bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
PsyNet: Self-Supervised Approach to Object Localization Using Point Symmetric Transformation
Authors: Baek Kyungjune , Lee Minhyun , Shim Hyunjung
Published: June 2020

Existing co-localization techniques significantly lose performance over weakly or fully supervised methods in accuracy and inference time. In this paper, we overcome common drawbacks of co-localization techniques by utilizing self-supervised learning approach. The major technical contributions of the proposed method are two-fold. 1) We devise a new geometric transformation, namely point symmetric transformation and utilize its parameters as an artificial label for self-supervised learning. This new transformation can also play the role of region-drop based regularization. 2) We suggest a heat map extraction method for computing the heat map from the network trained by self-supervision, namely class-agnostic activation mapping. It is done by computing the spatial attention map. Based on extensive evaluations, we observe that the proposed method records new state-of-the-art performance in three fine-grained datasets for unsupervised object localization. Moreover, we show that the idea of the proposed method can be adopted in a modified manner to solve the weakly supervised object localization task. As a result, we outperform the current state-of-the-art technique in weakly supervised object localization by a significant gap.
Incremental Multi-Domain Learning with Network Latent Tensor Factorization
Authors: Bulat Adrian , Kossaifi Jean , Tzimiropoulos Georgios , Pantic Maja
Published: June 2020

The prominence of deep learning, large amount of annotated data and increasingly powerful hardware made it possible to reach remarkable performance for supervised classification tasks, in many cases saturating the training sets. However the resulting models are specialized to a single very specific task and domain. Adapting the learned classification to new domains is a hard problem due to at least three reasons: (1) the new domains and the tasks might be drastically different; (2) there might be very limited amount of annotated data on the new domain and (3) full training of a new model for each new task is prohibitive in terms of computation and memory, due to the sheer number of parameters of deep CNNs. In this paper, we present a method to learn new-domains and tasks incrementally, building on prior knowledge from already learned tasks and without catastrophic forgetting. We do so by jointly parametrizing weights across layers using low-rank Tucker structure. The core is task agnostic while a set of task specific factors are learnt on each new domain. We show that leveraging tensor structure enables better performance than simply using matrix operations. Joint tensor modelling also naturally leverages correlations across different layers. Compared with previous methods which have focused on adapting each layer separately, our approach results in more compact representations for each new task/domain. We apply the proposed method to the 10 datasets of the Visual Decathlon Challenge and show that our method offers on average about 7.5× reduction in number of parameters and competitive performance in terms of both classification accuracy and Decathlon score.
Auto-GAN: Self-Supervised Collaborative Learning for Medical Image Synthesis
Authors: Cao Bing , Zhang Han , Wang Nannan , Gao Xinbo , Shen Dinggang
Published: June 2020

In various clinical scenarios, medical image is crucial in disease diagnosis and treatment. Different modalities of medical images provide complementary information and jointly helps doctors to make accurate clinical decision. However, due to clinical and practical restrictions, certain imaging modalities may be unavailable nor complete. To impute missing data with adequate clinical accuracy, here we propose a framework called self-supervised collaborative learning to synthesize missing modality for medical images. The proposed method comprehensively utilize all available information correlated to the target modality from multi-source-modality images to generate any missing modality in a single model. Different from the existing methods, we introduce an auto-encoder network as a novel, self-supervised constraint, which provides target-modality-specific information to guide generator training. In addition, we design a modality mask vector as the target modality label. With experiments on multiple medical image databases, we demonstrate a great generalization ability as well as specialty of our method compared with other state-of-the-arts.
General Partial Label Learning via Dual Bipartite Graph Autoencoder
Authors: Chen Brian , Wu Bo , Zareian Alireza , Zhang Hanwang , Chang Shih-Fu
Published: June 2020

We formulate a practical yet challenging problem: General Partial Label Learning (GPLL). Compared to the traditional Partial Label Learning (PLL) problem, GPLL relaxes the supervision assumption from instance-level — a label set partially labels an instance — to group-level: 1) a label set partially labels a group of instances, where the within-group instance-label link annotations are missing, and 2) cross-group links are allowed — instances in a group may be partially linked to the label set from another group. Such ambiguous group-level supervision is more practical in real-world scenarios as additional annotation on the instance-level is no longer required, e.g., face-naming in videos where the group consists of faces in a frame, labeled by a name set in the corresponding caption. In this paper, we propose a novel graph convolutional network (GCN) called Dual Bipartite Graph Autoencoder (DB-GAE) to tackle the label ambiguity challenge of GPLL. First, we exploit the cross-group correlations to represent the instance groups as dual bipartite graphs: within-group and cross-group, which reciprocally complements each other to resolve the linking ambiguities. Second, we design a GCN autoencoder to encode and decode them, where the decodings are considered as the refined results. It is worth noting that DB-GAE is self-supervised and transductive, as it only uses the group-level supervision without a separate offline training stage. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that DB-GAE significantly outperforms the best baseline over absolute 0.159 F1-score and 24.8% accuracy. We further offer analysis on various levels of label ambiguities.
Hierarchical Online Instance Matching for Person Search
Authors: Chen Di , Zhang Shanshan , Ouyang Wanli , Yang Jian , Schiele Bernt
Published: June 2020

