bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
DC-Former: Diverse and Compact Transformer for Person Re-identification
Authors: Li Wen , Zou Cheng , Wang Meng , Xu Furong , Zhao Jianan , Zheng Ruobing , Cheng Yuan , Chu Wei
Published: June 2023

In person re-identification (ReID) task, it is still challenging to learn discriminative representation by deep learning, due to limited data. Generally speaking, the model will get better performance when increasing the amount of data. The addition of similar classes strengthens the ability of the classifier to identify similar identities, thereby improving the discrimination of representation. In this paper, we propose a Diverse and Compact Transformer (DC-Former) that can achieve a similar effect by splitting embedding space into multiple diverse and compact subspaces. Compact embedding subspace helps model learn more robust and discriminative embedding to identify similar classes. And the fusion of these diverse embeddings containing more fine-grained information can further improve the effect of ReID. Specifically, multiple class tokens are used in vision transformer to represent multiple embedding spaces. Then, a self-diverse constraint (SDC) is applied to these spaces to push them away from each other, which makes each embedding space diverse and compact. Further, a dynamic weight controller (DWC) is further designed for balancing the relative importance among them during training. The experimental results of our method are promising, which surpass previous state-of-the-art methods on several commonly used person ReID benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ant-research/Diverse-and-Compact-Transformer.
LWSIS: LiDAR-Guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Li Xiang , Yin Junbo , Shi Botian , Li Yikang , Yang Ruigang , Shen Jianbing
Published: June 2023

Image instance segmentation is a fundamental research topic in autonomous driving, which is crucial for scene understanding and road safety. Advanced learning-based approaches often rely on the costly 2D mask annotations for training.
In this paper, we present a more artful framework, LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (LWSIS), which leverages the off-the-shelf 3D data, i.e., Point Cloud, together with the 3D boxes, as natural weak supervisions for
training the 2D image instance segmentation models. Our LWSIS not only exploits the complementary information in multimodal data during training but also significantly reduces the annotation cost of the dense 2D masks. In detail, LWSIS consists of two crucial modules, Point Label Assignment (PLA) and Graph-based Consistency Regularization (GCR). The former module aims to automatically assign the 3D point cloud as 2D point-wise labels, while the atter further refines the predictions by enforcing geometry and appearance consistency of the multimodal data. Moreover, we conduct a secondary instance segmentation annotation on the nuScenes, named nuInsSeg, to encourage further research on multimodal perception tasks. Extensive experiments on the nuInsSeg, as well as the large-scale Waymo, show that LWSIS can substantially improve existing weakly supervised segmentation models by only involving 3D data during training. Additionally, LWSIS can also be incorporated into 3D object detectors like PointPainting to boost the 3D detection performance for free. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Serenos/LWSIS.
Gradient Corner Pooling for Keypoint-Based Object Detection
Authors: Li Xuyang , Xie Xuemei , Yu Mingxuan , Luo Jiakai , Rao Chengwei , Shi Guangming
Published: June 2023

Detecting objects as multiple keypoints is an important approach in the anchor-free object detection methods while corner pooling is an effective feature encoding method for corner positioning. The corners of the bounding box are located by summing the feature maps which are max-pooled in the x and y directions respectively by corner pooling. In the unidirectional max pooling operation, the features of the densely arranged objects of the same class are prone to occlusion. To this end, we propose a method named Gradient Corner Pooling. The spatial distance information of objects on the feature map is encoded during the unidirectional pooling process, which effectively alleviates the occlusion of the homogeneous object features. Further, the computational complexity of gradient corner pooling is the same as traditional corner pooling and hence it can be implemented efficiently. Gradient corner pooling obtains consistent improvements for various keypoint-based methods by directly replacing corner pooling. We verify the gradient corner pooling algorithm on the dataset and in real scenarios, respectively. The networks with gradient corner pooling located the corner points earlier in the training process and achieve an average accuracy improvement of 0.2%-1.6% on the MS-COCO dataset. The detectors with gradient corner pooling show better angle adaptability for arrayed objects in the actual scene test.
Actionness Inconsistency-Guided Contrastive Learning for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Li Zhilin , Wang Zilei , Liu Qinying
Published: June 2023

