mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution
Authors: Yingqian Wang, Xiaoyu Dong, Qingyu Xu, Jungang Yang, Wei An, Yulan Guo Longguang Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most existing CNN-based super-resolution (SR) methods are developed based on an assumption that the degradation is fixed and known (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, these methods suffer a severe performance drop when the real degradation is different from their assumption. To handle various unknown degradations in real-world applications, previous methods rely on degradation estimation to reconstruct the SR image. Nevertheless, degradation estimation methods are usually time-consuming and may lead to SR failure due to large estimation errors. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised degradation representation learning scheme for blind SR without explicit degradation estimation. Specifically, we learn abstract representations to distinguish various degradations in the representation space rather than explicit estimation in the pixel space. Moreover, we introduce a Degradation-Aware SR (DASR) network with flexible adaption to various degradations based on the learned representations. It is demonstrated that our degradation representation learning scheme can extract discriminative representations to obtain accurate degradation information. Experiments on both synthetic and real images show that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance for the blind SR task. Code is available at: https://github.com/LongguangWang/DASR.
Convolutional Hough Matching Networks
Authors: Minsu Cho Juhong Min
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite advances in feature representation, leveraging geometric relations is crucial for establishing reliable visual correspondences under large variations of images. In this work we introduce a Hough transform perspective on convolutional matching and propose an effective geometric matching algorithm, dubbed Convolutional Hough Matching (CHM). The method distributes similarities of candidate matches over a geometric transformation space and evaluate them in a convolutional manner. We cast it into a trainable neural layer with a semi-isotropic high-dimensional kernel, which learns non-rigid matching with a small number of interpretable parameters. To validate the effect, we develop the neural network with CHM layers that perform convolutional matching in the space of translation and scaling. Our method sets a new state of the art on standard benchmarks for semantic visual correspondence, proving its strong robustness to challenging intra-class variations.
Hierarchical and Partially Observable Goal-Driven Policy Learning With Goals Relational Graph
Authors: Yezhou Yang Xin Ye
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel two-layer hierarchical reinforcement learning approach equipped with a Goals Relational Graph (GRG) for tackling the partially observable goal-driven task, such as goal-driven visual navigation. Our GRG captures the underlying relations of all goals in the goal space through a Dirichlet-categorical process that facilitates: 1) the high-level network raising a sub-goal towards achieving a designated final goal; 2) the low-level network towards an optimal policy; and 3) the overall system generalizing unseen environments and goals. We evaluate our approach with two settings of partially observable goal-driven tasks -- a grid-world domain and a robotic object search task. Our experimental results show that our approach exhibits superior generalization performance on both unseen environments and new goals.
Point 4D Transformer Networks for Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Point Cloud Videos
Authors: Yi Yang, Mohan Kankanhalli Hehe Fan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Point cloud videos exhibit irregularities and lack of order along the spatial dimension where points emerge inconsistently across different frames. To capture the dynamics in point cloud videos, point tracking is usually employed. However, as points may flow in and out across frames, computing accurate point trajectories is extremely difficult. Moreover, tracking usually relies on point colors and thus may fail to handle colorless point clouds. In this paper, to avoid point tracking, we propose a novel Point 4D Transformer (P4Transformer) network to model raw point cloud videos. Specifically, P4Transformer consists of (i) a point 4D convolution to embed the spatio-temporal local structures presented in a point cloud video and (ii) a transformer to capture the appearance and motion information across the entire video by performing self-attention on the embedded local features. In this fashion, related or similar local areas are merged with attention weight rather than by explicit tracking. Extensive experiments, including 3D action recognition and 4D semantic segmentation, on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our P4Transformer for point cloud video modeling.