Person Search is a challenging task which requires to retrieve a person's image and the corresponding position from an image dataset. It consists of two sub-tasks: pedestrian detection and person re-identification (re-ID). One of the key challenges is to properly combine the two sub-tasks into a unified framework. Existing works usually adopt a straightforward strategy by concatenating a detector and a re-ID model directly, either into an integrated model or into separated models. We argue that simply concatenating detection and re-ID is a sub-optimal solution, and we propose a Hierarchical Online Instance Matching (HOIM) loss which exploits the hierarchical relationship between detection and re-ID to guide the learning of our network. Our novel HOIM loss function harmonizes the objectives of the two sub-tasks and encourages better feature learning. In addition, we improve the loss update policy by introducing Selective Memory Refreshment (SMR) for unlabeled persons, which takes advantage of the potential discrimination power of unlabeled data. From the experiments on two standard person search benchmarks, i.e. CUHK-SYSU and PRW, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, which justifies the effectiveness of our proposed HOIM loss on learning robust features.
DASOT: A Unified Framework Integrating Data Association and Single Object Tracking for Online Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Chu Qi , Ouyang Wanli , Liu Bin , Zhu Feng , Yu Nenghai
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we propose an online multi-object tracking (MOT) approach that integrates data association and single object tracking (SOT) with a unified convolutional network (ConvNet), named DASOTNet. The intuition behind integrating data association and SOT is that they can complement each other. Following Siamese network architecture, DASOTNet consists of the shared feature ConvNet, the data association branch and the SOT branch. Data association is treated as a special re-identification task and solved by learning discriminative features for different targets in the data association branch. To handle the problem that the computational cost of SOT grows intolerably as the number of tracked objects increases, we propose an efficient two-stage tracking method in the SOT branch, which utilizes the merits of correlation features and can simultaneously track all the existing targets within one forward propagation. With feature sharing and the interaction between them, data association branch and the SOT branch learn to better complement each other. Using a multi-task objective, the whole network can be trained end-to-end. Compared with state-of-the-art online MOT methods, our method is much faster while maintaining a comparable performance.
Visual Relationship Detection with Low Rank Non-Negative Tensor Decomposition
Authors: Dupty Mohammed Haroon , Zhang Zhen , Lee Wee Sun
Published: June 2020

We address the problem of Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) which aims to describe the relationships between pairs of objects in the form of triplets of (subject, predicate, object). We observe that given a pair of bounding box proposals, objects often participate in multiple relations implying the distribution of triplets is multimodal. We leverage the strong correlations within triplets to learn the joint distribution of triplet variables conditioned on the image and the bounding box proposals, doing away with the hitherto used independent distribution of triplets. To make learning the triplet joint distribution feasible, we introduce a novel technique of learning conditional triplet distributions in the form of their normalized low rank non-negative tensor decompositions. Normalized tensor decompositions take form of mixture distributions of discrete variables and thus are able to capture multimodality. This allows us to efficiently learn higher order discrete multimodal distributions and at the same time keep the parameter size manageable. We further model the probability of selecting an object proposal pair and include a relation triplet prior in our model. We show that each part of the model improves performance and the combination outperforms state-of-the-art score on the Visual Genome (VG) and Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) datasets.
SADA: Semantic Adversarial Diagnostic Attacks for Autonomous Applications
Authors: Hamdi Abdullah , Mueller Matthias , Ghanem Bernard
Published: June 2020

One major factor impeding more widespread adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) is their lack of robustness, which is essential for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. This has motivated much recent work on adversarial attacks for DNNs, which mostly focus on pixel-level perturbations void of semantic meaning. In contrast, we present a general framework for adversarial attacks on trained agents, which covers semantic perturbations to the environment of the agent performing the task as well as pixel-level attacks. To do this, we re-frame the adversarial attack problem as learning a distribution of parameters that always fools the agent. In the semantic case, our proposed adversary (denoted as BBGAN) is trained to sample parameters that describe the environment with which the black-box agent interacts, such that the agent performs its dedicated task poorly in this environment. We apply BBGAN on three different tasks, primarily targeting aspects of autonomous navigation: object detection, self-driving, and autonomous UAV racing. On these tasks, BBGAN can generate failure cases that consistently fool a trained agent.
Coarse-to-Fine Hyper-Prior Modeling for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Hu Yueyu , Yang Wenhan , Liu Jiaying
Published: June 2020

