mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Scale-Equalizing Pyramid Convolution for Object Detection
Authors: Shilong Zhang,  Zhuoran Yu,  Litong Feng,  Wayne Zhang Xinjiang Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Feature pyramid has been an efficient method to extract features at different scales. Development over this method mainly focuses on aggregating contextual information at different levels while seldom touching the inter-level correlation in the feature pyramid. Early computer vision methods extracted scale-invariant features by locating the feature extrema in both spatial and scale dimension. Inspired by this, a convolution across the pyramid level is proposed in this study, which is termed pyramid convolution and is a modified 3-D convolution. Stacked pyramid convolutions directly extract 3-D (scale and spatial) features and outperforms other meticulously designed feature fusion modules. Based on the viewpoint of 3-D convolution, an integrated batch normalization that collects statistics from the whole feature pyramid is naturally inserted after the pyramid convolution. Furthermore, we also show that the naive pyramid convolution, together with the design of RetinaNet head, actually best applies for extracting features from a Gaussian pyramid, whose properties can hardly be satisfied by a feature pyramid. In order to alleviate this discrepancy, we build a scale-equalizing pyramid convolution (SEPC) that aligns the shared pyramid convolution kernel only at high-level feature maps. Being computationally efficient and compatible with the head design of most single-stage object detectors, the SEPC module brings significant performance improvement (>4AP increase on MS-COCO2017 dataset) in state-of-the-art one-stage object detectors, and a light version of SEPC also has  3.5AP gain with only around 7% inference time increase. The pyramid convolution also functions well as a stand-alone module in two-stage object detectors and is able to improve the performance by  2AP. The source code can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/SEPC.
Learning Selective Self-Mutual Attention for RGB-D Saliency Detection
Authors: Ni Zhang,  Junwei Han Nian Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Saliency detection on RGB-D images is receiving more and more research interests recently. Previous models adopt the early fusion or the result fusion scheme to fuse the input RGB and depth data or their saliency maps, which incur the problem of distribution gap or information loss. Some other models use the feature fusion scheme but are limited by the linear feature fusion methods. In this paper, we propose to fuse attention learned in both modalities. Inspired by the Non-local model, we integrate the self-attention and each other's attention to propagate long-range contextual dependencies, thus incorporating multi-modal information to learn attention and propagate contexts more accurately. Considering the reliability of the other modality's attention, we further propose a selection attention to weight the newly added attention term. We embed the proposed attention module in a two-stream CNN for RGB-D saliency detection. Furthermore, we also propose a residual fusion module to fuse the depth decoder features into the RGB stream. Experimental results on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model components and our final saliency model. Our code and saliency maps are available at https://github.com/nnizhang/S2MA.
Prior Guided GAN Based Semantic Inpainting
Authors: Arnav Kumar Jain,  Sanskar Agrawal,  Pabitra Mitra,  Prabir Kumar Biswas Avisek Lahiri
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Contemporary deep learning based semantic inpainting can be approached from two directions. First, and the more explored, approach is to train an offline deep regression network over the masked pixels with an additional refinement by adversarial training. This approach requires a single feed-forward pass for inpainting at inference. Another promising, yet unexplored approach is to first train a generative model to map a latent prior distribution to natural image manifold and during inference time search for the best-matching prior to reconstruct the signal. The primary aversion towards the latter genre is due to its inference time iterative optimization and difficulty to scale to higher resolution. In this paper, going against the general trend, we focus on the second paradigm of inpainting and address both of its mentioned problems. Most importantly, we learn a data driven parametric network to directly predict a matching prior for a given masked image. This converts an iterative paradigm to a single feed forward inference pipeline with around 800X speedup. We also regularize our network with structural prior (computed from the masked image itself) which helps in better preservation of pose and size of the object to be inpainted. Moreover, to extend our model for sequence reconstruction, we propose a recurrent net based grouped latent prior learning. Finally, we leverage recent advancements in high resolution GAN training to scale our inpainting network to 256X256. Experiments (spanning across resolutions from 64X64 to 256X256) conducted on SVHN, Standford Cars, CelebA, CelebA-HQ and ImageNet image datasets, and FaceForensics video datasets reveal that we consistently improve upon contemporary benchmarks from both schools of approaches.
DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning
Authors: Richard Bowden,  Simon Hadfield Jaime Spencer
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the current monocular depth research, the dominant approach is to employ unsupervised training on large datasets, driven by warped photometric consistency. Such approaches lack robustness and are unable to generalize to challenging domains such as nighttime scenes or adverse weather conditions where assumptions about photometric consistency break down. We propose DeFeat-Net (Depth & Feature network), an approach to simultaneously learn a cross-domain dense feature representation, alongside a robust depth-estimation framework based on warped feature consistency. The resulting feature representation is learned in an unsupervised manner with no explicit ground-truth correspondences required. We show that within a single domain, our technique is comparable to both the current state of the art in monocular depth estimation and supervised feature representation learning. However, by simultaneously learning features, depth and motion, our technique is able to generalize to challenging domains, allowing DeFeat-Net to outperform the current state-of-the-art with around 10% reduction in all error measures on more challenging sequences such as nighttime driving.
Regularizing Class-Wise Predictions via Self-Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Jongjin Park,  Kimin Lee,  Jinwoo Shin Sukmin Yun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks with millions of parameters may suffer from poor generalization due to overfitting. To mitigate the issue, we propose a new regularization method that penalizes the predictive distribution between similar samples. In particular, we distill the predictive distribution between different samples of the same label during training. This results in regularizing the dark knowledge (i.e., the knowledge on wrong predictions) of a single network (i.e., a self-knowledge distillation) by forcing it to produce more meaningful and consistent predictions in a class-wise manner. Consequently, it mitigates overconfident predictions and reduces intra-class variations. Our experimental results on various image classification tasks demonstrate that the simple yet powerful method can significantly improve not only the generalization ability but also the calibration performance of modern convolutional neural networks.
Modality Shifting Attention Network for Multi-Modal Video Question Answering
Authors: Minuk Ma,  Trung Pham,  Kyungsu Kim,  Chang D. Yoo Junyeong Kim
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper considers a network referred to as Modality Shifting Attention Network (MSAN) for Multimodal Video Question Answering (MVQA) task. MSAN decomposes the task into two sub-tasks: (1) localization of temporal moment relevant to the question, and (2) accurate prediction of the answer based on the localized moment. The modality required for temporal localization may be different from that for answer prediction, and this ability to shift modality is essential for performing the task. To this end, MSAN is based on (1) the moment proposal network (MPN) that attempts to locate the most appropriate temporal moment from each of the modalities, and also on (2) the heterogeneous reasoning network (HRN) that predicts the answer using an attention mechanism on both modalities. MSAN is able to place importance weight on the two modalities for each sub-task using a component referred to as Modality Importance Modulation (MIM). Experimental results show that MSAN outperforms previous state-of-the-art by achieving 71.13% test accuracy on TVQA benchmark dataset. Extensive ablation studies and qualitative analysis are conducted to validate various components of the network.
Vision-Language Navigation With Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Yi Zhu,  Xiaojun Chang,  Xiaodan Liang Fengda Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task where an agent learns to navigate following a natural language instruction. The key to this task is to perceive both the visual scene and natural language sequentially. Conventional approaches fully exploit vision and language features in cross-modal grounding. However, the VLN task remains challenging, since previous works have implicitly neglected the rich semantic information contained in environments (such as navigation graphs or sub-trajectory semantics). In this paper, we introduce Auxiliary Reasoning Navigation (AuxRN), a framework with four self-supervised auxiliary reasoning tasks to exploit the additional training signals derived from these semantic information. The auxiliary tasks have four reasoning objectives: explaining the previous actions, evaluating the trajectory consistency, estimating the progress and predict the next direction. As a result, these additional training signals help the agent to acquire knowledge of semantic representations in order to reason about its activities and build a thorough perception of environments. Our experiments demonstrate that auxiliary reasoning tasks improve both the performance of the main task and the model generalizability by a large margin. We further demonstrate empirically that an agent trained with self-supervised auxiliary reasoning tasks substantially outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method, being the best existing approach on the standard benchmark.
Hypergraph Attention Networks for Multimodal Learning
Authors: Woo Young Kang,  Kyoung-Woon On,  Yu-Jung Heo,  Byoung-Tak Zhang Eun-Sol Kim
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: One of the fundamental problems that arise in multimodal learning tasks is the disparity of information levels between different modalities. To resolve this problem, we propose Hypergraph Attention Networks (HANs), which define a common semantic space among the modalities with symbolic graphs and extract a joint representation of the modalities based on a co-attention map constructed in the semantic space. HANs follow the process: constructing the common semantic space with symbolic graphs of each modality, matching the semantics between sub-structures of the symbolic graphs, constructing co-attention maps between the graphs in the semantic space, and integrating the multimodal inputs using the co-attention maps to get the final joint representation. From the qualitative analysis with two Visual Question and Answering datasets, we discover that 1) the alignment of the information levels between the modalities is important, and 2) the symbolic graphs are very powerful ways to represent the information of the low-level signals in alignment. Moreover, HANs dramatically improve the state-of-the-art accuracy on the GQA dataset from 54.6% to 61.88% only using the symbolic information in quantitatively.
