mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Through Fog High-Resolution Imaging Using Millimeter Wave Radar
Authors: Sohrab Madani,  Suraj Jog,  Saurabh Gupta,  Haitham Hassanieh Junfeng Guan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper demonstrates high-resolution imaging using millimeter Wave (mmWave) radars that can function even in dense fog. We leverage the fact that mmWave signals have favorable propagation characteristics in low visibility conditions, unlike optical sensors like cameras and LiDARs which cannot penetrate through dense fog. Millimeter-wave radars, however, suffer from very low resolution, specularity, and noise artifacts. We introduce HawkEye, a system that leverages a cGAN architecture to recover high-frequency shapes from raw low-resolution mmWave heat-maps. We propose a novel design that addresses challenges specific to the structure and nature of the radar signals involved. We also develop a data synthesizer to aid with large-scale dataset generation for training. We implement our system on a custom-built mmWave radar platform and demonstrate performance improvement over both standard mmWave radars and other competitive baselines.
Self-Supervised Learning of Video-Induced Visual Invariances
Authors: Josip Djolonga,  Marvin Ritter,  Aravindh Mahendran,  Neil Houlsby,  Sylvain Gelly,  Mario Lucic Michael Tschannen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a general framework for self-supervised learning of transferable visual representations based on Video-Induced Visual Invariances (VIVI). We consider the implicit hierarchy present in the videos and make use of (i) frame-level invariances (e.g. stability to color and contrast perturbations), (ii) shot/clip-level invariances (e.g. robustness to changes in object orientation and lighting conditions), and (iii) video-level invariances (semantic relationships of scenes across shots/clips), to define a holistic self-supervised loss. Training models using different variants of the proposed framework on videos from the YouTube-8M (YT8M) data set, we obtain state-of-the-art self-supervised transfer learning results on the 19 diverse downstream tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), using only 1000 labels per task. We then show how to co-train our models jointly with labeled images, outperforming an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 by 0.8 points with 10x fewer labeled images, as well as the previous best supervised model by 3.7 points using the full ImageNet data set.
Butterfly Transform: An Efficient FFT Based Neural Architecture Design
Authors: Anish Prabhu,  Ali Farhadi,  Mohammad Rastegari Keivan Alizadeh vahid
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we show that extending the butterfly operations from the FFT algorithm to a general Butterfly Transform (BFT) can be beneficial in building an efficient block structure for CNN designs. Pointwise convolutions, which we refer to as channel fusions, are the main computational bottleneck in the state-of-the-art efficient CNNs (e.g. MobileNets). We introduce a set of criterion for channel fusion, and prove that BFT yields an asymptotically optimal FLOP count with respect to these criteria. By replacing pointwise convolutions with BFT, we reduce the computational complexity of these layers from O(n^2) to O(n log n) with respect to the number of channels. Our experimental evaluations show that our method results in significant accuracy gains across a wide range of network architectures, especially at low FLOP ranges. For example, BFT results in up to a 6.75% absolute Top-1 improvement for MobileNetV1, 4.4 % for ShuffleNet V2 and 5.4% for MobileNetV3 on ImageNet under a similar number of FLOPS. Notably, ShuffleNet-V2+BFT outperforms state-of-the-art architecture search methods MNasNet, FBNet and MobilenetV3 in the low FLOP regime.
Cross-Domain Detection via Graph-Induced Prototype Alignment
Authors: Hang Wang,  Bingbing Ni,  Qi Tian,  Wenjun Zhang Minghao Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Applying the knowledge of an object detector trained on a specific domain directly onto a new domain is risky, as the gap between two domains can severely degrade model's performance. Furthermore, since different instances commonly embody distinct modal information in object detection scenario, the feature alignment of source and target domain is hard to be realized. To mitigate these problems, we propose a Graph-induced Prototype Alignment (GPA) framework to seek for category-level domain alignment via elaborate prototype representations. In the nutshell, more precise instance-level features are obtained through graph-based information propagation among region proposals, and, on such basis, the prototype representation of each class is derived for category-level domain alignment. In addition, in order to alleviate the negative effect of class-imbalance on domain adaptation, we design a Class-reweighted Contrastive Loss to harmonize the adaptation training process. Combining with Faster R-CNN, the proposed framework conducts feature alignment in a two-stage manner. Comprehensive results on various cross-domain detection tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods with a remarkable margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChrisAllenMing/GPA-detection.
