Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Video OWL-ViT: Temporally-consistent open-world localization in video

We present an architecture and a training recipe that adapts pretrained open-world image models to localization in videos. Understanding the open visual world (without being constrained by fixed label spaces) is crucial for many real-world vision tasks. Contrastive pre-training on large image-text datasets has recently led to significant improvements for image-level tasks. For more structured tasks involving object localization applying pre-trained models is more challenging. This is particularly true for video tasks, where task-specific data is limited. We show successful transfer of open-world models by building on the OWL-ViT open-vocabulary detection model and adapting it to video by adding a transformer decoder. The decoder propagates object representations recurrently through time by using the output tokens for one frame as the object queries for the next. Our model is end-to-end trainable on video data and enjoys improved temporal consistency compared to tracking-by-detection baselines, while retaining the open-world capabilities of the backbone detector. We evaluate our model on the challenging TAO-OW benchmark and demonstrate that open-world capabilities, learned from large-scale image-text pretraining, can be transferred successfully to open-world localization across diverse videos.
Video Action Segmentation via Contextually Refined Temporal Keypoints

Video action segmentation involves categorizing each frame or short snippet of an untrimmed video into predefined action categories. Despite notable advancements in recent years, a considerable number of current approaches still rely on frame-wise segmentation that tends to render fragmentary results. To address it, we present an innovative approach for video action segmentation, centered around contextually refined temporal keypoints. Initially, our method identifies a set of sparse, over-complete temporal keypoints through non-local visual cues, with each keypoint representing a potential action segment candidate. Subsequent enhancements to these initial keypoints are achieved through iterative refining and re-assembling operations. Driven by the notion that optimal temporal keypoints should collectively resemble the true ground-truth structurally, we introduce a module that conducts graph matching between the keypoint-derived graph and the reference graph constructed from accurate annotations. This module effectively learns structural features used to further refine the initial keypoints. Moreover, a set of predefined rules is applied to re-assemble all temporal keypoints. The unfiltered temporal keypoints, resulting from these operations, are harnessed to generate the final action segments. We extensively evaluate our method across three video benchmarks: 50salads, GTEA, and Breakfast. Our proposed approach consistently demonstrates substantial improvements over existing methods, establishing its superiority in video action segmentation. It achieves F 1@50 scores (one of the key performance metrics for this task) of 79.5%, 83.4%, and 60.5%, respectively, v.s. previous state-of-the-art 78.5%, 79.8% and 57.4%.
Contrastive Learning Relies More on Spatial Inductive Bias Than Supervised Learning: An Empirical Study

Though self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) has shown its potential to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy without any supervision, its behavior still remains under-investigated. Different from most previous work that understands CL from learning objectives, we focus on an unexplored yet natural aspect: the spatial inductive bias which seems to be implicitly exploited via data augmentations in CL. We design an experiment to study the reliance of CL on such spatial inductive bias, by destroying the global or local spatial structures of an image with global or local patch shuffling, and comparing the performance drop between experiments on original and corrupted dataset to quantify the reliance on certain inductive bias. We also use the uniformity of feature space to further research how CL-pre-trained models behave with the corrupted dataset. Our results and analysis show that CL has a much higher reliance on spatial inductive bias than SL, regardless of specific CL algorithm or backbones, opening a new direction for studying the behavior of CL.
Movement Enhancement toward Multi-Scale Video Feature Representation for Temporal Action Detection

Boundary localization is a challenging problem in Temporal Action Detection (TAD), in which there are two main issues. First, the submergence of movement feature, i.e. the movement information in a snippet is covered by the scene information. Second, the scale of action, that is, the proportion of action segments in the entire video, is considerably variable. In this work, we first design a Movement Enhance Module (MEM) to highlight movement feature for better action location, and then, we propose a Scale Feature Pyramid Network (SFPN) to detect multi-scale actions in videos. For Movement Enhance Module, firstly, Movement Feature Extractor (MFE) is designed to get the movement feature. Secondly, we propose a Multi-Relation Enhance Module (MREM) to grasp valuable information correlation both locally and temporally. For Scale Feature Pyramid Network, we design a U-Shape Module to model different scale actions, moreover, we design the training and inference strategy of different scales, ensuring that each pyramid layer is only responsible for actions at a specific scale. These two innovations are integrated as the Movement Enhance Network (MENet), and extensive experiments conducted on two challenging benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness. MENet outperforms other representative TAD methods on ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS-14.
No Fear of Classifier Biases: Neural Collapse Inspired Federated Learning with Synthetic and Fixed Classifier

