bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Accelerating Data Discovery with an Ontology-driven Tool for an Enterprise-scale Data Lake Environment
Authors: Raje Satyajeet , Kervin Karina , Issaie Nergal , Channapatna Madhu
Published: September 2022

A large overhead in the analytics process is the time required to find relevant data. We present an ontology-driven data discovery application, implemented over IBM’s Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform (CEDP). CEDP contains a large collection of heterogeneous data assets from enterprise-wide data sources. The application accelerates the time required for data consumers to search and find data relevant for their analytics applications.
TAILOR: Teaching with Active and Incremental Learning for Object Registration
Authors: Xu Qianli , Gauthier Nicolas , Liang Wenyu , Fang Fen , Tan Hui Li , Sun Ying , Wu Yan , Li Liyuan , Lim Joo-Hwee
Published: September 2022

When deploying a robot to a new task, one often has to train it to detect novel objects, which is time-consuming and labor- intensive. We present TAILOR - a method and system for ob- ject registration with active and incremental learning. When instructed by a human teacher to register an object, TAILOR is able to automatically select viewpoints to capture informa- tive images by actively exploring viewpoints, and employs a fast incremental learning algorithm to learn new objects without potential forgetting of previously learned objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with a KUKA robot to learn novel objects used in a real-world gearbox as- sembly task through natural interactions.
Ref-NMS: Breaking Proposal Bottlenecks in Two-Stage Referring Expression Grounding
Authors: Chen Long , Ma Wenbo , Xiao Jun , Zhang Hanwang , Chang Shih-Fu
Published: September 2022

The prevailing framework for solving referring expression grounding is based on a two-stage process: 1) detecting proposals with an object detector and 2) grounding the referent to one of the proposals. Existing two-stage solutions mostly focus on the grounding step, which aims to align the expressions with the proposals. In this paper, we argue that these methods overlook an obvious mismatch between the roles of proposals in the two stages: they generate proposals solely based on the detection confidence (i.e., expression-agnostic), hoping that the proposals contain all right instances in the expression (i.e., expression-aware). Due to this mismatch, current two-stage methods suffer from a severe performance drop between detected and ground-truth proposals. To this end, we propose Ref-NMS, which is the first method to yield expression-aware proposals at the first stage. Ref-NMS regards all nouns in the expression as critical objects, and introduces a lightweight module to predict a score for aligning each box with a critical object. These scores can guide the NMS operation to filter out the boxes irrelevant to the expression, increasing the recall of critical objects, resulting in a significantly improved grounding performance. Since Ref- NMS is agnostic to the grounding step, it can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art two-stage method. Extensive ablation studies on several backbones, benchmarks, and tasks consistently demonstrate the superiority of Ref-NMS. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ChopinSharp/ref-nms.
RGB-D Salient Object Detection via 3D Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Chen Qian , Liu Ze , Zhang Yi , Fu Keren , Zhao Qijun , Du Hongwei
Published: September 2022

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) recently has attracted increasing research interest and many deep learning methods based on encoder-decoder architectures have emerged. However, most existing RGB-D SOD models conduct feature fusion either in the single encoder or the decoder stage, which hardly guarantees sufficient cross-modal fusion ability. In this paper, we make the first attempt in addressing RGB-D SOD through 3D convolutional neural networks. The proposed model, named RD3D, aims at pre-fusion in the encoder stage and in-depth fusion in the decoder stage to effectively promote the full integration of RGB and depth streams. Specifically, RD3D first conducts pre-fusion across RGB and depth modalities through an inflated 3D encoder, and later provides in-depth feature fusion by designing a 3D decoder equipped with rich back-projection paths (RBPP) for leveraging the extensive aggregation ability of 3D convolutions. With such a progressive fusion strategy involving both the encoder and decoder, effective and thorough interaction between the two modalities can be exploited and boost the detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on six widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that RD3D performs favorably against 14 state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD approaches in terms of four key evaluation metrics. Our code will be made publicly available: https://github.com/PPOLYpubki/RD3D.
Mind-the-Gap! Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Text-Video Retrieval
Authors: Chen Qingchao , Liu Yang , Albanie Samuel
Published: September 2022

When can we expect a text-video retrieval system to work effectively on datasets that differ from its training domain? In this work, we investigate this question through the lens of unsupervised domain adaptation in which the objective is to match natural language queries and video content in the presence of domain shift at query-time. Such systems have significant practical applications since they are capable generalising to new data sources without requiring corresponding text annotations. We make the following contributions: (1) We propose the UDAVR (Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Video Retrieval) benchmark and employ it to study the performance of text-video retrieval in the presence of domain
shift. (2) We propose Concept-Aware-Pseudo-Query (CAPQ), a method for learning discriminative and transferable features that bridge these cross-domain discrepancies to enable effective target domain retrieval using source domain supervision. (3) We show that CAPQ outperforms alternative domain adaptation strategies on UDAVR.
Cascade Network with Guided Loss and Hybrid Attention for Finding Good Correspondences
Authors: Chen Zhi , Yang Fan , Tao Wenbing
Published: September 2022

