Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
IDR: Self-Supervised Image Denoising via Iterative Data Refinement

The lack of large-scale noisy-clean image pairs restricts supervised denoising methods' deployment in actual applications. While existing unsupervised methods are able to learn image denoising without ground-truth clean images, they either show poor performance or work under impractical settings (e.g., paired noisy images). In this paper, we present a practical unsupervised image denoising method to achieve state-of-the-art denoising performance. Our method only requires single noisy images and a noise model, which is easily accessible in practical raw image denoising. It performs two steps iteratively: (1) Constructing a noisier-noisy dataset with random noise from the noise model; (2) training a model on the noisier-noisy dataset and using the trained model to refine noisy images to obtain the targets used in the next round. We further approximate our full iterative method with a fast algorithm for more efficient training while keeping its original high performance. Experiments on real-world, synthetic, and correlated noise show that our proposed unsupervised denoising approach has superior performances over existing unsupervised methods and competitive performance with supervised methods. In addition, we argue that existing denoising datasets are of low quality and contain only a small number of scenes. To evaluate raw image denoising performance in real-world applications, we build a high-quality raw image dataset SenseNoise-500 that contains 500 real-life scenes. The dataset can serve as a strong benchmark for better evaluating raw image denoising. Code and dataset will be released <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> https://github.com/zhangyi-3/IDR
Closing the Generalization Gap of Cross-silo Federated Medical Image Segmentation

Cross-silo federated learning (FL) has attracted much attention in medical imaging analysis with deep learning in recent years as it can resolve the critical issues of insufficient data, data privacy, and training efficiency. However, there can be a generalization gap between the model trained from FL and the one from centralized training. This important issue comes from the non-iid data distribution of the local data in the participating clients and is well-known as client drift. In this work, we propose a novel training frame-work FedSM to avoid the client drift issue and successfully close the generalization gap compared with the centralized training for medical image segmentation tasks for the first time. We also propose a novel personalized FL objective formulation and a new method SoftPull to solve it in our proposed framework FedSM. We conduct rigorous theoretical analysis to guarantee its convergence for optimizing the non-convex smooth objective function. Real-world medical image segmentation experiments using deep FL validate the motivations and effectiveness of our proposed method.
TubeR: Tubelet Transformer for Video Action Detection

We propose TubeR: a simple solution for spatio-temporal video action detection. Different from existing methods that depend on either an offline actor detector or hand-designed actor-positional hypotheses like proposals or anchors, we propose to directly detect an action tubelet in a video by simultaneously performing action localization and recognition from a single representation. TubeR learns a set of tubelet-queries and utilizes a tubelet-attention module to model the dynamic spatio-temporal nature of a video clip, which effectively reinforces the model capacity compared to using actor-positional hypotheses in the spatio-temporal space. For videos containing transitional states or scene changes, we propose a context aware classification head to utilize short-term and long-term context to strengthen action classification, and an action switch regression head for detecting the precise temporal action extent. TubeR directly produces action tubelets with variable lengths and even maintains good results for long video clips. TubeR outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on commonly used action detection datasets AVA, UCF101-24 and JHMDB51-21. Code will be available on GluonCV(https://cv.gluon.ai/).
End-to-End Human-Gaze-Target Detection with Transformers

In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method for Human-Gaze-Target (HGT) detection, i.e., gaze following. Current approaches decouple the HGT detection task into separate branches of salient object detection and human gaze prediction, employing a two-stage framework where human head locations must first be detected and then be fed into the next gaze target prediction sub-network. In contrast, we redefine the HGT detection task as detecting human head locations and their gaze targets, simultaneously. By this way, our method, named Human-Gaze-Target detection TRansformer or HGTTR, streamlines the HGT detection pipeline by eliminating all other additional components. HGTTR reasons about the relations of salient objects and human gaze from the global image context. Moreover, unlike existing two-stage methods that require human head locations as input and can predict only one human's gaze target at a time, HGTTR can directly predict the locations of all people and their gaze targets at one time in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method are verified with extensive experiments on the two standard benchmark datasets, GazeFollowing and VideoAttentionTarget. Without bells and whistles, HGTTR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by large margins (6.4 mAP gain on GazeFollowing and 10.3 mAP gain on VideoAttentionTarget) with a much simpler architecture.
Colar: Effective and Efficient Online Action Detection by Consulting Exemplars

