bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gated Fully Fusion for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Li Xiangtai , Zhao Houlong , Han Lei , Tong Yunhai , Tan Shaohua , Yang Kuiyuan
Published: June 2020

Semantic segmentation generates comprehensive understanding of scenes through densely predicting the category for each pixel. High-level features from Deep Convolutional Neural Networks already demonstrate their effectiveness in semantic segmentation tasks, however the coarse resolution of high-level features often leads to inferior results for small/thin objects where detailed information is important. It is natural to consider importing low level features to compensate for the lost detailed information in high-level features. Unfortunately, simply combining multi-level features suffers from the semantic gap among them. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, named Gated Fully Fusion(GFF), to selectively fuse features from multiple levels using gates in a fully connected way. Specifically, features at each level are enhanced by higher-level features with stronger semantics and lower-level features with more details, and gates are used to control the propagation of useful information which significantly reduces the noises during fusion. We achieve the state of the art results on four challenging scene parsing datasets including Cityscapes, Pascal Context, COCO-stuff and ADE20K.
Relation-Guided Spatial Attention and Temporal Refinement for Video-Based Person Re-Identification
Authors: Li Xingze , Zhou Wengang , Zhou Yun , Li Houqiang
Published: June 2020

Video-based person re-identification has received considerable attention in recent years due to its significant application in video surveillance. Compared with image-based person re-identification, video-based person re-identification is characterized by a much richer context, which raises the significance of identifying informative regions and fusing the temporal information across frames. In this paper, we propose two relation-guided modules to learn reinforced feature representations for effective re-identification. First, a relation-guided spatial attention (RGSA) module is designed to explore the discriminative regions globally. The weight at each position is determined by its feature as well as the relation features from other positions, revealing the dependence between local and global contents. Based on the adaptively weighted frame-level feature, then, a relation-guided temporal refinement (RGTR) module is proposed to further refine the feature representations across frames. The learned relation information via the RGTR module enables the individual frames to complement each other in an aggregation manner, leading to robust video-level feature representations. Extensive experiments on four prevalent benchmarks verify the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method.
Natural Image Matting via Guided Contextual Attention
Authors: Li Yaoyi , Lu Hongtao
Published: June 2020

Over the last few years, deep learning based approaches have achieved outstanding improvements in natural image matting. Many of these methods can generate visually plausible alpha estimations, but typically yield blurry structures or textures in the semitransparent area. This is due to the local ambiguity of transparent objects. One possible solution is to leverage the far-surrounding information to estimate the local opacity. Traditional affinity-based methods often suffer from the high computational complexity, which are not suitable for high resolution alpha estimation. Inspired by affinity-based method and the successes of contextual attention in inpainting, we develop a novel end-to-end approach for natural image matting with a guided contextual attention module, which is specifically designed for image matting. Guided contextual attention module directly propagates high-level opacity information globally based on the learned low-level affinity. The proposed method can mimic information flow of affinity-based methods and utilize rich features learned by deep neural networks simultaneously. Experiment results on Composition-1k testing set and alphamatting.com benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in natural image matting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Yaoyi-Li/GCA-Matting.
Filtration and Distillation: Enhancing Region Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Liu Chuanbin , Xie Hongtao , Zha Zheng-Jun , Ma Lingfeng , Yu Lingyun , Zhang Yongdong
Published: June 2020

Delicate attention of the discriminative regions plays a critical role in Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC). Unfortunately, most of the existing attention models perform poorly in FGVC, due to the pivotal limitations in discriminative regions proposing and region-based feature learning. 1) The discriminative regions are predominantly located based on the filter responses over the images, which can not be directly optimized with a performance metric. 2) Existing methods train the region-based feature extractor as a one-hot classification task individually, while neglecting the knowledge from the entire object. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel “Filtration and Distillation Learning” (FDL) model to enhance the region attention of discriminate parts for FGVC. Firstly, a Filtration Learning (FL) method is put forward for discriminative part regions proposing based on the matchability between proposing and predicting. Specifically, we utilize the proposing-predicting matchability as the performance metric of Region Proposal Network (RPN), thus enable a direct optimization of RPN to filtrate most discriminative regions. Go in detail, the object-based feature learning and region-based feature learning are formulated as “teacher” and “student”, which can furnish better supervision for region-based feature learning. Accordingly, our FDL can enhance the region attention effectively, and the overall framework can be trained end-to-end without neither object nor parts annotations. Extensive experiments verify that FDL yields state-of-the-art performance under the same backbone with the most competitive approaches on several FGVC tasks.
Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Liu Minghua , Sheng Lu , Yang Sheng , Shao Jing , Hu Shi-Min
Published: June 2020