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) aims to detect action instances given only video-level labels. To address the challenge, recent methods commonly employ a two-branch framework, consisting of a class-aware branch and a class-agnostic branch. In principle, the two branches are supposed to produce the same actionness activation. However, we observe that there are actually many inconsistent activation regions. These inconsistent regions usually contain some challenging segments whose semantic information (action or background) is ambiguous. In this work, we propose a novel Actionness Inconsistency-guided Contrastive Learning (AICL) method which utilizes the consistent segments to boost the representation learning of the inconsistent segments. Specifically, we first define the consistent and inconsistent segments by comparing the predictions of two branches and then construct positive and negative pairs between consistent segments and inconsistent segments for contrastive learning. In addition, to avoid the trivial case where there is no consistent sample, we introduce an action consistency constraint to control the difference between the two branches. We conduct extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.2, and ActivityNet v1.3 datasets, and the results show the effectiveness of AICL with state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/lizhilin-ustc/AAAI2023-AICL.
HybridCap: Inertia-Aid Monocular Capture of Challenging Human Motions
Authors: Liang Han , He Yannan , Zhao Chengfeng , Li Mutian , Wang Jingya , Yu Jingyi , Xu Lan
Published: June 2023

Monocular 3D motion capture (mocap) is beneficial to many applications. The use of a single camera, however, often fails to handle occlusions of different body parts and hence it is limited to capture relatively simple movements. We present a light-weight, hybrid mocap technique called HybridCap that augments the camera with only 4 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) in a novel learning-and-optimization framework. We first employ a weakly-supervised and hierarchical motion inference module based on cooperative pure residual recurrent blocks that serve as limb, body and root trackers as well as an inverse kinematics solver. Our network effectively narrows the search space of plausible motions via coarse-to-fine pose estimation and manages to tackle challenging movements with high efficiency. We further develop a hybrid optimization scheme that combines inertial feedback and visual cues to improve tracking accuracy. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate HybridCap can robustly handle challenging movements ranging from fitness actions to Latin dance. It also achieves real-time performance up to 60 fps with state-of-the-art accuracy.
Accelerating the Training of Video Super-resolution Models
Authors: Lin Lijian , Wang Xintao , Qi Zhongang , Shan Ying
Published: June 2023

Despite that convolution neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for video super-resolution (VSR), efficiently training competitive VSR models remains a challenging problem. It usually takes an order of magnitude more time than training their counterpart image models, leading to long research cycles. Existing VSR methods typically train models with fixed spatial and temporal sizes from beginning to end. The fixed sizes are usually set to large values for good performance, resulting to slow training. However, is such a rigid training strategy necessary for VSR? In this work, we show that it is possible to gradually train video models from small to large spatial/temporal sizes, \ie, in an easy-to-hard manner. In particular, the whole training is divided into several stages and the earlier stage has smaller training spatial shape. Inside each stage, the temporal size also varies from short to long while the spatial size remains unchanged. Training is accelerated by such a multigrid training strategy, as most of computation is performed on smaller spatial and shorter temporal shapes. For further acceleration with GPU parallelization, we also investigate the large minibatch training without the loss in accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of largely speeding up training (up to $6.2\times$ speedup in wall-clock training time) without performance drop for various VSR models.
M3AE: Multimodal Representation Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities
Authors: Liu Hong , Wei Dong , Lu Donghuan , Sun Jinghan , Wang Liansheng , Zheng Yefeng
Published: June 2023

Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for sub-region analysis of brain tumors. Plenty of methods have been proposed for automatic brain tumor segmentation using four common MRI modalities and achieved remarkable performance. In practice, however, it is common to have one or more modalities missing due to image corruption, artifacts, acquisition protocols, allergy to contrast agents, or simply cost. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage framework for brain tumor segmentation with missing modalities. In the first stage, a multimodal masked autoencoder (M3AE) is proposed, where both random modalities (i.e., modality dropout) and random patches of the remaining modalities are masked for a reconstruction task, for self-supervised learning of robust multimodal representations against missing modalities. To this end, we name our framework M3AE. Meanwhile, we employ model inversion to optimize a representative full-modal image at marginal extra cost, which will be used to substitute for the missing modalities and boost performance during inference. Then in the second stage, a memory-efficient self distillation is proposed to distill knowledge between heterogenous missing-modal situations while fine-tuning the model for supervised segmentation. Our M3AE belongs to the ‘catch-all’ genre where a single model can be applied to all possible subsets of modalities, thus is economic for both training and deployment. Extensive experiments on BraTS 2018 and 2020 datasets demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods with missing modalities, as well as the efficacy of its components. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ccarliu/m3ae.
TransLO: A Window-Based Masked Point Transformer Framework for Large-Scale LiDAR Odometry
Authors: Liu Jiuming , Wang Guangming , Jiang Chaokang , Liu Zhe , Wang Hesheng
Published: June 2023