RL-CycleGAN: Reinforcement Learning Aware Simulation-to-Real
Authors: Chris Harris,  Alex Irpan,  Sergey Levine,  Julian Ibarz,  Mohi Khansari Kanishka Rao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural network based reinforcement learning (RL) can learn appropriate visual representations for complex tasks like vision-based robotic grasping without the need for manually engineering or prior learning a perception system. However, data for RL is collected via running an agent in the desired environment, and for applications like robotics, running a robot in the real world may be extremely costly and time consuming. Simulated training offers an appealing alternative, but ensuring that policies trained in simulation can transfer effectively into the real world requires additional machinery. Simulations may not match reality, and typically bridging the simulation-to-reality gap requires domain knowledge and task-specific engineering. We can automate this process by employing generative models to translate simulated images into realistic ones. However, this sort of translation is typically task-agnostic, in that the translated images may not preserve all features that are relevant to the task. In this paper, we introduce the RL-scene consistency loss for image translation, which ensures that the translation operation is invariant with respect to the Q-values associated with the image. This allows us to learn a task-aware translation. Incorporating this loss into unsupervised domain translation, we obtain the RL-CycleGAN, a new approach for simulation-to-real-world transfer for reinforcement learning. In evaluations of RL-CycleGAN on two vision-based robotics grasping tasks, we show that RL-CycleGAN offers a substantial improvement over a number of prior methods for sim-to-real transfer, attaining excellent real-world performance with only a modest number of real-world observations.
Video Instance Segmentation Tracking With a Modified VAE Architecture
Authors: Ying Hung,  Rogerio Feris,  Linglin He Chung-Ching Lin
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a modified variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture built on top of Mask R-CNN for instance-level video segmentation and tracking. The method builds a shared encoder and three parallel decoders, yielding three disjoint branches for predictions of future frames, object detection boxes, and instance segmentation masks. To effectively solve multiple learning tasks, we introduce a Gaussian Process model to enhance the statistical representation of VAE by relaxing the prior strong independent and identically distributed (iid) assumption of conventional VAEs and allowing potential correlations among extracted latent variables. The network learns embedded spatial interdependence and motion continuity in video data and creates a representation that is effective to produce high-quality segmentation masks and track multiple instances in diverse and unstructured videos. Evaluation on a variety of recently introduced datasets shows that our model outperforms previous methods and achieves the new best in class performance.
High-Dimensional Convolutional Networks for Geometric Pattern Recognition
Authors: Junha Lee,  Rene Ranftl,  Jaesik Park,  Vladlen Koltun Christopher Choy
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: High-dimensional geometric patterns appear in many computer vision problems. In this work, we present high-dimensional convolutional networks for geometric pattern recognition problems that arise in 2D and 3D registration problems. We first propose high-dimensional convolutional networks from 4 to 32 dimensions and analyze the geometric pattern recognition capacity in high-dimensional linear regression problems. Next, we show that the 3D correspondences form hyper-surface in a 6-dimensional space and validate our network on 3D registration problems. Finally, we use image correspondences, which form a 4-dimensional hyper-conic section, and show that the high-dimensional convolutional networks are on par with many state-of-the-art multi-layered perceptrons.
AOWS: Adaptive and Optimal Network Width Search With Latency Constraints
Authors: Leonid Pishchulin,  Ning Xu,  Matthew B. Blaschko,  Gerard Medioni Maxim Berman
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Neural architecture search (NAS) approaches aim at automatically finding novel CNN architectures that fit computational constraints while maintaining a good performance on the target platform. We introduce a novel efficient one-shot NAS approach to optimally search for channel numbers, given latency constraints on a specific hardware. We first show that we can use a black-box approach to estimate a realistic latency model for a specific inference platform, without the need for low-level access to the inference computation. Then, we design a pairwise MRF to score any channel configuration and use dynamic programming to efficiently decode the best performing configuration, yielding an optimal solution for the network width search. Finally, we propose an adaptive channel configuration sampling scheme to gradually specialize the training phase to the target computational constraints. Experiments on ImageNet classification show that our approach can find networks fitting the resource constraints on different target platforms while improving accuracy over the state-of-the-art efficient networks.