Finding good correspondences is a critical prerequisite in many feature based tasks. Given a putative correspondence set of an image pair, we propose a neural network which finds correct correspondences by a binary-class classifier and estimates relative pose through classified correspondences. First, we analyze that due to the imbalance in the number of correct and wrong correspondences, the loss function has a great impact on the classification results. Thus, we propose a new Guided Loss that can directly use evaluation criterion (Fn-measure) as guidance to dynamically adjust the objective function during training. We theoretically prove that the perfect negative correlation between the Guided Loss and Fn-measure, so that the network is always trained towards the direction of increasing Fn-measure to maximize it. We then propose a hybrid attention block to extract feature, which integrates the Bayesian attentive context normalization (BACN) and channel-wise attention (CA). BACN can mine the prior information to better exploit global context and CA can capture complex channel context to enhance the channel awareness of the network. Finally, based on our Guided Loss and hybrid attention block, a cascade network is designed to gradually optimize the result for more superior performance. Experiments have shown that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Our code will be available in https://github.com/wenbingtao/GLHA.
DIRV: Dense Interaction Region Voting for End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Fang Hao-Shu , Xie Yichen , Shao Dian , Lu Cewu
Published: September 2022

Recent years, human-object interaction (HOI) detection has achieved impressive advances. However, conventional two-stage methods are usually slow in inference. On the other hand, existing one-stage methods mainly focus on the union regions of interactions, which introduce unnecessary visual information as disturbances to HOI detection. To tackle the problems above, we propose a novel one-stage HOI detection approach DIRV in this paper, based on a new concept called interaction region for the HOI problem. Unlike previous methods, our approach concentrates on the densely sampled interaction regions across different scales for each human-object pair, so as to capture the subtle visual features that is most essential to the interaction. Moreover, in order to compensate for the detection flaws of a single interaction region, we introduce a novel voting strategy that makes full use of those overlapped interaction regions in place of conventional Non-Maximal Suppression (NMS). Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks: V-COCO and HICO-DET show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts by a large margin with the highest inference speed and lightest network architecture. Our code
is publicly available at www.github.com/MVIG-SJTU/DIRV.
Interpretable Graph Capsule Networks for Object Recognition
Authors: Gu Jindong
Published: September 2022

Capsule Networks, as alternatives to Convolutional Neural Networks, have been proposed to recognize objects from images. The current literature demonstrates many advantages of CapsNets over CNNs. However, how to create explanations for individual classifications of CapsNets has not been well explored. The widely used saliency methods are mainly proposed for explaining CNN-based classifications; they create saliency map explanations by combining activation values and the corresponding gradients, e.g., Grad-CAM. These saliency methods require a specific architecture of the underlying classifiers and cannot be trivially applied to CapsNets due to the iterative routing mechanism therein. To overcome the lack of interpretability, we can either propose new post-hoc interpretation methods for CapsNets or modifying the model to have build-in explanations. In this work, we explore the latter. Specifically, we propose interpretable Graph Capsule Networks (GraCapsNets), where we replace the routing part with a multi-head attention-based Graph Pooling approach. In the proposed model, individual classification explanations can be created effectively and efficiently. Our model also demonstrates some unexpected benefits, even though it replaces the fundamental part of CapsNets. Our GraCapsNets achieve better classification performance with fewer parameters and better adversarial robustness, when compared to CapsNets. Besides, GraCapsNets also keep other advantages of CapsNets, namely, disentangled representations and affine transformation robustness.
Class-Incremental Instance Segmentation via Multi-Teacher Networks
Authors: Gu Yanan , Deng Cheng , Wei Kun
Published: September 2022

Although deep neural networks have achieved amazing results on instance segmentation, they are still ill-equipped when they are required to learn new tasks incrementally. Concretely, they suffer from “catastrophic forgetting”, an abrupt degradation of performance on old classes with the initial training data missing. Moreover, they are subjected to a negative transfer problem on new classes, which renders the model unable to update its knowledge while preserving the previous knowledge. To address these problems, we propose an incremental instance segmentation method that consists of three networks: Former Teacher Network (FTN), Current Student Network (CSN) and Current Teacher Network (CTN). Specifically, FTN supervises CSN to preserve the previous knowledge, and CTN supervises CSN to adapt to new classes. The supervision of two teacher networks is achieved by a distillation loss function for instances, bounding boxes, and classes. In addition, we adjust the supervision weights of different
teacher networks to balance between the knowledge preservation for former classes and the adaption to new classes. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL 2012 SBD and COCO datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
EfficientDeRain: Learning Pixel-wise Dilation Filtering for High-Efficiency Single-Image Deraining
Authors: Guo Qing , Sun Jingyang , Juefei-Xu Felix , Ma Lei , Xie Xiaofei , Feng Wei , Liu Yang , Zhao Jianjun
Published: September 2022