Data heterogeneity is an inherent challenge that hinders the performance of federated learning (FL). Recent studies have identified the biased classifiers of local models as the key bottleneck. Previous attempts have used classifier calibration after FL training, but this approach falls short in improving the poor feature representations caused by training-time classifier biases. Resolving the classifier bias dilemma in FL requires a full understanding of the mechanisms behind the classifier. Recent advances in neural collapse have shown that the classifiers and feature prototypes under perfect training scenarios collapse into an optimal structure called simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). Building on this neural collapse insight, we propose a solution to the FL's classifier bias problem by utilizing a synthetic and fixed ETF classifier during training. The optimal classifier structure enables all clients to learn unified and optimal feature representations even under extremely heterogeneous data. We devise several effective modules to better adapt the ETF structure in FL, achieving both high generalization and personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/ZexiLee/ICCV-2023-FedETF.
DiFaReli: Diffusion Face Relighting

We present a novel approach to single-view face relighting in the wild. Handling non-diffuse effects, such as global illumination or cast shadows, has long been a challenge in face relighting. Prior work often assumes Lambertian surfaces, simplified lighting models or involves estimating 3D shape, albedo, or a shadow map. This estimation, however, is error-prone and requires many training examples with lighting ground truth to generalize well. Our work bypasses the need for accurate estimation of intrinsic components and can be trained solely on 2D images without any light stage data, multi-view images, or lighting ground truth. Our key idea is to leverage a conditional diffusion implicit model (DDIM) for decoding a disentangled light encoding along with other encodings related to 3D shape and facial identity inferred from off-the-shelf estimators. We also propose a novel conditioning technique that eases the modeling of the complex interaction between light and geometry by using a rendered shading reference to spatially modulate the DDIM. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmark Multi-PIE and can photorealistically relight in-the-wild images. Please visit our page: https://diffusion-face-relighting.github.io.
Deep Active Contours for Real-time 6-DoF Object Tracking

This paper solves the problem of real-time 6-DoF object tracking from an RGB video. Prior optimization-based methods optimize the object pose by aligning the projected model to the image based on handcrafted features, which are prone to suboptimal solutions. Recent learning-based methods use neural networks to predict the pose, which suffer from limited generalizability or computational efficiency. We propose a learning-based active contour model to make the best use of both worlds. Specifically, given an initial pose, we project the object model to the image plane to obtain the initial contour and use a lightweight network to predict how the contour should move to match the true object boundary, which provides the gradients to optimize the object pose. We also devise an efficient optimization algorithm to train our model end-to-end with pose supervision. Experimental results on semi-synthetic and real-world 6-DoF object tracking datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin in pose accuracy, while achieving real-time performance on mobile devices. Code is available on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/deep_ac/.
Online Continual Learning on Hierarchical Label Expansion

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without forgetting previously learned knowledge. While current CL setups have ignored the relationship between labels in the past task and the new task with or without small task overlaps, real-world scenarios often involve hierarchical relationships between old and new tasks, posing another challenge for traditional CL approaches. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-level hierarchical class incremental task configuration with an online learning constraint, called hierarchical label expansion (HLE). Our configuration allows a network to first learn coarse-grained classes, with data labels continually expanding to more fine-grained classes in various hierarchy depths. To tackle this new setup, we propose a rehearsal-based method that utilizes hierarchy-aware pseudo-labeling to incorporate hierarchical class information. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective memory management and sampling strategy that selectively adopts samples of newly encountered classes. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively use hierarchy on our HLE setup to improve classification accuracy across all levels of hierarchies, regardless of depth and class imbalance ratio, outperforming prior state-of-the-art works by significant margins while also outperforming them on the conventional disjoint, blurry and i-Blurry CL setups.
Box-based Refinement for Weakly Supervised and Unsupervised Localization Tasks