Approaches to image compression with machine learning now achieve superior performance on the compression rate compared to existing hybrid codecs. The conventional learning-based methods for image compression exploits hyper-prior and spatial context model to facilitate probability estimations. Such models have limitations in modeling long-term dependency and do not fully squeeze out the spatial redundancy in images. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework with hierarchical layers of hyper-priors to conduct comprehensive analysis of the image and more effectively reduce spatial redundancy, which improves the rate-distortion performance of image compression significantly. Signal Preserving Hyper Transforms are designed to achieve an in-depth analysis of the latent representation and the Information Aggregation Reconstruction sub-network is proposed to maximally utilize side-information for reconstruction. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to efficiently reduce the redundancies in images and improve the rate-distortion performance, especially for high-resolution images. Our project is publicly available at https://huzi96.github.io/coarse-to-fine-compression.html.
Unsupervised Deep Learning via Affinity Diffusion
Authors: Huang Jiabo , Dong Qi , Gong Shaogang , Zhu Xiatian
Published: June 2020

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in a variety of computer vision tasks. However, they usually rely on supervised model learning with the need for massive labelled training data, limiting dramatically their usability and deployability in real-world scenarios without any labelling budget. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose unsupervised deep learning approach to deriving discriminative feature representations. It is based on self-discovering semantically consistent groups of unlabelled training samples with the same class concepts through a progressive affinity diffusion process. Extensive experiments on object image classification and clustering show the performance superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning models using six common image recognition benchmarks including MNIST, SVHN, STL10, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet.
EAC-Net: Efficient and Accurate Convolutional Network for Video Recognition
Authors: Jin Bowei , Xu Zhuo
Published: June 2020

Research for computation-efficient video understanding is of great importance to real-world deployment. However, most of high-performance approaches are too computationally expensive for practical application. Though several efficiency oriented works are proposed, they inevitably suffer degradation of performance in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we explore a new architecture EAC-Net, enjoying both high efficiency and high performance. Specifically, we propose Motion Guided Temporal Encode (MGTE) blocks for temporal modeling, which exploits motion information and temporal relations among neighbor frames. EAC-Net is then constructed by inserting multiple MGTE blocks to common 2D CNNs. Furthermore, we proposed Atrous Temporal Encode (ATE) block for capturing long-term temporal relations at multiple time scales for further enhancing representation power of EAC-Net. Through experiments on Kinetics, our EAC-Nets achieved better results than TSM models with fewer FLOPs. With same 2D backbones, EAC-Nets outperformed Non-Local I3D counterparts by achieving higher accuracy with only about 7× fewer FLOPs. On Something-Something-V1 dataset, EAC-Net achieved 47% top-1 accuracy with 70G FLOPs which is 0.9% more accurate and 8× less FLOPs than that of Non-Local I3D+GCN.
Learned Video Compression via Joint Spatial-Temporal Correlation Exploration
Authors: Liu Haojie , Shen Han , Huang Lichao , Lu Ming , Chen Tong , Ma Zhan
Published: June 2020

Traditional video compression technologies have been developed over decades in pursuit of higher coding efficiency. Efficient temporal information representation plays a key role in video coding. Thus, in this paper, we propose to exploit the temporal correlation using both first-order optical flow and second-order flow prediction. We suggest an one-stage learning approach to encapsulate flow as quantized features from consecutive frames which is then entropy coded with adaptive contexts conditioned on joint spatial-temporal priors to exploit second-order correlations. Joint priors are embedded in autoregressive spatial neighbors, co-located hyper elements and temporal neighbors using ConvLSTM recurrently. We evaluate our approach for the low-delay scenario with High-Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC), H.264/AVC and another learned video compression method, following the common test settings. Our work offers the state-of-the-art performance, with consistent gains across all popular test sequences.
A Generalized Framework for Edge-Preserving and Structure-Preserving Image Smoothing
Authors: Liu Wei , Zhang Pingping , Lei Yinjie , Huang Xiaolin , Yang Jie , Reid Ian
Published: June 2020

Image smoothing is a fundamental procedure in applications of both computer vision and graphics. The required smoothing properties can be different or even contradictive among different tasks. Nevertheless, the inherent smoothing nature of one smoothing operator is usually fixed and thus cannot meet the various requirements of different applications. In this paper, a non-convex non-smooth optimization framework is proposed to achieve diverse smoothing natures where even contradictive smoothing behaviors can be achieved. To this end, we first introduce the truncated Huber penalty function which has seldom been used in image smoothing. A robust framework is then proposed. When combined with the strong flexibility of the truncated Huber penalty function, our framework is capable of a range of applications and can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches in several tasks. In addition, an efficient numerical solution is provided and its convergence is theoretically guaranteed even the optimization framework is non-convex and non-smooth. The effectiveness and superior performance of our approach are validated through comprehensive experimental results in a range of applications.
Learning to Follow Directions in Street View
Authors: Hermann Karl Moritz , Malinowski Mateusz , Mirowski Piotr , Banki-Horvath Andras , Anderson Keith , Hadsell Raia
Published: June 2020