What Makes Training Multi-Modal Classification Networks Hard?
Authors: Du Tran,  Matt Feiszli Weiyao Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Consider end-to-end training of a multi-modal vs. a uni-modal network on a task with multiple input modalities: the multi-modal network receives more information, so it should match or outperform its uni-modal counterpart. In our experiments, however, we observe the opposite: the best uni-modal network can outperform the multi-modal network. This observation is consistent across different combinations of modalities and on different tasks and benchmarks for video classifications. This paper identifies two main causes for this performance drop: first, multi-modal networks are often prone to overfitting due to increased capacity. Second, different modalities overfit and generalize at different rates, so training them jointly with a single optimization strategy is sub-optimal. We address these two problems with a technique we call Gradient-Blending, which computes an optimal blending of modalities based on their overfitting behaviors. We demonstrate that Gradient Blending outperforms widely-used baselines for avoiding overfitting and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on various tasks including human action recognition, ego-centric action recognition, and acoustic event detection.
Sparse Layered Graphs for Multi-Object Segmentation
Authors: Anders N. Christensen,  Vedrana A. Dahl,  Anders B. Dahl Niels Jeppesen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce the novel concept of a Sparse Layered Graph (SLG) for s-t graph cut segmentation of image data. The concept is based on the widely used Ishikawa layered technique for multi-object segmentation, which allows explicit object interactions, such as containment and exclusion with margins. However, the spatial complexity of the Ishikawa technique limits its use for many segmentation problems. To solve this issue, we formulate a general method for adding containment and exclusion interaction constraints to layered graphs. Given some prior knowledge, we can create a SLG, which is often orders of magnitude smaller than traditional Ishikawa graphs, with identical segmentation results. This allows us to solve many problems that could previously not be solved using general graph cut algorithms. We then propose three algorithms for further reducing the spatial complexity of SLGs, by using ordered multi-column graphs. In our experiments, we show that SLGs, and in particular ordered multi-column SLGs, can produce high-quality segmentation results using extremely simple data terms. We also show the scalability of ordered multi-column SLGs, by segmenting a high-resolution volume with several hundred interacting objects.
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Xiaopeng Hong,  Xinyuan Chang,  Songlin Dong,  Xing Wei,  Yihong Gong Xiaoyu Tao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The ability to incrementally learn new classes is crucial to the development of real-world artificial intelligence systems. In this paper, we focus on a challenging but practical few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) problem. FSCIL requires CNN models to incrementally learn new classes from very few labelled samples, without forgetting the previously learned ones. To address this problem, we represent the knowledge using a neural gas (NG) network, which can learn and preserve the topology of the feature manifold formed by different classes. On this basis, we propose the TOpology-Preserving knowledge InCrementer (TOPIC) framework. TOPIC mitigates the forgetting of the old classes by stabilizing NG's topology and improves the representation learning for few-shot new classes by growing and adapting NG to new training samples. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art class-incremental learning methods on CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200 datasets.
Exploring Bottom-Up and Top-Down Cues With Attentive Learning for Webly Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Qingyi Tao,  Guosheng Lin,  Jianfei Cai Zhonghua Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Fully supervised object detection has achieved great success in recent years. However, abundant bounding boxes annotations are needed for training a detector for novel classes. To reduce the human labeling effort, we propose a novel webly supervised object detection (WebSOD) method for novel classes which only requires the web images without further annotations. Our proposed method combines bottom-up and top-down cues for novel class detection. Within our approach, we introduce a bottom-up mechanism based on the well-trained fully supervised object detector (i.e. Faster RCNN) as an object region estimator for web images by recognizing the common objectiveness shared by base and novel classes. With the estimated regions on the web images, we then utilize the top-down attention cues as the guidance for region classification. Furthermore, we propose a residual feature refinement (RFR) block to tackle the domain mismatch between web domain and the target domain. We demonstrate our proposed method on PASCAL VOC dataset with three different novel/base splits. Without any target-domain novel-class images and annotations, our proposed webly supervised object detection model is able to achieve promising performance for novel classes. Moreover, we also conduct transfer learning experiments on large scale ILSVRC 2013 detection dataset and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
SpineNet: Learning Scale-Permuted Backbone for Recognition and Localization
Authors: Tsung-Yi Lin,  Pengchong Jin,  Golnaz Ghiasi,  Mingxing Tan,  Yin Cui,  Quoc V. Le,  Xiaodan Song Xianzhi Du
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Convolutional neural networks typically encode an input image into a series of intermediate features with decreasing resolutions. While this structure is suited to classification tasks, it does not perform well for tasks requiring simultaneous recognition and localization (e.g., object detection). The encoder-decoder architectures are proposed to resolve this by applying a decoder network onto a backbone model designed for classification tasks. In this paper, we argue encoder-decoder architecture is ineffective in generating strong multi-scale features because of the scale-decreased backbone. We propose SpineNet, a backbone with scale-permuted intermediate features and cross-scale connections that is learned on an object detection task by Neural Architecture Search. Using similar building blocks, SpineNet models outperform ResNet-FPN models by 3%+ AP at various scales while using 10-20% fewer FLOPs. In particular, SpineNet-190 achieves 52.1% AP on COCO, attaining the new state-of-the-art performance for single model object detection without test-time augmentation. SpineNet can transfer to classification tasks, achieving 5% top-1 accuracy improvement on a challenging iNaturalist fine-grained dataset. Code is at: https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection.