Single-image deraining is rather challenging due to the unknown rain model. Existing methods often make specific assumptions of the rain model, which can hardly cover many diverse circumstances in the real world, compelling them to employ complex optimization or progressive refinement. This, however, significantly affects these methods' efficiency and effectiveness for many efficiency-critical applications. To fill this gap, in this paper, we regard the single-image deraining as a general image-enhancing problem and originally propose a model-free deraining method, i.e., EfficientDeRain, which is able to process a rainy image within 10 ms (i.e., around 6 ms on average), over 80 times faster than the state-of-the-art method (i.e., RCDNet), while achieving similar de-rain effects. We first propose novel pixel-wise dilation filtering. In particular, a rainy image is filtered with the pixel-wise kernels estimated from a kernel prediction network, by which suitable multi-scale kernels for each pixel can be efficiently predicted. Then, to eliminate the gap between synthetic and real data, we further propose an effective data augmentation method (i.e., RainMix) that helps to train the network for handling real rainy images. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on both synthetic and real-world rainy datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. We release the model and code in https://github.com/tsingqguo/efficientderain.git.
Spherical Image Generation from a Single Image by Considering Scene Symmetry
Authors: Hara Takayuki , Mukuta Yusuke , Harada Tatsuya
Published: September 2022

Spherical images taken in all directions (360 degrees by 180 degrees) allow the full surroundings of a subject to be represented, providing an immersive experience to viewers. Generating a spherical image from a single normal-field-of-view (NFOV) image is convenient and expands the usage scenarios considerably without relying on a specific panoramic camera or images taken from multiple directions; however, achieving such images remains a challenging and unresolved problem. The primary challenge is controlling the high degree of freedom involved in generating a wide area that includes all directions of the desired spherical image. We focus on scene symmetry, which is a basic property of the global structure of spherical images, such as rotational symmetry, plane symmetry, and asymmetry. We propose a method for generating a spherical image from a single NFOV image and controlling the degree of freedom of the generated regions using the scene symmetry. To estimate and control the scene symmetry using both a circular shift and flip of the latent image features, we incorporate the intensity of the symmetry as a latent variable into conditional variational autoencoders. Our experiments show that the proposed method can generate various plausible spherical images controlled from symmetric to asymmetric, and can reduce the reconstruction errors of the generated images based on the estimated symmetry.
Hand-Model-Aware Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Hu Hezhen , Zhou Wengang , Li Houqiang
Published: September 2022

Hand gestures play a dominant role in the expression of sign language. Current deep-learning based video sign language recognition (SLR) methods usually follow a data-driven paradigm under the supervision of the category label. However, those methods suffer limited interpretability and may encounter the overfitting issue due to limited sign data sources. In this paper, we introduce the hand prior and propose a new hand-model-aware framework for isolated SLR with the modeling hand as the intermediate representation. We first transform the cropped hand sequence into the latent semantic feature. Then the hand model introduces the hand prior and provides a mapping from the semantic feature to the compact hand pose representation. Finally, the inference module enhances the spatio-temporal pose representation and performs the final recognition. Due to the lack of annotation on the hand pose under current sign language datasets, we further guide its learning by utilizing multiple weakly-supervised losses to constrain its spatial and temporal consistency. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we perform extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including NMFs-CSL, SLR500, MSASL and WLASL. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on all four popular benchmarks with a notable margin.
VIVO: Visual Vocabulary Pre-Training for Novel Object Captioning
Authors: Hu Xiaowei , Yin Xi , Lin Kevin , Zhang Lei , Gao Jianfeng , Wang Lijuan , Liu Zicheng
Published: September 2022

It is highly desirable yet challenging to generate image captions that can describe novel objects which are unseen in caption-labeled training data, a capability that is evaluated in the novel object captioning challenge (nocaps). In this challenge, no additional image-caption training data, other than COCO Captions, is allowed for model training. Thus, conventional Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) methods cannot be applied. This paper presents VIsual VOcabulary pre-training (VIVO) that performs pre-training in the absence of caption annotations. By breaking the dependency of paired image-caption training data in VLP, VIVO can leverage large amounts of paired image-tag data to learn a visual vocabulary. This is done by pre-training a multi-layer Transformer model that learns to align image-level tags with their corresponding image region features. To address the unordered nature of image tags, VIVO uses a Hungarian matching loss with masked tag prediction to conduct pre-training.