Attentive Weights Generation for Few Shot Learning via Information Maximization
Authors: Ngai-Man Cheung Yiluan Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Few shot image classification aims at learning a classifier from limited labeled data. Generating the classification weights has been applied in many meta-learning methods for few shot image classification due to its simplicity and effectiveness. In this work, we present Attentive Weights Generation for few shot learning via Information Maximization (AWGIM), which introduces two novel contributions: i) Mutual information maximization between generated weights and data within the task; this enables the generated weights to retain information of the task and the specific query sample. ii) Self-attention and cross-attention paths to encode the context of the task and individual queries. Both two contributions are shown to be very effective in extensive experiments. Overall, AWGIM is competitive with state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/Yiluan/AWGIM.
DeepLPF: Deep Local Parametric Filters for Image Enhancement
Authors: Pierre Marza,  Steven McDonagh,  Sarah Parisot,  Gregory Slabaugh Sean Moran
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Digital artists often improve the aesthetic quality of digital photographs through manual retouching. Beyond global adjustments, professional image editing programs provide local adjustment tools operating on specific parts of an image. Options include parametric (graduated, radial filters) and unconstrained brush tools. These highly expressive tools enable a diverse set of local image enhancements. However, their use can be time consuming, and requires artistic capability. State-of-the-art automated image enhancement approaches typically focus on learning pixel-level or global enhancements. The former can be noisy and lack interpretability, while the latter can fail to capture fine-grained adjustments. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to automatically enhance images using learned spatially local filters of three different types (Elliptical Filter, Graduated Filter, Polynomial Filter). We introduce a deep neural network, dubbed Deep Local Parametric Filters (DeepLPF), which regresses the parameters of these spatially localized filters that are then automatically applied to enhance the image. DeepLPF provides a natural form of model regularization and enables interpretable, intuitive adjustments that lead to visually pleasing results. We report on multiple benchmarks and show that DeepLPF produces state-of-the-art performance on two variants of the MIT-Adobe 5k dataset, often using a fraction of the parameters required for competing methods.
Joint Graph-Based Depth Refinement and Normal Estimation
Authors: Mireille El Gheche,  Andreas Kuhn,  Pascal Frossard Mattia Rossi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Depth estimation is an essential component in understanding the 3D geometry of a scene, with numerous applications in urban and indoor settings. These scenarios are characterized by a prevalence of human made structures, which in most of the cases are either inherently piece-wise planar or can be approximated as such. With these settings in mind, we devise a novel depth refinement framework that aims at recovering the underlying piece-wise planarity of those inverse depth maps associated to piece-wise planar scenes. We formulate this task as an optimization problem involving a data fidelity term, which minimizes the distance to the noisy and possibly incomplete input inverse depth map, as well as a regularization, which enforces a piece-wise planar solution. As for the regularization term, we model the inverse depth map pixels as the nodes of a weighted graph, with the weight of the edge between two pixels capturing the likelihood that they belong to the same plane in the scene. The proposed regularization fits a plane at each pixel automatically, avoiding any a priori estimation of the scene planes, and enforces that strongly connected pixels are assigned to the same plane. The resulting optimization problem is solved efficiently with the ADAM solver. Extensive tests show that our method leads to a significant improvement in depth refinement, both visually and numerically, with respect to state-of-the-art algorithms on the Middlebury, KITTI and ETH3D multi-view datasets.
Recognizing Objects From Any View With Object and Viewer-Centered Representations
Authors: Vincent Nguyen,  Isaac Rehg,  Zhuowen Tu Sainan Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle an important task in computer vision: any view object recognition. In both training and testing, for each object instance, we are only given its 2D image viewed from an unknown angle. We propose a computational framework by designing object and viewer-centered neural networks (OVCNet) to recognize an object instance viewed from an arbitrary unknown angle. OVCNet consists of three branches that respectively implement object-centered, 3D viewer-centered, and in-plane viewer-centered recognition. We evaluate our proposed OVCNet using two metrics with unseen views from both seen and novel object instances. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of OVCNet over classic 2D-image-based CNN classifiers, 3D-object (inferred from 2D image) classifiers, and competing multi-view based approaches. It gives rise to a viable and practical computing framework that combines both viewpoint-dependent and viewpoint-independent features for object recognition from any view.