LatentFusion: End-to-End Differentiable Reconstruction and Rendering for Unseen Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Arsalan Mousavian,  Yu Xiang,  Dieter Fox Keunhong Park
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Current 6D object pose estimation methods usually require a 3D model for each object. These methods also require additional training in order to incorporate new objects. As a result, they are difficult to scale to a large number of objects and cannot be directly applied to unseen objects. We propose a novel framework for 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. We present a network that reconstructs a latent 3D representation of an object using a small number of reference views at inference time. Our network is able to render the latent 3D representation from arbitrary views. Using this neural renderer, we directly optimize for pose given an input image. By training our network with a large number of 3D shapes for reconstruction and rendering, our network generalizes well to unseen objects. We present a new dataset for unseen object pose estimation--MOPED. We evaluate the performance of our method for unseen object pose estimation on MOPED as well as the ModelNet and LINEMOD datasets. Our method performs competitively to supervised methods that are trained on those objects. Code and data will be available at https://keunhong.com/publications/latentfusion/
Offset Bin Classification Network for Accurate Object Detection
Authors: Hongliang Li,  Qingbo Wu,  Hengcan Shi Heqian Qiu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Object detection combines object classification and object localization problems. Most existing object detection methods usually locate objects by leveraging regression networks trained with Smooth L1 loss function to predict offsets between candidate boxes and objects. However, this loss function applies the same penalties on different samples with large errors, which results in suboptimal regression networks and inaccurate offsets. In this paper, we propose an offset bin classification network optimized with cross entropy loss to predict more accurate offsets. It not only provides different penalties for different samples but also avoids the gradient explosion problem caused by the samples with large errors. Specifically, we discretize the continuous offset into a number of bins, and predict the probability of each offset bin. Furthermore, we propose an expectation-based offset prediction and a hierarchical focusing method to improve the prediction precision. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our method outperforms the baseline methods by a large margin.
Generating Accurate Pseudo-Labels in Semi-Supervised Learning and Avoiding Overconfident Predictions via Hermite Polynomial Activations
Authors: Songwong Tasneeyapant,  Abhay Venkatesh,  Sathya N. Ravi,  Vikas Singh Vishnu Suresh Lokhande
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) are among the most widely used activation function in a broad variety of tasks in vision. Recent theoretical results suggest that despite their excellent practical performance, in various cases, a substitution with basis expansions (e.g., polynomials) can yield significant benefits from both the optimization and generalization perspective. Unfortunately, the existing results remain limited to networks with a couple of layers, and the practical viability of these results is not yet known. Motivated by some of these results, we explore the use of Hermite polynomial expansions as a substitute for ReLUs in deep networks. While our experiments with supervised learning do not provide a clear verdict, we find that this strategy offers considerable benefits in semi-supervised learning (SSL) / transductive learning settings. We carefully develop this idea and show how the use of Hermite polynomials based activations can yield improvements in pseudo-label accuracies and sizable financial savings (due to concurrent runtime benefits). Further, we show via theoretical analysis, that the networks (with Hermite activations) offer robustness to noise and other attractive mathematical properties.
MiLeNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Mixed-Level Reformulation
Authors: Haishan Ye,  Li Shen,  Tong Zhang Chaoyang He
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many recently proposed methods for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can be formulated as bilevel optimization. For efficient implementation, its solution requires approximations of second-order methods. In this paper, we demonstrate that gradient errors caused by such approximations lead to suboptimality, in the sense that the optimization procedure fails to converge to a (locally) optimal solution. To remedy this, this paper proposes MiLeNAS, a mixed-level reformulation for NAS that can be optimized efficiently and reliably. It is shown that even when using a simple first-order method on the mixed-level formulation, MiLeNAS can achieve a lower validation error for NAS problems. Consequently, architectures obtained by our method achieve consistently higher accuracies than those obtained from bilevel optimization. Moreover, MiLeNAS proposes a framework beyond DARTS. It is upgraded via model size-based search and early stopping strategies to complete the search process in around 5 hours. Extensive experiments within the convolutional architecture search space validate the effectiveness of our approach.
G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection
Authors: Chen Zhao,  David S. Rojas,  Ali Thabet,  Bernard Ghanem Mengmeng Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Temporal action detection is a fundamental yet challenging task in video understanding. Video context is a critical cue to effectively detect actions, but current works mainly focus on temporal context, while neglecting semantic context as well as other important context properties. In this work, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN) model to adaptively incorporate multi-level semantic context into video features and cast temporal action detection as a sub-graph localization problem. Specifically, we formulate video snippets as graph nodes, snippet-snippet correlations as edges, and actions associated with context as target sub-graphs. With graph convolution as the basic operation, we design a GCN block called GCNeXt, which learns the features of each node by aggregating its context and dynamically updates the edges in the graph. To localize each sub-graph, we also design an SGAlign layer to embed each sub-graph into the Euclidean space. Extensive experiments show that G-TAD is capable of finding effective video context without extra supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two detection benchmarks. On ActivityNet-1.3 it obtains an average mAP of 34.09%; on THUMOS14 it reaches 51.6% at IoU@0.5 when combined with a proposal processing method. The code has been made available at https://github.com/frostinassiky/gtad.
Learning Saliency Propagation for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Xin Wang,  Jianbin Jiao,  Trevor Darrell,  Fisher Yu Yanzhao Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Instance segmentation is a challenging task for both modeling and annotation. Due to the high annotation cost, modeling becomes more difficult because of the limited amount of supervision. We aim to improve the accuracy of the existing instance segmentation models by utilizing a large amount of detection supervision. We propose ShapeProp, which learns to activate the salient regions within the object detection and propagate the areas to the whole instance through an iterative learnable message passing module. ShapeProp can benefit from more bounding box supervision to locate the instances more accurately and utilize the feature activations from the larger number of instances to achieve more accurate segmentation. We extensively evaluate ShapeProp on three datasets (MS COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100k) with different supervision setups based on both two-stage (Mask R-CNN) and single-stage (RetinaMask) models. The results show our method establishes new states of the art for semi-supervised instance segmentation.
Dataless Model Selection With the Deep Frame Potential
Authors: Simon Lucey Calvin Murdock
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Choosing a deep neural network architecture is a fundamental problem in applications that require balancing performance and parameter efficiency. Standard approaches rely on ad-hoc engineering or computationally expensive validation on a specific dataset. We instead attempt to quantify networks by their intrinsic capacity for unique and robust representations, enabling efficient architecture comparisons without requiring any data. Building upon theoretical connections between deep learning and sparse approximation, we propose the deep frame potential: a measure of coherence that is approximately related to representation stability but has minimizers that depend only on network structure. This provides a framework for jointly quantifying the contributions of architectural hyper-parameters such as depth, width, and skip connections. We validate its use as a criterion for model selection and demonstrate correlation with generalization error on a variety of common residual and densely connected network architectures.