Recently, transformer architecture has gained great success in the computer vision community, such as image classification, object detection, etc. Nonetheless, its application for 3D vision remains to be explored, given that point cloud is inherently sparse, irregular, and unordered. Furthermore, existing point transformer frameworks usually feed raw point cloud of N×3 dimension into transformers, which limits the point processing scale because of their quadratic computational costs to the input size N. In this paper, we rethink the structure of point transformer. Instead of directly applying transformer to points, our network (TransLO) can process tens of thousands of points simultaneously by projecting points onto a 2D surface and then feeding them into a local transformer with linear complexity. Specifically, it is mainly composed of two components: Window-based Masked transformer with Self Attention (WMSA) to capture long-range dependencies; Masked Cross-Frame Attention (MCFA) to associate two frames and predict pose estimation. To deal with the sparsity issue of point cloud, we propose a binary mask to remove invalid and dynamic points. To our knowledge, this is the first transformer-based LiDAR odometry network. The experiment results on the KITTI odometry dataset show that our average rotation and translation RMSE achieves 0.500°/100m and 0.993% respectively. The performance of our network surpasses all recent learning-based methods and even outperforms LOAM on most evaluation sequences.Codes will be released on https://github.com/IRMVLab/TransLO.
DQ-DETR: Dual Query Detection Transformer for Phrase Extraction and Grounding
Authors: Liu Shilong , Huang Shijia , Li Feng , Zhang Hao , Liang Yaoyuan , Su Hang , Zhu Jun , Zhang Lei
Published: June 2023

In this paper, we study the problem of visual grounding by considering both phrase extraction and grounding (PEG). In contrast to the previous phrase-known-at-test setting, PEG requires a model to extract phrases from text and locate objects from image simultaneously, which is a more practical setting in real applications. As phrase extraction can be regarded as a 1D text segmentation problem, we formulate PEG as a dual detection problem and propose a novel DQ-DETR model, which introduces dual queries to probe different features from image and text for object prediction and phrase mask prediction. Each pair of dual queries are designed to have shared positional parts but different content parts. Such a design effectively alleviates the difficulty of modality alignment between image and text (in contrast to a single query design) and empowers Transformer decoder to leverage phrase mask-guided attention to improve the performance. To evaluate the performance of PEG, we also propose a new metric CMAP (cross-modal average precision), analogous to the AP metric in object detection. The new metric overcomes the ambiguity of Recall@1 in many-box-to-one-phrase cases in phrase grounding. As a result, our PEG pre-trained DQ-DETR establishes new state-of-the-art results on all visual grounding benchmarks with a ResNet-101 backbone. For example, it achieves 91.04% and 83.51% in terms of recall rate on RefCOCO testA and testB with a ResNet-101 backbone.
CoordFill: Efficient High-Resolution Image Inpainting via Parameterized Coordinate Querying
Authors: Liu Weihuang , Cun Xiaodong , Pun Chi-Man , Xia Menghan , Zhang Yong , Wang Jue
Published: June 2023

Image inpainting aims to fill the missing hole of the input. It is hard to solve this task efficiently when facing high-resolution images due to two reasons: (1) Large reception field needs to be handled for high-resolution image inpainting. (2) The general encoder and decoder network synthesizes many background pixels synchronously due to the form of the image matrix. In this paper, we try to break the above limitations for the first time thanks to the recent development of continuous implicit representation. In detail, we down-sample and encode the degraded image to produce the spatial-adaptive parameters for each spatial patch via an attentional Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC)-based parameter generation network. Then, we take these parameters as the weights and biases of a series of multi-layer perceptron (MLP), where the input is the encoded continuous coordinates and the output is the synthesized color value. Thanks to the proposed structure, we only encode the high-resolution image in a relatively low resolution for larger reception field capturing. Then, the continuous position encoding will be helpful to synthesize the photo-realistic high-frequency textures by re-sampling the coordinate in a higher resolution. Also, our framework enables us to query the coordinates of missing pixels only in parallel, yielding a more efficient solution than the previous methods. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves real-time performance on the 2048X2048 images using a single GTX 2080 Ti GPU and can handle 4096X4096 images, with much better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods visually and numerically. The code is available at: https://github.com/NiFangBaAGe/CoordFill.
Good Helper Is around You: Attention-Driven Masked Image Modeling
Authors: Liu Zhengqi , Gui Jie , Luo Hao
Published: June 2023