Learning to Segment the Tail
Authors: Yi Jiang,  Kaihua Tang,  Jingyuan Chen,  Chunyan Miao,  Hanwang Zhang Xinting Hu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Real-world visual recognition requires handling the extreme sample imbalance in large-scale long-tailed data. We propose a "divide&conquer" strategy for the challenging LVIS task: divide the whole data into balanced parts and then apply incremental learning to conquer each one. This derives a novel learning paradigm: class-incremental few-shot learning, which is especially effective for the challenge evolving over time: 1) the class imbalance among the old class knowledge review and 2) the few-shot data in new-class learning. We call our approach Learning to Segment the Tail (LST). In particular, we design an instance-level balanced replay scheme, which is a memory-efficient approximation to balance the instance-level samples from the old-class images. We also propose to use a meta-module for new-class learning, where the module parameters are shared across incremental phases, gaining the learning-to-learn knowledge incrementally, from the data-rich head to the data-poor tail. We empirically show that: at the expense of a little sacrifice of head-class forgetting, we can gain a significant 8.3% AP improvement for the tail classes with less than 10 instances, achieving an overall 2.0% AP boost for the whole 1,230 classes.
ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks
Authors: Jesse Thomason,  Daniel Gordon,  Yonatan Bisk,  Winson Han,  Roozbeh Mottaghi,  Luke Zettlemoyer,  Dieter Fox Mohit Shridhar
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present ALFRED (Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives), a benchmark for learning a mapping from natural language instructions and egocentric vision to sequences of actions for household tasks. ALFRED includes long, compositional tasks with non-reversible state changes to shrink the gap between research benchmarks and real-world applications. ALFRED consists of expert demonstrations in interactive visual environments for 25k natural language directives. These directives contain both high-level goals like "Rinse off a mug and place it in the coffee maker." and low-level language instructions like "Walk to the coffee maker on the right." ALFRED tasks are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space, and language than existing vision- and-language task datasets. We show that a baseline model based on recent embodied vision-and-language tasks performs poorly on ALFRED, suggesting that there is significant room for developing innovative grounded visual language understanding models with this benchmark.
Robust Object Detection Under Occlusion With Context-Aware CompositionalNets
Authors: Yihong Sun,  Adam Kortylewski,  Alan L. Yuille Angtian Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Detecting partially occluded objects is a difficult task. Our experimental results show that deep learning approaches, such as Faster R-CNN, are not robust at object detection under occlusion. Compositional convolutional neural networks (CompositionalNets) have been shown to be robust at classifying occluded objects by explicitly representing the object as a composition of parts. In this work, we propose to overcome two limitations of CompositionalNets which will enable them to detect partially occluded objects: 1) CompositionalNets, as well as other DCNN architectures, do not explicitly separate the representation of the context from the object itself. Under strong object occlusion, the influence of the context is amplified which can have severe negative effects for detection at test time. In order to overcome this, we propose to segment the context during training via bounding box annotations. We then use the segmentation to learn a context-aware compositionalNet that disentangles the representation of the context and the object. 2) We extend the part-based voting scheme in CompositionalNets to vote for the corners of the object's bounding box, which enables the model to reliably estimate bounding boxes for partially occluded objects. Our extensive experiments show that our proposed model can detect objects robustly, increasing the detection performance of strongly occluded vehicles from PASCAL3D+ and MS-COCO by 41% and 35% respectively in absolute performance relative to Faster R-CNN.
MnasFPN: Learning Latency-Aware Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection on Mobile Devices
Authors: Golnaz Ghiasi,  Hanxiao Liu,  Tsung-Yi Lin,  Dmitry Kalenichenko,  Hartwig Adam,  Quoc V. Le Bo Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Despite the blooming success of architecture search for vision tasks in resource-constrained environments, the design of on-device object detection architectures have mostly been manual. The few automated search efforts are either centered around non-mobile-friendly search spaces or not guided by on-device latency. We propose MnasFPN, a mobile-friendly search space for the detection head, and combine it with latency-aware architecture search to produce efficient object detection models. The learned MnasFPN head, when paired with MobileNetV2 body, outperforms MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.8 mAP at similar latency on Pixel. It is both 1 mAP more accurate and 10% faster than NAS-FPNLite. Ablation studies show that the majority of the performance gain comes from innovations in the search space. Further explorations reveal an interesting coupling between the search space design and the search algorithm, for which the complexity of MnasFPN search space is opportune.
