mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Reversible GANs for Memory-Efficient Image-To-Image Translation
Authors: Daniel E. Worrall Tycho F.A. van der Ouderaa
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The pix2pix and CycleGAN losses have vastly improved the qualitative and quantitative visual quality of results in image-to-image translation tasks. We extend this framework by exploring approximately invertible architectures which are well suited to these losses. These architectures are approximately invertible by design and thus partially satisfy cycle-consistency before training even begins. Furthermore, since invertible architectures have constant memory complexity in depth, these models can be built arbitrarily deep. We are able to demonstrate superior quantitative output on the Cityscapes and Maps datasets at near constant memory budget.
Sensitive-Sample Fingerprinting of Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Tianwei Zhang,  Ruby Lee Zecheng He
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Numerous cloud-based services are provided to help customers develop and deploy deep learning applications. When a customer deploys a deep learning model in the cloud and serves it to end-users, it is important to be able to verify that the deployed model has not been tampered with.  In this paper, we propose a novel and practical methodology to verify the integrity of remote deep learning models, with only black-box access to the target models. Specifically, we define Sensitive-Sample fingerprints, which are a small set of human unnoticeable transformed inputs that make the model outputs sensitive to the model's parameters. Even small model changes can be clearly reflected in the model outputs. Experimental results on different types of model integrity attacks show that we proposed approach is both effective and efficient. It can detect model integrity breaches with high accuracy (>99.95%) and guaranteed zero false positives on all evaluated attacks. Meanwhile, it only requires up to 103X fewer model inferences, compared with non-sensitive samples.
Soft Labels for Ordinal Regression
Authors: Amit Marathe Raul Diaz
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Ordinal regression attempts to solve classification problems in which categories are not independent, but rather follow a natural order. It is crucial to classify each class correctly while learning adequate interclass ordinal relationships. We present a simple and effective method that constrains these relationships among categories by seamlessly incorporating metric penalties into ground truth label representations. This encoding allows deep neural networks to automatically learn intraclass and interclass relationships without any explicit modification of the network architecture. Our method converts data labels into soft probability distributions that pair well with common categorical loss functions such as cross-entropy. We show that this approach is effective by using off-the-shelf classification and segmentation networks in four wildly different scenarios: image quality ranking, age estimation, horizon line regression, and monocular depth estimation. We demonstrate that our general-purpose method is very competitive with respect to specialized approaches, and adapts well to a variety of different network architectures and metrics.
Local to Global Learning: Gradually Adding Classes for Training Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Dongze Lian,  Bowen Deng,  Shenghua Gao,  Tao Tan,  Yanlin Geng Hao Cheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose a new learning paradigm, Local to Global Learning (LGL), for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to improve the performance of classification problems. The core of LGL is to learn a DNN model from fewer categories (local) to more categories (global) gradually within the entire training set. LGL is most related to the Self-Paced Learning (SPL) algorithm but its formulation is different from SPL. SPL trains its data from simple to complex, while LGL from local to global. In this paper, we incorporate the idea of LGL into the learning objective of DNNs and explain why LGL works better from an information-theoretic perspective. Experiments on the toy data, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet dataset show that LGL outperforms the baseline and SPL-based algorithms.
What Does It Mean to Learn in Deep Networks? And, How Does One Detect Adversarial Attacks?
Authors: Meysam Madadi,  Sergio Escalera,  Aleix M. Martinez Ciprian A. Corneanu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The flexibility and high-accuracy of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has transformed computer vision. But, the fact that we do not know when a specific DNN will work and when it will fail has resulted in a lack of trust. A clear example is self-driving cars; people are uncomfortable sitting in a car driven by algorithms that may fail under some unknown, unpredictable conditions. Interpretability and explainability approaches attempt to address this by uncovering what a DNN models, i.e., what each node (cell) in the network represents and what images are most likely to activate it. This can be used to generate, for example, adversarial attacks. But these approaches do not generally allow us to determine where a DNN will succeed or fail and   why . i.e., does this learned representation   generalize  to unseen samples? Here, we derive a novel approach to define what it means to learn in deep networks, and how to use this knowledge to detect adversarial attacks. We show how this defines the ability of a network to generalize to unseen testing samples and, most importantly,   why  this is the case.