3D point cloud completion, the task of inferring the complete geometric shape from a partial point cloud, has been attracting attention in the community. For acquiring high-fidelity dense point clouds and avoiding uneven distribution, blurred details, or structural loss of existing methods' results, we propose a novel approach to complete the partial point cloud in two stages. Specifically, in the first stage, the approach predicts a complete but coarse-grained point cloud with a collection of parametric surface elements. Then, in the second stage, it merges the coarse-grained prediction with the input point cloud by a novel sampling algorithm. Our method utilizes a joint loss function to guide the distribution of the points. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing methods in both the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and the Chamfer Distance (CD).
Progressive Boundary Refinement Network for Temporal Action Detection
Authors: Liu Qinying , Wang Zilei
Published: June 2020

Temporal action detection is a challenging task due to vagueness of action boundaries. To tackle this issue, we propose an end-to-end progressive boundary refinement network (PBRNet) in this paper. PBRNet belongs to the family of one-stage detectors and is equipped with three cascaded detection modules for localizing action boundary more and more precisely. Specifically, PBRNet mainly consists of coarse pyramidal detection, refined pyramidal detection, and fine-grained detection. The first two modules build two feature pyramids to perform the anchor-based detection, and the third one explores the frame-level features to refine the boundaries of each action instance. In the fined-grained detection module, three frame-level classification branches are proposed to augment the frame-level features and update the confidence scores of action instances. Evidently, PBRNet integrates the anchor-based and frame-level methods. We experimentally evaluate the proposed PBRNet and comprehensively investigate the effect of the main components. The results show PBRNet achieves the state-of-the-art detection performances on two popular benchmarks: THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet, and meanwhile possesses a high inference speed.
Learning Cross-Modal Context Graph for Visual Grounding
Authors: Liu Yongfei , Wan Bo , Zhu Xiaodan , He Xuming
Published: June 2020

Visual grounding is a ubiquitous building block in many vision-language tasks and yet remains challenging due to large variations in visual and linguistic features of grounding entities, strong context effect and the resulting semantic ambiguities. Prior works typically focus on learning representations of individual phrases with limited context information. To address their limitations, this paper proposes a language-guided graph representation to capture the global context of grounding entities and their relations, and develop a cross-modal graph matching strategy for the multiple-phrase visual grounding task. In particular, we introduce a modular graph neural network to compute context-aware representations of phrases and object proposals respectively via message propagation, followed by a graph-based matching module to generate globally consistent localization of grounding phrases. We train the entire graph neural network jointly in a two-stage strategy and evaluate it on the Flickr30K Entities benchmark. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the prior state of the arts by a sizable margin, evidencing the efficacy of our grounding framework. Code is available at https://github.com/youngfly11/LCMCG-PyTorch.
TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention
Authors: Liu Zhe , Zhao Xin , Huang Tengteng , Hu Ruolan , Zhou Yu , Bai Xiang
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we focus on exploring the robustness of the 3D object detection in point clouds, which has been rarely discussed in existing approaches. We observe two crucial phenomena: 1) the detection accuracy of the hard objects, e.g., Pedestrians, is unsatisfactory, 2) when adding additional noise points, the performance of existing approaches decreases rapidly. To alleviate these problems, a novel TANet is introduced in this paper, which mainly contains a Triple Attention (TA) module, and a Coarse-to-Fine Regression (CFR) module. By considering the channel-wise, point-wise and voxel-wise attention jointly, the TA module enhances the crucial information of the target while suppresses the unstable cloud points. Besides, the novel stacked TA further exploits the multi-level feature attention. In addition, the CFR module boosts the accuracy of localization without excessive computation cost. Experimental results on the validation set of KITTI dataset demonstrate that, in the challenging noisy cases, i.e., adding additional random noisy points around each object, the presented approach goes far beyond state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, for the 3D object detection task of the KITTI benchmark, our approach ranks the first place on Pedestrian class, by using the point clouds as the only input. The running speed is around 29 frames per second.
Learning Saliency-Free Model with Generic Features for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Luo Wenfeng , Yang Meng
Published: June 2020

Current weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods often estimate initial supervision from class activation maps (CAM), which produce sparse discriminative object seeds and rely on image saliency to provide background cues when only class labels are used. To eliminate the demand of extra data for training saliency detector, we propose to discover class pattern inherent in the lower layer convolution features, which are scarcely explored as in previous CAM methods. Specifically, we first project the convolution features into a low-dimension space and then decide on a decision boundary to generate class-agnostic maps for each semantic category that exists in the image. Features from Lower layer are more generic, thus capable of generating proxy ground-truth with more accurate and integral objects. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show that the proposed saliency-free method outperforms the previous approaches under the same weakly-supervised setting and achieves superior segmentation results, which are 64.5% on the validation set and 64.6% on the test set concerning mIoU metric.
Shallow Feature Based Dense Attention Network for Crowd Counting
Authors: Miao Yunqi , Lin Zijia , Ding Guiguang , Han Jungong
Published: June 2020