Online action detection has attracted increasing research interests in recent years. Current works model historical dependencies and anticipate the future to perceive the action evolution within a video segment and improve the detection accuracy. However, the existing paradigm ignores category-level modeling and does not pay sufficient attention to efficiency. Considering a category, its representative frames exhibit various characteristics. Thus, the category-level modeling can provide complimentary guidance to the temporal dependencies modeling. This paper develops an effective exemplar-consultation mechanism that first measures the similarity between a frame and exemplary frames, and then aggregates exemplary features based on the similarity weights. This is also an efficient mechanism, as both similarity measurement and feature aggregation require limited computations. Based on the exemplar-consultation mechanism, the long-term dependencies can be captured by regarding historical frames as exemplars, while the category-level modeling can be achieved by regarding representative frames from a category as exemplars. Due to the complementarity from the categorylevel modeling, our method employs a lightweight architecture but achieves new high performance on three benchmarks. In addition, using a spatio-temporal network to tackle video frames, our method makes a good trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/VividLe/Online-Action-Detection.
ASpanFormer: Detector-Free Image Matching with Adaptive Span Transformer

Generating robust and reliable correspondences across images is a fundamental task for a diversity of applications. To capture context at both global and local granularity, we propose ASpanFormer, a Transformer-based detector-free matcher that is built on hierarchical attention structure, adopting a novel attention operation which is capable of adjusting attention span in a self-adaptive manner. To achieve this goal, first, flow maps are regressed in each cross attention phase to locate the center of search region. Next, a sampling grid is generated around the center, whose size, instead of being empirically configured as fixed, is adaptively computed from a pixel uncertainty estimated along with the flow map. Finally, attention is computed across two images within derived regions, referred to as attention span. By these means, we are able to not only maintain long-range dependencies, but also enable fine-grained attention among pixels of high relevance that compensates essential locality and piece-wise smoothness in matching tasks. State-of-the-art accuracy on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks validates the strong matching capability of our method.
CAMRL: A Joint Method of Channel Attention and Multidimensional Regression Loss for 3D Object Detection in Automated Vehicles

Fully automated vehicles collect information about their road environments to adjust their driving actions, such as braking and slowing down. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) has improved the cognitive abilities of vehicles, allowing them to detect traffic signs, pedestrians, and obstacles for increasing the intelligence of these transportation systems. Three-dimensional (3D) object detection in front-view images taken by vehicle cameras is important for both object detection and depth estimation. In this paper, a joint channel attention and multidimensional regression loss method for 3D object detection in automated vehicles (called CAMRL) is proposed to improve the average precision of 3D object detection by focusing on the model’s ability to infer the locations and sizes of objects. First, channel attention is introduced to effectively learn the yaw angles from the road images captured by vehicle cameras. Second, a multidimensional regression loss algorithm is designed to further optimize the size and position parameters during the training process. Third, the intrinsic parameters of the camera and the depth estimate of the model are combined to reduce the object depth computation error, allowing us to calculate the distance between an object and the camera after the object’s size is confirmed. As a result, objects are detected, and their depth estimations are validated. Then, the vehicle can determine when and how to stop if an object is nearby. Finally, experiments conducted on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method is effective and performs better than other baseline methods, especially in terms of 3D object detection and bird’s-eye view (BEV) evaluation.
Unknown-Aware Object Detection: Learning What You Don't Know from Videos in the Wild

Building reliable object detectors that can detect out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is critical yet underexplored. One of the key challenges is that models lack supervision signals from unknown data, producing over-confident predictions on OOD objects. We propose a new unknown-aware object detection framework through Spatial-Temporal Unknown Distillation (STUD), which dis-tills unknown objects from videos in the wild and meaningfully regularizes the model's decision boundary. STUD first identifies the unknown candidate object proposals in the spatial dimension, and then aggregates the candidates across multiple video frames to form a diverse set of unknown objects near the decision boundary. Along-side, we employ an energy-based uncertainty regularization loss, which contrastively shapes the uncertainty space between the in-distribution and distilled unknown objects. STUD establishes the state-of-the-art performance on OOD detection tasks for object detection, reducing the FPR95 score by over 10% compared to the previous best method. Code is available at https://github.com/deep/earning-wisc/stud.
Cost Aggregation with 4D Convolutional Swin Transformer for Few-Shot Segmentation