We validate the effectiveness of VIVO by fine-tuning the pre-trained model for image captioning. In addition, we perform an analysis of the visual-text alignment inferred by our model. The results show that our model can not only generate fluent image captions that describe novel objects, but also identify the locations of these objects. Our single model has achieved new state-of-the-art results on nocaps and surpassed the human CIDEr score.
Exploiting Relationship for Complex-scene Image Generation
Authors: Hua Tianyu , Zheng Hongdong , Bai Yalong , Zhang Wei , Zhang Xiao-Ping , Mei Tao
Published: September 2022

The significant progress on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has facilitated realistic single-object image generation based on language input. However, complex-scene generation (with various interactions among multiple objects) still suffers from messy layouts and object distortions, due to diverse configurations in layouts and appearances. Prior methods are mostly object-driven and ignore their inter-relations that play a significant role in complex-scene images. This work explores relationship-aware complex-scene image generation, where multiple objects are inter-related as a scene graph. With the help of relationships, we propose three major updates in the generation framework. First, reasonable spatial layouts are inferred by jointly considering the semantics and relationships among objects. Compared to standard location regression, we show relative scales and distances serve a more reliable target. Second, since the relations between objects have significantly influenced an object's appearance, we design a relation-guided generator to generate objects reflecting their relationships. Third, a novel scene graph discriminator is proposed to guarantee the consistency between the generated image and the input scene graph. Our method tends to synthesize plausible layouts and objects, respecting the interplay of multiple objects in an image. Experimental results on Visual Genome and HICO-DET datasets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms prior arts in terms of IS and FID metrics. Based on our user study and visual inspection, our method is more effective in generating logical layout and appearance for complex-scenes.
End-to-End Differentiable Learning to HDR Image Synthesis for Multi-exposure Images
Authors: Kim Junghee , Lee Siyeong , Kang Suk-Ju
Published: September 2022

Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction based on the multiple exposure stack from a given single exposure utilizes a deep learning framework to generate high-quality HDR images. These conventional networks focus on the exposure transfer task to reconstruct the multi-exposure stack. Therefore, they often fail to fuse the multi-exposure stack into a perceptually pleasant HDR image as the inversion artifacts occur. We tackle the problem in stack reconstruction-based methods by proposing a novel framework with a fully differentiable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) process. By explicitly using the loss, which compares the network's output with the ground truth HDR image, our framework enables a neural network that generates the multiple exposure stack for HDRI to train stably. In other words, our differentiable HDR synthesis layer helps the deep neural network to train to create multi-exposure stacks while reflecting the precise correlations between multi-exposure images in the HDRI process. In addition, our network uses the image decomposition and the recursive process to facilitate the exposure transfer task and to adaptively respond to recursion frequency. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative results in terms of both the exposure transfer tasks and the whole HDRI process.
Structured Co-reference Graph Attention for Video-grounded Dialogue
Authors: Kim Junyeong , Yoon Sunjae , Kim Dahyun , Yoo Chang D.
Published: September 2022

A video-grounded dialogue system referred to as the Structured Co-reference Graph Attention (SCGA) is presented for decoding the answer sequence to a question regarding a given video while keeping track of the dialogue context. Although recent efforts have made great strides in improving the quality of the response, performance is still far from satisfactory. The two main challenging issues are as follows: (1) how to deduce co-reference among multiple modalities and (2) how to reason on the rich underlying semantic structure of video with complex spatial and temporal dynamics. To this end, SCGA is based on (1) Structured Co-reference Resolver that performs dereferencing via building a structured graph over multiple modalities, (2) Spatio-temporal Video Reasoner that captures local-to-global dynamics of video via gradually neighboring graph attention. SCGA makes use of pointer network to dynamically replicate parts of the question for decoding the answer sequence. The validity of the proposed SCGA is demonstrated on AVSD@DSTC7 and AVSD@DSTC8 datasets, a challenging video-grounded dialogue benchmarks, and TVQA dataset, a large-scale videoQA benchmark. Our empirical results show that SCGA outperforms other state-of-the-art dialogue systems on both benchmarks, while extensive ablation study and qualitative analysis reveal performance gain and improved interpretability.
Bidirectional RNN-based Few Shot Learning for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Kim Soopil , An Sion , Chikontwe Philip , Park Sang Hyun
Published: September 2022