Navigating and understanding the real world remains a key challenge in machine learning and inspires a great variety of research in areas such as language grounding, planning, navigation and computer vision. We propose an instruction-following task that requires all of the above, and which combines the practicality of simulated environments with the challenges of ambiguous, noisy real world data. StreetNav is built on top of Google Street View and provides visually accurate environments representing real places. Agents are given driving instructions which they must learn to interpret in order to successfully navigate in this environment. Since humans equipped with driving instructions can readily navigate in previously unseen cities, we set a high bar and test our trained agents for similar cognitive capabilities. Although deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods are frequently evaluated only on data that closely follow the training distribution, our dataset extends to multiple cities and has a clean train/test separation. This allows for thorough testing of generalisation ability. This paper presents the StreetNav environment and tasks, models that establish strong baselines, and extensive analysis of the task and the trained agents.
Pyramid Attention Aggregation Network for Semantic Segmentation of Surgical Instruments
Authors: Ni Zhen-Liang , Bian Gui-Bin , Wang Guan-An , Zhou Xiao-Hu , Hou Zeng-Guang , Chen Hua-Bin , Xie Xiao-Liang
Published: June 2020

Semantic segmentation of surgical instruments plays a critical role in computer-assisted surgery. However, specular reflection and scale variation of instruments are likely to occur in the surgical environment, undesirably altering visual features of instruments, such as color and shape. These issues make semantic segmentation of surgical instruments more challenging. In this paper, a novel network, Pyramid Attention Aggregation Network, is proposed to aggregate multi-scale attentive features for surgical instruments. It contains two critical modules: Double Attention Module and Pyramid Upsampling Module. Specifically, the Double Attention Module includes two attention blocks (i.e., position attention block and channel attention block), which model semantic dependencies between positions and channels by capturing joint semantic information and global contexts, respectively. The attentive features generated by the Double Attention Module can distinguish target regions, contributing to solving the specular reflection issue. Moreover, the Pyramid Upsampling Module extracts local details and global contexts by aggregating multi-scale attentive features. It learns the shape and size features of surgical instruments in different receptive fields and thus addresses the scale variation issue. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. It achieves a new record of 97.10% mean IOU on Cata7. Besides, it comes first in the MICCAI EndoVis Challenge 2017 with 9.90% increase on mean IOU.
Differentiable Grammars for Videos
Authors: Piergiovanni AJ , Angelova Anelia , Ryoo Michael S.
Published: June 2020

This paper proposes a novel algorithm which learns a formal regular grammar from real-world continuous data, such as videos. Learning latent terminals, non-terminals, and production rules directly from continuous data allows the construction of a generative model capturing sequential structures with multiple possibilities. Our model is fully differentiable, and provides easily interpretable results which are important in order to understand the learned structures. It outperforms the state-of-the-art on several challenging datasets and is more accurate for forecasting future activities in videos. We plan to open-source the code.1
Dynamic Graph Representation for Occlusion Handling in Biometrics
Authors: Ren Min , Wang Yunlong , Sun Zhenan , Tan Tieniu
Published: June 2020

The generalization ability of Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for biometrics drops greatly due to the adverse effects of various occlusions. To this end, we propose a novel unified framework integrated the merits of both CNNs and graphical models to learn dynamic graph representations for occlusion problems in biometrics, called Dynamic Graph Representation (DGR). Convolutional features onto certain regions are re-crafted by a graph generator to establish the connections among the spatial parts of biometrics and build Feature Graphs based on these node representations. Each node of Feature Graphs corresponds to a specific part of the input image and the edges express the spatial relationships between parts. By analyzing the similarities between the nodes, the framework is able to adaptively remove the nodes representing the occluded parts. During dynamic graph matching, we propose a novel strategy to measure the distances of both nodes and adjacent matrixes. In this way, the proposed method is more convincing than CNNs-based methods because the dynamic graph method implies a more illustrative and reasonable inference of the biometrics decision. Experiments conducted on iris and face demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework, which boosts the accuracy of occluded biometrics recognition by a large margin comparing with baseline methods.
Identifying Model Weakness with Adversarial Examiner
Authors: Shu Michelle , Liu Chenxi , Qiu Weichao , Yuille Alan
Published: June 2020