CoCoNets: Continuous Contrastive 3D Scene Representations
Authors: Mihir Prabhudesai, Ishita Mediratta, Adam W. Harley, Katerina Fragkiadaki Shamit Lal
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper explores self-supervised learning of amodal 3D feature representations from RGB and RGB-D posed images and videos, agnostic to object and scene semantic content, and evaluates the resulting scene representations in the downstream tasks of visual correspondence, object tracking, and object detection. The model infers a latent 3D representation of the scene in the form of 3D feature points, where each continuous world 3D point is mapped to its corresponding feature vector. The model is trained for contrastive view prediction by rendering 3D feature clouds in queried viewpoints and matching against the 3D feature point cloud predicted from the query view. Notably, the representation can be queried for any 3D location, even if it is not visible from the input view. Our model brings together three powerful ideas of recent exciting research work: 3D feature grids as a neural bottleneck for view prediction, implicit functions for handling resolution limitations of 3D grids, and contrastive learning for unsupervised training of feature representations. We show the resulting 3D visual feature representations effectively scale across objects and scenes, imagine information occluded or missing from the input viewpoints, track objects over time, align semantically related objects in 3D, and improve 3D object detection. We outperform many existing state-of-the-art methods for 3D feature learning and view prediction, which are either limited by 3D grid spatial resolution, do not attempt to build amodal 3D representations, or do not handle combinatorial scene variability due to their non-convolutional bottlenecks.
Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Long-Tail Visual Recognition
Authors: Zeming Li, Shipeng Yan, Xuming He, Jian Sun Songyang Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite the success of the deep neural networks, it remains challenging to effectively build a system for long-tail visual recognition tasks. To address this problem, we first investigate the performance bottleneck of the two-stage learning framework via ablative study. Motivated by our discovery, we develop a unified distribution alignment strategy for long-tail visual recognition. Particularly, we first propose an adaptive calibration strategy for each data point to calibrate its classification scores. Then we introduce a generalized re-weight method to incorporate the class prior, which provides a flexible and unified solution to copy with diverse scenarios of various visual recognition tasks. We validate our method by extensive experiments on four tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results across all four recognition tasks with a simple and unified framework.
Dynamic Class Queue for Large Scale Face Recognition in the Wild
Authors: Teng Xi, Gang Zhang, Haocheng Feng, Junyu Han, Jingtuo Liu, Errui Ding, Wenyu Liu Bi Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning discriminative representation using large-scale face datasets in the wild is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains challenging. The difficulties lie in many aspects and this work focus on computing resource constraint and long-tailed class distribution. Recently, classification-based representation learning with deep neural networks and well-designed losses have demonstrated good recognition performance. However, the computing and memory cost linearly scales up to the number of identities (classes) in the training set, and the learning process suffers from unbalanced classes. In this work, we propose a dynamic class queue (DCQ) to tackle these two problems. Specifically, for each iteration during training, a subset of classes for recognition are dynamically selected and their class weights are dynamically generated on-the-fly which are stored in a queue. Since only a subset of classes is selected for each iteration, the computing requirement is reduced. By using a single server without model parallel, we empirically verify in large-scale datasets that 10% of classes are sufficient to achieve similar performance as using all classes. Moreover, the class weights are dynamically generated in a few-shot manner and therefore suitable for tail classes with only a few instances. We show clear improvement over a strong baseline in the largest public dataset Megaface Challenge2 (MF2) which has 672K identities and over 88% of them have less than 10 instances. Code is available at https://github.com/bilylee/DCQ
3D-MAN: 3D Multi-Frame Attention Network for Object Detection
Authors: Yin Zhou, Zhifeng Chen, Jiquan Ngiam Zetong Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: 3D object detection is an important module in autonomous driving and robotics. However, many existing methods focus on using single frames to perform 3D detection, and do not fully utilize information from multiple frames. In this paper, we present 3D-MAN: a 3D multi-frame attention network that effectively aggregates features from multiple perspectives and achieves state-of-the-art performance on Waymo Open Dataset. 3D-MAN first uses a novel fast single-frame detector to produce box proposals. The box proposals and their corresponding feature maps are then stored in a memory bank. We design a multi-view alignment and aggregation module, using attention networks, to extract and aggregate the temporal features stored in the memory bank. This effectively combines the features coming from different perspectives of the scene. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the large-scale complex Waymo Open Dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to published single-frame and multi-frame methods.
Cross-Modal Center Loss for 3D Cross-Modal Retrieval
Authors: Elahe Vahdani, Jiaxing Tan, Yingli Tian Longlong Jing
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Cross-modal retrieval aims to learn discriminative and modal-invariant features for data from different modalities. Unlike the existing methods which usually learn from the features extracted by offline networks, in this paper, we propose an approach to jointly train the components of cross-modal retrieval framework with metadata, and enable the network to find optimal features. The proposed end-to-end framework is updated with three loss functions: 1) a novel cross-modal center loss to eliminate cross-modal discrepancy, 2) cross-entropy loss to maximize inter-class variations, and 3) mean-square-error loss to reduce modality variations. In particular, our proposed cross-modal center loss minimizes the distances of features from objects belonging to the same class across all modalities. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the retrieval tasks across multi-modalities including 2D image, 3D point cloud and mesh data. The proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for both cross-modal and in-domain retrieval for 3D objects on the ModelNet10 and ModelNet40 datasets.