Segmentation of organs of interest in 3D medical images is necessary for accurate diagnosis and longitudinal studies. Though recent advances using deep learning have shown success for many segmentation tasks, large datasets are required for high performance and the annotation process is both time consuming and labor intensive. In this paper, we propose a 3D few shot segmentation framework for accurate organ segmentation using limited training samples of the target organ annotation. To achieve this, a U-Net like network is designed to predict segmentation by learning the relationship between 2D slices of support data and a query image, including a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) that learns consistency of encoded features between adjacent slices. Also, we introduce a transfer learning method to adapt the characteristics of the target image and organ by updating the model before testing with arbitrary support and query data sampled from the support data. We evaluate our proposed model using three 3D CT datasets with annotations of different organs. Our model yielded significantly improved performance over state-of-the-art few shot segmentation models and was comparable to a fully supervised model trained with more target training data.
Regularizing Attention Networks for Anomaly Detection in Visual Question Answering
Authors: Lee Doyup , Cheon Yeongjae , Han Wook-Shin
Published: September 2022

For stability and reliability of real-world applications, the robustness of DNNs in unimodal tasks has been evaluated. However, few studies consider abnormal situations that a visual question answering (VQA) model might encounter at test time after deployment in the real-world. In this study, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art VQA models to five different anomalies, including worst-case scenarios, the most frequent scenarios, and the current limitation of VQA models. Different from the results in unimodal tasks, the maximum confidence of answers in VQA models cannot detect anomalous inputs, and post-training of the outputs, such as outlier exposure, is ineffective for VQA models. Thus, we propose an attention-based method, which uses confidence of reasoning between input images and questions and shows much more promising results than the previous methods in unimodal tasks. In addition, we show that a maximum entropy regularization of attention networks can significantly improve the attention-based anomaly detection of the VQA models. Thanks to the simplicity, attention-based anomaly detection and the regularization are model-agnostic methods, which can be used for various cross-modal attentions in the state-of-the-art VQA models. The results imply that cross-modal attention in VQA is important to improve not only VQA accuracy, but also the robustness to various anomalies.
Joint Semantic-geometric Learning for Polygonal Building Segmentation
Authors: Li Weijia , Zhao Wenqian , Zhong Huaping , He Conghui , Lin Dahua
Published: September 2022

Building extraction from aerial or satellite images has been an important research issue in remote sensing and computer vision domains for decades. Compared with pixel-wise semantic segmentation models that output raster building segmentation map, polygonal building segmentation approaches produce more realistic building polygons that are in the desirable vector format for practical applications. Despite the substantial efforts over recent years, state-of-the-art polygonal building segmentation methods still suffer from several limitations, e.g., (1) relying on a perfect segmentation map to guarantee the vectorization quality; (2) requiring a complex post-processing procedure; (3) generating inaccurate vertices with a fixed quantity, a wrong sequential order, self-intersections, etc. To tackle the above issues, in this paper, we propose a polygonal building segmentation approach and make the following contributions: (1) We design a multi-task segmentation network for joint semantic and geometric learning via three tasks, i.e., pixel-wise building segmentation, multi-class corner prediction, and edge orientation prediction. (2) We propose a simple but effective vertex generation module for transforming the segmentation contour into high-quality polygon vertices. (3) We further propose a polygon refinement network that automatically moves the polygon vertices into more accurate locations. Results on two popular building segmentation datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements for both building instance segmentation (with 2% F1-score gain) and polygon vertex prediction (with 6% F1-score gain) compared with current state-of-the-art methods.
Generalized Zero-Shot Learning via Disentangled Representation
Authors: Li Xiangyu , Xu Zhe , Wei Kun , Deng Cheng
Published: September 2022

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to recognize images belonging to unseen classes that are unavailable in the training
process, while Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) is a more realistic variant that both seen and unseen classes appear during testing. Most GZSL approaches achieve knowledge transfer based on the features of samples that inevitably contain information irrelevant to recognition, bringing negative influence for the performance. In this work, we propose a novel method, dubbed Disentangled-VAE, which aims to disentangle category-distilling factors and category-dispersing factors from visual as well as semantic features, respectively. In addition, a batch re-combining strategy on latent features is introduced to guide the disentanglement, encouraging the distilling latent features to be more discriminative for recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four challenging benchmark datasets
Temporal Pyramid Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Multi-Supervision
Authors: Liang Rongqin , Li Yuanman , Li Xia , Tang Yi , Zhou Jiantao , Zou Wenbin
Published: September 2022

Predicting human motion behavior in a crowd is important for many applications, ranging from the natural navigation of autonomous vehicles to intelligent security systems of video surveillance. All the previous works model and predict the trajectory with a single resolution, which is relatively ineffective and difficult to simultaneously exploit the long-range information (e.g., the destination of the trajectory), and the short-range information (e.g., the walking direction and speed at a certain time) of the motion behavior. In this paper, we propose a temporal pyramid network for pedestrian trajectory prediction through a squeeze modulation and a dilation modulation. Our hierarchical framework builds a feature pyramid with increasingly richer temporal information from top to bottom, which can better capture the motion behavior at various tempos. Furthermore, we propose a coarse-to-fine fusion strategy with multi-supervision. By progressively merging the top coarse features of global context to the bottom fine features of rich local context, our method can fully exploit both the long-range and short-range information of the trajectory. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our code and models will be available upon acceptance.
Adaptive Pattern-Parameter Matching for Robust Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Liu Mengyin , Zhu Chao , Wang Jun , Yin Xu-Cheng
Published: September 2022