While the performance of crowd counting via deep learning has been improved dramatically in the recent years, it remains an ingrained problem due to cluttered backgrounds and varying scales of people within an image. In this paper, we propose a Shallow feature based Dense Attention Network (SDANet) for crowd counting from still images, which diminishes the impact of backgrounds via involving a shallow feature based attention model, and meanwhile, captures multi-scale information via densely connecting hierarchical image features. Specifically, inspired by the observation that backgrounds and human crowds generally have noticeably different responses in shallow features, we decide to build our attention model upon shallow-feature maps, which results in accurate background-pixel detection. Moreover, considering that the most representative features of people across different scales can appear in different layers of a feature extraction network, to better keep them all, we propose to densely connect hierarchical image features of different layers and subsequently encode them for estimating crowd density. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of SDANet when dealing with different scenarios. Particularly, on the challenging UCF_CC_50 dataset, our method outperforms other existing methods by a large margin, as is evident from a remarkable 11.9% Mean Absolute Error (MAE) drop of our SDANet.
LCD: Learned Cross-Domain Descriptors for 2D-3D Matching
Authors: Pham Quang-Hieu , Uy Mikaela Angelina , Hua Binh-Son , Nguyen Duc Thanh , Roig Gemma , Yeung Sai-Kit
Published: June 2020

In this work, we present a novel method to learn a local cross-domain descriptor for 2D image and 3D point cloud matching. Our proposed method is a dual auto-encoder neural network that maps 2D and 3D input into a shared latent space representation. We show that such local cross-domain descriptors in the shared embedding are more discriminative than those obtained from individual training in 2D and 3D domains. To facilitate the training process, we built a new dataset by collecting ≈ 1.4 millions of 2D-3D correspondences with various lighting conditions and settings from publicly available RGB-D scenes. Our descriptor is evaluated in three main experiments: 2D-3D matching, cross-domain retrieval, and sparse-to-dense depth estimation. Experimental results confirm the robustness of our approach as well as its competitive performance not only in solving cross-domain tasks but also in being able to generalize to solve sole 2D and 3D tasks. Our dataset and code are released publicly at https://hkust-vgd.github.io/lcd.
Exploit and Replace: An Asymmetrical Two-Stream Architecture for Versatile Light Field Saliency Detection
Authors: Piao Yongri , Rong Zhengkun , Zhang Miao , Lu Huchuan
Published: June 2020

Light field saliency detection is becoming of increasing interest in recent years due to the significant improvements in challenging scenes by using abundant light field cues. However, high dimension of light field data poses computation-intensive and memory-intensive challenges, and light field data access is far less ubiquitous as RGB data. These may severely impede practical applications of light field saliency detection. In this paper, we introduce an asymmetrical two-stream architecture inspired by knowledge distillation to confront these challenges. First, we design a teacher network to learn to exploit focal slices for higher requirements on desktop computers and meanwhile transfer comprehensive focusness knowledge to the student network. Our teacher network is achieved relying on two tailor-made modules, namely multi-focusness recruiting module (MFRM) and multi-focusness screening module (MFSM), respectively. Second, we propose two distillation schemes to train a student network towards memory and computation efficiency while ensuring the performance. The proposed distillation schemes ensure better absorption of focusness knowledge and enable the student to replace the focal slices with a single RGB image in an user-friendly way. We conduct the experiments on three benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our teacher network achieves state-of-the-arts performance and student network (ResNet18) achieves Top-1 accuracies on HFUT-LFSD dataset and Top-4 on DUT-LFSD, which tremendously minimizes the model size by 56% and boosts the Frame Per Second (FPS) by 159%, compared with the best performing method.
Visualizing Deep Networks by Optimizing with Integrated Gradients
Authors: Qi Zhongang , Khorram Saeed , Fuxin Li
Published: June 2020

