Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Matching Is Not Enough: A Two-Stage Framework for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

Category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) aims to predict keypoints for arbitrary categories given support images with keypoint annotations. Existing approaches match the keypoints across the image for localization. However, such a one-stage matching paradigm shows inferior accuracy: the prediction heavily relies on the matching results, which can be noisy due to the open set nature in CAPE. For example, two mirror-symmetric keypoints (e.g., left and right eyes) in the query image can both trigger high similarity on certain support keypoints (eyes), which leads to duplicated or opposite predictions. To calibrate the inaccurate matching results, we introduce a two-stage framework, where matched keypoints from the first stage are viewed as similarity-aware position proposals. Then, the model learns to fetch relevant features to correct the initial proposals in the second stage. We instantiate the framework with a transformer model tailored for CAPE. The transformer encoder incorporates specific designs to improve the representation and similarity modeling in the first matching stage. In the second stage, similarity-aware proposals are packed as queries in the decoder for refinement via cross-attention. Our method surpasses the previous best approach by large margins on CAPE benchmark MP-100 on both accuracy and efficiency. Code available at github.com/flyinglynx/CapeFormer
Learned Two-Plane Perspective Prior based Image Resampling for Efficient Object Detection

Real-time efficient perception is critical for autonomous navigation and city scale sensing. Orthogonal to architectural improvements, streaming perception approaches have exploited adaptive sampling improving real-time detection performance. In this work, we propose a learnable geometry-guided prior that incorporates rough geometry of the 3D scene (a ground plane and a plane above) to resample images for efficient object detection. This significantly improves small and far-away object detection performance while also being more efficient both in terms of latency and memory. For autonomous navigation, using the same detector and scale, our approach improves detection rate by +4.1 AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</inf> or +39% and in real-time performance by +5.3 sAPs or +63% for small objects over state-of-the-art (SOTA). For fixed traffic cameras, our approach detects small objects at image scales other methods cannot. At the same scale, our approach improves detection of small objects by 195% (+12.5 AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S</inf> ) over naive-downsampling and 63% (+4.2 AP <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S</inf> ) over SOTA.
Learning Neural Proto-Face Field for Disentangled 3D Face Modeling in the Wild

Generative models show good potential for recovering 3D faces beyond limited shape assumptions. While plausible details and resolutions are achieved, these models easily fail under extreme conditions of pose, shadow or appearance, due to the entangled fitting or lack of multi-view priors. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel Neural Proto-face Field (NPF) for unsupervised robust 3D face modeling. Instead of using constrained images as Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), NPF disentangles the common/specific facial cues, i.e., ID, expression and scene-specific details from in-the-wild photo collections. Specifically, NPF learns a face prototype to aggregate 3D-consistent identity via uncertainty modeling, extracting multi-image priors from a photo collection. NPF then learns to deform the prototype with the appropriate facial expressions, constrained by a loss of expression consistency and personal idiosyncrasies. Finally, NPF is optimized to fit a target image in the collection, recovering specific details of appearance and geometry. In this way, the generative model benefits from multi-image priors and meaningful facial structures. Extensive experiments on benchmarks show that NPF recovers superior or competitive facial shapes and textures, compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Masked Autoencoding Does Not Help Natural Language Supervision at Scale

Self supervision and natural language supervision have emerged as two exciting ways to train general purpose image encoders which excel at a variety of downstream tasks. Recent works such as M3AE [31] and SLIP [63] have suggested that these approaches can be effectively combined, but most notably their results use small <20M examples) pre-training datasets and don't effectively reflect the large-scale regime (> 100M samples) that is commonly used for these approaches. Here we investigate whether a similar approach can be effective when trained with a much larger amount of data. We find that a combination of two state of the art approaches: masked autoencoders, MAE [37] and contrastive language image pretraining, CLIP [68] provides a benefit over CLIP when trained on a corpus of 11.3M image-text pairs, but little to no benefit (as evaluated on a suite of common vision tasks) over CLIP when trained on a large corpus of 1.4B images. Our work provides some much needed clarity into the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of self supervision for large-scale image-text training.
Neural Pixel Composition for 3D-4D View Synthesis from Multi-Views

We present Neural Pixel Composition (NPC), a novel approach for continuous 3D-4D view synthesis given a discrete set of multi-view observations as input. Existing state-of-the-art approaches require dense multi-view supervision and an extensive computational budget. The proposed formulation reliably operates on sparse and wide-baseline multi-view images/videos and can be trained efficiently within a few seconds to 10 minutes for hi-res (12MP) content. Crucial to our approach are two core novelties: 1) a representation of a pixel that contains color and depth information accumulated from multi-views for a particular location and time along a line of sight, and 2) a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that enables the composition of this rich information provided for a pixel location to obtain the final color output. We experiment with a large variety of multi-view sequences, compare to existing approaches, and achieve better results in diverse and challenging settings.
Co-speech Gesture Synthesis by Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive Pretrained Rewards