Machine learning models are usually evaluated according to the average case performance on the test set. However, this is not always ideal, because in some sensitive domains (e.g. autonomous driving), it is the worst case performance that matters more. In this paper, we are interested in systematic exploration of the input data space to identify the weakness of the model to be evaluated. We propose to use an adversarial examiner in the testing stage. Different from the existing strategy to always give the same (distribution of) test data, the adversarial examiner will dynamically select the next test data to hand out based on the testing history so far, with the goal being to undermine the model's performance. This sequence of test data not only helps us understand the current model, but also serves as constructive feedback to help improve the model in the next iteration. We conduct experiments on ShapeNet object classification. We show that our adversarial examiner can successfully put more emphasis on the weakness of the model, preventing performance estimates from being overly optimistic.
Attention-Based View Selection Networks for Light-Field Disparity Estimation
Authors: Tsai Yu-Ju , Liu Yu-Lun , Ouhyoung Ming , Chuang Yung-Yu
Published: June 2020

This paper introduces a novel deep network for estimating depth maps from a light field image. For utilizing the views more effectively and reducing redundancy within views, we propose a view selection module that generates an attention map indicating the importance of each view and its potential for contributing to accurate depth estimation. By exploring the symmetric property of light field views, we enforce symmetry in the attention map and further improve accuracy. With the attention map, our architecture utilizes all views more effectively and efficiently. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and ranks the first on a popular benchmark for disparity estimation for light field images.
Show, Recall, and Tell: Image Captioning with Recall Mechanism
Authors: Wang Li , Bai Zechen , Zhang Yonghua , Lu Hongtao
Published: June 2020

Generating natural and accurate descriptions in image captioning has always been a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel recall mechanism to imitate the way human conduct captioning. There are three parts in our recall mechanism : recall unit, semantic guide (SG) and recalled-word slot (RWS). Recall unit is a text-retrieval module designed to retrieve recalled words for images. SG and RWS are designed for the best use of recalled words. SG branch can generate a recalled context, which can guide the process of generating caption. RWS branch is responsible for copying recalled words to the caption. Inspired by pointing mechanism in text summarization, we adopt a soft switch to balance the generated-word probabilities between SG and RWS. In the CIDEr optimization step, we also introduce an individual recalled-word reward (WR) to boost training. Our proposed methods (SG+RWS+WR) achieve BLEU-4 / CIDEr / SPICE scores of 36.6 / 116.9 / 21.3 with cross-entropy loss and 38.7 / 129.1 / 22.4 with CIDEr optimization on MSCOCO Karpathy test split, which surpass the results of other state-of-the-art methods.
Task-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Wang Xinlong , Yin Wei , Kong Tao , Jiang Yuning , Li Lei , Shen Chunhua
Published: June 2020

Monocular depth estimation enables 3D perception from a single 2D image, thus attracting much research attention for years. Almost all methods treat foreground and background regions (“things and stuff”) in an image equally. However, not all pixels are equal. Depth of foreground objects plays a crucial role in 3D object recognition and localization. To date how to boost the depth prediction accuracy of foreground objects is rarely discussed. In this paper, we first analyze the data distributions and interaction of foreground and background, then propose the foreground-background separated monocular depth estimation (ForeSeE) method, to estimate the foreground and background depth using separate optimization objectives and decoders. Our method significantly improves the depth estimation performance on foreground objects. Applying ForeSeE to 3D object detection, we achieve 7.5 AP gains and set new state-of-the-art results among other monocular methods. Code will be available at: https://github.com/WXinlong/ForeSeE.
Localize, Assemble, and Predicate: Contextual Object Proposal Embedding for Visual Relation Detection
Authors: Wu Ruihai , Xu Kehan , Liu Chenchen , Zhuang Nan , Mu Yadong
Published: June 2020

Visual relation detection (VRD) aims to describe all interacting objects in an image using subject-predicate-object triplets. Critically, valid relations combinatorially grow in O(C2 R) for C object categories and R relationships. The frequencies of relation triplets exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which inevitably leads to bias towards popular visual relations in the learned VRD model. To address this problem, we propose localize-assemble-predicate network (LAP-Net), which decomposes VRD into three sub-tasks: localizing individual objects, assembling and predicting the subject-object pairs. In the first stage of LAP-Net, Region Proposal Network (RPN) is used to generate a few class-agnostic object proposals. Next, these proposals are assembled to form subject-object pairs via a second Pair Proposal Network (PPN), in which we propose a novel contextual embedding scheme. The inner product between embedded representations faithfully reflects the compatibility between a pair of proposals, without estimating object and subject class. Top-ranked pairs from stage two are fed into a third sub-network, which precisely estimates the relationship. The whole pipeline except for the last stage is object-category-agnostic in localizing relationships in an image, alleviating the bias in popular relations induced by training data. Our LAP-Net can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate that LAP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the VRD benchmark while maintaining high speed in inference.
3D Single-Person Concurrent Activity Detection Using Stacked Relation Network
Authors: Wei Yi , Li Wenbo , Fan Yanbo , Xu Linghan , Chang Ming-Ching , Lyu Siwei
Published: June 2020