It has been witnessed that masked image modeling (MIM) has shown a huge potential in self-supervised learning in the past year. Benefiting from the universal backbone vision transformer, MIM learns self-supervised visual representations through masking a part of patches of the image while attempting to recover the missing pixels. Most previous works mask patches of the image randomly, which underutilizes the semantic information that is beneficial to visual representation learning. On the other hand, due to the large size of the backbone, most previous works have to spend much time on pre-training. In this paper, we propose Attention-driven Masking and Throwing Strategy (AMT), which could solve both problems above. We first leverage the self-attention mechanism to obtain the semantic information of the image during the training process automatically without using any supervised methods. Masking strategy can be guided by that information to mask areas selectively, which is helpful for representation learning. Moreover, a redundant patch throwing strategy is proposed, which makes learning more efficient. As a plug-and-play module for masked image modeling, AMT improves the linear probing accuracy of MAE by 2.9% ~ 5.9% on CIFAR-10/100, STL-10, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K, and obtains an improved performance with respect to fine-tuning accuracy of MAE and SimMIM. Moreover, this design also achieves superior performance on downstream detection and segmentation tasks.
CRIN: Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis and Rotation Estimation via Centrifugal Reference Frame
Authors: Lou Yujing , Ye Zelin , You Yang , Jiang Nianjuan , Lu Jiangbo , Wang Weiming , Ma Lizhuang , Lu Cewu
Published: June 2023

Various recent methods attempt to implement rotation-invariant 3D deep learning by replacing the input coordinates of points with relative distances and angles. Due to the incompleteness of these low-level features, they have to undertake the expense of losing global information. In this paper, we propose the CRIN, namely Centrifugal Rotation-Invariant Network. CRIN directly takes the coordinates of points as input and transforms local points into rotation-invariant representations via centrifugal reference frames. Aided by centrifugal reference frames, each point corresponds to a discrete rotation so that the information of rotations can be implicitly stored in point features. Unfortunately, discrete points are far from describing the whole rotation space. We further introduce a continuous distribution for 3D rotations based on points. Furthermore, we propose an attention-based down-sampling strategy to sample points invariant to rotations. A relation module is adopted at last for reinforcing the long-range dependencies between sampled points and predicts the anchor point for unsupervised rotation estimation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves rotation invariance, accurately estimates the object rotation, and obtains state-of-the-art results on rotation-augmented classification and part segmentation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the network design.
StyleTalk: One-Shot Talking Head Generation with Controllable Speaking Styles
Authors: Ma Yifeng , Wang Suzhen , Hu Zhipeng , Fan Changjie , Lv Tangjie , Ding Yu , Deng Zhidong , Yu Xin
Published: June 2023

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.
Adapting Object Size Variance and Class Imbalance for Semi-supervised Object Detection
Authors: Nie Yuxiang , Fang Chaowei , Cheng Lechao , Lin Liang , Li Guanbin
Published: June 2023

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) attracts extensive research interest due to its great significance in reducing the data annotation effort. Collecting high-quality and category-balanced pseudo labels for unlabeled images is critical to addressing the SSOD problem. However, most of the existing pseudo-labeling-based methods depend on a large and fixed threshold to select high-quality pseudo labels from the predictions of a teacher model. Considering different object classes usually have different detection difficulty levels due to scale variance and data distribution imbalance, conventional pseudo-labeling-based methods are arduous to explore the value of unlabeled data sufficiently. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive pseudo labeling strategy, which can assign thresholds to classes with respect to their “hardness”. This is beneficial for ensuring the high quality of easier classes and increasing the quantity of harder classes simultaneously. Besides, label refinement modules are set up based on box jittering for guaranteeing the localization quality of pseudo labels. To further improve the algorithm’s robustness against scale variance and make the most of pseudo labels, we devise a joint feature-level and prediction-level consistency learning pipeline for transferring the information of the teacher model to the student model. Extensive experiments on COCO and VOC datasets indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Especially, it brings mean average precision gains of 2.08 and 1.28 on MS-COCO dataset with 5% and 10% labeled images, respectively.
Domain Decorrelation with Potential Energy Ranking
Authors: Pei Sen , Sun Jiaxi , Xu Richard Yi Da , Xiang Shiming , Meng Gaofeng
Published: June 2023