Handwriting Recognition in Low-Resource Scripts Using Adversarial Learning
Authors: Abhirup Das,  Ankan Kumar Bhunia,  Perla Sai Raj Kishore,  Partha Pratim Roy Ayan Kumar Bhunia
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Handwritten Word Recognition and Spotting is a challenging field dealing with handwritten text possessing irregular and complex shapes. The design of deep neural network models makes it necessary to extend training datasets in order to introduce variations and increase the number of samples; word-retrieval is therefore very difficult in low-resource scripts. Much of the existing literature comprises preprocessing strategies which are seldom sufficient to cover all possible variations. We propose an Adversarial Feature Deformation Module (AFDM) that learns ways to elastically warp extracted features in a scalable manner. The AFDM is inserted between intermediate layers and trained alternatively with the original framework, boosting its capability to better learn highly informative features rather than trivial ones. We test our meta-framework, which is built on top of popular word-spotting and word-recognition frameworks and enhanced by AFDM, not only on extensive Latin word datasets but also on sparser Indic scripts. We record results for varying sizes of training data, and observe that our enhanced network generalizes much better in the low-data regime; the overall word-error rates and mAP scores are observed to improve as well.
Adversarial Defense Through Network Profiling Based Path Extraction
Authors: Jingwen Leng,  Cong Guo,  Quan Chen,  Chao Li,  Minyi Guo,  Yuhao Zhu Yuxian Qiu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recently, researchers have started decomposing deep neural network models according to their semantics or functions. Recent work has shown the effectiveness of decomposed functional blocks for defending adversarial attacks, which add small input perturbation to the input image to fool the DNN models. This work proposes a profiling-based method to decompose the DNN models to different functional blocks, which lead to the effective path as a new approach to exploring DNNs' internal organization. Specifically, the per-image effective path can be aggregated to the class-level effective path, through which we observe that adversarial images activate effective path different from normal images. We propose an effective path similarity-based method to detect adversarial images with an interpretable model, which achieve better accuracy and broader applicability than the state-of-the-art technique.
RENAS: Reinforced Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Gaofeng Meng,  Qian Zhang,  Shiming Xiang,  Chang Huang,  Lisen Mu,  Xinggang Wang Yukang Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an important yet challenging task in network design due to its high computational consumption. To address this issue, we propose the Reinforced Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (RENAS), which is an evolutionary method with reinforced mutation for NAS. Our method integrates reinforced mutation into an evolution algorithm for neural architecture exploration, in which a mutation controller is introduced to learn the effects of slight modifications and make mutation actions. The reinforced mutation controller guides the model population to evolve efficiently. Furthermore, as child models can inherit parameters from their parents during evolution, our method requires very limited computational resources. In experiments, we conduct the proposed search method on CIFAR-10 and obtain a powerful network architecture, RENASNet. This architecture achieves a competitive result on CIFAR-10. The explored network architecture is transferable to ImageNet and achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy, i.e., 75.7% top-1 accuracy with 5.36M parameters on mobile ImageNet. We further test its performance on semantic segmentation with DeepLabv3 on the PASCAL VOC. RENASNet outperforms MobileNet-v1, MobileNet-v2 and NASNet. It achieves 75.83% mIOU without being pretrained on COCO.
Co-Occurrence Neural Network
Authors: Shai Avidan Irina Shevlev
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) became a very popular tool for image analysis. Convolutions are fast to compute and easy to store, but they also have some limitations. First, they are shift-invariant and, as a result, they do not adapt to different regions of the image. Second, they have a fixed spatial layout, so small geometric deformations in the layout of a patch will completely change the filter response. For these reasons, we need multiple filters to handle the different parts and variations in the input. We augment the standard convolutional tools used in CNNs with a new filter that addresses both issues raised above. Our filter combines two terms, a spatial filter and a term that is based on the co-occurrence statistics of input values in the neighborhood. The proposed filter is differentiable and can therefore be packaged as a layer in CNN and trained using back-propagation. We show how to train the filter as part of the network and report results on several data sets. In particular, we replace a convolutional layer with hundreds of thousands of parameters with a Co-occurrence Layer consisting of only a few hundred parameters with minimal impact on accuracy.