MUXConv: Information Multiplexing in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Kalyanmoy Deb,  Vishnu Naresh Boddeti Zhichao Lu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Convolutional neural networks have witnessed remarkable improvements in computational efficiency in recent years. A key driving force has been the idea of trading-off model expressivity and efficiency through a combination of 1x1 and depth-wise separable convolutions in lieu of a standard convolutional layer. The price of the efficiency, however, is the sub-optimal flow of information across space and channels in the network. To overcome this limitation, we present MUXConv, a layer that is designed to increase the flow of information by progressively multiplexing channel and spatial information in the network, while mitigating computational complexity. Furthermore, to demonstrate the effectiveness of MUXConv, we integrate it within an efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to search for the optimal model hyper-parameters while simultaneously optimizing accuracy, compactness, and computational efficiency. On ImageNet, the resulting models, dubbed MUXNets, match the performance (75.3% top-1 accuracy) and multiply-add operations (218M) of MobileNetV3 while being 1.6x more compact, and outperform other mobile models in all the three criteria. MUXNet also performs well under transfer learning and when adapted to object detection. On the ChestX-Ray 14 benchmark, its accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art while being 3.3x more compact and 14x more efficient. Similarly, detection on PASCAL VOC 2007 is 1.2% more accurate, 28% faster and 6% more compact compared to MobileNetV2.
Learning to Segment 3D Point Clouds in 2D Image Space
Authors: Xinming Huang,  Ziming Zhang Yecheng Lyu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In contrast to the literature where local patterns in 3D point clouds are captured by customized convolutional operators, in this paper we study the problem of how to effectively and efficiently project such point clouds into a 2D image space so that traditional 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as U-Net can be applied for segmentation. To this end, we are motivated by graph drawing and reformulate it as an integer programming problem to learn the topology-preserving graph-to-grid mapping for each individual point cloud. To accelerate the computation in practice, we further propose a novel hierarchical approximate algorithm. With the help of the Delaunay triangulation for graph construction from point clouds and a multi-scale U-Net for segmentation, we manage to demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on ShapeNet and PartNet, respectively, with significant improvement over the literature. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhang-VISLab.
Interactive Image Segmentation With First Click Attention
Authors: Zhao Zhang,  Lin-Zhuo Chen,  Ming-Ming Cheng,  Shao-Ping Lu Zheng Lin
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the task of interactive image segmentation, users initially click one point to segment the main body of the target object and then provide more points on mislabeled regions iteratively for a precise segmentation. Existing methods treat all interaction points indiscriminately, ignoring the difference between the first click and the remaining ones. In this paper, we demonstrate the critical role of the first click about providing the location and main body information of the target object. A deep framework, named First Click Attention Network (FCA-Net), is proposed to make better use of the first click. In this network, the interactive segmentation result can be much improved with the following benefits: focus invariance, location guidance, and error-tolerant ability. We then put forward a click-based loss function and a structural integrity strategy for better segmentation effect. The visualized segmentation results and sufficient experiments on five datasets demonstrate the importance of the first click and the superiority of our FCA-Net.
Attention Convolutional Binary Neural Tree for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Longyin Wen,  Libo Zhang,  Dawei Du,  Yanjun Wu,  Chen Zhao,  Xianglong Liu,  Feiyue Huang Ruyi Ji
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is an important but challenging task due to high intra-class variances and low inter-class variances caused by deformation, occlusion, illumination, etc. An attention convolutional binary neural tree architecture is presented to address those problems for weakly supervised FGVC. Specifically, we incorporate convolutional operations along edges of the tree structure, and use the routing functions in each node to determine the root-to-leaf computational paths within the tree. The final decision is computed as the summation of the predictions from leaf nodes. The deep convolutional operations learn to capture the representations of objects, and the tree structure characterizes the coarse-to-fine hierarchical feature learning process. In addition, we use the attention transformer module to enforce the network to capture discriminative features. The negative log-likelihood loss is used to train the entire network in an end-to-end fashion by SGD with back-propagation. Several experiments on the CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and Aircraft datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts.
Dynamic Convolution: Attention Over Convolution Kernels
Authors: Xiyang Dai,  Mengchen Liu,  Dongdong Chen,  Lu Yuan,  Zicheng Liu Yinpeng Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) suffer performance degradation as their low computational budgets constrain both the depth (number of convolution layers) and the width (number of channels) of CNNs, resulting in limited representation capability. To address this issue, we present Dynamic Convolution, a new design that increases model complexity without increasing the network depth or width. Instead of using a single convolution kernel per layer, dynamic convolution aggregates multiple parallel convolution kernels dynamically based upon their attentions, which are input dependent. Assembling multiple kernels is not only computationally efficient due to the small kernel size, but also has more representation power since these kernels are aggregated in a non-linear way via attention. By simply using dynamic convolution for the state-of-the-art architecture MobileNetV3-Small, the top-1 accuracy of ImageNet classification is boosted by 2.9% with only 4% additional FLOPs and 2.9 AP gain is achieved on COCO keypoint detection.