It has been established that training a box-based detector network can enhance the localization performance of weakly supervised and unsupervised methods. Moreover, we extend this understanding by demonstrating that these detectors can be utilized to improve the original network, paving the way for further advancements. To accomplish this, we train the detectors on top of the network output instead of the image data and apply suitable loss backpropagation. Our findings reveal a significant improvement in phrase grounding for the "what is where by looking" task, as well as various methods of unsupervised object discovery. Our code is available at https://github.com/eyalgomel/box-based-refinement.
Towards Robust Model Watermark via Reducing Parametric Vulnerability

Deep neural networks are valuable assets considering their commercial benefits and huge demands for costly annotation and computation resources. To protect the copyright of DNNs, backdoor-based ownership verification becomes popular recently, in which the model owner can watermark the model by embedding a specific backdoor behavior before releasing it. The defenders (usually the model owners) can identify whether a suspicious third-party model is "stolen" from them based on the presence of the behavior. Unfortunately, these watermarks are proven to be vulnerable to removal attacks even like fine-tuning. To further explore this vulnerability, we investigate the parameter space and find there exist many watermark-removed models in the vicinity of the watermarked one, which may be easily used by removal attacks. Inspired by this finding, we propose a mini-max formulation to find these watermark-removed models and recover their watermark behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the robustness of the model watermarking against parametric changes and numerous watermark-removal attacks. The codes for reproducing our main experiments are available at https://github.com/GuanhaoGan/robust-model-watermarking.
Verbs in Action: Improving verb understanding in video-language models

Understanding verbs is crucial to modelling how people and objects interact with each other and the environment through space and time. Recently, state-of-the-art video-language models based on CLIP have been shown to have limited verb understanding and to rely extensively on nouns, restricting their performance in real-world video applications that require action and temporal understanding. In this work, we improve verb understanding for CLIP-based video-language models by proposing a new Verb-Focused Contrastive (VFC) framework. This consists of two main components: (1) leveraging pretrained large language models (LLMs) to create hard negatives for cross-modal contrastive learning, together with a calibration strategy to balance the occurrence of concepts in positive and negative pairs; and (2) enforcing a fine-grained, verb phrase alignment loss. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results for zero-shot performance on three downstream tasks that focus on verb understanding, including video-text matching, video question-answering and video classification; while maintaining performance on noun-focused settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which proposes a method to alleviate the verb understanding problem, and does not simply highlight it. Our code is publicly available at [16] : scenic/projects/verbs_in_action.
Semi-supervised Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation via Cross-modal Encoding

Existing Speech-driven 3D facial animation methods typically follow the supervised paradigm, involving regression from speech to 3D facial animation. This paradigm faces two major challenges: the high cost of supervision acquisition, and the ambiguity in mapping between speech and lip movements. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel cross-modal semi-supervised framework, comprising a Speech-to-Image Transcoder and a Face-to-Geometry Regressor. The former jointly learns a common representation space from speech and image domains, enabling the transformation of speech into semantically-consistent facial images. The latter is responsible for reconstructing 3D facial meshes from the transformed images. Both modules require minimal effort to acquire the necessary training data, thereby obviating the dependence on costly supervised data. Furthermore, the joint learning scheme enables the fusion of intricate visual features into speech encoding, thereby facilitating the transformation of subtle speech variations into nuanced lip movements, ultimately enhancing the fidelity of 3D face reconstructions. Consequently, the ambiguity of the direct mapping of speech-to-animation is significantly reduced, leading to coherent and high-fidelity generation of lip motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach produces competitive results compared to supervised methods.
EgoObjects: A Large-Scale Egocentric Dataset for Fine-Grained Object Understanding

Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multistage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.
LightDepth: Single-View Depth Self-Supervision from Illumination Decline

Single-view depth estimation can be remarkably effective if there is enough ground-truth depth data for supervised training. However, there are scenarios, especially in medicine in the case of endoscopies, where such data cannot be obtained. In such cases, multi-view self-supervision and synthetic-to-real transfer serve as alternative approaches, however, with a considerable performance reduction in comparison to supervised case. Instead, we propose a single-view self-supervised method that achieves a performance similar to the supervised case. In some medical devices, such as endoscopes, the camera and light sources are co-located at a small distance from the target surfaces. Thus, we can exploit that, for any given albedo and surface orientation, pixel brightness is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the surface, providing a strong single-view self-supervisory signal. In our experiments, our self-supervised models deliver accuracies comparable to those of fully supervised ones, while being applicable without depth ground-truth data.
UHDNeRF: Ultra-High-Definition Neural Radiance Fields

We propose UHDNeRF, a new framework for novel view synthesis on the challenging ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 4K) real-world scenes. Previous NeRF methods are not specifically designed for rendering on extremely high resolutions, leading to burry results with notable detail-losing problems even though trained on 4K images. This is mainly due to the mismatch between the high-resolution inputs and the low-dimensional volumetric representation. To address this issue, we introduce an adaptive implicit-explicit scene representation with which an explicit sparse point cloud is used to boost the performance of an implicit volume on modeling subtle details. Specifically, we reconstruct the complex real-world scene with a frequency separation strategy that the implicit volume learns to represent the low-frequency properties of the whole scene, and the sparse point cloud is used for reproducing high-frequency details. To better explore the information embedded in the point cloud, we extract a global structure feature and a local point-wise feature from the point cloud for each sample located in the high-frequency regions. Furthermore, a patch-based sampling strategy is introduced to reduce the computational cost. The high-fidelity rendering results demonstrate the superiority of our method for retaining high-frequency details at 4K ultra-high-resolution scenarios against state-of-the-art NeRF-based solutions.
ExBluRF: Efficient Radiance Fields for Extreme Motion Blurred Images

We present ExBluRF, a novel view synthesis method for extreme motion blurred images based on efficient radiance fields optimization. Our approach consists of two main components: 6-DOF camera trajectory-based motion blur formulation and voxel-based radiance fields. From extremely blurred images, we optimize the sharp radiance fields by jointly estimating the camera trajectories that generate the blurry images. In training, multiple rays along the camera trajectory are accumulated to reconstruct single blurry color, which is equivalent to the physical motion blur operation. We minimize the photo-consistency loss on blurred image space and obtain the sharp radiance fields with camera trajectories that explain the blur of all images. The joint optimization on the blurred image space demands painfully increasing computation and resources proportional to the blur size. Our method solves this problem by replacing the MLP-based framework to low-dimensional 6-DOF camera poses and voxel-based radiance fields. Compared with the existing works, our approach restores much sharper 3D scenes from challenging motion blurred views with the order of 10× less training time and GPU memory consumption.
E<sup>2</sup>NeRF: Event Enhanced Neural Radiance Fields from Blurry Images

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves impressive rendering performance by learning volumetric 3D representation from several images of different views. However, it is difficult to reconstruct a sharp NeRF from blurry input as often occurred in the wild. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Event-Enhanced NeRF (E <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> NeRF) by utilizing the combination data of a bio-inspired event camera and a standard RGB camera. To effectively introduce event stream into the learning process of neural volumetric representation, we propose a blur rendering loss and an event rendering loss, which guide the network via modelling real blur process and event generation process, respectively. Moreover, a camera pose estimation framework for real-world data is built with the guidance of event stream to generalize the method to practical applications. In contrast to previous image-based or event-based NeRF, our framework effectively utilizes the internal relationship between events and images. As a result, E <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> NeRF not only achieves image deblurring but also achieves high-quality novel view image generation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and real-world data demonstrate that E <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> NeRF can effectively learn a sharp NeRF from blurry images, especially in complex and low-light scenes. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/E2NeRF.