Machine learning systems, especially the methods based on deep learning, enjoy great success in modern computer vision tasks under ideal experimental settings. Generally, these classic deep learning methods are built on the i.i.d. assumption, supposing the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution independently and identically. However, the aforementioned i.i.d. assumption is, in general, unavailable in the real-world scenarios, and as a result, leads to sharp performance decay of deep learning algorithms. Behind this, domain shift is one of the primary factors to be blamed. In order to tackle this problem, we propose using Potential Energy Ranking (PoER) to decouple the object feature and the domain feature in given images, promoting the learning of label-discriminative representations while filtering out the irrelevant correlations between the objects and the background. PoER employs the ranking loss in shallow layers to make features with identical category and domain labels close to each other and vice versa. This makes the neural networks aware of both objects and background characteristics, which is vital for generating domain-invariant features. Subsequently, with the stacked convolutional blocks, PoER further uses the contrastive loss to make features within the same categories distribute densely no matter domains, filtering out the domain information progressively for feature alignment. PoER reports superior performance on domain generalization benchmarks, improving the average top-1 accuracy by at least 1.20% compared to the existing methods. Moreover, we use PoER in the ECCV 2022 NICO Challenge, achieving top place with only a vanilla ResNet-18 and winning the jury award. The code has been made publicly available at: https://github.com/ForeverPs/PoER.
PDRF: Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field for Fast Scene Reconstruction from Blurry Images
Authors: Peng Cheng , Chellappa Rama
Published: June 2023

We present Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field (PDRF), a novel approach to efficiently reconstruct high quality radiance fields from blurry images. While current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) scene reconstruction methods achieve photo-realistic renderings from clean source views, their performances suffer when the source views are affected by blur, which is commonly observed in the wild. Previous deblurring methods either do not account for 3D geometry, or are computationally intense. To addresses these issues, PDRF uses a progressively deblurring scheme for radiance field modeling, which can accurately model blur with 3D scene context. PDRF further uses an efficient importance sampling scheme that results in fast scene optimization. We perform extensive experiments and show that PDRF is 15X faster than previous SoTA while achieving better performance on both synthetic and real scenes.
Context-Aware Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Automatic Annotation
Authors: Qian Xiaoyan , Liu Chang , Qi Xiaojuan , Tan Siew-Chong , Lam Edmund , Wong Ngai
Published: June 2023

3D automatic annotation has received increased attention since manually annotating 3D point clouds is laborious. However, existing methods are usually complicated, e.g., pipelined training for 3D foreground/background segmentation, cylindrical object proposals, and point completion. Furthermore, they often overlook the inter-object feature correlation that is particularly informative to hard samples for 3D annotation.
To this end, we propose a simple yet effective end-to-end Context-Aware Transformer (CAT) as an automated 3D-box labeler to generate precise 3D box annotations from 2D boxes, trained with a small number of human annotations. We adopt the general encoder-decoder architecture, where the CAT encoder consists of an intra-object encoder (local) and an inter-object encoder (global), performing self-attention along the sequence and batch dimensions, respectively. The former models intra-object interactions among points and the latter extracts feature relations among different objects, thus boosting scene-level understanding.
Via local and global encoders, CAT can generate high-quality 3D box annotations with a streamlined workflow, allowing it to outperform existing state-of-the-arts by up to 1.79% 3D AP on the hard task of the KITTI test set.
Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder
Authors: Qin Guanyi , Hu Runze , Liu Yutao , Zheng Xiawu , Liu Haotian , Li Xiu , Zhang Yan
Published: June 2023