Cylindrical Convolutional Networks for Joint Object Detection and Viewpoint Estimation
Authors: Seungryong Kim,  Hanjae Kim,  Minsu Kim,  Ig-Jae Kim,  Junghyun Cho,  Kwanghoon Sohn Sunghun Joung
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Existing techniques to encode spatial invariance within deep convolutional neural networks only model 2D transformation fields. This does not account for the fact that objects in a 2D space are a projection of 3D ones, and thus they have limited ability to severe object viewpoint changes. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a learnable module, cylindrical convolutional networks (CCNs), that exploit cylindrical representation of a convolutional kernel defined in the 3D space. CCNs extract a view-specific feature through a view-specific convolutional kernel to predict object category scores at each viewpoint. With the view-specific feature, we simultaneously determine objective category and viewpoints using the proposed sinusoidal soft-argmax module. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the cylindrical convolutional networks on joint object detection and viewpoint estimation.
Straight to the Point: Fast-Forwarding Videos via Reinforcement Learning Using Textual Data
Authors: Michel Silva,  Edson Araujo,  Leandro Soriano Marcolino,  Erickson Nascimento Washington Ramos
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The rapid increase in the amount of published visual data and the limited time of users bring the demand for processing untrimmed videos to produce shorter versions that convey the same information. Despite the remarkable progress that has been made by summarization methods, most of them can only select a few frames or skims, which creates visual gaps and breaks the video context. In this paper, we present a novel methodology based on a reinforcement learning formulation to accelerate instructional videos. Our approach can adaptively select frames that are not relevant to convey the information without creating gaps in the final video. Our agent is textually and visually oriented to select which frames to remove to shrink the input video. Additionally, we propose a novel network, called Visually-guided Document Attention Network (VDAN), able to generate a highly discriminative embedding space to represent both textual and visual data. Our experiments show that our method achieves the best performance in terms of F1 Score and coverage at the video segment level.
SPARE3D: A Dataset for SPAtial REasoning on Three-View Line Drawings
Authors: Siyuan Xiang,  Chenhui Liu,  Ruoyu Wang,  Chen Feng Wenyu Han
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Spatial reasoning is an important component of human intelligence. We can imagine the shapes of 3D objects and reason about their spatial relations by merely looking at their three-view line drawings in 2D, with different levels of competence. Can deep networks be trained to perform spatial reasoning tasks? How can we measure their "spatial intelligence"? To answer these questions, we present the SPARE3D dataset. Based on cognitive science and psychometrics, SPARE3D contains three types of 2D-3D reasoning tasks on view consistency, camera pose, and shape generation, with increasing difficulty. We then design a method to automatically generate a large number of challenging questions with ground truth answers for each task. They are used to provide supervision for training our baseline models using state-of-the-art architectures like ResNet. Our experiments show that although convolutional networks have achieved superhuman performance in many visual learning tasks, their spatial reasoning performance in SPARE3D is almost equal to random guesses. We hope SPARE3D can stimulate new problem formulations and network designs for spatial reasoning to empower intelligent robots to operate effectively in the 3D world via 2D sensors.
Learning the Redundancy-Free Features for Generalized Zero-Shot Object Recognition
Authors: Zhenyong Fu,  Jian Yang Zongyan Han
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Zero-shot object recognition or zero-shot learning aims to transfer the object recognition ability among the semantically related categories, such as fine-grained animal or bird species. However, the images of different fine-grained objects tend to merely exhibit subtle differences in appearance, which will severely deteriorate zero-shot object recognition. To reduce the superfluous information in the fine-grained objects, in this paper, we propose to learn the redundancy-free features for generalized zero-shot learning. We achieve our motivation by projecting the original visual features into a new (redundancy-free) feature space and then restricting the statistical dependence between these two feature spaces. Furthermore, we require the projected features to keep and even strengthen the category relationship in the redundancy-free feature space. In this way, we can remove the redundant information from the visual features without losing the discriminative information. We extensively evaluate the performance on four benchmark datasets. The results show that our redundancy-free feature based generalized zero-shot learning (RFF-GZSL) approach can outperform the state-of-the-arts often by a large margin.