Learning View Selection for 3D Scenes
Authors: Qixing Huang, Dun-Yu Hsiao, Li Guan, Gang Hua Yifan Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Efficient 3D space sampling to represent an underlying3D object/scene is essential for 3D vision, robotics, and be-yond. A standard approach is to explicitly sample a densecollection of views and formulate it as a view selection prob-lem, or, more generally, a set cover problem. In this paper,we introduce a novel approach that avoids dense view sam-pling. The key idea is to learn a view prediction networkand a trainable aggregation module that takes the predictedviews as input and outputs an approximation of their genericscores (e.g., surface coverage, viewing angle from surfacenormals). This methodology allows us to turn the set coverproblem (or multi-view representation optimization) into acontinuous optimization problem. We then explain how toeffectively solve the induced optimization problem using con-tinuation, i.e., aggregating a hierarchy of smoothed scoringmodules. Experimental results show that our approach ar-rives at similar or better solutions with about 10 x speed upin running time, comparing with the standard methods.
FESTA: Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention for Scene Point Clouds
Authors: Jiahao Pang, Muhammad A. Lodhi, Yingli Tian, Dong Tian Haiyan Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Scene flow depicts the dynamics of a 3D scene, which is critical for various applications such as autonomous driving, robot navigation, AR/VR, etc. Conventionally, scene flow is estimated from dense/regular RGB video frames. With the development of depth-sensing technologies, precise 3D measurements are available via point clouds which have sparked new research in 3D scene flow. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract scene flow from point clouds due to the sparsity and irregularity in typical point cloud sampling patterns. One major issue related to irregular sampling is identified as the randomness during point set abstraction/feature extraction---an elementary process in many flow estimation scenarios. A novel Spatial Abstraction with Attention (SA^2) layer is accordingly proposed to alleviate the unstable abstraction problem. Moreover, a Temporal Abstraction with Attention (TA^2) layer is proposed to rectify attention in temporal domain, leading to benefits with motions scaled in a larger range. Extensive analysis and experiments verified the motivation and significant performance gains of our method, dubbed as Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention (FESTA), when compared to several state-of-the-art benchmarks of scene flow estimation.
Semi-Supervised Action Recognition With Temporal Contrastive Learning
Authors: Omprakash Chakraborty, Ashutosh Varshney, Rameswar Panda, Rogerio Feris, Kate Saenko, Abir Das Ankit Singh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning to recognize actions from only a handful of labeled videos is a challenging problem due to the scarcity of tediously collected activity labels. We approach this problem by learning a two-pathway temporal contrastive model using unlabeled videos at two different speeds leveraging the fact that changing video speed does not change an action. Specifically, we propose to maximize the similarity between encoded representations of the same video at two different speeds as well as minimize the similarity between different videos played at different speeds. This way we use the rich supervisory information in terms of `time' that is present in otherwise unsupervised pool of videos. With this simple yet effective strategy of manipulating video playback rates, we considerably outperform video extensions of sophisticated state-of-the-art semi-supervised image recognition methods across multiple diverse benchmark datasets and network architectures. Interestingly, our proposed approach benefits from out-of-domain unlabeled videos showing generalization and robustness. We also perform rigorous ablations and analysis to validate our approach. Project page: https://cvir.github.io/TCL/.
SG-Net: Spatial Granularity Network for One-Stage Video Instance Segmentation
Authors: Yiming Cui, Wenbo Tan, Yingjie Chen Dongfang Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Video instance segmentation (VIS) is a new and critical task in computer vision. To date, top-performing VIS methods extend the two-stage Mask R-CNN by adding a tracking branch, leaving plenty of room for improvement. In contrast, we approach the VIS task from a new perspective and propose a one-stage spatial granularity network (SG-Net). SG-Net demonstrates four advantages: 1) Our task heads (detection, segmentation, and tracking) are crafted interdependently so they can effectively share features and enjoy the joint optimization; 2) Each of our task predictions avoids using proposal-based RoI features, resulting in much reduced runtime complexity per instance; 3) Our mask prediction is dynamically performed on the sub-regions of each detected instance, leading to high-quality masks of fine granularity; 4) Our tracking head models objects' centerness movements for tracking, which effectively enhances the tracking robustness to different object appearances. In evaluation, we present state-of-the-art comparisons on the YouTube-VIS dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our compact one-stage method can achieve improved performance in both accuracy and inference speed. We hope our SG-Net could serve as a simple yet strong baseline for the VIS task. Code will be available.
Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations
Authors: Ben Mildenhall, Terrance Wang, Divi Schmidt, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Jonathan T. Barron, Ren Ng Matthew Tancik
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Coordinate-based neural representations have shown significant promise as an alternative to discrete, array-based representations for complex low dimensional signals. However, optimizing a coordinate-based network from randomly initialized weights for each new signal is inefficient. We propose applying standard meta-learning algorithms to learn the initial weight parameters for these fully-connected networks based on the underlying class of signals being represented (e.g., images of faces or 3D models of chairs). Despite requiring only a minor change in implementation, using these learned initial weights enables faster convergence during optimization and can serve as a strong prior over the signal class being modeled, resulting in better generalization when only partial observations of a given signal are available. We explore these benefits across a variety of tasks, including representing 2D images, reconstructing CT scans, and recovering 3D shapes and scenes from 2D image observations.
Actor-Context-Actor Relation Network for Spatio-Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Siyu Chen, Mike Zheng Shou, Yu Liu, Jing Shao, Hongsheng Li Junting Pan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Localizing persons and recognizing their actions from videos is a challenging task towards high-level video under-standing. Recent advances have been achieved by modeling direct pairwise relations between entities. In this paper, we take one step further, not only model direct relations between pairs but also take into account indirect higher-order relations established upon multiple elements. We propose to explicitly model the Actor-Context-Actor Relation, which is the relation between two actors based on their interactions with the context. To this end, we design an Actor-Context-Actor Relation Network (ACAR-Net) which builds upon a novel High-order Relation Reasoning Operator and an Actor-Context Feature Bank to enable indirect relation reasoning for spatio-temporal action localization. Experiments on AVA and UCF101-24 datasets show the advantages of modeling actor-context-actor relations, and visualization of attention maps further verifies that our model is capable of finding relevant higher-order relations to support action detection. Notably, our method ranks first in the AVA-Kinetics action localization task of ActivityNet Challenge 2020, outperforming other entries by a significant margin (+6.71 mAP). The code is available online.
Cross-View Cross-Scene Multi-View Crowd Counting
Authors: Wei Lin, Antoni B. Chan Qi Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-view crowd counting has been previously proposed to utilize multi-cameras to extend the field-of-view of a single camera, capturing more people in the scene, and improve counting performance for occluded people or those in low resolution. However, the current multi-view paradigm trains and tests on the same single scene and camera-views, which limits its practical application. In this paper, we propose a cross-view cross-scene (CVCS) multi-view crowd counting paradigm, where the training and testing occur on different scenes with arbitrary camera layouts. To dynamically handle the challenge of optimal view fusion under scene and camera layout change and non-correspondence noise due to camera calibration errors or erroneous features, we propose a CVCS model that attentively selects and fuses multiple views together using camera layout geometry, and a noise view regularization method to train the model to handle non-correspondence errors. We also generate a large synthetic multi-camera crowd counting dataset with a large number of scenes and camera views to capture many possible variations, which avoids the difficulty of collecting and annotating such a large real dataset. We then test our trained CVCS model on real multi-view counting datasets, by using unsupervised domain transfer. The proposed CVCS model trained on synthetic data outperforms the same model trained only on real data, and achieves promising performance compared to fully supervised methods that train and test on the same single scene.
Semantic Segmentation With Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization
Authors: Junlin Yang, Karsten Kreis, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler Daiqing Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training deep networks with limited labeled data while achieving a strong generalization ability is key in the quest to reduce human annotation efforts. This is the goal of semi-supervised learning, which exploits more widely available unlabeled data to complement small labeled data sets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for discriminative pixel-level tasks using a generative model of both images and labels. Concretely, we learn a generative adversarial network that captures the joint image-label distribution and is trained efficiently using a large set of unlabeled images supplemented with only few labeled ones. We build our architecture on top of StyleGAN2, augmented with a label synthesis branch. Image labeling at test time is achieved by first embedding the target image into the joint latent space via an encoder network and test-time optimization, and then generating the label from the inferred embedding. We evaluate our approach in two important domains: medical image segmentation and part-based face segmentation. We demonstrate strong in-domain performance compared to several baselines, and are the first to showcase extreme out-of-domain generalization, such as transferring from CT to MRI in medical imaging, and photographs of real faces to paintings, sculptures, and even cartoons and animal faces.