Understanding and interpreting the decisions made by deep learning models is valuable in many domains. In computer vision, computing heatmaps from a deep network is a popular approach for visualizing and understanding deep networks. However, heatmaps that do not correlate with the network may mislead human, hence the performance of heatmaps in providing a faithful explanation to the underlying deep network is crucial. In this paper, we propose I-GOS, which optimizes for a heatmap so that the classification scores on the masked image would maximally decrease. The main novelty of the approach is to compute descent directions based on the integrated gradients instead of the normal gradient, which avoids local optima and speeds up convergence. Compared with previous approaches, our method can flexibly compute heatmaps at any resolution for different user needs. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the heatmaps produced by our approach are more correlated with the decision of the underlying deep network, in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches.
Hidden Trigger Backdoor Attacks
Authors: Saha Aniruddha , Subramanya Akshayvarun , Pirsiavash Hamed
Published: June 2020

With the success of deep learning algorithms in various domains, studying adversarial attacks to secure deep models in real world applications has become an important research topic. Backdoor attacks are a form of adversarial attacks on deep networks where the attacker provides poisoned data to the victim to train the model with, and then activates the attack by showing a specific small trigger pattern at the test time. Most state-of-the-art backdoor attacks either provide mislabeled poisoning data that is possible to identify by visual inspection, reveal the trigger in the poisoned data, or use noise to hide the trigger. We propose a novel form of backdoor attack where poisoned data look natural with correct labels and also more importantly, the attacker hides the trigger in the poisoned data and keeps the trigger secret until the test time. We perform an extensive study on various image classification settings and show that our attack can fool the model by pasting the trigger at random locations on unseen images although the model performs well on clean data. We also show that our proposed attack cannot be easily defended using a state-of-the-art defense algorithm for backdoor attacks.
Temporal Interlacing Network
Authors: Shao Hao , Qian Shengju , Liu Yu
Published: June 2020

For a long time, the vision community tries to learn the spatio-temporal representation by combining convolutional neural network together with various temporal models, such as the families of Markov chain, optical flow, RNN and temporal convolution. However, these pipelines consume enormous computing resources due to the alternately learning process for spatial and temporal information. One natural question is whether we can embed the temporal information into the spatial one so the information in the two domains can be jointly learned once-only. In this work, we answer this question by presenting a simple yet powerful operator – temporal interlacing network (TIN). Instead of learning the temporal features, TIN fuses the two kinds of information by interlacing spatial representations from the past to the future, and vice versa. A differentiable interlacing target can be learned to control the interlacing process. In this way, a heavy temporal model is replaced by a simple interlacing operator. We theoretically prove that with a learnable interlacing target, TIN performs equivalently to the regularized temporal convolution network (r-TCN), but gains 4% more accuracy with 6x less latency on 6 challenging benchmarks. These results push the state-of-the-art performances of video understanding by a considerable margin. Not surprising, the ensemble model of the proposed TIN won the 1st place in the ICCV19 - Multi Moments in Time challenge. Code is made available to facilitate further research.1
Efficient Residual Dense Block Search for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Song Dehua , Xu Chang , Jia Xu , Chen Yiyi , Xu Chunjing , Wang Yunhe
Published: June 2020

Although remarkable progress has been made on single image super-resolution due to the revival of deep convolutional neural networks, deep learning methods are confronted with the challenges of computation and memory consumption in practice, especially for mobile devices. Focusing on this issue, we propose an efficient residual dense block search algorithm with multiple objectives to hunt for fast, lightweight and accurate networks for image super-resolution. Firstly, to accelerate super-resolution network, we exploit the variation of feature scale adequately with the proposed efficient residual dense blocks. In the proposed evolutionary algorithm, the locations of pooling and upsampling operator are searched automatically. Secondly, network architecture is evolved with the guidance of block credits to acquire accurate super-resolution network. The block credit reflects the effect of current block and is earned during model evaluation process. It guides the evolution by weighing the sampling probability of mutation to favor admirable blocks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed searching method and the found efficient super-resolution models achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods with limited number of parameters and FLOPs.
Image Cropping with Composition and Saliency Aware Aesthetic Score Map
Authors: Tu Yi , Niu Li , Zhao Weijie , Cheng Dawei , Zhang Liqing
Published: June 2020

Aesthetic image cropping is a practical but challenging task which aims at finding the best crops with the highest aesthetic quality in an image. Recently, many deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem, but they did not reveal the intrinsic mechanism of aesthetic evaluation. In this paper, we propose an interpretable image cropping model to unveil the mystery. For each image, we use a fully convolutional network to produce an aesthetic score map, which is shared among all candidate crops during crop-level aesthetic evaluation. Then, we require the aesthetic score map to be both composition-aware and saliency-aware. In particular, the same region is assigned with different aesthetic scores based on its relative positions in different crops. Moreover, a visually salient region is supposed to have more sensitive aesthetic scores so that our network can learn to place salient objects at more proper positions. Such an aesthetic score map can be used to localize aesthetically important regions in an image, which sheds light on the composition rules learned by our model. We show the competitive performance of our model in the image cropping task on several benchmark datasets, and also demonstrate its generality in real-world applications.
Progressive Feature Polishing Network for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Wang Bo , Chen Quan , Zhou Min , Zhang Zhiqiang , Jin Xiaogang , Gai Kun
Published: June 2020