Pedestrians with challenging patterns, e.g. small scale or heavy occlusion, appear frequently in practical applications like autonomous driving, which remains tremendous obstacle to higher robustness of detectors. Although plenty of previous works have been dedicated to these problems, properly matching patterns of pedestrian and parameters of detector, i.e., constructing a detector with proper parameter sizes for certain pedestrian patterns of different complexity, has been seldom investigated intensively. Pedestrian instances are usually handled equally with the same amount of parameters, which in our opinion is inadequate for those with more difficult patterns and leads to unsatisfactory performance. Thus, we propose in this paper a novel detection approach via adaptive pattern-parameter matching. The input pedestrian patterns, especially the complex ones, are first disentangled into simpler patterns for detection head by Pattern Disentangling Module (PDM) with various receptive fields. Then, Gating Feature Filtering Module (GFFM) dynamically decides the spatial positions where the patterns are still not simple enough and need further disentanglement by the next-level PDM. Cooperating with these two key components, our approach can adaptively select the best matched parameter size for the input patterns according to their complexity. Moreover, to further explore the relationship between parameter sizes and their performance on the corresponding patterns, two parameter selection policies are designed: 1) extending parameter size to maximum, aiming at more difficult patterns for different occlusion types; 2) specializing parameter size by group division, aiming at complex patterns for scale variations. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, Caltech and CityPersons, show that our proposed method achieves superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods on subsets of different scales and occlusion types.
Aggregated Multi-GANs for Controlled 3D Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Liu Zhenguang , Lyu Kedi , Wu Shuang , Chen Haipeng , Hao Yanbin , Ji Shouling
Published: September 2022

Human motion prediction from historical pose sequence is at the core of many applications in machine intelligence. However, in current state-of-the-art methods, the predicted future motion is confined within the same activity. One can neither generate predictions that differ from the current activity, nor manipulate the body parts to explore various future possibilities. Undoubtedly, this greatly limits the usefulness and applicability of motion prediction. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the human motion prediction task in which control parameters can be readily incorporated to adjust the forecasted motion. Our method is compelling in that it enables manipulable motion prediction across activity types and allows customization of the human movement in a variety of fine-grained ways. To this aim, a simple yet effective composite GAN structure, consisting of local GANs for different body parts and aggregated via a global GAN is presented. The local GANs game in lower dimensions, while the global GAN adjusts in high dimensional space to avoid mode collapse. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art. The codes are available at https://github.com/herolvkd/AM-GAN.
PC-HMR: Pose Calibration for 3D Human Mesh Recovery from 2D Images/Videos
Authors: Luan Tianyu , Wang Yali , Zhang Junhao , Wang Zhe , Zhou Zhipeng , Qiao Yu
Published: September 2022

The end-to-end Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) approach has been successfully used for 3D body reconstruction. However, most HMR-based frameworks reconstruct human body by directly learning mesh parameters from images or videos, while lacking explicit guidance of 3D human pose in visual data. As a result, the generated mesh often exhibits incorrect pose for complex activities. To tackle this problem, we propose to exploit 3D pose to calibrate human mesh. Specifically, we develop two novel Pose Calibration frameworks, i.e., Serial PC-HMR and Parallel PC-HMR. By coupling advanced 3D pose estimators and HMR in a serial or parallel manner, these two frameworks can effectively correct human mesh with guidance of a concise pose calibration module. Furthermore, since the calibration module is designed via non-rigid pose transformation, our PC-HMR frameworks can flexibly tackle bone length variations to alleviate misplacement in the calibrated mesh. Finally, our frameworks are based on generic and complementary integration of data-driven learning and geometrical modeling. Via plug-and-play modules, they can be efficiently adapted for both image/video-based human mesh recovery. Additionally, they have no requirement of extra 3D pose annotations in the testing phase, which releases inference difficulties in practice. We perform extensive experiments on the popular benchmarks, i.e., Human3.6M, 3DPW and SURREAL, where our PC-HMR frameworks achieve the SOTA results.
MANGO: A Mask Attention Guided One-Stage Scene Text Spotter
Authors: Qiao Liang , Chen Ying , Cheng Zhanzhan , Xu Yunlu , Niu Yi , Pu Shiliang , Wu Fei
Published: September 2022