We aim to detect real-world concurrent activities performed by a single person from a streaming 3D skeleton sequence. Different from most existing works that deal with concurrent activities performed by multiple persons that are seldom correlated, we focus on concurrent activities that are spatio-temporally or causally correlated and performed by a single person. For the sake of generalization, we propose an approach based on a decompositional design to learn a dedicated feature representation for each activity class. To address the scalability issue, we further extend the class-level decompositional design to the postural-primitive level, such that each class-wise representation does not need to be extracted by independent backbones, but through a dedicated weighted aggregation of a shared pool of postural primitives. There are multiple interdependent instances deriving from each decomposition. Thus, we propose Stacked Relation Networks (SRN), with a specialized relation network for each decomposition, so as to enhance the expressiveness of instance-wise representations via the inter-instance relationship modeling. SRN achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public dataset and a newly collected dataset. The relation weights within SRN are interpretable among the activity contexts. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/weiyi1991/UA_Concurrent/
Motion-Based Generator Model: Unsupervised Disentanglement of Appearance, Trackable and Intrackable Motions in Dynamic Patterns
Authors: Xie Jianwen , Gao Ruiqi , Zheng Zilong , Zhu Song-Chun , Wu Ying Nian
Published: June 2020

Dynamic patterns are characterized by complex spatial and motion patterns. Understanding dynamic patterns requires a disentangled representational model that separates the factorial components. A commonly used model for dynamic patterns is the state space model, where the state evolves over time according to a transition model and the state generates the observed image frames according to an emission model. To model the motions explicitly, it is natural for the model to be based on the motions or the displacement fields of the pixels. Thus in the emission model, we let the hidden state generate the displacement field, which warps the trackable component in the previous image frame to generate the next frame while adding a simultaneously emitted residual image to account for the change that cannot be explained by the deformation. The warping of the previous image is about the trackable part of the change of image frame, while the residual image is about the intrackable part of the image. We use a maximum likelihood algorithm to learn the model parameters that iterates between inferring latent noise vectors that drive the transition model and updating the parameters given the inferred latent vectors. Meanwhile we adopt a regularization term to penalize the norms of the residual images to encourage the model to explain the change of image frames by trackable motion. Unlike existing methods on dynamic patterns, we learn our model in unsupervised setting without ground truth displacement fields or optical flows. In addition, our model defines a notion of intrackability by the separation of warped component and residual component in each image frame. We show that our method can synthesize realistic dynamic pattern, and disentangling appearance, trackable and intrackable motions. The learned models can be useful for motion transfer, and it is natural to adopt it to define and measure intrackability of a dynamic pattern.
Planar Prior Assisted PatchMatch Multi-View Stereo
Authors: Xu Qingshan , Tao Wenbing
Published: June 2020

The completeness of 3D models is still a challenging problem in multi-view stereo (MVS) due to the unreliable photometric consistency in low-textured areas. Since low-textured areas usually exhibit strong planarity, planar models are advantageous to the depth estimation of low-textured areas. On the other hand, PatchMatch multi-view stereo is very efficient for its sampling and propagation scheme. By taking advantage of planar models and PatchMatch multi-view stereo, we propose a planar prior assisted PatchMatch multi-view stereo framework in this paper. In detail, we utilize a probabilistic graphical model to embed planar models into PatchMatch multi-view stereo and contribute a novel multi-view aggregated matching cost. This novel cost takes both photometric consistency and planar compatibility into consideration, making it suited for the depth estimation of both non-planar and planar regions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can efficiently recover the depth information of extremely low-textured areas, thus obtaining high complete 3D models and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Gated Convolutional Networks with Hybrid Connectivity for Image Classification
Authors: Yang Chuanguang , An Zhulin , Zhu Hui , Hu Xiaolong , Zhang Kun , Xu Kaiqiang , Li Chao , Xu Yongjun
Published: June 2020