SpotTune: Transfer Learning Through Adaptive Fine-Tuning
Authors: Honghui Shi,  Abhishek Kumar,  Kristen Grauman,  Tajana Rosing,  Rogerio Feris Yunhui Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Transfer learning, which allows a source task to affect the inductive bias of the target task, is widely used in computer vision. The typical way of conducting transfer learning with deep neural networks is to fine-tune a model pretrained on the source task using data from the target task. In this paper, we propose an adaptive fine-tuning approach, called SpotTune, which finds the optimal fine-tuning strategy per instance for the target data. In SpotTune, given an image from the target task, a policy network is used to make routing decisions on whether to pass the image through the fine-tuned layers or the pre-trained layers. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our method outperforms the traditional fine-tuning approach on 12 out of 14 standard datasets. We also compare SpotTune with other state-of-the-art fine-tuning strategies, showing superior performance. On the Visual Decathlon datasets, our method achieves the highest score across the board without bells and whistles.
Signal-To-Noise Ratio: A Robust Distance Metric for Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Weihong Deng,  Jian Tang,  Yinan Tang,  Binghui Chen Tongtong Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Deep metric learning, which learns discriminative features to process image clustering and retrieval tasks, has attracted extensive attention in recent years. A number of deep metric learning methods, which ensure that similar examples are mapped close to each other and dissimilar examples are mapped farther apart, have been proposed to construct effective structures for loss functions and have shown promising results. In this paper, different from the approaches on learning the loss structures, we propose a robust SNR distance metric based on Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for measuring the similarity of image pairs for deep metric learning. By exploring the properties of our SNR distance metric from the view of geometry space and statistical theory, we analyze the properties of our metric and show that it can preserve the semantic similarity between image pairs, which well justify its suitability for deep metric learning. Compared with Euclidean distance metric, our SNR distance metric can further jointly reduce the intra-class distances and enlarge the inter-class distances for learned features. Leveraging our SNR distance metric, we propose Deep SNR-based Metric Learning (DSML) to generate discriminative feature embeddings. By extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, including CARS196, CUB200-2011 and CIFAR10, our DSML has shown its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we extend our SNR distance metric to deep hashing learning, and conduct experiments on two benchmarks, including CIFAR10 and NUS-WIDE, to demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our SNR distance metric.
Detection Based Defense Against Adversarial Examples From the Steganalysis Point of View
Authors: Weiming Zhang,  Yiwei Zhang,  Dongdong Hou,  Yujia Liu,  Hongyue Zha,  Nenghai Yu Jiayang Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently led to significant improvements in many fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are samples with imperceptible perturbations while dramatically misleading the DNNs. Moreover, adversarial examples can be used to perform an attack on various kinds of DNN based systems, even if the adversary has no access to the underlying model. Many defense methods have been proposed, such as obfuscating gradients of the networks or detecting adversarial examples. However it is proved out that these defense methods are not effective or cannot resist secondary adversarial attacks. In this paper, we point out that steganalysis can be applied to adversarial examples detection, and propose a method to enhance steganalysis features by estimating the probability of modifications caused by adversarial attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect adversarial examples. Moreover, secondary adversarial attacks are hard to be directly performed to our method because our method is not based on a neural network but based on high-dimensional artificial features and Fisher Linear Discriminant ensemble.
HetConv: Heterogeneous Kernel-Based Convolutions for Deep CNNs
Authors: Vinay Kumar Verma,  Piyush Rai,  Vinay P. Namboodiri Pravendra Singh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present a novel deep learning architecture in which the convolution operation leverages heterogeneous kernels. The proposed HetConv (Heterogeneous Kernel-Based Convolution) reduces the computation (FLOPs) and the number of parameters as compared to standard convolution operation while still maintaining representational efficiency. To show the effectiveness of our proposed convolution, we present extensive experimental results on the standard convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures such as VGG  and ResNet. We find that after replacing the standard convolutional filters in these architectures with our proposed HetConv filters, we achieve 3X to 8X FLOPs based improvement in speed while still maintaining (and sometimes improving) the accuracy. We also compare our proposed convolutions with group/depth wise convolutions and show that it achieves more FLOPs reduction with significantly higher accuracy.