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision, which however remains unresolved due to the complex distortion conditions and diversified image contents. To confront this challenge, we in this paper propose a novel BIQA pipeline based on the Transformer architecture, which achieves an efficient quality-aware feature representation with much fewer data. More specifically, we consider the traditional fine-tuning in BIQA as an interpretation of the pre-trained model. In this way, we further introduce a Transformer decoder to refine the perceptual information of the CLS token from different perspectives. This enables our model to establish the quality-aware feature manifold efficiently while attaining a strong generalization capability. Meanwhile, inspired by the subjective evaluation behaviors of human, we introduce a novel attention panel mechanism, which improves the model performance and reduces the prediction uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed BIQA method maintains a light-weight design with only one layer of the decoder, yet extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) demonstrate its superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the SRCC values of 0.875 (vs. 0.859 in LIVEC) and 0.980 (vs. 0.969 in LIVE). Checkpoints, logs and code will be available at https://github.com/narthchin/DEIQT.
FoPro: Few-Shot Guided Robust Webly-Supervised Prototypical Learning
Authors: Qin Yulei , Chen Xingyu , Chen Chao , Shen Yunhang , Ren Bo , Gu Yun , Yang Jie , Shen Chunhua
Published: June 2023

Recently, webly supervised learning (WSL) has been studied to leverage numerous and accessible data from the Internet. Most existing methods focus on learning noise-robust models from web images while neglecting the performance drop caused by the differences between web domain and real-world domain. However, only by tackling the performance gap above can we fully exploit the practical value of web datasets. To this end, we propose a Few-shot guided Prototypical (FoPro) representation learning method, which only needs a few labeled examples from reality and can significantly improve the performance in the real-world domain. Specifically, we initialize each class center with few-shot real-world data as the ``realistic" prototype. Then, the intra-class distance between web instances and ``realistic" prototypes is narrowed by contrastive learning. Finally, we measure image-prototype distance with a learnable metric. Prototypes are polished by adjacent high-quality web images and involved in removing distant out-of-distribution samples. In experiments, FoPro is trained on web datasets with a few real-world examples guided and evaluated on real-world datasets. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three fine-grained datasets and two large-scale datasets. Compared with existing WSL methods under the same few-shot settings, FoPro still excels in real-world generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fopro.
Exploring Stroke-Level Modifications for Scene Text Editing
Authors: Qu Yadong , Tan Qingfeng , Xie Hongtao , Xu Jianjun , Wang YuXin , Zhang Yongdong
Published: June 2023

Scene text editing (STE) aims to replace text with the desired one while preserving background and styles of the original text. However, due to the complicated background textures and various text styles, existing methods fall short in generating clear and legible edited text images. In this study, we attribute the poor editing performance to two problems: 1) Implicit decoupling structure. Previous methods of editing the whole image have to learn different translation rules of background and text regions simultaneously. 2) Domain gap. Due to the lack of edited real scene text images, the network can only be well trained on synthetic pairs and performs poorly on real-world images. To handle the above problems, we propose a novel network by MOdifying Scene Text image at strokE Level (MOSTEL). Firstly, we generate stroke guidance maps to explicitly indicate regions to be edited. Different from the implicit one by directly modifying all the pixels at image level, such explicit instructions filter out the distractions from background and guide the network to focus on editing rules of text regions. Secondly, we propose a Semi-supervised Hybrid Learning to train the network with both labeled synthetic images and unpaired real scene text images. Thus, the STE model is adapted to real-world datasets distributions. Moreover, two new datasets (Tamper-Syn2k and Tamper-Scene) are proposed to fill the blank of public evaluation datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MOSTEL outperforms previous methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Datasets and code will be available at https://github.com/qqqyd/MOSTEL.
MIDMs: Matching Interleaved Diffusion Models for Exemplar-Based Image Translation
Authors: Seo Junyoung , Lee Gyuseong , Cho Seokju , Lee Jiyoung , Kim Seungryong
Published: June 2023

We present a novel method for exemplar-based image translation, called matching interleaved diffusion models (MIDMs). Most existing methods for this task were formulated as GAN-based matching-then-generation framework. However, in this framework, matching errors induced by the difficulty of semantic matching across cross-domain, e.g., sketch and photo, can be easily propagated to the generation step, which in turn leads to the degenerated results. Motivated by the recent success of diffusion models, overcoming the shortcomings of GANs, we incorporate the diffusion models to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we formulate a diffusion-based matching-and-generation framework that interleaves cross-domain matching and diffusion steps in the latent space by iteratively feeding the intermediate warp into the noising process and denoising it to generate a translated image. In addition, to improve the reliability of diffusion process, we design confidence-aware process using cycle-consistency to consider only confident regions during translation. Experimental results show that our MIDMs generate more plausible images than state-of-the-art methods.
Adaptive Dynamic Filtering Network for Image Denoising
Authors: Shen Hao , Zhao Zhong-Qiu , Zhang Wandi
Published: June 2023