This paper presents a novel cost aggregation network, called Volumetric Aggregation with Transformers (VAT), for few-shot segmentation. The use of transformers can benefit correlation map aggregation through self-attention over a global receptive field. However, the tokenization of a correlation map for transformer processing can be detrimental, because the discontinuity at token boundaries reduces the local context available near the token edges and decreases inductive bias. To address this problem, we propose a 4D Convolutional Swin Transformer, where a high-dimensional Swin Transformer is preceded by a series of small-kernel convolutions that impart local context to all pixels and introduce convolutional inductive bias. We additionally boost aggregation performance by applying transformers within a pyramidal structure, where aggregation at a coarser level guides aggregation at a finer level. Noise in the transformer output is then filtered in the subsequent decoder with the help of the query’s appearance embedding. With this model, a new state-of-the-art is set for all the standard benchmarks in few-shot segmentation. It is shown that VAT attains state-of-the-art performance for semantic correspondence as well, where cost aggregation also plays a central role. Code and trained models are available at https://seokju-cho.github.io/VAT/ .
Explainable Artificial Intelligence by Genetic Programming: A Survey

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has received great interest in the recent decade, due to its importance in critical application domains, such as self-driving cars, law, and healthcare. Genetic programming (GP) is a powerful evolutionary algorithm for machine learning. Compared with other standard machine learning models such as neural networks, the models evolved by GP tend to be more interpretable due to their model structure with symbolic components. However, interpretability has not been explicitly considered in GP until recently, following the surge in the popularity of XAI. This article provides a comprehensive review of the studies on GP that can potentially improve the model interpretability, both explicitly and implicitly, as a byproduct. We group the existing studies related to explainable artificial intelligence by GP into two categories. The first category considers the intrinsic interpretability, aiming to directly evolve more interpretable (and effective) models by GP. The second category focuses on post-hoc interpretability, which uses GP to explain other black-box machine learning models, or explain the models evolved by GP by simpler models such as linear models. This comprehensive survey demonstrates the strong potential of GP for improving the interpretability of machine learning models and balancing the complex tradeoff between model accuracy and interpretability.
Modulated Contrast for Versatile Image Synthesis

Perceiving the similarity between images has been a long-standing and fundamental problem underlying various visual generation tasks. Predominant approaches measure the inter-image distance by computing pointwise absolute deviations, which tends to estimate the median of instance distributions and leads to blurs and artifacts in the generated images. This paper presents MoNCE, a versatile metric that introduces image contrast to learn a calibrated metric for the perception of multifaceted inter-image distances. Unlike vanilla contrast which indiscriminately pushes negative samples from the anchor regardless of their similarity, we propose to re-weight the pushing force of negative samples adaptively according to their similarity to the anchor, which facilitates the contrastive learning from informative negative samples. Since multiple patch-level contrastive objectives are involved in image distance measurement, we introduce optimal transport in MoNCE to modulate the pushing force of negative samples collaboratively across multiple contrastive objectives. Extensive experiments over multiple image translation tasks show that the proposed MoNCE outperforms various prevailing metrics substantially. The code is available at MoNCE.
On Improving Bounding Box Representations for Oriented Object Detection

Detecting objects in remote sensing images (RSIs) using oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) is flourishing but challenging, wherein the design of OBB representations is the key to achieving accurate detection. In this article, we focus on two issues that hinder the performance of the two-stage oriented detectors: 1) the notorious boundary discontinuity problem, which would result in significant loss increases in boundary conditions, and 2) the inconsistency in regression schemes between the two stages. We propose a simple and effective bounding box representation by drawing inspiration from the polar coordinate system and integrate it into two detection stages to circumvent the two issues. The first stage specifically initializes four quadrant points as the starting points of the regression for producing high-quality oriented candidates without any postprocessing. In the second stage, the final localization results are refined using the proposed novel bounding box representation, which can fully release the capabilities of the oriented detectors. Such consistency brings a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. With only flipping augmentation and single-scale training and testing, our approach with ResNet-50-FPN harvests 76.25% mAP on the DOTA dataset with a speed of up to 16.5 frames/s, achieving the best accuracy and the fastest speed among the mainstream two-stage oriented detectors. Additional results on the DIOR-R and HRSC2016 datasets also demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. The source code is publicly available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/yanqingyao1994/QPDet</uri> .
Batch Arguments for $$\textsf{NP}$$ and More from Standard Bilinear Group Assumptions