There is a growing demand of automatically synthesizing co-speech gestures for virtual characters. However, it remains a challenge due to the complex relationship between input speeches and target gestures. Most existing works focus on predicting the next gesture that fits the data best, however, such methods are myopic and lack the ability to plan for future gestures. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework called RACER to generate sequences of gestures that maximize the overall satisfactory. RACER employs a vector quantized variational autoencoder to learn compact representations of gestures and a GPT-based policy architecture to generate coherent sequence of gestures autoregressively. In particular, we propose a contrastive pre-training approach to calculate the rewards, which integrates contextual information into action evaluation and successfully captures the complex relationships between multi-modal speech-gesture data. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of both objective metrics and subjective human judgements. Demos can be found at https://github.com/RLracer/RACER.git.
Boosting Transductive Few-Shot Fine-tuning with Margin-based Uncertainty Weighting and Probability Regularization

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) has been rapidly developed in recent years, potentially eliminating the requirement for significant data acquisition. Few-shot fine-tuning has been demonstrated to be practically efficient and helpful, especially for out-of-distribution datum [7, 13, 17, 29]. In this work, we first observe that the few-shot fine-tuned methods are learned with the imbalanced class marginal distribution, leading to imbalanced per-class testing accuracy. This observation further motivates us to propose the Transductive Fine-tuning with Margin-based uncertainty weighting and Probability regularization (TF-MP), which learns a more balanced class marginal distribution as shown in Fig. 1. We first conduct sample weighting on unlabeled testing data with margin-based uncertainty scores and fur-ther regularize each test sample's categorical probability. TF-MP achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-/out-of-distribution evaluations of Meta- Dataset [31] and sur-passes previous transductive methods by a large margin.
Fantastic Breaks: A Dataset of Paired 3D Scans of Real-World Broken Objects and Their Complete Counterparts

Automated shape repair approaches currently lack access to datasets that describe real-world damaged geometry. We present Fantastic Breaks (and Where to Find Them: https://terascale-all-sensing-research-studio.github.io/FantasticBreaks), a dataset containing scanned, waterproofed, and cleaned 3D meshes for 150 broken objects, paired and geometrically aligned with complete counterparts. Fantastic Breaks contains class and material labels, proxy repair parts that join to broken meshes to generate complete meshes, and manually annotated fracture boundaries. Through a detailed analysis of fracture geometry, we reveal differences between Fantastic Breaks and synthetic fracture datasets generated using geometric and physics-based methods. We show experimental shape repair evaluation with Fantastic Breaks using multiple learning-based approaches pre-trained with synthetic datasets and re-trained with subset of Fantastic Breaks.
ReDirTrans: Latent-to-Latent Translation for Gaze and Head Redirection

Learning-based gaze estimation methods require large amounts of training data with accurate gaze annotations. Facing such demanding requirements of gaze data collection and annotation, several image synthesis methods were proposed, which successfully redirected gaze directions pre-cisely given the assigned conditions. However, these methods focused on changing gaze directions of the images that only include eyes or restricted ranges of faces with low res-olution (less than <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$128\times 128$</tex> ) to largely reduce interference from other attributes such as hairs, which limits application scenarios. To cope with this limitation, we proposed a portable network, called ReDirTrans, achieving latent-to-latent translation for redirecting gaze directions and head orientations in an interpretable manner. ReDirTrans projects input latent vectors into aimed-attribute embed-dings only and redirects these embeddings with assigned pitch and yaw values. Then both the initial and edited embeddings are projected back (deprojected) to the initial latent space as residuals to modify the input latent vec-tors by subtraction and addition, representing old status re-moval and new status addition. The projection of aimed at-tributes only and subtraction-addition operations for status replacement essentially mitigate impacts on other attributes and the distribution of latent vectors. Thus, by combining ReDirTrans with a pretrained fixed e4e-StyleGAN pair, we created ReDirTrans-GAN, which enables accurately redi-recting gaze in full-face images with <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1024\times 1024$</tex> resolution while preserving other attributes such as identity, expres-sion, and hairstyle. Furthermore, we presented improvements for the downstream learning-based gaze estimation task, using redirected samples as dataset augmentation.
Exploring Incompatible Knowledge Transfer in Few-shot Image Generation