Recently end-to-end scene text spotting has become a popular research topic due to its advantages of global optimization and high maintainability in real applications. Most methods attempt to develop various region of interest (RoI) operations to concatenate the detection part and the sequence recognition part into a two-stage text spotting framework. However, in such framework, the recognition part is highly sensitive to the detected results (e.g., the compactness of text contours). To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Mask AttentioN Guided One-stage text spotting framework named MANGO, in which character sequences can be directly recognized without RoI operation. Concretely, a position-aware mask attention module is developed to generate attention weights on each text instance and its characters. It allows different text instances in an image to be allocated on different feature map channels which are further grouped as a batch of instance features. Finally, a lightweight sequence decoder is applied to generate the character sequences. It is worth noting that MANGO inherently adapts to arbitrary-shaped text spotting and can be trained end-to-end with only coarse position information (e.g., rectangular bounding box) and text annotations. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive and even new state-of-the-art performance on both regular and irregular text spotting benchmarks, i.e., ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015, Total-Text, and SCUT-CTW1500.
AutoLR: Layer-wise Pruning and Auto-tuning of Learning Rates in Fine-tuning of Deep Networks
Authors: Ro Youngmin , Choi Jin Young
Published: September 2022

Existing fine-tuning methods use a single learning rate over all layers. In this paper, first, we discuss that trends of layer-wise weight variations by fine-tuning using a single learning rate do not match the well-known notion that lower-level layers extract general features and higher-level layers extract specific features. Based on our discussion, we propose an algorithm that improves fine-tuning performance and reduces network complexity through layer-wise pruning and auto-tuning of layer-wise learning rates.
The proposed algorithm has verified the effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art performance on the image retrieval benchmark datasets (CUB-200, Cars-196, Stanford online product, and Inshop). Code is available at https://github.com/youngminPIL/AutoLR.
Efficient Certification of Spatial Robustness
Authors: Ruoss Anian , Baader Maximilian , Balunović Mislav , Vechev Martin
Published: September 2022

Recent work has exposed the vulnerability of computer vision models to vector field attacks. Due to the widespread usage of such models in safety-critical applications, it is crucial to quantify their robustness against such spatial transformations. However, existing work only provides empirical robustness quantification against vector field deformations via adversarial attacks, which lack provable guarantees. In this work, we propose novel convex relaxations, enabling us, for the first time, to provide a certificate of robustness against vector field transformations. Our relaxations are model-agnostic and can be leveraged by a wide range of neural network verifiers. Experiments on various network architectures and different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our method.
To Choose or to Fuse? Scale Selection for Crowd Counting
Authors: Song Qingyu , Wang Changan , Wang Yabiao , Tai Ying , Wang Chengjie , Li Jilin , Wu Jian , Ma Jiayi
Published: September 2022

In this paper, we address the large scale variation problem in crowd counting by taking full advantage of the multi-scale feature representations in a multi-level network. We implement such an idea by keeping the counting error of a patch as small as possible with a proper feature level selection strategy, since a specific feature level tends to perform better for a certain range of scales. However, without scale annotations, it is sub-optimal and error-prone to manually assign the predictions for heads of different scales to specific feature levels. Therefore, we propose a Scale-Adaptive Selection Network (SASNet), which automatically learns the internal correspondence between the scales and the feature levels. Instead of directly using the predictions from the most appropriate feature level as the final estimation, our SASNet also considers the predictions from other feature levels via weighted average, which helps to mitigate the gap between discrete feature levels and continuous scale variation. Since the heads in a local patch share roughly a same scale, we conduct the adaptive selection strategy in a patch-wise style. However, pixels within a patch contribute different counting errors due to the various difficulty degrees of learning. Thus, we further propose a Pyramid Region Awareness Loss (PRA Loss) to recursively select the most hard sub-regions within a patch until reaching the pixel level. With awareness of whether the parent patch is over-estimated or under-estimated, the fine-grained optimization with the PRA Loss for these region-aware hard pixels helps to alleviate the inconsistency problem between training target and evaluation metric. The state-of-the-art results on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The code will be available at: https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/CrowdCounting-SASNet.
Image Captioning with Context-Aware Auxiliary Guidance
Authors: Song Zeliang , Zhou Xiaofei , Mao Zhendong , Tan Jianlong
Published: September 2022