In image denoising networks, feature scaling is widely used to enlarge the receptive field size and reduce computational costs. This practice, however, also leads to the loss of high-frequency information and fails to consider within-scale characteristics. Recently, dynamic convolution has exhibited powerful capabilities in processing high-frequency information (e.g., edges, corners, textures), but previous works lack sufficient spatial contextual information in filter generation. To alleviate these issues, we propose to employ dynamic convolution to improve the learning of high-frequency and multi-scale features. Specifically, we design a spatially enhanced kernel generation (SEKG) module to improve dynamic convolution, enabling the learning of spatial context information with a very low computational complexity. Based on the SEKG module, we propose a dynamic convolution block (DCB) and a multi-scale dynamic convolution block (MDCB). The former enhances the high-frequency information via dynamic convolution and preserves low-frequency information via skip connections. The latter utilizes shared adaptive dynamic kernels and the idea of dilated convolution to achieve efficient multi-scale feature extraction. The proposed multi-dimension feature integration (MFI) mechanism further fuses the multi-scale features, providing precise and contextually enriched feature representations. Finally, we build an efficient denoising network with the proposed DCB and MDCB, named ADFNet. It achieves better performance with low computational complexity on real-world and synthetic Gaussian noisy datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/it-hao/ADFNet.
FeedFormer: Revisiting Transformer Decoder for Efficient Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Shim Jae-hun , Yu Hyunwoo , Kong Kyeongbo , Kang Suk-Ju
Published: June 2023

With the success of Vision Transformer (ViT) in image classification, its variants have yielded great success in many downstream vision tasks. Among those, the semantic segmentation task has also benefited greatly from the advance of ViT variants. However, most studies of the transformer for semantic segmentation only focus on designing efficient transformer encoders, rarely giving attention to designing the decoder. Several studies make attempts in using the transformer decoder as the segmentation decoder with class-wise learnable query. Instead, we aim to directly use the encoder features as the queries. This paper proposes the Feature Enhancing Decoder transFormer (FeedFormer) that enhances structural information using the transformer decoder. Our goal is to decode the high-level encoder features using the lowest-level encoder feature. We do this by formulating high-level features as queries, and the lowest-level feature as the key and value. This enhances the high-level features by collecting the structural information from the lowest-level feature. Additionally, we use a simple reformation trick of pushing the encoder blocks to take the place of the existing self-attention module of the decoder to improve efficiency. We show the superiority of our decoder with various light-weight transformer-based decoders on popular semantic segmentation datasets. Despite the minute computation, our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in the performance computation trade-off. Our model FeedFormer-B0 surpasses SegFormer-B0 with 1.8% higher mIoU and 7.1% less computation on ADE20K, and 1.7% higher mIoU and 14.4% less computation on Cityscapes, respectively. Code will be released at: https://github.com/jhshim1995/FeedFormer.
SHUNIT: Style Harmonization for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Song Seokbeom , Lee Suhyeon , Seong Hongje , Min Kyoungwon , Kim Euntai
Published: June 2023

We propose a novel solution for unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation. To translate complex images with a wide range of objects to a different domain, recent approaches often use the object annotations to perform per-class source-to-target style mapping. However, there remains a point for us to exploit in the I2I. An object in each class consists of multiple components, and all the sub-object components have different characteristics. For example, a car in CAR class consists of a car body, tires, windows and head and tail lamps, etc., and they should be handled separately for realistic I2I translation. The simplest solution to the problem will be to use more detailed annotations with sub-object component annotations than the simple object annotations, but it is not possible. The key idea of this paper is to bypass the sub-object component annotations by leveraging the original style of the input image because the original style will include the information about the characteristics of the sub-object components. Specifically, for each pixel, we use not only the per-class style gap between the source and target domains but also the pixel’s original style to determine the target style of a pixel. To this end, we present Style Harmonization for unpaired I2I translation (SHUNIT). Our SHUNIT generates a new style by harmonizing the target domain style retrieved from a class memory and an original source image style. Instead of direct source-to-target style mapping, we aim for source and target styles harmonization. We validate our method with extensive experiments and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark sets. The source code is available online: https://github.com/bluejangbaljang/SHUNIT.
CLIPVG: Text-Guided Image Manipulation Using Differentiable Vector Graphics
Authors: Song Yiren , Shao Xuning , Chen Kang , Zhang Weidong , Jing Zhongliang , Li Minzhe
Published: June 2023