Feature matters for salient object detection. Existing methods mainly focus on designing a sophisticated structure to incorporate multi-level features and filter out cluttered features. We present Progressive Feature Polishing Network (PFPN), a simple yet effective framework to progressively polish the multi-level features to be more accurate and representative. By employing multiple Feature Polishing Modules (FPMs) in a recurrent manner, our approach is able to detect salient objects with fine details without any post-processing. A FPM parallelly updates the features of each level by directly incorporating all higher level context information. Moreover, it can keep the dimensions and hierarchical structures of the feature maps, which makes it flexible to be integrated with any CNN-based models. Empirical experiments show that our results are monotonically getting better with increasing number of FPMs. Without bells and whistles, PFPN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly on five benchmark datasets under various evaluation metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chenquan-cq/PFPN.
Sparsity-Inducing Binarized Neural Networks
Authors: Wang Peisong , He Xiangyu , Li Gang , Zhao Tianli , Cheng Jian
Published: June 2020

Binarization of feature representation is critical for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs). Currently, sign function is the commonly used method for feature binarization. Although it works well on small datasets, the performance on ImageNet remains unsatisfied. Previous methods mainly focus on minimizing quantization error, improving the training strategies and decomposing each convolution layer into several binary convolution modules. However, whether sign is the only option for binarization has been largely overlooked. In this work, we propose the Sparsity-inducing Binarized Neural Network (Si-BNN), to quantize the activations to be either 0 or +1, which introduces sparsity into binary representation. We further introduce trainable thresholds into the backward function of binarization to guide the gradient propagation. Our method dramatically outperforms current state-of-the-arts, lowering the performance gap between full-precision networks and BNNs on mainstream architectures, achieving the new state-of-the-art on binarized AlexNet (Top-1 50.5%), ResNet-18 (Top-1 59.7%), and VGG-Net (Top-1 63.2%). At inference time, Si-BNN still enjoys the high efficiency of exclusive-not-or (xnor) operations.
Heuristic Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Video Recognition Models
Authors: Wei Zhipeng , Chen Jingjing , Wei Xingxing , Jiang Linxi , Chua Tat-Seng , Zhou Fengfeng , Jiang Yu-Gang
Published: June 2020

We study the problem of attacking video recognition models in the black-box setting, where the model information is unknown and the adversary can only make queries to detect the predicted top-1 class and its probability. Compared with the black-box attack on images, attacking videos is more challenging as the computation cost for searching the adversarial perturbations on a video is much higher due to its high dimensionality. To overcome this challenge, we propose a heuristic black-box attack model that generates adversarial perturbations only on the selected frames and regions. More specifically, a heuristic-based algorithm is proposed to measure the importance of each frame in the video towards generating the adversarial examples. Based on the frames' importance, the proposed algorithm heuristically searches a subset of frames where the generated adversarial example has strong adversarial attack ability while keeps the perturbations lower than the given bound. Besides, to further boost the attack efficiency, we propose to generate the perturbations only on the salient regions of the selected frames. In this way, the generated perturbations are sparse in both temporal and spatial domains. Experimental results of attacking two mainstream video recognition methods on the UCF-101 dataset and the HMDB-51 dataset demonstrate that the proposed heuristic black-box adversarial attack method can significantly reduce the computation cost and lead to more than 28% reduction in query numbers for the untargeted attack on both datasets.
3D Human Pose Estimation via Explicit Compositional Depth Maps
Authors: Wu Haiping , Xiao Bin
Published: June 2020

In this work, we tackle the problem of estimating 3D human pose in camera space from a monocular image. First, we propose to use densely-generated limb depth maps to ease the learning of body joints depth, which are well aligned with image cues. Then, we design a lifting module from 2D pixel coordinates to 3D camera coordinates which explicitly takes the depth values as inputs, and is aligned with camera perspective projection model. We show our method achieves superior performance on large-scale 3D pose datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, and sets the new state-of-the-art.
Tree-Structured Policy Based Progressive Reinforcement Learning for Temporally Language Grounding in Video
Authors: Wu Jie , Li Guanbin , Liu Si , Lin Liang
Published: June 2020