We propose a simple yet effective method to reduce the redundancy of DenseNet by substantially decreasing the number of stacked modules by replacing the original bottleneck by our SMG module, which is augmented by local residual. Furthermore, SMG module is equipped with an efficient two-stage pipeline, which aims to DenseNet-like architectures that need to integrate all previous outputs, i.e., squeezing the incoming informative but redundant features gradually by hierarchical convolutions as a hourglass shape and then exciting it by multi-kernel depthwise convolutions, the output of which would be compact and hold more informative multi-scale features. We further develop a forget and an update gate by introducing the popular attention modules to implement the effective fusion instead of a simple addition between reused and new features. Due to the Hybrid Connectivity (nested combination of global dense and local residual) and Gated mechanisms, we called our network as the HCGNet. Experimental results on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets show that HCGNet is more prominently efficient than DenseNet, and can also significantly outperform state-of-the-art networks with less complexity. Moreover, HCGNet also shows the remarkable interpretability and robustness by network dissection and adversarial defense, respectively. On MS-COCO, HCGNet can consistently learn better features than popular backbones.
Mining on Heterogeneous Manifolds for Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Image Retrieval
Authors: Yang Fan , Wang Zheng , Xiao Jing , Satoh Shin'ichi
Published: June 2020

Most recent approaches for the zero-shot cross-modal image retrieval map images from different modalities into a uniform feature space to exploit their relevance by using a pre-trained model. Based on the observation that manifolds of zero-shot images are usually deformed and incomplete, we argue that the manifolds of unseen classes are inevitably distorted during the training of a two-stream model that simply maps images from different modalities into a uniform space. This issue directly leads to poor cross-modal retrieval performance. We propose a bi-directional random walk scheme to mining more reliable relationships between images by traversing heterogeneous manifolds in the feature space of each modality. Our proposed method benefits from intra-modal distributions to alleviate the interference caused by noisy similarities in the cross-modal feature space. As a result, we achieved great improvement in the performance of the thermal v.s. visible image retrieval task. The code of this paper: https://github.com/fyang93/cross-modal-retrieval
SOGNet: Scene Overlap Graph Network for Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yang Yibo , Li Hongyang , Li Xia , Zhao Qijie , Wu Jianlong , Lin Zhouchen
Published: June 2020

The panoptic segmentation task requires a unified result from semantic and instance segmentation outputs that may contain overlaps. However, current studies widely ignore modeling overlaps. In this study, we aim to model overlap relations among instances and resolve them for panoptic segmentation. Inspired by scene graph representation, we formulate the overlapping problem as a simplified case, named scene overlap graph. We leverage each object's category, geometry and appearance features to perform relational embedding, and output a relation matrix that encodes overlap relations. In order to overcome the lack of supervision, we introduce a differentiable module to resolve the overlap between any pair of instances. The mask logits after removing overlaps are fed into per-pixel instance id classification, which leverages the panoptic supervision to assist in the modeling of overlap relations. Besides, we generate an approximate ground truth of overlap relations as the weak supervision, to quantify the accuracy of overlap relations predicted by our method. Experiments on COCO and Cityscapes demonstrate that our method is able to accurately predict overlap relations, and outperform the state-of-the-art performance for panoptic segmentation. Our method also won the Innovation Award in COCO 2019 challenge.
Reliability Does Matter: An End-to-End Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Approach
Authors: Zhang Bingfeng , Xiao Jimin , Wei Yunchao , Sun Mingjie , Huang Kaizhu
Published: June 2020

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task as it only takes image-level information as supervision for training but produces pixel-level predictions for testing. To address such a challenging task, most recent state-of-the-art approaches propose to adopt two-step solutions, i.e. 1) learn to generate pseudo pixel-level masks, and 2) engage FCNs to train the semantic segmentation networks with the pseudo masks. However, the two-step solutions usually employ many bells and whistles in producing high-quality pseudo masks, making this kind of methods complicated and inelegant. In this work, we harness the image-level labels to produce reliable pixel-level annotations and design a fully end-to-end network to learn to predict segmentation maps. Concretely, we firstly leverage an image classification branch to generate class activation maps for the annotated categories, which are further pruned into confident yet tiny object/background regions. Such reliable regions are then directly served as ground-truth labels for the parallel segmentation branch, where a newly designed dense energy loss function is adopted for optimization. Despite its apparent simplicity, our one-step solution achieves competitive mIoU scores (val: 62.6, test: 62.9) on Pascal VOC compared with those two-step state-of-the-arts. By extending our one-step method to two-step, we get a new state-of-the-art performance on the Pascal VOC (val: 66.3, test: 66.5).
Embedding Convolution Neural Network-Based Defect Finder for Deployed Vision Inspector in Manufacturing Company Frontec
Authors: Lee Kyoung Jun , Kwon Jun Woo , Min Soohong , Yoon Jungho
Published: June 2020