Transform and Tell: Entity-Aware News Image Captioning
Authors: Alexander Mathews,  Lexing Xie Alasdair Tran
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose an end-to-end model which generates captions for images embedded in news articles. News images present two key challenges: they rely on real-world knowledge, especially about named entities; and they typically have linguistically rich captions that include uncommon words. We address the first challenge by associating words in the caption with faces and objects in the image, via a multi-modal, multi-head attention mechanism. We tackle the second challenge with a state-of-the-art transformer language model that uses byte-pair-encoding to generate captions as a sequence of word parts. On the GoodNews dataset, our model outperforms the previous state of the art by a factor of four in CIDEr score (13 to 54). This performance gain comes from a unique combination of language models, word representation, image embeddings, face embeddings, object embeddings, and improvements in neural network design. We also introduce the NYTimes800k dataset which is 70% larger than GoodNews, has higher article quality, and includes the locations of images within articles as an additional contextual cue.
MTL-NAS: Task-Agnostic Neural Architecture Search Towards General-Purpose Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Haoping Bai,  Zequn Jie,  Jiayi Ma,  Kui Jia,  Wei Liu Yuan Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose to incorporate neural architecture search (NAS) into general-purpose multi-task learning (GP-MTL). Existing NAS methods typically define different search spaces according to different tasks. In order to adapt to different task combinations (i.e., task sets), we disentangle the GP-MTL networks into single-task backbones (optionally encode the task priors), and a hierarchical and layerwise features sharing/fusing scheme across them. This enables us to design a novel and general task-agnostic search space, which inserts cross-task edges (i.e., feature fusion connections) into fixed single-task network backbones. Moreover, we also propose a novel single-shot gradient-based search algorithm that closes the performance gap between the searched architectures and the final evaluation architecture. This is realized with a minimum entropy regularization on the architecture weights during the search phase, which makes the architecture weights converge to near-discrete values and therefore achieves a single model. As a result, our searched model can be directly used for evaluation without (re-)training from scratch. We perform extensive experiments using different single-task backbones on various task sets, demonstrating the promising performance obtained by exploiting the hierarchical and layerwise features, as well as the desirable generalizability to different i) task sets and ii) single-task backbones. The code of our paper is available at https://github.com/bhpfelix/MTLNAS.
12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning
Authors: Vedanuj Goswami,  Marcus Rohrbach,  Devi Parikh,  Stefan Lee Jiasen Lu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Much of vision-and-language research focuses on a small but diverse set of independent tasks and supporting datasets often studied in isolation; however, the visually-grounded language understanding skills required for success at these tasks overlap significantly. In this work, we investigate these relationships between vision-and-language tasks by developing a large-scale, multi-task model. Our approach culminates in a single model on 12 datasets from four broad categories of task including visual question answering, caption-based image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and multimodal verification. Compared to independently trained single-task models, this represents a reduction from approximately 3 billion parameters to 270 million while simultaneously improving performance by 2.05 points on average across tasks. We use our multi-task framework to perform in-depth analysis of the effect of joint training diverse tasks. Further, we show that finetuning task-specific models from our single multi-task model can lead to further improvements, achieving performance at or above the state-of-the-art.
Disentangling Physical Dynamics From Unknown Factors for Unsupervised Video Prediction
Authors: Nicolas Thome Vincent Le Guen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Leveraging physical knowledge described by partial differential equations (PDEs) is an appealing way to improve unsupervised video forecasting models. Since physics is too restrictive for describing the full visual content of generic video sequences, we introduce PhyDNet, a two-branch deep architecture, which explicitly disentangles PDE dynamics from unknown complementary information. A second contribution is to propose a new recurrent physical cell (PhyCell), inspired from data assimilation techniques, for performing PDE-constrained prediction in latent space. Extensive experiments conducted on four various datasets show the ability of PhyDNet to outperform state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also highlight the important gain brought out by both disentanglement and PDE-constrained prediction. Finally, we show that PhyDNet presents interesting features for dealing with missing data and long-term forecasting.