Temporally language grounding in untrimmed videos is a newly-raised task in video understanding. Most of the existing methods suffer from inferior efficiency, lacking interpretability, and deviating from the human perception mechanism. Inspired by human's coarse-to-fine decision-making paradigm, we formulate a novel Tree-Structured Policy based Progressive Reinforcement Learning (TSP-PRL) framework to sequentially regulate the temporal boundary by an iterative refinement process. The semantic concepts are explicitly represented as the branches in the policy, which contributes to efficiently decomposing complex policies into an interpretable primitive action. Progressive reinforcement learning provides correct credit assignment via two task-oriented rewards that encourage mutual promotion within the tree-structured policy. We extensively evaluate TSP-PRL on the Charades-STA and ActivityNet datasets, and experimental results show that TSP-PRL achieves competitive performance over existing state-of-the-art methods.
Recognizing Instagram Filtered Images with Feature De-Stylization
Authors: Wu Zhe , Wu Zuxuan , Singh Bharat , Davis Larry
Published: June 2020

Deep neural networks have been shown to suffer from poor generalization when small perturbations are added (like Gaussian noise), yet little work has been done to evaluate their robustness to more natural image transformations like photo filters. This paper presents a study on how popular pretrained models are affected by commonly used Instagram filters. To this end, we introduce ImageNet-Instagram, a filtered version of ImageNet, where 20 popular Instagram filters are applied to each image in ImageNet. Our analysis suggests that simple structure preserving filters which only alter the global appearance of an image can lead to large differences in the convolutional feature space. To improve generalization, we introduce a lightweight de-stylization module that predicts parameters used for scaling and shifting feature maps to “undo” the changes incurred by filters, inverting the process of style transfer tasks. We further demonstrate the module can be readily plugged into modern CNN architectures together with skip connections. We conduct extensive studies on ImageNet-Instagram, and show quantitatively and qualitatively, that the proposed module, among other things, can effectively improve generalization by simply learning normalization parameters without retraining the entire network, thus recovering the alterations in the feature space caused by the filters.
ZoomNet: Part-Aware Adaptive Zooming Neural Network for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Xu Zhenbo , Zhang Wei , Ye Xiaoqing , Tan Xiao , Yang Wei , Wen Shilei , Ding Errui , Meng Ajin , Huang Liusheng
Published: June 2020

3D object detection is an essential task in autonomous driving and robotics. Though great progress has been made, challenges remain in estimating 3D pose for distant and occluded objects. In this paper, we present a novel framework named ZoomNet for stereo imagery-based 3D detection. The pipeline of ZoomNet begins with an ordinary 2D object detection model which is used to obtain pairs of left-right bounding boxes. To further exploit the abundant texture cues in rgb images for more accurate disparity estimation, we introduce a conceptually straight-forward module – adaptive zooming, which simultaneously resizes 2D instance bounding boxes to a unified resolution and adjusts the camera intrinsic parameters accordingly. In this way, we are able to estimate higher-quality disparity maps from the resized box images then construct dense point clouds for both nearby and distant objects. Moreover, we introduce to learn part locations as complementary features to improve the resistance against occlusion and put forward the 3D fitting score to better estimate the 3D detection quality. Extensive experiments on the popular KITTI 3D detection dataset indicate ZoomNet surpasses all previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins (improved by 9.4% on APbv (IoU=0.7) over pseudo-LiDAR). Ablation study also demonstrates that our adaptive zooming strategy brings an improvement of over 10% on AP3d (IoU=0.7). In addition, since the official KITTI benchmark lacks fine-grained annotations like pixel-wise part locations, we also present our KFG dataset by augmenting KITTI with detailed instance-wise annotations including pixel-wise part location, pixel-wise disparity, etc.. Both the KFG dataset and our codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/detectRecog/ZoomNet.
FAS-Net: Construct Effective Features Adaptively for Multi-Scale Object Detection
Authors: Yan Jiangqiao , Zhang Yue , Chang Zhonghan , Zhang Tengfei , Yan Menglong , Diao Wenhui , Wang Hongqi , Sun Xian
Published: June 2020