Depth-Aware Mirror Segmentation
Authors: Bo Dong, Wen Dong, Pieter Peers, Xin Yang, Qiang Zhang, Xiaopeng Wei Haiyang Mei
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel mirror segmentation method that leverages depth estimates from ToF-based cameras as an additional cue to disambiguate challenging cases where the contrast or relation in RGB colors between the mirror reflection and the surrounding scene is subtle. A key observation is that ToF depth estimates do not report the true depth of the mirror surface, but instead return the total length of the reflected light paths, thereby creating obvious depth discontinuities at the mirror boundaries. To exploit depth information in mirror segmentation, we first construct a large-scale RGB-D mirror segmentation dataset, which we subsequently employ to train a novel depth-aware mirror segmentation framework. Our mirror segmentation framework first locates the mirrors based on color and depth discontinuities and correlations. Next, our model further refines the mirror boundaries through contextual contrast taking into account both color and depth information. We extensively validate our depth-aware mirror segmentation method and demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art RGB and RGB-D based methods for mirror segmentation. Experimental results also show that depth is a powerful cue for mirror segmentation.
You Only Look One-Level Feature
Authors: Yingming Wang, Tong Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Cheng, Jian Sun Qiang Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper revisits feature pyramids networks (FPN) for one-stage detectors and points out that the success of FPN is due to its divide-and-conquer solution to the optimization problem in object detection rather than multi-scale feature fusion. From the perspective of optimization, we introduce an alternative way to address the problem instead of adopting the complex feature pyramids -- utilizing only one-level feature for detection. Based on the simple and efficient solution, we present You Only Look One-level Feature (YOLOF). In our method, two key components, Dilated Encoder and Uniform Matching, are proposed and bring considerable improvements. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our YOLOF achieves comparable results with its feature pyramids counterpart RetinaNet while being 2.5 times faster. Without transformer layers, YOLOF can match the performance of DETR in a single-level feature manner with 7 times less training epochs.
Multi-Perspective LSTM for Joint Visual Representation Learning
Authors: Fernando Pereira, Paulo Lobato Correia, Ali Etemad Alireza Sepas-Moghaddam
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel LSTM cell architecture capable of learning both intra- and inter-perspective relationships available in visual sequences captured from multiple perspectives. Our architecture adopts a novel recurrent joint learning strategy that uses additional gates and memories at the cell level. We demonstrate that by using the proposed cell to create a network, more effective and richer visual representations are learned for recognition tasks. We validate the performance of our proposed architecture in the context of two multi-perspective visual recognition tasks namely lip reading and face recognition. Three relevant datasets are considered and the results are compared against fusion strategies, other existing multi-input LSTM architectures, and alternative recognition solutions. The experiments show the superior performance of our solution over the considered benchmarks, both in terms of recognition accuracy and complexity. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/arsm/MPLSTM
Towards Improving the Consistency, Efficiency, and Flexibility of Differentiable Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Shan You, Hongyang Li, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Zhouchen Lin Yibo Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most differentiable neural architecture search methods construct a super-net for search and derive a target-net as its sub-graph for evaluation. There exists a significant gap between the architectures in search and evaluation. As a result, current methods suffer from an inconsistent, inefficient, and inflexible search process. In this paper, we introduce EnTranNAS that is composed of Engine-cells and Transit-cells. The Engine-cell is differentiable for architecture search, while the Transit-cell only transits a sub-graph by architecture derivation. Consequently, the gap between the architectures in search and evaluation is significantly reduced. Our method also spares much memory and computation cost, which speeds up the search process. A feature sharing strategy is introduced for more balanced optimization and more efficient search. Furthermore, we develop an architecture derivation method to replace the traditional one that is based on a hand-crafted rule. Our method enables differentiable sparsification, and keeps the derived architecture equivalent to that of Engine-cell, which further improves the consistency between search and evaluation. More importantly, it supports the search for topology where a node can be connected to prior nodes with any number of connections, so that the searched architectures could be more flexible. Our search on CIFAR-10 has an error rate of 2.22% with only 0.07 GPU-day. We can also directly perform the search on ImageNet with topology learnable and achieve a top-1 error rate of 23.8% in 2.1 GPU-day.
