), with paired egocentric videos and human motion. On both ARES and real data, our EgoEgo model performs significantly better than the current state-of-the-art methods.
PD-Quant: Post-Training Quantization Based on Prediction Difference Metric

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a neural network compression technique that converts a full-precision model into a quantized model using lower-precision data types. Although it can help reduce the size and computational cost of deep neural networks, it can also introduce quantization noise and reduce prediction accuracy, especially in extremely low-bit settings. How to determine the appropriate quantization parameters (e.g., scaling factors and rounding of weights) is the main problem facing now. Existing methods attempt to determine these parameters by minimize the distance between features before and after quantization, but such an approach only considers local information and may not result in the most optimal quantization parameters. We analyze this issue and propose PD-Quant, a method that addresses this limitation by considering global information. It determines the quantization parameters by using the information of differences between network prediction before and after quantization. In addition, PD-Quant can alleviate the overfitting problem in PTQ caused by the small number of calibration sets by adjusting the distribution of activations. Experiments show that PD-Quant leads to better quantization parameters and improves the prediction accuracy of quantized models, especially in low-bit settings. For example, PD-Quant pushes the accuracy of ResNet-18 up to 53.14% and RegNetX-600MF up to 40.67% in weight 2-bit activation 2-bit. The code is released at https://github.com/hustv1/PD-Quant.
HAAV: Hierarchical Aggregation of Augmented Views for Image Captioning

A great deal of progress has been made in image captioning, driven by research into how to encode the image using pre-trained models. This includes visual encodings (e.g. image grid features or detected objects) and more recently textual encodings (e.g. image tags or text descriptions of image regions). As more advanced encodings are available and incorporated, it is natural to ask: how to efficiently and effectively leverage the heterogeneous set of encodings? In this paper, we propose to regard the encodings as augmented views of the input image. The image captioning model encodes each view independently with a shared encoder efficiently, and a contrastive loss is incorporated across the encoded views in a novel way to improve their representation quality and the model's data efficiency. Our proposed hierarchical decoder then adaptively weighs the encoded views according to their effectiveness for caption generation by first aggregating within each view at the token level, and then across views at the view level. We demonstrate significant performance improvements of +5.6% CIDEr on MS-COCO and + 12.9% CIDEr on Flickr30k compared to state of the arts, and conduct rigorous analyses to demonstrate the importance of each part of our design.
Affordance Grounding from Demonstration Video to Target Image

Humans excel at learning from expert demonstrations and solving their own problems. To equip intelligent robots and assistants, such as AR glasses, with this ability, it is essential to ground human hand interactions (i.e., affordances) from demonstration videos and apply them to a target image like a user's AR glass view. This video-to-image affordance grounding task is challenging due to (1) the need to predict fine-grained affordances, and (2) the limited training data, which inadequately covers video-image discrepancies and negatively impacts grounding. To tackle them, we propose Affordance Transformer (Afformer), which has a fine-grained transformer-based decoder that gradually refines affordance grounding. Moreover, we introduce Mask Affordance Hand (MaskAHand), a self-supervised pre-training technique for synthesizing video-image data and simulating context changes, enhancing affordance grounding across video-image discrepancies. Afformer with MaskAHand pre-training achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including a sub-stantial 37% improvement on the OPRA dataset. Code is made available at https://github.com/showlab/afformer.
Towards Modality-Agnostic Person Re-identification with Descriptive Query

Person re-identification (ReID) with descriptive query (text or sketch) provides an important supplement for general image-image paradigms, which is usually studied in a single cross-modality matching manner, e.g., text-to-image or sketch-to-photo. However, without a camera-captured photo query, it is uncertain whether the text or sketch is available or not in practical scenarios. This motivates us to study a new and challenging modality-agnostic person re-ideruification problem. Towards this goal, we propose a unified person re-identification (UNIReID) architecture that can effectively adapt to cross-modality and multi-modality tasks. Specifically, UNIReID incorporates a simple dual-encoder with task-specific modality learning to mine and fuse visual and textual modality information. To deal with the imbalanced training problem of different tasks in UNIReID, we propose a task-aware dynamic training strategy in terms of task difficulty, adaptively adjusting the training focus. Besides, we construct three multi-modal ReID datasets by collecting the corresponding sketches from photos to support this challenging study. The experimental results on three multi-modal ReID datasets show that our UNIReID greatly improves the retrieval accuracy and generalization ability on different tasks and unseen scenarios.
Feature Alignment and Uniformity for Test Time Adaptation