Feature pyramid is the mainstream method for multi-scale object detection. In most detectors with feature pyramid, each proposal is predicted based on feature grids pooled from only one feature level, which is assigned heuristically. Recent studies report that the feature representation extracted using this method is sub-optimal, since they ignore the valid information exists on other unselected layers of the feature pyramid. To address this issue, researchers present to fuse valid information across all feature levels. However, these methods can be further improved: the feature fusion strategies, which use common operation (element-wise max or sum) in most detectors, should be replaced by a more flexible way. In this work, a novel method called feature adaptive selection subnetwork (FAS-Net) is proposed to construct effective features for detecting objects of different scales. Particularly, its adaption consists of two level: global attention and local adaptive selection. First, we model the global context of each feature map with global attention based feature selection module (GAFSM), which can strengthen the effective features across each layer adaptively. Then we extract the features of each region of interest (RoI) on the entire feature pyramid to construct a RoI feature pyramid. Finally, the RoI feature pyramid is sent to the feature adaptive selection module (FASM) to integrate the strengthened features according to the input adaptively. Our FAS-Net can be easily extended to other two-stage object detectors with feature pyramid, and supports to analyze the importance of different feature levels for multi-scale objects quantitatively. Besides, FAS-Net can also be further applied to instance segmentation task and get consistent improvements. Experiments on PASCAL07/12 and MSCOCO17 demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.
Context-Transformer: Tackling Object Confusion for Few-Shot Detection
Authors: Yang Ze , Wang Yali , Chen Xianyu , Liu Jianzhuang , Qiao Yu
Published: June 2020

Few-shot object detection is a challenging but realistic scenario, where only a few annotated training images are available for training detectors. A popular approach to handle this problem is transfer learning, i.e., fine-tuning a detector pretrained on a source-domain benchmark. However, such transferred detector often fails to recognize new objects in the target domain, due to low data diversity of training samples. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Context-Transformer within a concise deep transfer framework. Specifically, Context-Transformer can effectively leverage source-domain object knowledge as guidance, and automatically exploit contexts from only a few training images in the target domain. Subsequently, it can adaptively integrate these relational clues to enhance the discriminative power of detector, in order to reduce object confusion in few-shot scenarios. Moreover, Context-Transformer is flexibly embedded in the popular SSD-style detectors, which makes it a plug-and-play module for end-to-end few-shot learning. Finally, we evaluate Context-Transformer on the challenging settings of few-shot detection and incremental few-shot detection. The experimental results show that, our framework outperforms the recent state-of-the-art approaches.
Object-Guided Instance Segmentation for Biological Images
Authors: Yi Jingru , Tang Hui , Wu Pengxiang , Liu Bo , Hoeppner Daniel J. , Metaxas Dimitris N. , Han Lianyi , Fan Wei
Published: June 2020

Instance segmentation of biological images is essential for studying object behaviors and properties. The challenges, such as clustering, occlusion, and adhesion problems of the objects, make instance segmentation a non-trivial task. Current box-free instance segmentation methods typically rely on local pixel-level information. Due to a lack of global object view, these methods are prone to over- or under-segmentation. On the contrary, the box-based instance segmentation methods incorporate object detection into the segmentation, performing better in identifying the individual instances. In this paper, we propose a new box-based instance segmentation method. Mainly, we locate the object bounding boxes from their center points. The object features are subsequently reused in the segmentation branch as a guide to separate the clustered instances within an RoI patch. Along with the instance normalization, the model is able to recover the target object distribution and suppress the distribution of neighboring attached objects. Consequently, the proposed model performs excellently in segmenting the clustered objects while retaining the target object details. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on three biological datasets: cell nuclei, plant phenotyping dataset, and neural cells.
Cross-Modality Attention with Semantic Graph Embedding for Multi-Label Classification
Authors: You Renchun , Guo Zhiyao , Cui Lei , Long Xiang , Bao Yingze , Wen Shilei
Published: June 2020

Multi-label image and video classification are fundamental yet challenging tasks in computer vision. The main challenges lie in capturing spatial or temporal dependencies between labels and discovering the locations of discriminative features for each class. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose to use cross-modality attention with semantic graph embedding for multi-label classification. Based on the constructed label graph, we propose an adjacency-based similarity graph embedding method to learn semantic label embeddings, which explicitly exploit label relationships. Then our novel cross-modality attention maps are generated with the guidance of learned label embeddings. Experiments on two multi-label image classification datasets (MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE) show our method outperforms other existing state-of-the-arts. In addition, we validate our method on a large multi-label video classification dataset (YouTube-8M Segments) and the evaluation results demonstrate the generalization capability of our method.
Realistic Face Reenactment via Self-Supervised Disentangling of Identity and Pose
Authors: Zeng Xianfang , Pan Yusu , Wang Mengmeng , Zhang Jiangning , Liu Yong
Published: June 2020