Few-shot image generation (FSIG) learns to generate diverse and high-fidelity images from a target domain using a few (e.g., 10) reference samples. Existing FSIG methods select, preserve and transfer prior knowledge from a source generator (pretrained on a related domain) to learn the target generator. In this work, we investigate an underexplored issue in FSIG, dubbed as incompatible knowledge transfer, which would significantly degrade the realisticness of synthetic samples. Empirical observations show that the issue stems from the least significant filters from the source generator. To this end, we propose knowledge truncation to mitigate this issue in FSIG, which is a complementary operation to knowledge preservation and is implemented by a lightweight pruning-based method. Extensive experiments show that knowledge truncation is simple and effective, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, including challenging setups where the source and target domains are more distant. Project Page: yunqing-me.github.io/RICK.
Distilling Neural Fields for Real-Time Articulated Shape Reconstruction

We present a method for reconstructing articulated 3D models from videos in real-time, without test-time optimization or manual 3D supervision at training time. Prior work often relies on pre-built deformable models (e.g. SMAL/SMPL), or slow perscene optimization through differentiable rendering (e.g. dynamic NeRFs). Such methods fail to support arbitrary object categories, or are unsuitable for real-time applications. To address the challenge of collecting large-scale 3D training data for arbitrary deformable object categories, our key insight is to use off-the-shelf video-based dynamic NeRFs as 3D supervision to train a fast feed-forward network, turning 3D shape and motion prediction into a supervised distillation task. Our temporal-aware network uses articulated bones and blend skinning to represent arbitrary deformations, and is self-supervised on video datasets without requiring 3D shapes or viewpoints as input. Through distillation, our network learns to 3D-reconstruct unseen articulated objects at interactive frame rates. Our method yields higher-fidelity 3D reconstructions than prior real-time methods for animals, with the ability to render realistic images at novel viewpoints and poses.
NVTC: Nonlinear Vector Transform Coding

In theory, vector quantization (VQ) is always better than scalar quantization (SQ) in terms of rate-distortion (RD) performance [33]. Recent state-of-the-art methods for neural image compression are mainly based on nonlinear transform coding (NTC) with uniform scalar quantization, overlooking the benefits of VQ due to its exponentially increased complexity. In this paper, we first investigate on some toy sources, demonstrating that even if modern neural networks considerably enhance the compression performance of SQ with nonlinear transform, there is still an insurmountable chasm between SQ and VQ. Therefore, revolving around VQ, we propose a novel framework for neural image compression named Nonlinear Vector Transform Coding (NVTC). NVTC solves the critical complexity issue of VQ through (1) a multi-stage quantization strategy and (2) nonlinear vector transforms. In addition, we apply entropy-constrained VQ in latent space to adaptively determine the quantization boundaries for joint rate-distortion optimization, which improves the performance both theoretically and experimentally. Compared to previous NTC approaches, NVTC demonstrates superior rate-distortion performance, faster decoding speed, and smaller model size. Our code is available at https://github.com/USTC-IMCL/NVTC.
Revisiting Rotation Averaging: Uncertainties and Robust Losses

In this paper, we revisit the rotation averaging problem applied in global Structure-from-Motion pipelines. We argue that the main problem of current methods is the minimized cost function that is only weakly connected with the input data via the estimated epipolar geometries. We propose to better model the underlying noise distributions by directly propagating the uncertainty from the point correspondences into the rotation averaging. Such uncertainties are obtained for free by considering the Jacobians of two-view refinements. Moreover, we explore integrating a variant of the MAGSAC loss into the rotation averaging problem, instead of using classical robust losses employed in current frameworks. The proposed method leads to results superior to baselines, in terms of accuracy, on large-scale public benchmarks. The code is public. https://github.com/zhangganlin/GlobalSfMpy
Enhancing Multiple Reliability Measures via Nuisance-Extended Information Bottleneck

In practical scenarios where training data is limited, many predictive signals in the data can be rather from some biases in data acquisition (i.e., less generalizable), so that one cannot prevent a model from co-adapting on such (so-called) “shortcut” signals: this makes the model fragile in various distribution shifts. To bypass such failure modes, we consider an adversarial threat model under a mutual information constraint to cover a wider class of perturbations in training. This motivates us to extend the standard information bottleneck to additionally model the nuisance information. We propose an autoencoder-based training to implement the objective, as well as practical encoder designs to facilitate the proposed hybrid discriminative-generative training concerning both convolutional- and Transformer-based architectures. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves robustness of learned representations (remarkably without using any domain-specific knowledge), with respect to multiple challenging reliability measures. For example, our model could advance the state-of-the-art on a recent challenging OBJECTS benchmark in novelty detection by 78.4% → 87.2% in AUROC, while simultaneously enjoying improved corruption, background and (certified) adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-jeong/nuisance_ib.
Frame Interpolation Transformer and Uncertainty Guidance