Gaussian Context Transformer
Authors: Daiyin Wang, Yuan Zheng, Nenggan Zheng, Min Zheng Dongsheng Ruan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, a large number of channel attention blocks are proposed to boost the representational power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These approaches commonly learn the relationship between global contexts and attention activations by using fully-connected layers or linear transformations. However, we empirically find that though many parameters are introduced, these attention blocks may not learn the relationship well. In this paper, we hypothesize that the relationship is predetermined. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a simple yet extremely efficient channel attention block, called Gaussian Context Transformer (GCT), which achieves contextual feature excitation using a Gaussian function that satisfies the presupposed relationship. According to whether the standard deviation of the Gaussian function is learnable, we develop two versions of GCT: GCT-B0 and GCT-B1. GCT-B0 is a parameter-free channel attention block by fixing the standard deviation. It directly maps global contexts to attention activations without learning. In contrast, GCT-B1 is a parameterized channel attention block, which adaptively learns the standard deviation to enhance the mapping ability. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and MS COCO benchmarks demonstrate that our GCTs lead to consistent improvements across various deep CNNs and detectors. Compared with a bank of state-of-the-art channel attention blocks, such as SE and ECA , our GCTs are superior in effectiveness and efficiency.
Keypoint-Graph-Driven Learning Framework for Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Wanqing Zhao, Ziyu Guan, Xianlin Peng, Jinye Peng Shaobo Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many recent 6D pose estimation methods exploited object 3D models to generate synthetic images for training because labels come for free. However, due to the domain shift of data distributions between real images and synthetic images, the network trained only on synthetic images fails to capture robust features in real images for 6D pose estimation. We propose to solve this problem by making the network insensitive to different domains, rather than taking the more difficult route of forcing synthetic images to be similar to real images. Inspired by domain adaption methods, a Domain Adaptive Keypoints Detection Network (DAKDN) including a domain adaption layer is used to minimize the discrepancy of deep features between synthetic and real images. A unique challenge here is the lack of ground truth labels (i.e., keypoints) for real images. Fortunately, the geometry relations between keypoints are invariant under real/synthetic domains. Hence, we propose to use the domain-invariant geometry structure among keypoints as a "bridge" constraint to optimize DAKDN for 6D pose estimation across domains. Specifically, DAKDN employs a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) block to learn the geometry structure from synthetic images and uses the GCN to guide the training for real images. The 6D poses of objects are calculated using Perspective-n-Point (PnP) algorithm based on the predicted keypoints. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches without manual poses labels and competes with approaches using manual poses labels.
Deep Burst Super-Resolution
Authors: Martin Danelljan, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte Goutam Bhat
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While single-image super-resolution (SISR) has attracted substantial interest in recent years, the proposed approaches are limited to learning image priors in order to add high frequency details. In contrast, multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) offers the possibility of reconstructing rich details by combining signal information from multiple shifted images. This key advantage, along with the increasing popularity of burst photography, have made MFSR an important problem for real-world applications. We propose a novel architecture for the burst super-resolution task. Our network takes multiple noisy RAW images as input, and generates a denoised, super-resolved RGB image as output. This is achieved by explicitly aligning deep embeddings of the input frames using pixel-wise optical flow. The information from all frames are then adaptively merged using an attention-based fusion module. In order to enable training and evaluation on real-world data, we additionally introduce the BurstSR dataset, consisting of smartphone bursts and high-resolution DSLR ground-truth. We perform comprehensive experimental analysis, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
Transferable Semantic Augmentation for Domain Adaptation
Authors: Mixue Xie, Kaixiong Gong, Chi Harold Liu, Yulin Wang, Wei Li Shuang Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Domain adaptation has been widely explored by transferring the knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. Most existing domain adaptation algorithms attend to adapting feature representations across two domains with the guidance of a shared source-supervised classifier. However, such classifier limits the generalization ability towards unlabeled target recognition. To remedy this, we propose a Transferable Semantic Augmentation (TSA) approach to enhance the classifier adaptation ability through implicitly generating source features towards target semantics. Specifically, TSA is inspired by the fact that deep feature transformation towards a certain direction can be represented as meaningful semantic altering in the original input space. Thus, source features can be augmented to effectively equip with target semantics to train a more transferable classifier. To achieve this, for each class, we first use the inter-domain feature mean difference and target intra-class feature covariance to construct a multivariate normal distribution. Then we augment source features with random directions sampled from the distribution class-wisely. Interestingly, such source augmentation is implicitly implemented through an expected transferable cross-entropy loss over the augmented source distribution, where an upper bound of the expected loss is derived and minimized, introducing negligible computational overhead. As a light-weight and general technique, TSA can be easily plugged into various domain adaptation methods, bringing remarkable improvements. Comprehensive experiments on cross-domain benchmarks validate the efficacy of TSA.