Image captioning is a challenging computer vision task, which aims to generate a natural language description of an image. Most recent researches follow the encoder-decoder framework which depends heavily on the previous generated words for the current prediction. Such methods can not effectively take advantage of the future predicted information to learn complete semantics. In this paper, we propose Context-Aware Auxiliary Guidance (CAAG) mechanism that can guide the captioning model to perceive global contexts. Upon the captioning model, CAAG performs semantic attention that selectively concentrates on useful information of the global predictions to reproduce the current generation. To validate the adaptability of the method, we apply CAAG to three popular captioners and our proposal achieves competitive performance on the challenging Microsoft COCO image captioning benchmark, e.g. 132.2 CIDEr-D score on Karpathy split and 130.7 CIDEr-D (c40) score on official online evaluation server.
BSN++: Complementary Boundary Regressor with Scale-Balanced Relation Modeling for Temporal Action Proposal Generation
Authors: Su Haisheng , Gan Weihao , Wu Wei , Qiao Yu , Yan Junjie
Published: September 2022

Generating human action proposals in untrimmed videos is an important yet challenging task with wide applications. Current methods often suffer from the noisy boundary locations and the inferior quality of confidence scores used for proposal retrieving. In this paper, we present BSN++, a new framework which exploits complementary boundary regressor and relation modeling for temporal proposal generation. First, we propose a novel boundary regressor based on the complementary characteristics of both starting and ending boundary classifiers. Specifically, we utilize the U-shaped architecture with nested skip connections to capture rich contexts and introduce bi-directional boundary matching mechanism to improve boundary precision. Second, to account for the proposal-proposal relations ignored in previous methods, we devise a proposal relation block to which includes two self-attention modules from the aspects of position and channel. Furthermore, we find that there inevitably exists data imbalanced problems in the positive/negative proposals and temporal durations, which harm the model performance on tail distributions. To relieve this issue, we introduce the scale-balanced re-sampling strategy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular benchmarks: ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, which demonstrate that BSN++ achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Not surprisingly, the proposed BSN++ ranked 1st place in the CVPR19 - ActivityNet challenge leaderboard on temporal action localization task.
Deep Probabilistic Imaging: Uncertainty Quantification and Multi-modal Solution Characterization for Computational Imaging
Authors: Sun He , Bouman Katherine L.
Published: September 2022

Computational image reconstruction algorithms generally produce a single image without any measure of uncertainty or confidence. Regularized Maximum Likelihood (RML) and feed-forward deep learning approaches for inverse problems typically focus on recovering a point estimate. This is a serious limitation when working with under-determined imaging systems, where it is conceivable that multiple image modes would be consistent with the measured data. Characterizing the space of probable images that explain the observational data is therefore crucial. In this paper, we propose a variational deep probabilistic imaging approach to quantify reconstruction uncertainty. Deep Probabilistic Imaging (DPI) employs an untrained deep generative model to estimate a posterior distribution of an unobserved image. This approach does not require any training data; instead, it optimizes the weights of a neural network to generate image samples that fit a particular measurement dataset. Once the network weights have been learned, the posterior distribution can be efficiently sampled. We demonstrate this approach in the context of interferometric radio imaging, which is used for black hole imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, and compressed sensing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
Adversarial Training Reduces Information and Improves Transferability
Authors: Terzi Matteo , Achille Alessandro , Maggipinto Marco , Susto Gian Antonio
Published: September 2022

Recent results show that features of adversarially trained networks for classification, in addition to being robust, enable desirable properties such as invertibility.
The latter property may seem counter-intuitive as it is widely accepted by the community that classification models should only capture the minimal information (features) required for the task.
Motivated by this discrepancy, we investigate the dual relationship between Adversarial Training and Information Theory. We show that the Adversarial Training can improve linear transferability to new tasks, from which arises a new trade-off between transferability of representations and accuracy on the source task. We validate our results employing robust networks trained on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet on several datasets.
Moreover, we show that Adversarial Training reduces Fisher information of representations about the input and of the weights about the task, and we provide a theoretical argument which explains the invertibility of deterministic networks without violating the principle of minimality. Finally, we leverage our theoretical insights to remarkably improve the quality of reconstructed images through inversion.
SCNet: Training Inference Sample Consistency for Instance Segmentation
Authors: Vu Thang , Kang Haeyong , Yoo Chang D.
Published: September 2022

Cascaded architectures have brought significant performance improvement in object detection and instance segmentation. However, there are lingering issues regarding the disparity in the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) distribution of the samples between training and inference. This disparity can potentially exacerbate detection accuracy. This paper proposes an architecture referred to as Sample Consistency Network (SCNet) to ensure that the IoU distribution of the samples at training time is close to that at inference time. Furthermore, SCNet incorporates feature relay and utilizes global contextual information to further reinforce the reciprocal relationships among classifying, detecting, and segmenting sub-tasks. Extensive experiments on the standard COCO dataset reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method over multiple evaluation metrics, including box AP, mask AP, and inference speed. In particular, while running 38\% faster, the proposed SCNet improves the AP of the box and mask predictions by respectively 1.3 and 2.3 points compared to the strong Cascade Mask R-CNN baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/thangvubk/SCNet.