Instance-Aware, Context-Focused, and Memory-Efficient Weakly Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Zhiding Yu,  Xiaodong Yang,  Ming-Yu Liu,  Yong Jae Lee,  Alexander G. Schwing,  Jan Kautz Zhongzheng Ren
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Weakly supervised learning has emerged as a compelling tool for object detection by reducing the need for strong supervision during training. However, major challenges remain: (1) differentiation of object instances can be ambiguous; (2) detectors tend to focus on discriminative parts rather than entire objects; (3) without ground truth, object proposals have to be redundant for high recalls, causing significant memory consumption. Addressing these challenges is difficult, as it often requires to eliminate uncertainties and trivial solutions. To target these issues we develop an instance-aware and context-focused unified framework. It employs an instance-aware self-training algorithm and a learnable Concrete DropBlock while devising a memory-efficient sequential batch back-propagation. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO (12.1% AP, 24.8% AP50), VOC 2007 (54.9% AP), and VOC 2012 (52.1% AP), improving baselines by great margins. In addition, the proposed method is the first to benchmark ResNet based models and weakly supervised video object detection. Refer to our project page for code, models, and more details: https://github.com/NVlabs/wetectron.
Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mo Yu,  Yunchao Wei,  Rogerio Feris,  Jinjun Xiong,  Wen-mei Hwu,  Thomas S. Huang,  Honghui Shi Zhonghao Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation by easing the domain shift between the source domain (synthetic data) and the target domain (real data) in this work. State-of-the-art approaches prove that performing semantic-level alignment is helpful in tackling the domain shift issue. Based on the observation that stuff categories usually share similar appearances across images of different domains while things (i.e. object instances) have much larger differences, we propose to improve the semantic-level alignment with different strategies for stuff regions and for things: 1) for the stuff categories, we generate feature representation for each class and conduct the alignment operation from the target domain to the source domain; 2) for the thing categories, we generate feature representation for each individual instance and encourage the instance in the target domain to align with the most similar one in the source domain. In this way, the individual differences within thing categories will also be considered to alleviate over-alignment. In addition to our proposed method, we further reveal the reason why the current adversarial loss is often unstable in minimizing the distribution discrepancy and show that our method can help ease this issue by minimizing the most similar stuff and instance features between the source and the target domains. We conduct extensive experiments in two unsupervised domain adaptation tasks, i.e. GTA5 - Cityscapes and SYNTHIA - Cityscapes, and achieve the new state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy.
One-Shot Adversarial Attacks on Visual Tracking With Dual Attention
Authors: Xiyu Yan,  Feng Zheng,  Yong Jiang,  Shu-Tao Xia,  Yong Zhao,  Rongrong Ji Xuesong Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Almost all adversarial attacks in computer vision are aimed at pre-known object categories, which could be offline trained for generating perturbations. But as for visual object tracking, the tracked target categories are normally unknown in advance. However, the tracking algorithms also have potential risks of being attacked, which could be maliciously used to fool the surveillance systems. Meanwhile, it is still a challenging task that adversarial attacks on tracking since it has the free-model tracked target. Therefore, to help draw more attention to the potential risks, we study adversarial attacks on tracking algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel one-shot adversarial attack method to generate adversarial examples for free-model single object tracking, where merely adding slight perturbations on the target patch in the initial frame causes state-of-the-art trackers to lose the target in subsequent frames. Specifically, the optimization objective of the proposed attack consists of two components and leverages the dual attention mechanisms. The first component adopts a targeted attack strategy by optimizing the batch confidence loss with confidence attention while the second one applies a general perturbation strategy by optimizing the feature loss with channel attention. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly lower the accuracy of the most advanced Siamese network-based trackers on three benchmarks.
Video Object Grounding Using Semantic Roles in Language Description
Authors: Kan Chen,  Ram Nevatia Arka Sadhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We explore the task of Video Object Grounding (VOG), which grounds objects in videos referred to in natural language descriptions. Previous methods apply image grounding based algorithms to address VOG, fail to explore the object relation information and suffer from limited generalization. Here, we investigate the role of object relations in VOG and propose a novel framework VOGNet to encode multi-modal object relations via self-attention with relative position encoding. To evaluate VOGNet, we propose novel contrasting sampling methods to generate more challenging grounding input samples, and construct a new dataset called ActivityNet-SRL (ASRL) based on existing caption and grounding datasets. Experiments on ASRL validate the need of encoding object relations in VOG, and our VOGNet outperforms competitive baselines by a significant margin.