Patchwise Generative ConvNet: Training Energy-Based Models From a Single Natural Image for Internal Learning
Authors: Jianwen Xie, Ping Li Zilong Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Exploiting internal statistics of a single natural image has long been recognized as a significant research paradigm where the goal is to learn the distribution of patches within the image without relying on external training data. Different from prior works that model such distributions implicitly with a top-down latent variable model (i.e., generator), in this work, we propose to explicitly represent the statistical distribution within a single natural image by using an energy-based generative framework, where a pyramid of energy functions parameterized by bottom-up deep neural networks, are used to capture the distributions of patches at different resolutions. Meanwhile, a coarse-to-fine sequential training and sampling strategy is presented to train the model efficiently. Besides learning to generate random samples from white noise, the model can learn in parallel to recover a real image from its incomplete version, which can improve the descriptive power of the learned models. The proposed model not only is simple and natural in that it does not require auxiliary models (e.g., discriminators) to assist the training, but also unifies internal statistics learning and image generation in a single framework. Qualitative results are presented on various image generation tasks, including super-resolution, image editing, harmonization, etc. The evaluation and user studies demonstrate the superior quality of our results.
Clusformer: A Transformer Based Clustering Approach to Unsupervised Large-Scale Face and Visual Landmark Recognition
Authors: Duc Toan Bui, Chi Nhan Duong, Tien D. Bui, Khoa Luu Xuan-Bac Nguyen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The research in automatic unsupervised visual clustering has received considerable attention over the last couple years. It aims at explaining distributions of unlabeled visual images by clustering them via a parameterized model of appearance. Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) have recently been one of the most popular clustering methods. However, it has reached some limitations. Firstly, it is quite sensitive to hard or noisy samples. Secondly, it is hard to investigate with various deep network models due to its computational training time. Finally, it is hard to design an end-to-end training model between the deep feature extraction and GCN clustering modeling. This work therefore presents the Clusformer, a simple but new perspective of Transformer based approach, to automatic visual clustering via its unsupervised attention mechanism. The proposed method is able to robustly deal with noisy or hard samples. It is also flexible and effective to collaborate with different deep network models with various model sizes in an end-to-end framework. The proposed method is evaluated on two popular large-scale visual databases, i.e. Google Landmark and MS-Celeb-1M face database, and outperforms prior unsupervised clustering methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Clusformer
No Frame Left Behind: Full Video Action Recognition
Authors: Silvia L. Pintea, Fatemeh Karimi Nejadasl, Olaf Booij, Jan C. van Gemert Xin Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Not all video frames are equally informative for recognizing an action. It is computationally infeasible to train deep networks on all video frames when actions develop over hundreds of frames. A common heuristic is uniformly sampling a small number of video frames and using these to recognize the action. Instead, here we propose full video action recognition and consider all video frames. To make this computational tractable, we first cluster all frame activations along the temporal dimension based on their similarity with respect to the classification task, and then temporally aggregate the frames in the clusters into a smaller number of representations. Our method is end-to-end trainable and computationally efficient as it relies on temporally localized clustering in combination with fast Hamming distances in feature space. We evaluate on UCF101, HMDB51, Breakfast, and Something-Something V1 and V2, where we compare favorably to existing heuristic frame sampling methods.