Gold Seeker: Information Gain From Policy Distributions for Goal-Oriented Vision-and-Langauge Reasoning
Authors: Iman Abbasnejad,  Qi Wu,  Javen Shi,  Anton van den Hengel Ehsan Abbasnejad
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: As Computer Vision moves from passive analysis of pixels to active analysis of semantics, the breadth of information algorithms need to reason over has expanded significantly. One of the key challenges in this vein is the ability to identify the information required to make a decision, and select an action that will recover it. We propose a reinforcement-learning approach that maintains a distribution over its internal information, thus explicitly representing the ambiguity in what it knows, and needs to know, towards achieving its goal. Potential actions are then generated according to this distribution. For each potential action a distribution of the expected outcomes is calculated, and the value of the potential information gain assessed. The action taken is that which maximizes the potential information gain. We demonstrate this approach applied to two vision-and-language problems that have attracted significant recent interest, visual dialog and visual query generation. In both cases the method actively selects actions that will best reduce its internal uncertainty, and outperforms its competitors in achieving the goal of the challenge.
Beyond Short-Term Snippet: Video Relation Detection With Spatio-Temporal Global Context
Authors: Yang Jin,  Kehan Xu,  Guoqiang Gong,  Yadong Mu Chenchen Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Video visual relation detection (VidVRD) aims to describe all interacting objects in a video. Different from relationships in static images, videos contain an addition temporal channel. A majority of existing works divide a video into short segments, predict relationships in each segment, and merge them. Such methods cannot capture relations involving long motions. Predicting the same relationship across neighboring video segments is also inefficient. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel sliding-window scheme to simultaneously predict short-term and long-term relationships. We run windows with different kernel sizes on object tracklets to generate sub-tracklet proposals with different duration, while the computational load is similar to that in segment-based methods. To fully utilize spatial and temporal information in videos, we construct one spatial and one temporal graph and employ Graph Convloutional Network to generate contextual embedding for tracklet proposal compatibility evaluation. We only predict relationships on highly-compatible proposal pairs. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both ImageNet-VidVRD and VidOR dataset across multiple tasks. Especially for ImageNet-VidVRD, we obtain an average of 3% (R@50 from 8.07% to 11.21%) improvement under all evaluation metrics.
Semi-Supervised Semantic Image Segmentation With Self-Correcting Networks
Authors: Arash Vahdat,  Mani Ranjbar,  William G. Macready Mostafa S. Ibrahim
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Building a large image dataset with high-quality object masks for semantic segmentation is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce a principled semi-supervised framework that only use a small set of fully supervised images (having semantic segmentation labels and box labels) and a set of images with only object bounding box labels (we call it the weak-set). Our framework trains the primary segmentation model with the aid of an ancillary model that generates initial segmentation labels for the weak-set and a self-correction module that improves the generated labels during training using the increasingly accurate primary model. We introduce two variants of the self-correction module using either linear or convolutional functions. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscape datasets show that our models trained with a small fully supervised set perform similar to, or better than, models trained with a large fully supervised set while requiring 7x less annotation effort.
BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network With Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Authors: Quan Cui,  Xiu-Shen Wei,  Zhao-Min Chen Boyan Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Our work focuses on tackling the challenging but natural visual recognition task of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy most of the data, while most classes have rarely few samples). In the literature, class re-balancing strategies (e.g., re-weighting and re-sampling) are the prominent and effective methods proposed to alleviate the extreme imbalance for dealing with long-tailed problems. In this paper, we firstly discover that these re-balancing methods achieving satisfactory recognition accuracy owe to that they could significantly promote the classifier learning of deep networks. However, at the same time, they will unexpectedly damage the representative ability of the learned deep features to some extent. Therefore, we propose a unified Bilateral-Branch Network (BBN) to take care of both representation learning and classifier learning simultaneously, where each branch does perform its own duty separately. In particular, our BBN model is further equipped with a novel cumulative learning strategy, which is designed to first learn the universal patterns and then pay attention to the tail data gradually. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including the large-scale iNaturalist ones, justify that the proposed BBN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, validation experiments can demonstrate both our preliminary discovery and effectiveness of tailored designs in BBN for long-tailed problems. Our method won the first place in the iNaturalist 2019 large scale species classification competition, and our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/Megvii-Nanjing/BBN.