Recent works have shown how realistic talking face images can be obtained under the supervision of geometry guidance, e.g., facial landmark or boundary. To alleviate the demand for manual annotations, in this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised hybrid model (DAE-GAN) that learns how to reenact face naturally given large amounts of unlabeled videos. Our approach combines two deforming autoencoders with the latest advances in the conditional generation. On the one hand, we adopt the deforming autoencoder to disentangle identity and pose representations. A strong prior in talking face videos is that each frame can be encoded as two parts: one for video-specific identity and the other for various poses. Inspired by that, we utilize a multi-frame deforming autoencoder to learn a pose-invariant embedded face for each video. Meanwhile, a multi-scale deforming autoencoder is proposed to extract pose-related information for each frame. On the other hand, the conditional generator allows for enhancing fine details and overall reality. It leverages the disentangled features to generate photo-realistic and pose-alike face images. We evaluate our model on VoxCeleb1 and RaFD dataset. Experiment results demonstrate the superior quality of reenacted images and the flexibility of transferring facial movements between identities.
Understanding Chat Messages for Sticker Recommendation in Messaging Apps
Authors: Laddha Abhishek , Hanoosh Mohamed , Mukherjee Debdoot , Patwa Parth , Narang Ankur
Published: June 2020

Stickers are popularly used in messaging apps such as Hike to visually express a nuanced range of thoughts and utterances to convey exaggerated emotions. However, discovering the right sticker from a large and ever expanding pool of stickers while chatting can be cumbersome. In this paper, we describe a system for recommending stickers in real time as the user is typing based on the context of the conversation. We decompose the sticker recommendation (SR) problem into two steps. First, we predict the message that the user is likely to send in the chat. Second, we substitute the predicted message with an appropriate sticker. Majority of Hike's messages are in the form of text which is transliterated from users' native language to the Roman script. This leads to numerous orthographic variations of the same message and makes accurate message prediction challenging. To address this issue, we learn dense representations of chat messages employing character level convolution network in an unsupervised manner. We use them to cluster the messages that have the same meaning. In the subsequent steps, we predict the message cluster instead of the message. Our approach does not depend on human labelled data (except for validation), leading to fully automatic updation and tuning pipeline for the underlying models. We also propose a novel hybrid message prediction model, which can run with low latency on low-end phones that have severe computational limitations. Our described system has been deployed for more than 6 months and is being used by millions of users along with hundreds of thousands of expressive stickers.
Feedback-Based Self-Learning in Large-Scale Conversational AI Agents
Authors: Ponnusamy Pragaash , Roshan Ghias Alireza , Guo Chenlei , Sarikaya Ruhi
Published: June 2020

Today, most of the large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Entity Resolution (ER). Typically, the accuracy of the machine learning models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages customer/system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users of these systems tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by either errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win-loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.
Clarity: Data-Driven Automatic Assessment of Product Competitiveness
Authors: Usmani Sheema , Bernagozzi Mariana , Huang Yufeng , Morales Michelle , Sabet Sarvestani Amir , Srivastava Biplav
Published: June 2020

Competitive analysis is a critical part of any business. Product managers, sellers, and marketers spend time and resources scouring through an immense amount of online and offline content, aiming to discover what their competitors are doing in the marketplace to understand what type of threat they pose to their business' financial well-being. Currently, this process is time and labor-intensive, slow and costly. This paper presents Clarity, a data-driven unsupervised system for assessment of products, which is currently in deployment in the large IT company, IBM. Clarity has been running for more than a year and is used by over 1,500 people to perform over 160 competitive analyses involving over 800 products. The system considers multiple factors from a collection of online content: numeric ratings by online users, sentiments of reviews for key product performance dimensions, content volume, and recency of content. The results and explanations of factors leading to the results are visualized in an interactive dashboard that allows users to track their product's performance as well as understand main contributing factors. Its efficacy has been tested in a series of cases across IBM's portfolio which spans software, hardware, and services.
Probabilistic Super Resolution for Mineral Spectroscopy
Authors: Candela Alberto , Thompson David R. , Wettergreen David , Cawse-Nicholson Kerry , Geier Sven , Eastwood Michael L. , Green Robert O.
Published: June 2020

Earth and planetary sciences often rely upon the detailed examination of spectroscopic data for rock and mineral identification. This typically requires the collection of high resolution spectroscopic measurements. However, they tend to be scarce, as compared to low resolution remote spectra. This work addresses the problem of inferring high-resolution mineral spectroscopic measurements from low resolution observations using probability models. We present the Deep Gaussian Conditional Model, a neural network that performs probabilistic super resolution via maximum likelihood estimation. It also provides insight into learned correlations between measurements and spectroscopic features, allowing for the tractability and interpretability that scientists often require for mineral identification. Experiments using remote spectroscopic data demonstrate that our method compares favorably to other analogous probabilistic methods. Finally, we show and discuss how our method provides human-interpretable results, making it a compelling analysis tool for scientists.