ColorRL: Reinforced Coloring for End-to-End Instance Segmentation
Authors: Nguyen Tuan Khoa, Tran Minh Quan, Won-Ki Jeong Tran Anh Tuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Instance segmentation, the task of identifying and separating each individual object of interest in the image, is one of the actively studied research topics in computer vision. Although many feed-forward networks produce high-quality binary segmentation on different types of images, their final result heavily relies on the post-processing step, which separates instances from the binary mask. In comparison, the existing iterative methods extract a single object at a time using discriminative knowledge-based properties (e.g., shapes, boundaries, etc.) without relying on post-processing. However, they do not scale well with a large number of objects. To exploit the advantages of conventional sequential segmentation methods without impairing the scalability, we propose a novel iterative deep reinforcement learning agent that learns how to differentiate multiple objects in parallel. By constructing a relational graph between pixels, we design a reward function that encourages separating pixels of different objects and grouping pixels that belong to the same instance. We demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently perform instance segmentation of many objects without heavy post-processing.
Compatibility-Aware Heterogeneous Visual Search
Authors: Hao Zhou, Shuo Yang, Yuanjun Xiong, Wei Xia, Zhuowen Tu, Stefano Soatto Rahul Duggal
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle the problem of visual search under resource constraints. Existing systems use the same embedding model to compute representations (embeddings) for the query and gallery images. Such systems inherently face a hard accuracy-efficiency trade-off: the embedding model needs to be large enough to ensure high accuracy, yet small enough to enable query-embedding computation on resource-constrained platforms. This trade-off could be mitigated if gallery embeddings are generated from a large model and query embeddings are extracted using a compact model. The key to building such a system is to ensure representation compatibility between the query and gallery models. In this paper, we address two forms of compatibility: One enforced by modifying the parameters of each model that computes the embeddings. The other by modifying the architectures that compute the embeddings, leading to compatibility-aware neural architecture search (CMP-NAS). We test CMP-NAS on challenging retrieval tasks for fashion images (DeepFashion2), and face images (IJB-C). Compared to ordinary (homogeneous) visual search using the largest embedding model (paragon), CMP-NAS achieves 80-fold and 23-fold cost reduction while maintaining accuracy within 0.3% and 1.6% of the paragon on DeepFashion2 and IJB-C respectively.
WOAD: Weakly Supervised Online Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos
Authors: Yingbo Zhou, Ran Xu, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong Mingfei Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Online action detection in untrimmed videos aims to identify an action as it happens, which makes it very important for real-time applications. Previous methods rely on tedious annotations of temporal action boundaries for training, which hinders the scalability of online action detection systems. We propose WOAD, a weakly supervised framework that can be trained using only video-class labels. WOAD contains two jointly-trained modules, i.e., temporal proposal generator (TPG) and online action recognizer (OAR). Supervised by video-class labels, TPG works offline and targets at accurately mining pseudo frame-level labels for OAR. With the supervisory signals from TPG, OAR learns to conduct action detection in an online fashion. Experimental results on THUMOS'14, ActivityNet1.2 and ActivityNet1.3 show that our weakly-supervised method largely outperforms weakly-supervised baselines and achieves comparable performance to the previous strongly-supervised methods. Beyond that, WOAD is flexible to leverage strong supervision when it is available. When strongly supervised, our method obtains the state-of-the-art results in the tasks of both online per-frame action recognition and online detection of action start.
Deep Dual Consecutive Network for Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Haoming Chen, Runyang Feng, Shuang Wu, Shouling Ji, Bailin Yang, Xun Wang Zhenguang Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-frame human pose estimation in complicated situations is challenging. Although state-of-the-art human joints detectors have demonstrated remarkable results for static images, their performances come short when we apply these models to video sequences. Prevalent shortcomings include the failure to handle motion blur, video defocus, or pose occlusions, arising from the inability in capturing the temporal dependency among video frames. On the other hand, directly employing conventional recurrent neural networks incurs empirical difficulties in modeling spatial contexts, especially for dealing with pose occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-frame human pose estimation framework, leveraging abundant temporal cues between video frames to facilitate keypoint detection. Three modular components are designed in our framework. A Pose Temporal Merger encodes keypoint spatiotemporal context to generate effective searching scopes while a Pose Residual Fusion module computes weighted pose residuals in dual directions. These are then processed via our Pose Correction Network for efficient refining of pose estimations. Our method ranks No.1 in the Multi-frame Person Pose Estimation Challenge on the large-scale benchmark datasets PoseTrack2017 and PoseTrack2018. We have released our code, hoping to inspire future research.