In collaboration with Frontec, which produces parts such as bolts and nuts for the automobile industry, Kyung Hee University and Benple Inc. develop and deploy AI system for automatic quality inspection of weld nuts. Various constraints to consider exist in adopting AI for the factory, such as response time and limited computing resources available. Our convolutional neural network (CNN) system using large-scale images must classify weld nuts within 0.2 seconds with accuracy over 95%. We designed Circular Hough Transform based preprocessing and an adjusted VGG (Visual Geometry Group) model. The system showed accuracy over 99% and response time of about 0.14 sec. We use TCP / IP protocol to communicate the embedded classification system with an existing vision inspector using LabVIEW. We suggest ways to develop and embed a deep learning framework in an existing manufacturing environment without a hardware change.
FedVision: An Online Visual Object Detection Platform Powered by Federated Learning
Authors: Liu Yang , Huang Anbu , Luo Yun , Huang He , Liu Youzhi , Chen Yuanyuan , Feng Lican , Chen Tianjian , Yu Han , Yang Qiang
Published: June 2020

Visual object detection is a computer vision-based artificial intelligence (AI) technique which has many practical applications (e.g., fire hazard monitoring). However, due to privacy concerns and the high cost of transmitting video data, it is highly challenging to build object detection models on centrally stored large training datasets following the current approach. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to resolve this challenge. Nevertheless, there currently lacks an easy to use tool to enable computer vision application developers who are not experts in federated learning to conveniently leverage this technology and apply it in their systems. In this paper, we report FedVision - a machine learning engineering platform to support the development of federated learning powered computer vision applications. The platform has been deployed through a collaboration between WeBank and Extreme Vision to help customers develop computer vision-based safety monitoring solutions in smart city applications. Over four months of usage, it has achieved significant efficiency improvement and cost reduction while removing the need to transmit sensitive data for three major corporate customers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real application of FL in computer vision-based tasks.
PIDS: An Intelligent Electric Power Management Platform
Authors: Zheng Yongqing , Yu Han , Shi Yuliang , Zhang Kun , Zhen Shuai , Cui Lizhen , Leung Cyril , Miao Chunyan
Published: June 2020

Electricity information tracking systems are increasingly being adopted across China. Such systems can collect real-time power consumption data from users, and provide opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI) to help power companies and authorities make optimal demand-side management decisions. In this paper, we discuss power utilization improvement in Shandong Province, China with a deployed AI application - the Power Intelligent Decision Support (PIDS) platform. Based on improved short-term power consumption gap prediction, PIDS uses an optimal power adjustment plan which enables fine-grained Demand Response (DR) and Orderly Power Utilization (OPU) recommendations to ensure stable operation while minimizing power disruptions and improving fair treatment of participating companies. Deployed in August 2018, the platform is helping over 400 companies optimize their power consumption through DR while dynamically managing the OPU process for around 10,000 companies. Compared to the previous system, power outage under PIDS through planned shutdown has been reduced from 16% to 0.56%, resulting in significant gains in economic activities.
Calorie Estimation in a Real-World Recipe Service
Authors: Harashima Jun , Hiramatsu Makoto , Sanjo Satoshi
Published: June 2020

Cooking recipes play an important role in promoting a healthy lifestyle, and a vast number of user-generated recipes are currently available on the Internet. Allied to this growth in the amount of information is an increase in the number of studies on the use of such data for recipe analysis, recipe generation, and recipe search. However, there have been few attempts to estimate the number of calories per serving in a recipe. This study considers this task and introduces two challenging subtasks: ingredient normalization and serving estimation. The ingredient normalization task aims to convert the ingredients written in a recipe (e.g.,), which says “sesame oil (for finishing)” in Japanese) into their canonical forms (e.g., , sesame oil) so that their calorific content can be looked up in an ingredient dictionary. The serving estimation task aims to convert the amount written in the recipe (e.g., N, N pieces) into the number of servings (e.g., M, M people), thus enabling the calories per serving to be calculated. We apply machine learning-based methods to these tasks and describe their practical deployment in Cookpad, the largest recipe service in the world. A series of experiments demonstrate that the performance of our methods is sufficient for use in real-world services.
Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK
Authors: Shi Zheyuan Ryan , Schlenker Aaron , Hay Brian , Bittleston Daniel , Gao Siyu , Peterson Emily , Trezza John , Fang Fei
Published: June 2020

Cyber adversaries have increasingly leveraged social engineering attacks to breach large organizations and threaten the well-being of today's online users. One clever technique, the “watering hole” attack, compromises a legitimate website to execute drive-by download attacks by redirecting users to another malicious domain. We introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the salient aspects for an organization protecting itself from a watering hole attack by altering the environment information in web traffic so as to deceive the attackers. Our main contributions are (1) a novel Social Engineering Deception (SED) game model that features a continuous action set for the attacker, (2) an in-depth analysis of the SED model to identify computationally feasible real-world cases, and (3) the CyberTWEAK algorithm which solves for the optimal protection policy. To illustrate the potential use of our framework, we built a browser extension based on our algorithms which is now publicly available online. The CyberTWEAK extension will be vital to the continued development and deployment of countermeasures for social engineering.