Video frame interpolation has seen important progress in recent years, thanks to developments in several directions. Some works leverage better optical flow methods with improved splatting strategies or additional cues from depth, while others have investigated alternative approaches through direct predictions or transformers. Still, the problem remains unsolved in more challenging conditions such as complex lighting or large motion. In this work, we are bridging the gap towards video production with a novel transformer-based interpolation network architecture capable of estimating the expected error together with the interpolated frame. This offers several advantages that are of key importance for frame interpolation usage: First, we obtained improved visual quality over several datasets. The improvement in terms of quality is also clearly demonstrated through a user study. Second, our method estimates error maps for the interpolated frame, which are essential for real-life applications on longer video sequences where problematic frames need to be flagged. Finally, for rendered content a partial rendering pass of the intermediate frame, guided by the predicted error, can be utilized during the interpolation to generate a new frame of superior quality. Through this error estimation, our method can produce even higher-quality intermediate frames using only a fraction of the time compared to a full rendering.
Neuralizer: General Neuroimage Analysis without Re-Training

Neuroimage processing tasks like segmentation, reconstruction, and registration are central to the study of neuroscience. Robust deep learning strategies and architectures used to solve these tasks are often similar. Yet, when presented with a new task or a dataset with different visual characteristics, practitioners most often need to train a new model, or fine-tune an existing one. This is a time-consuming process that poses a substantial barrier for the thousands of neuroscientists and clinical researchers who often lack the resources or machine-learning expertise to train deep learning models. In practice, this leads to a lack of adoption of deep learning, and neuroscience tools being dominated by classical frameworks. We introduce Neuralizer, a single model that generalizes to previously unseen neuroimaging tasks and modalities without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. Tasks do not have to be known a priori, and generalization happens in a single forward pass during inference. The model can solve processing tasks across multiple image modalities, acquisition methods, and datasets, and generalize to tasks and modalities it has not been trained on. Our experiments on coronal slices show that when few annotated subjects are available, our multi-task network outperforms task-specific baselines without training on the task.
Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Masked Shape Prediction for 3D Scene Understanding

Masked signal modeling has greatly advanced self-supervised pre-training for language and 2D images. However, it is still not fully explored in 3D scene understanding. Thus, this paper introduces Masked Shape Prediction (MSP), a new framework to conduct masked signal modeling in 3D scenes. MSP uses the essential 3D semantic cue, i.e., geometric shape, as the prediction target for masked points. The context-enhanced shape target consisting of explicit shape context and implicit deep shape feature is proposed to facilitate exploiting contextual cues in shape prediction. Meanwhile, the pre-training architecture in MSP is carefully designed to alleviate the masked shape leakage from point coordinates. Experiments on multiple 3D understanding tasks on both indoor and outdoor datasets demon-strate the effectiveness of MSP in learning good feature representations to consistently boost downstream performance.
Network Expansion For Practical Training Acceleration

Recently, the sizes of deep neural networks and training datasets both increase drastically to pursue better performance in a practical sense. With the prevalence of transformer-based models in vision tasks, even more pressure is laid on the GPU platforms to train these heavy models, which consumes a large amount of time and computing resources as well. Therefore, it's crucial to accelerate the training process of deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a general network expansion method to reduce the practical time cost of the model training process. Specifically, we utilize both width- and depth-level sparsity of dense models to accelerate the training of deep neural networks. Firstly, we pick a sparse sub-network from the original dense model by reducing the number of parameters as the starting point of training. Then the sparse architecture will gradually expand during the training procedure and finally grow into a dense one. We design different expanding strategies to grow CNNs and ViTs respectively, due to the great heterogeneity in between the two architectures. Our method can be easily integrated into popular deep learning frameworks, which saves considerable training time and hardware resources. Extensive experiments show that our acceleration method can significantly speed up the training process of modern vision models on general GPU devices with negligible performance drop (e.g. 1.42× faster for ResNet-101 and 1.34× faster for DeiT-base on ImageNet-1k). The code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/TrainingAcceleration/NetworkExpansion and https://gitee.com/mindspore/hub/blob/master/mshub_res/assets/noah-cvlab/gpu/1.8/networkexpansion_v1.0_imagenet2012.md