Strike (With) a Pose: Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled by Strange Poses of Familiar Objects
Authors: Qi Li,  Zhitao Gong,  Chengfei Wang,  Long Mai,  Wei-Shinn Ku,  Anh Nguyen Michael A. Alcorn
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Despite excellent performance on stationary test sets, deep neural networks (DNNs) can fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs, including natural, non-adversarial ones, which are common in real-world settings. In this paper, we present a framework for discovering DNN failures that harnesses 3D renderers and 3D models. That is, we estimate the parameters of a 3D renderer that cause a target DNN to misbehave in response to the rendered image. Using our framework and a self-assembled dataset of 3D objects, we investigate the vulnerability of DNNs to OoD poses of well-known objects in ImageNet. For objects that are readily recognized by DNNs in their canonical poses, DNNs incorrectly classify 97% of their pose space. In addition, DNNs are highly sensitive to slight pose perturbations. Importantly, adversarial poses transfer across models and datasets. We find that 99.9% and 99.4% of the poses misclassified by Inception-v3 also transfer to the AlexNet and ResNet-50 image classifiers trained on the same ImageNet dataset, respectively, and 75.5% transfer to the YOLOv3 object detector trained on MS COCO.
Blind Geometric Distortion Correction on Images Through Deep Learning
Authors: Bo Zhang,  Pedro V. Sander,  Jing Liao Xiaoyu Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose the first general framework to automatically correct different types of geometric distortion in a single input image. Our proposed method employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained by using a large synthetic distortion dataset to predict the displacement field between distorted images and corrected images. A model fitting method uses the CNN output to estimate the distortion parameters, achieving a more accurate prediction. The final corrected image is generated based on the predicted flow using an efficient, high-quality resampling method. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms traditional correction methods, and allows for interesting applications such as distortion transfer, distortion exaggeration, and co-occurring distortion correction.
Instance-Level Meta Normalization
Authors: Ding-Jie Chen,  Hwann-Tzong Chen Songhao Jia
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper presents a normalization mechanism called Instance-Level Meta Normalization (ILM Norm) to address a learning-to-normalize problem. ILM Norm learns to predict the normalization parameters via both the feature feed-forward and the gradient back-propagation paths. ILM Norm provides a meta normalization mechanism and has several good properties. It can be easily plugged into existing instance-level normalization schemes such as Instance Normalization, Layer Normalization, or Group Normalization. ILM Norm normalizes each instance individually and therefore maintains high performance even when small mini-batch is used. The experimental results show that ILM Norm well adapts to different network architectures and tasks, and it consistently improves the performance of the original models.
Iterative Normalization: Beyond Standardization Towards Efficient Whitening
Authors: Yi Zhou,  Fan Zhu,  Li Liu,  Ling Shao Lei Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Batch Normalization (BN) is ubiquitously employed for accelerating neural network training and improving the generalization capability by performing standardization within mini-batches.  Decorrelated Batch Normalization (DBN) further boosts the above effectiveness by whitening.  However, DBN relies heavily on either a large batch size, or eigen-decomposition that suffers from poor efficiency on GPUs.  We propose Iterative Normalization (IterNorm), which employs Newton's iterations for much more efficient whitening, while simultaneously avoiding the eigen-decomposition. Furthermore, we develop a comprehensive study to show IterNorm has better trade-off between optimization and generalization, with theoretical and experimental support. To this end, we exclusively introduce Stochastic Normalization Disturbance (SND), which measures the inherent stochastic uncertainty of samples when applied to normalization operations. With the support of SND, we provide natural explanations to several phenomena from the perspective of optimization, e.g., why group-wise whitening of DBN generally outperforms full-whitening and why the accuracy of BN degenerates with reduced batch sizes.  We demonstrate the consistently improved performance of IterNorm with extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet over BN and DBN.
On Learning Density Aware Embeddings
Authors: Richa Singh,  Mayank Vatsa Soumyadeep Ghosh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Deep metric learning algorithms have been utilized to learn discriminative and generalizable models which are effective for classifying unseen classes. In this paper, a novel noise tolerant deep metric learning algorithm is proposed. The proposed method, termed as Density Aware Metric Learning, enforces the model to learn embeddings that are pulled towards the most dense region of the clusters for each class. It is achieved by iteratively shifting the estimate of the center towards the dense region of the cluster thereby leading to faster convergence and higher generalizability. In addition to this, the approach is robust to noisy samples in the training data, often present as outliers. Detailed experiments and analysis on two challenging cross-modal face recognition databases and two popular object recognition databases exhibit the efficacy of the proposed approach. It has superior convergence, requires lesser training time, and yields better accuracies than several popular deep metric learning methods.
Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Lu Jiang,  Yi Yang,  Alexander G. Hauptmann Guoliang Kang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) makes predictions for the target domain data while manual annotations are only available in the source domain. Previous methods minimize the domain discrepancy neglecting the class information, which may lead to misalignment and poor generalization performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes Contrastive Adaptation Network (CAN) optimizing a new metric which explicitly models the intra-class domain discrepancy and the inter-class domain discrepancy. We design an alternating update strategy for training CAN in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on two real-world benchmarks Office-31 and VisDA-2017 demonstrate that CAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods and produces more discriminative features.
LP-3DCNN: Unveiling Local Phase in 3D Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Shanmuganathan Raman Sudhakar Kumawat
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Traditional 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are computationally expensive, memory intensive, prone to overfit, and most importantly, there is a need to improve their feature learning capabilities. To address these issues, we propose Rectified Local Phase Volume (ReLPV) block, an efficient alternative to the standard 3D convolutional layer. The ReLPV block extracts the phase in a 3D local neighborhood (e.g., 3x3x3) of each position of the input map to obtain the feature maps. The phase is extracted by computing 3D Short Term Fourier Transform (STFT) at multiple fixed low frequency points in the 3D local neighborhood of each position. These feature maps at different frequency points are then linearly combined after passing them through an activation function.  The ReLPV block provides significant parameter savings of at least, 3^3 to 13^3 times compared to the standard 3D convolutional layer with the filter sizes 3x3x3 to 13x13x13, respectively. We show that the  feature learning capabilities of the ReLPV block are significantly better than the standard 3D convolutional layer. Furthermore, it produces consistently better results across different 3D data representations. We achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the volumetric ModelNet10 and ModelNet40 datasets while utilizing only 11% parameters of the current state-of-the-art. We also improve the state-of-the-art on the  UCF-101 split-1 action recognition dataset by 5.68% (when trained from scratch) while using only 15% of the parameters of the state-of-the-art.
Attribute-Driven Feature Disentangling and Temporal Aggregation for Video Person Re-Identification
Authors: Xu Shen,  Zhongming Jin,  Hongtao Lu,  Xian-sheng Hua Yiru Zhao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Video-based person re-identification plays an important role in surveillance video analysis, expanding image-based methods by learning features of multiple frames. Most existing methods fuse features by temporal average-pooling, without exploring the different frame weights caused by various viewpoints, poses, and occlusions. In this paper, we propose an attribute-driven method for feature disentangling and frame re-weighting. The features of single frames are disentangled into groups of sub-features, each corresponds to specific semantic attributes. The sub-features are re-weighted by the confidence of attribute recognition and then aggregated at the temporal dimension as the final representation. By means of this strategy, the most informative regions of each frame are enhanced and contributes to a more discriminative sequence representation. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of feature disentangling as well as temporal re-weighting. The experimental results on the iLIDS-VID, PRID-2011 and MARS datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Binary Ensemble Neural Network: More Bits per Network or More Networks per Bit?
Authors: Xin Dong,  Hao Su Shilin Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Binary neural networks (BNN) have been studied extensively since they run dramatically faster at lower memory and power consumption than floating-point networks, thanks to the efficiency of bit operations. However, contemporary BNNs whose weights and activations are both single bits suffer from severe accuracy degradation. To understand why, we investigate the representation ability, speed and bias/variance of BNNs through extensive experiments. We conclude that the error of BNNs is predominantly caused by intrinsic instability (training time) and non-robustness (train & test time). Inspired by this investigation, we propose the Binary Ensemble Neural Network (BENN) which leverages ensemble methods to improve the performance of BNNs with limited efficiency cost. While ensemble techniques have been broadly believed to be only marginally helpful for strong classifiers such as deep neural networks, our analysis and experiments show that they are naturally a perfect fit to boost BNNs. We find that our BENN, which is faster and more robust than state-of-the-art binary networks, can even surpass the accuracy of the full-precision floating number network with the same architecture.