Non-interactive batch arguments for $$\textsf{NP}$$ provide a way to amortize the cost of $$\textsf{NP}$$ verification across multiple instances. They enable a prover to convince a verifier of multiple $$\textsf{NP}$$ statements with communication much smaller than the total witness length and verification time much smaller than individually checking each instance. In this work, we give the first construction of a non-interactive batch argument for $$\textsf{NP}$$ from standard assumptions on groups with bilinear maps (specifically, from either the subgroup decision assumption in composite-order groups or from the $$k$$ - $$\textsf{Lin}$$ assumption in prime-order groups for any $$k \ge 1$$ ). Previously, batch arguments for $$\textsf{NP}$$ were only known from $$\textsf{LWE}$$ , or a combination of multiple assumptions, or from non-standard/non-falsifiable assumptions. Moreover, our work introduces a new direct approach for batch verification and avoids heavy tools like correlation-intractable hash functions or probabilistically-checkable proofs common to previous approaches. As corollaries to our main construction, we obtain the first publicly-verifiable non-interactive delegation scheme for RAM programs (i.e., a succinct non-interactive argument (SNARG) for $$\textsf{P}$$ ) with a CRS of sublinear size (in the running time of the RAM program), as well as the first aggregate signature scheme (supporting bounded aggregation) from standard assumptions on bilinear maps.
DirecFormer: A Directed Attention in Transformer Approach to Robust Action Recognition

Human action recognition has recently become one of the popular research topics in the computer vision community. Various 3D-CNN based methods have been presented to tackle both the spatial and temporal dimensions in the task of video action recognition with competitive results. However, these methods have suffered some fundamental limitations such as lack of robustness and generalization, e.g., how does the temporal ordering of video frames affect the recognition results? This work presents a novel end-to-end Transformer-based Directed Attention (Direc-Former) framework <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> The implementation of DirecFormer is available at https://github.com/uark-cviu/DirecFormer for robust action recognition. The method takes a simple but novel perspective of Transformer-based approach to understand the right order of sequence actions. Therefore, the contributions of this work are three-fold. Firstly, we introduce the problem of ordered temporal learning issues to the action recognition problem. Secondly, a new Directed Attention mechanism is introduced to understand and provide attentions to human actions in the right order. Thirdly, we introduce the conditional dependency in action sequence modeling that includes orders and classes. The proposed approach consistently achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results compared with the recent action recognition methods [4, 18, 72, 74]. on three standard large-scale benchmarks, i.e. Jester, Kinetics-400 and Something-Something-V2.
Human Mesh Recovery from Multiple Shots

Videos from edited media like movies are a useful, yet underexplored source of information, with rich variety of appearance and interactions between humans depicted over a large temporal context. However, the richness of data comes at the expense of fundamental challenges such as abrupt shot changes and close up shots of actors with heavy truncation, which limits the applicability of existing 3D human understanding methods. In this paper, we address these limitations with the insight that while shot changes of the same scene incur a discontinuity between frames, the 3D structure of the scene still changes smoothly. This allows us to handle frames before and after the shot change as multi-view signal that provide strong cues to recover the 3D state of the actors. We propose a multi-shot optimization framework that realizes this insight, leading to improved 3D reconstruction and mining of sequences with pseudo-ground truth 3D human mesh. We treat this data as valuable supervision for models that enable human mesh recovery from movies; both from single image and from video, where we propose a transformer-based temporal encoder that can naturally handle missing observations due to shot changes in the input frames. We demonstrate the importance of our insight and proposed models through extensive experiments. The tools we develop open the door to processing and analyzing in 3D content from a large library of edited media, which could be helpful for many downstream applications. Code, models and data are available at: https://geopavlakos.github.io/multishot/.
ObjectBox: From Centers to Boxes for Anchor-Free Object Detection

We present ObjectBox, a novel single-stage anchor-free and highly generalizable object detection approach. As opposed to both existing anchor-based and anchor-free detectors, which are more biased toward specific object scales in their label assignments, we use only object center locations as positive samples and treat all objects equally in different feature levels regardless of the objects’ sizes or shapes. Specifically, our label assignment strategy considers the object center locations as shape- and size-agnostic anchors in an anchor-free fashion, and allows learning to occur at all scales for every object. To support this, we define new regression targets as the distances from two corners of the center cell location to the four sides of the bounding box. Moreover, to handle scale-variant objects, we propose a tailored IoU loss to deal with boxes with different sizes. As a result, our proposed object detector does not need any dataset-dependent hyperparameters to be tuned across datasets. We evaluate our method on MS-COCO 2017 and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets, and compare our results to state-of-the-art methods. We observe that ObjectBox performs favorably in comparison to prior works. Furthermore, we perform rigorous ablation experiments to evaluate different components of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MohsenZand/ObjectBox .