Considerable progress has recently been made in leveraging CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) models for text-guided image manipulation. However, all existing works rely on additional generative models to ensure the quality of results, because CLIP alone cannot provide enough guidance information for fine-scale pixel-level changes. In this paper, we introduce CLIPVG, a text-guided image manipulation framework using differentiable vector graphics, which is also the first CLIP-based general image manipulation framework that does not require any additional generative models. We demonstrate that CLIPVG can not only achieve state-of-art performance in both semantic correctness and synthesis quality, but also is flexible enough to support various applications far beyond the capability of all existing methods.
Compact Transformer Tracker with Correlative Masked Modeling
Authors: Song Zikai , Luo Run , Yu Junqing , Chen Yi-Ping Phoebe , Yang Wei
Published: June 2023

Transformer framework has been showing superior performances in visual object tracking for its great strength in information aggregation across the template and search image with the well-known attention mechanism. Most recent advances focus on exploring attention mechanism variants for better information aggregation. We find these schemes are equivalent to or even just a subset of the basic self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we prove that the vanilla self-attention structure is sufficient for information aggregation, and structural adaption is unnecessary. The key is not the attention structure, but how to extract the discriminative feature for tracking and enhance the communication between the target and search image. Based on this finding, we adopt the basic vision transformer (ViT) architecture as our main tracker and concatenate the template and search image for feature embedding. To guide the encoder to capture the invariant feature for tracking, we attach a lightweight correlative masked decoder which reconstructs the original template and search image from the corresponding masked tokens. The correlative masked decoder serves as a plugin for the compact transformer tracker and is skipped in inference. Our compact tracker uses the most simple structure which only consists of a ViT backbone and a box head, and can run at 40 fps. Extensive experiments show the proposed compact transform tracker outperforms existing approaches, including advanced attention variants, and demonstrates the sufficiency of self-attention in tracking tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five challenging datasets, along with the VOT2020, UAV123, LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10k benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/HUSTDML/CTTrack.
Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-Source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Su Zixian , Yao Kai , Yang Xi , Huang Kaizhu , Wang Qiufeng , Sun Jie
Published: June 2023

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation. Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of C (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained Bezier transformation on both global and local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity. A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Kaiseem/SLAug.
UCoL: Unsupervised Learning of Discriminative Facial Representations via Uncertainty-Aware Contrast
Authors: Wang Hao , Li Min , Song Yangyang , Zhang Youjian , Chi Liying
Published: June 2023

This paper presents Uncertainty-aware Contrastive Learning (UCoL): a fully unsupervised framework for discriminative facial representation learning. Our UCoL is built upon a momentum contrastive network, referred to as Dual-path Momentum Network. Specifically, two flows of pairwise contrastive training are conducted simultaneously: one is formed with intra-instance self augmentation, and the other is to identify positive pairs collected by online pairwise prediction. We introduce a novel uncertainty-aware consistency K-nearest neighbors algorithm to generate predicted positive pairs, which enables efficient discriminative learning from large-scale open-world unlabeled data. Experiments show that UCoL significantly improves the baselines of unsupervised models and performs on par with the semi-supervised and supervised face representation learning methods.
Calibrated Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection
Authors: Wang Haohan , Liu Liang , Zhang Boshen , Zhang Jiangning , Zhang Wuhao , Gan Zhenye , Wang Yabiao , Wang Chengjie , Wang Haoqian
Published: June 2023

Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages and among different object detectors. Therefore, the current methods with fixed thresholds have sub-optimal performance, and are difficult to be applied to other detectors. In order to resolve this obstacle, we propose a Calibrated Teacher, of which the confidence estimation of the prediction is well calibrated to match its real precision. In this way, different detectors in different training stages would share a similar distribution of the output confidence, so that multiple detectors could share the same fixed threshold and achieve better performance. Furthermore, we present a simple but effective Focal IoU Weight (FIoU) for the classification loss. FIoU aims at reducing the loss weight of false negative samples caused by the missing annotation, and thus works as the complement of the teacher-student paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our methods set new state-of-the-art under all different sparse settings in COCO. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/CalibratedTeacher.