Distilling Object Detectors With Fine-Grained Feature Imitation
Authors: Li Yuan,  Xiaopeng Zhang,  Jiashi Feng Tao Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: State-of-the-art CNN based recognition models are often computationally prohibitive to deploy on low-end devices. A promising high level approach tackling this limitation is knowledge distillation, which let small student model mimic cumbersome teacher model's output to get improved generalization. However, related methods mainly focus on simple task of classification while do not consider complex tasks like object detection. We show applying the vanilla knowledge distillation to detection model gets minor gain.  To address the challenge of distilling knowledge in detection model, we propose a fine-grained feature imitation method exploiting the cross-location discrepancy of feature response. Our intuition is that detectors care more about local near object regions. Thus the discrepancy of feature response on the near object anchor locations reveals important information of how teacher model tends to generalize. We design a novel mechanism to estimate those locations and let student model imitate the teacher on them to get enhanced performance. We first validate the idea on a developed lightweight toy detector which carries simplest notion of current state-of-the-art anchor based detection models on challenging KITTI dataset, our method generates up to 15% boost of mAP for the student model compared to the non-imitated counterpart. We then extensively evaluate the method with Faster R-CNN model under various scenarios with common object detection benchmark of Pascal VOC and COCO, imitation alleviates up to 74% performance drop of student model compared to teacher. Codes released at https://github.com/twangnh/Distilling-Object-Detectors
Centripetal SGD for Pruning Very Deep Convolutional Networks With Complicated Structure
Authors: Guiguang Ding,  Yuchen Guo,  Jungong Han Xiaohan Ding
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The redundancy is widely recognized in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which enables to remove some unimportant filters from convolutional layers so as to slim the network with acceptable performance drop. Inspired by the linearity of convolution, we seek to make some filters increasingly close and eventually identical for network slimming. To this end, we propose Centripetal SGD (C-SGD), a novel optimization method, which can train several filters to collapse into a single point in the parameter hyperspace. When the training is completed, the removal of the identical filters can trim the network with NO performance loss, thus no finetuning is needed. By doing so, we have partly solved an open problem of constrained filter pruning on CNNs with complicated structure, where some layers must be pruned following the others. Our experimental results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet have justified the effectiveness of C-SGD-based filter pruning. Moreover, we have provided empirical evidences for the assumption that the redundancy in deep neural networks helps the convergence of training by showing that a redundant CNN trained using C-SGD outperforms a normally trained counterpart with the equivalent width.
Knockoff Nets: Stealing Functionality of Black-Box Models
Authors: Bernt Schiele,  Mario Fritz Tribhuvanesh Orekondy
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in the wild to perform a wide range of tasks. In this work, we ask to what extent can an adversary steal functionality of such "victim" models based solely on blackbox interactions: image in, predictions out. In contrast to prior work, we study complex victim blackbox models, and an adversary lacking knowledge of train/test data used by the model, its internals, and semantics over model outputs. We formulate model functionality stealing as a two-step approach: (i) querying a set of input images to the blackbox model to obtain predictions; and (ii) training a "knockoff" with queried image-prediction pairs. We make multiple remarkable observations: (a) querying random images from a different distribution than that of the blackbox training data results in a well-performing knockoff; (b) this is possible even when the knockoff is represented using a different architecture; and (c) our reinforcement learning approach additionally improves query sample efficiency in certain settings and provides performance gains. We validate model functionality stealing on a range of datasets and tasks, as well as show that a reasonable knockoff of an image analysis API could be created for as little as 30.
Deep Embedding Learning With Discriminative Sampling Policy
Authors: Lei Chen,  Jiwen Lu,  Jie Zhou Yueqi Duan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Deep embedding learning aims to learn a distance metric for effective similarity measurement, which has achieved promising performance in various tasks. As the vast majority of training samples produce gradients with magnitudes close to zero, hard example mining is usually employed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the training procedure. However, most existing sampling methods are designed by hand, which ignores the dependence between examples and suffer from exhaustive searching. In this paper, we propose a deep embedding with discriminative sampling policy (DE-DSP) learning framework by simultaneously training two models: a deep sampler network that learns effective sampling strategies, and a feature embedding that maps samples to the feature space. Rather than exhaustively calculating the hardness of all the examples for mining through forward-propagation, the deep sampler network exploits the strong prior of relations among samples to learn discriminative sampling policy in an more efficient manner. Experimental results demonstrate faster convergence and stronger discriminative power of our DE-DSP framework under different embedding objectives.
Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation
Authors: Jiangmiao Pang,  Jiaqi Wang,  Yu Xiong,  Xiaoxiao Li,  Shuyang Sun,  Wansen Feng,  Ziwei Liu,  Jianping Shi,  Wanli Ouyang,  Chen Change Loy,  Dahua Lin Kai Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Cascade is a classic yet powerful architecture that has boosted performance on various tasks. However, how to introduce cascade to instance segmentation remains an open question. A simple combination of Cascade R-CNN and Mask R-CNN only brings limited gain. In exploring a more effective approach, we find that the key to a successful instance segmentation cascade is to fully leverage the reciprocal relationship between detection and segmentation. In this work, we propose a new framework, Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC), which differs in two important aspects: (1) instead of performing cascaded refinement on these two tasks separately, it interweaves them for a joint multi-stage processing; (2) it adopts a fully convolutional branch to provide spatial context, which can help distinguishing hard foreground from cluttered background. Overall, this framework can learn more discriminative features progressively while integrating complementary features together in each stage. Without bells and whistles, a single HTC obtains 38.4% and 1.5% improvement over a strong Cascade Mask R-CNN baseline on MSCOCO dataset. Moreover, our overall system achieves 48.6 mask AP on the test-challenge split, ranking 1st in the COCO 2018 Challenge Object Detection Task. Code is available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.
Multi-Task Self-Supervised Object Detection via Recycling of Bounding Box Annotations
Authors: Joonil Na,  Gunhee Kim Wonhee Lee
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In spite of recent enormous success of deep convolutional networks in object detection, they require a large amount of bounding box annotations, which are often time-consuming and error-prone to obtain. To make better use of given limited labels, we propose a novel object detection approach that takes advantage of both multi-task learning (MTL) and self-supervised learning (SSL). We propose a set of auxiliary tasks that help improve the accuracy of object detection. They create their own labels by recycling the bounding box labels (i.e. annotations of the main task) in an SSL manner, and are jointly trained with the object detection model in an MTL way. Our approach is integrable with any region proposal based detection models. We empirically validate that our approach effectively improves detection performance on various architectures and datasets. We test two state-of-the-art region proposal object detectors, including Faster R-CNN and R-FCN, with three CNN backbones of ResNet-101, Inception-ResNet-v2, and MobileNet on two benchmark datasets of PASCAL VOC and COCO.
ClusterNet: Deep Hierarchical Cluster Network With Rigorously Rotation-Invariant Representation for Point Cloud Analysis
Authors: Guanbin Li,  Ruijia Xu,  Tianshui Chen,  Meng Wang,  Liang Lin Chao Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Current neural networks for 3D object recognition are vulnerable to 3D rotation. Existing works mostly rely on massive amounts of rotation-augmented data to alleviate the problem, which lacks solid guarantee of the 3D rotation invariance. In this paper, we address the issue by introducing a novel point cloud representation that can be mathematically proved rigorously rotation-invariant, i.e., identical point clouds in different orientations are unified as a unique and consistent representation. Moreover, the proposed representation is conditional information-lossless, because it retains all necessary information of point cloud except for orientation information. In addition, the proposed representation is complementary with existing network architectures for point cloud and fundamentally improves their robustness against rotation transformation. Finally, we propose a deep hierarchical cluster network called ClusterNet to better adapt to the proposed representation. We employ hierarchical clustering to explore and exploit the geometric structure of point cloud, which is embedded in a hierarchical structure tree. Extensive experimental results have shown that our proposed method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in rotation robustness on rotation-augmented 3D object classification benchmarks.
Learning to Learn Relation for Important People Detection in Still Images
Authors: Fa-Ting Hong,  Wei-Shi Zheng Wei-Hong Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Humans can easily recognize the importance of people in social event images, and they always focus on the most important individuals. However, learning to learn the relation between people in an image, and inferring the most important person based on this relation, remains undeveloped. In this work, we propose a deep imPOrtance relatIon NeTwork (POINT) that combines both relation modeling and feature learning. In particular, we infer two types of interaction modules: the person-person interaction module that learns the interaction between people and the event-person interaction module that learns to describe how a person is involved in the event occurring in an image. We then estimate the importance relations among people from both interactions and encode the relation feature from the importance relations. In this way, POINT automatically learns several types of relation features in parallel, and we aggregate these relation features and the person's feature to form the importance feature for important people classification. Extensive experimental results show that our method is effective for important people detection and verify the efficacy of learning to learn relations for important people detection.