Test time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt deep neural networks when receiving out of distribution test domain samples. In this setting, the model can only access online unlabeled test samples and pretrained models on the training domains. We first address TTA as a feature revision problem due to the domain gap between source domains and target domains. After that, we follow the two measurements alignment and uniformity to discuss the test time feature revision. For test time feature uniformity, we propose a test time self-distillation strategy to guarantee the consistency of uniformity between representations of the current batch and all the previous batches. For test time feature alignment, we propose a memorized spatial local clustering strategy to align the representations among the neighborhood samples for the upcoming batch. To deal with the common noisy label problem, we propound the entropy and consistency filters to select and drop the possible noisy labels. To prove the scalability and efficacy of our method, we conduct experiments on four domain generalization bench marks and four medical image segmentation tasks with various backbones. Experiment results show that our method not only improves baseline stably but also outperforms existing state-of-the-art test time adaptation methods.
Human Pose Estimation in Extremely Low-Light Conditions

We study human pose estimation in extremely low-light images. This task is challenging due to the difficulty of collecting real low-light images with accurate labels, and severely corrupted inputs that degrade prediction quality significantly. To address the first issue, we develop a ded-icated camera system and build a new dataset of real low-light images with accurate pose labels. Thanks to our camera system, each low-light image in our dataset is coupled with an aligned well-lit image, which enables accurate pose labeling and is used as privileged information during training. We also propose a new model and a new training strategy that fully exploit the privileged information to learn representation insensitive to lighting conditions. Our method demonstrates outstanding performance on real extremely low-light images, and extensive analyses validate that both of our model and dataset contribute to the success.
Integrally Pre-Trained Transformer Pyramid Networks

In this paper, we present an integral pre-training framework based on masked image modeling (MIM). We advocate for pre-training the backbone and neck jointly so that the transfer gap between MIM and downstream recognition tasks is minimal. We make two technical contributions. First, we unify the reconstruction and recognition necks by inserting a feature pyramid into the pre-training stage. Second, we complement mask image modeling (MIM) with masked feature modeling (MFM) that offers multi-stage supervision to the feature pyramid. The pre-trained models, termed integrally pre-trained transformer pyramid networks (iTPNs), serve as powerful foundation models for visual recognition. In particular, the base/large-level iTPN achieves an 86.2%/87.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, a 53.2%/55.6% box AP on COCO object detection with 1× training schedule using Mask-RCNN, and a 54.7%/57.7% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation using UPerHead – all these results set new records. Our work inspires the community to work on unifying upstream pre-training and downstream fine-tuning tasks. Code is available at github.com/sunsmarterjie/iTPN.
SlowLiDAR: Increasing the Latency of LiDAR-Based Detection Using Adversarial Examples

LiDAR-based perception is a central component of autonomous driving, playing a key role in tasks such as vehicle localization and obstacle detection. Since the safety of LiDAR-based perceptual pipelines is critical to safe autonomous driving, a number of past efforts have investigated its vulnerability under adversarial perturbations of raw point cloud inputs. However, most such efforts have focused on investigating the impact of such perturbations on predictions (integrity), and little has been done to understand the impact on latency (availability), a critical concern for real-time cyber-physical systems. We present the first systematic investigation of the availability of LiDAR detection pipelines, and SlowLiDAR, an adversarial perturbation attack that maximizes LiDAR detection runtime. The attack overcomes the technical challenges posed by the non-differentiable parts of the LiDAR detection pipelines by using differentiable proxies and uses a novel loss function that effectively captures the impact of adversarial perturbations on the execution time of the pipeline. Extensive experimental results show that SlowLiDAR can significantly increase the latency of the six most popular LiDAR detection pipelines while maintaining imperceptibility <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 is available at: https://github.com/WUSTL-CSPL/SlowLiDAR.