Context Prior for Scene Segmentation
Authors: Jingbo Wang,  Changxin Gao,  Gang Yu,  Chunhua Shen,  Nong Sang Changqian Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent works have widely explored the contextual dependencies to achieve more accurate segmentation results. However, most approaches rarely distinguish different types of contextual dependencies, which may pollute the scene understanding. In this work, we directly supervise the feature aggregation to distinguish the intra-class and interclass context clearly. Specifically, we develop a Context Prior with the supervision of the Affinity Loss. Given an input image and corresponding ground truth, Affinity Loss constructs an ideal affinity map to supervise the learning of Context Prior. The learned Context Prior extracts the pixels belonging to the same category, while the reversed prior focuses on the pixels of different classes. Embedded into a conventional deep CNN, the proposed Context Prior Layer can selectively capture the intra-class and inter-class contextual dependencies, leading to robust feature representation. To validate the effectiveness, we design an effective Context Prior Network (CPNet). Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches. More specifically, our algorithm achieves 46.3% mIoU on ADE20K, 53.9% mIoU on PASCAL-Context, and 81.3% mIoU on Cityscapes. Code is available at https://git.io/ContextPrior.
Binarizing MobileNet via Evolution-Based Searching
Authors: Zechun Liu,  Dang Huynh,  Marios Savvides,  Kwang-Ting Cheng,  Zhiqiang Shen Hai Phan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), known to be one among the effectively compact network architectures, have achieved great outcomes in the visual tasks. Designing efficient binary architectures is not trivial due to the binary nature of the network. In this paper, we propose a use of evolutionary search to facilitate the construction and training scheme when binarizing MobileNet, a compact network with separable depth-wise convolution. Being inspired by one-shot architecture search frameworks, we manipulate the idea of group convolution to design efficient 1-Bit Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), assuming an approximately optimal trade-off between computational cost and model accuracy. Our objective is to come up with a tiny yet efficient binary neural architecture by exploring the best candidates of the group convolution while optimizing the model performance in terms of complexity and latency. The approach is threefold. First, we modify and train strong baseline binary networks with a wide range of random group combinations at each convolutional layer. This set-up gives the binary neural networks a capability of preserving essential information through layers. Second, to find a good set of hyper-parameters for group convolutions we make use of the evolutionary search which leverages the exploration of efficient 1-bit models. Lastly, these binary models are trained from scratch in a usual manner to achieve the final binary model. Various experiments on ImageNet are conducted to show that following our construction guideline, the final model achieves 60.09% Top-1 accuracy and outperforms the state-of-the-art CI-BCNN with the same computational cost.
Adaptive Hierarchical Down-Sampling for Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Ehsan Taghavi,  Ryan Razani,  Bingbing Liu,  Jun Luo Ehsan Nezhadarya
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deterministic down-sampling of an unordered point cloud in a deep neural network has not been rigorously studied so far. Existing methods down-sample the points regardless of their importance for the network output and often address down-sampling the raw point cloud before processing. As a result, some important points in the point cloud may be removed, while less valuable points may be passed to next layers. In contrast, the proposed adaptive down-sampling method samples the points by taking into account the importance of each point, which varies according to application, task and training data. In this paper, we propose a novel deterministic, adaptive, permutation-invariant down-sampling layer, called Critical Points Layer (CPL), which learns to reduce the number of points in an unordered point cloud while retaining the important (critical) ones. Unlike most graph-based point cloud down-sampling methods that use k-NN to find the neighboring points, CPL is a global down-sampling method, rendering it computationally very efficient. The proposed layer can be used along with a graph-based point cloud convolution layer to form a convolutional neural network, dubbed CP-Net in this paper. We introduce a CP-Net for 3D object classification that achieves high accuracy for the ModelNet 40 dataset among point cloud-based methods, which validates the effectiveness of the CPL.
Learning Multi-View Camera Relocalization With Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Xin Wu,  Shaojun Cai,  Junqiu Wang Fei Xue
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose to construct a view graph to excavate the information of the whole given sequence for absolute camera pose estimation. Specifically, we harness GNNs to model the graph, allowing even non-consecutive frames to exchange information with each other. Rather than adopting the regular GNNs directly, we redefine the nodes, edges, and embedded functions to fit the relocalization task. Redesigned GNNs cooperate with CNNs in guiding knowledge propagation and feature extraction respectively to process multi-view high-dimension image features iteratively at different levels. Besides, a general graph-based loss function beyond constraints between consecutive views is employed for training the network in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments conducted on both indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous approaches especially in large-scale and challenging scenarios.