Looking for the Devil in the Details: Learning Trilinear Attention Sampling Network for Fine-Grained Image Recognition
Authors: Jianlong Fu,  Zheng-Jun Zha,  Jiebo Luo Heliang Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Learning subtle yet discriminative features (e.g., beak and eyes for a bird) plays a significant role in fine-grained image recognition. Existing attention-based approaches localize and amplify significant parts to learn fine-grained details, which often suffer from a limited number of parts and heavy computational cost. In this paper, we propose to learn such fine-grained features from hundreds of part proposals by Trilinear Attention Sampling Network (TASN) in an efficient teacher-student manner. Specifically, TASN consists of 1) a trilinear attention module, which generates attention maps by modeling the inter-channel relationships, 2) an attention-based sampler which highlights attended parts with high resolution, and 3) a feature distiller, which distills part features into an object-level feature by weight sharing and feature preserving strategies. Extensive experiments verify that TASN yields the best performance under the same settings with the most competitive approaches, in iNaturalist-2017, CUB-Bird, and Stanford-Cars datasets.
Multi-Similarity Loss With General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Xintong Han,  Weilin Huang,  Dengke Dong,  Matthew R. Scott Xun Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: A family of loss functions built on pair-based computation have been proposed in the literature which provide a myriad of solutions for deep metric learning.   In this pa-per, we provide a general weighting framework for under-standing  recent  pair-based  loss  functions.   Our  contributions are three-fold: (1) we establish a General Pair Weighting (GPW) framework, which casts the sampling problem of deep metric learning into a unified view of pair weighting through gradient analysis, providing a powerful tool for understanding recent pair-based loss functions; (2) we show that with GPW, various existing pair-based methods can be compared and discussed comprehensively, with clear differences and key limitations identified; (3) we propose a new loss called multi-similarity loss (MS loss) under the GPW,which is implemented in two iterative steps (i.e., mining and weighting). This allows it to fully consider three similarities for pair weighting, providing a more principled approach for collecting and weighting informative pairs. Finally, the proposed MS loss obtains new state-of-the-art performance on four image retrieval benchmarks, where it outperforms the  most  recent  approaches,  such  as  ABE[14]  and  HTL[4], by a large margin, e.g.,60.6%-65.7%on CUB200,and 80.9%-88.0%on In-Shop Clothes Retrieval datasetat Recall@1.
Domain-Symmetric Networks for Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Hui Tang,  Kui Jia,  Mingkui Tan Yabin Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to learn a model of classifier for unlabeled samples on the target domain, given training data of labeled samples on the source domain. Impressive progress is made recently by learning invariant features via domain-adversarial training of deep networks. In spite of the recent progress, domain adaptation is still limited in achieving the invariance of feature distributions at a finer category level. To this end, we propose in this paper a new domain adaptation method called Domain-Symmetric Networks (SymNets). The proposed SymNet is  based on a symmetric design of source and target task classifiers, based on which we also construct an additional classifier that shares with them its layer neurons. To train the SymNet, we propose a novel adversarial learning objective whose key design is based on a two-level domain confusion scheme, where the category-level confusion loss improves over the domain-level one by driving the learning of intermediate network features to be invariant at the corresponding categories of the two domains. Both domain discrimination and domain confusion are implemented based on the constructed additional classifier. Since target samples are unlabeled, we also propose a scheme of cross-domain training to help learn the target classifier. Careful ablation studies show the efficacy of our proposed method. In particular, based on commonly used base networks, our SymNets achieve the new state of the art on three benchmark domain adaptation datasets.
End-To-End Supervised Product Quantization for Image Search and Retrieval
Authors: Lior Wolf Benjamin Klein
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Product Quantization, a dictionary based hashing method, is one of the leading unsupervised hashing techniques. While it ignores the labels, it harnesses the features to construct look up tables that can approximate the feature space. In recent years, several works have achieved state of the art results on hashing benchmarks by learning binary representations in a supervised manner. This work presents Deep Product Quantization (DPQ), a technique that leads to more accurate retrieval and classification than the latest state of the art methods, while having similar computational complexity and memory footprint as the Product Quantization method. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a dictionary-based representation that is inspired by Product Quantization and which is learned end-to-end, and thus benefits from the supervised signal. DPQ explicitly learns soft and hard representations to enable an efficient and accurate asymmetric search, by using a straight-through estimator. Our method obtains state of the art results on an extensive array of retrieval and classification experiments.