Sketch Less for More: On-the-Fly Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Authors: Yongxin Yang,  Timothy M. Hospedales,  Tao Xiang,  Yi-Zhe Song Ayan Kumar Bhunia
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses the problem of retrieving a particular photo instance given a user's query sketch. Its widespread applicability is however hindered by the fact that drawing a sketch takes time, and most people struggle to draw a complete and faithful sketch. In this paper, we reformulate the conventional FG-SBIR framework to tackle these challenges, with the ultimate goal of retrieving the target photo with the least number of strokes possible. We further propose an on-the-fly design that starts retrieving as soon as the user starts drawing. To accomplish this, we devise a reinforcement learning based cross-modal retrieval framework that directly optimizes rank of the ground-truth photo over a complete sketch drawing episode. Additionally, we introduce a novel reward scheme that circumvents the problems related to irrelevant sketch strokes, and thus provides us with a more consistent rank list during the retrieval. We achieve superior early-retrieval efficiency over state-of-the-art methods and alternative baselines on two publicly available fine-grained sketch retrieval datasets.
STINet: Spatio-Temporal-Interactive Network for Pedestrian Detection and Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Jiyang Gao,  Junhua Mao,  Yukai Liu,  Dragomir Anguelov,  Congcong Li Zhishuai Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians and predicting future trajectories for them are critical tasks for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving. Previous methods either treat the detection and prediction as separate tasks or simply add a trajectory regression head on top of a detector. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end two-stage network: Spatio-Temporal-Interactive Network (STINet). In addition to 3D geometry modeling of pedestrians, we model the temporal information for each of the pedestrians. To do so, our method predicts both current and past locations in the first stage, so that each pedestrian can be linked across frames and the comprehensive spatio-temporal information can be captured in the second stage. Also, we model the interaction among objects with an interaction graph, to gather the information among the neighboring objects. Comprehensive experiments on the Lyft Dataset and the recently released large-scale Waymo Open Dataset for both object detection and future trajectory prediction validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For the Waymo Open Dataset, we achieve a bird-eyes-view (BEV) detection AP of 80.73 and trajectory prediction average displacement error (ADE) of 33.67cm for pedestrians, which establish the state-of-the-art for both tasks.
Intelligent Home 3D: Automatic 3D-House Design From Linguistic Descriptions Only
Authors: Qi Wu,  Rui Tang,  Yuhan Wang,  Shuai Wang,  Mingkui Tan Qi Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Home design is a complex task that normally requires architects to finish with their professional skills and tools. It will be fascinating that if one can produce a house plan intuitively without knowing much knowledge about home design and experience of using complex designing tools, for example, via natural language. In this paper, we formulate it as a language conditioned visual content generation problem that is further divided into a floor plan generation and an interior texture (such as floor and wall) synthesis task. The only control signal of the generation process is the linguistic expression given by users that describe the house details. To this end, we propose a House Plan Generative Model (HPGM) that first translates the language input to a structural graph representation and then predicts the layout of rooms with a Graph Conditioned Layout Prediction Network (GC-LPN) and generates the interior texture with a Language Conditioned Texture GAN (LCT-GAN). With some post-processing, the final product of this task is a 3D house model. To train and evaluate our model, we build the first Text--to--3D House Model dataset, which will be released at: https:// hidden-link-for-submission.
Mask Encoding for Single Shot Instance Segmentation
Authors: Zhi Tian,  Chunhua Shen,  Mingyu You,  Youliang Yan Rufeng Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: To date, instance segmentation is dominated by two-stage methods, as pioneered by Mask R-CNN. In contrast, one-stage alternatives cannot compete with Mask R-CNN in mask AP, mainly due to the difficulty of compactly representing masks, making the design of one-stage methods very challenging. In this work, we propose a simple single-shot instance segmentation framework, termed mask encoding based instance segmentation (MEInst). Instead of predicting the two-dimensional mask directly, MEInst distills it into a compact and fixed-dimensional representation vector, which allows the instance segmentation task to be incorporated into one-stage bounding-box detectors and results in a simple yet efficient instance segmentation framework. The proposed one-stage MEInst achieves 36.4% in mask AP with single-model (ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone) and single-scale testing on the MS-COCO benchmark. We show that the much simpler and flexible one-stage instance segmentation method, can also achieve competitive performance. This framework can be easily adapted for other instance-level recognition tasks. Code is available at: git.io/AdelaiDet