mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Extreme Low-Light Environment-Driven Image Denoising Over Permanently Shadowed Lunar Regions With a Physical Noise Model
Authors: Valentin Bickel, Ignacio G. Lopez-Francos, Loveneesh Rana Ben Moseley
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, learning-based approaches have achieved impressive results in the field of low-light image denoising. Some state of the art approaches employ a rich physical model to generate realistic training data. However, the performance of these approaches ultimately depends on the realism of the physical model, and many works only concentrate on everyday photography. In this work we present a denoising approach for extremely low-light images of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) on the lunar surface, taken by the Narrow Angle Camera on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite. Our approach extends existing learning-based approaches by combining a physical noise model of the camera with real noise samples and training image scene selection based on 3D ray tracing to generate realistic training data. We also condition our denoising model on the camera's environmental metadata at the time of image capture (such as the camera's temperature and age), showing that this improves performance. Our quantitative and qualitative results show that our method strongly outperforms the existing calibration routine for the camera and other baselines. Our results could significantly impact lunar science and exploration, for example by aiding the identification of surface water-ice and reducing uncertainty in rover and human traverse planning into PSRs.
Unsupervised Discovery of the Long-Tail in Instance Segmentation Using Hierarchical Self-Supervision
Authors: Mehmet Giray Ogut, Shai Limonchik, Serena Yeung Zhenzhen Weng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Instance segmentation is an active topic in computer vision that is usually solved by using supervised learning approaches over very large datasets composed of object level masks. Obtaining such a dataset for any new domain can be very expensive and time-consuming. In addition, models trained on certain annotated categories do not generalize well to unseen objects. The goal of this paper is to propose a method that can perform unsupervised discovery of long-tail categories in instance segmentation, through learning instance embeddings of masked regions. Leveraging rich relationship and hierarchical structure between objects in the images, we propose self-supervised losses for learning mask embeddings. Trained on COCO dataset without additional annotations of the long-tail objects, our model is able to discover novel and more fine-grained objects than the common categories in COCO. We show that the model achieves competitive quantitative results on LVIS as compared to the supervised and partially supervised methods.
How Privacy-Preserving Are Line Clouds? Recovering Scene Details From 3D Lines
Authors: Fredrik Kahl, Torsten Sattler Kunal Chelani
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Visual localization is the problem of estimating the camera pose of a given image with respect to a known scene. Visual localization algorithms are a fundamental building block in advanced computer vision applications, including Mixed and Virtual Reality systems. Many algorithms used in practice represent the scene through a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) point cloud, where each 3D point is associated with one or more local image features. Establishing 2D-3D matches between features in a query image and the 3D points through descriptor matching Visual localization is the problem of estimating the camera pose of a given image with respect to a known scene. Visual localization algorithms are a fundamental building block in advanced computer vision applications, including Mixed and Virtual Reality systems. Many algorithms used in practice represent the scene through a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) point cloud and use 2D-3D matches between a query image and the 3D points for camera pose estimation. As recently shown, image details can be accurately recovered from SfM point clouds by translating renderings of the sparse point clouds to images. To address the resulting potential privacy risks for user-generated content, it was recently proposed to lift point clouds to line clouds by replacing 3D points by randomly oriented 3D lines passing through these points. The resulting representation is unintelligible to humans and effectively prevents point cloud-to-image translation. This paper shows that a significant amount of information about the 3D scene geometry is preserved in these line clouds, allowing us to (approximately) recover the 3D point positions and thus to (approximately) recover image content. Our approach is based on the observation that the closest points between lines can yield a good approximation to the original 3D points. Code is available at \href https://github.com/kunalchelani/Line2Point  https://github.com/kunalchelani/Line2Point .
Multi-View 3D Reconstruction of a Texture-Less Smooth Surface of Unknown Generic Reflectance
Authors: Hongdong Li, Yuta Asano, Yinqiang Zheng, Imari Sato Ziang Cheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recovering the 3D geometry of a purely texture-less object with generally unknown surface reflectance (e.g. nonLambertian) is regarded as a challenging task in multiview reconstruction. The major obstacle revolves around establishing cross-view correspondences where photometric constancy is violated. This paper proposes a simple and practical solution to overcome this challenge based on a co-located camera-light scanner device. Unlike existing solutions, we do not explicitly solve for correspondence. Instead, we argue the problem is generally well-posed by multi-view geometrical and photometric constraints, and can be solved from a small number of input views. We formulate the reconstruction task as a joint energy minimization over the surface geometry and reflectance. Despite this energy is highly non-convex, we develop an optimization algorithm that robustly recovers globally optimal shape and reflectance even from a random initialization. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data have validated our method, and possible future extensions are discussed
Rectification-Based Knowledge Retention for Continual Learning
Authors: Pratik Mazumder, Piyush Rai, Vinay P. Namboodiri Pravendra Singh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained in an incremental learning setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address the task incremental learning problem, which involves training a model on new tasks that arrive in an incremental manner. The task incremental learning problem becomes even more challenging when the test set contains classes that are not part of the train set, i.e., a task incremental generalized zero-shot learning problem. Our approach can be used in both the zero-shot and non zero-shot task incremental learning settings. Our proposed method uses weight rectifications and affine transformations in order to adapt the model to different tasks that arrive sequentially. Specifically, we adapt the network weights to work for new tasks by "rectifying" the weights learned from the previous task. We learn these weight rectifications using very few parameters. We additionally learn affine transformations on the outputs generated by the network in order to better adapt them for the new task. We perform experiments on several datasets in both zero-shot and non zero-shot task incremental learning settings and empirically show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results. Specifically, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art non zero-shot task incremental learning method by over 5% on the CIFAR-100 dataset. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art task incremental generalized zero-shot learning method by absolute margins of 6.91% and 6.33% for the AWA1 and CUB datasets, respectively. We validate our approach using various ablation studies.
Scale-Aware Automatic Augmentation for Object Detection
Authors: Yanwei Li, Tao Kong, Lu Qi, Ruihang Chu, Lei Li, Jiaya Jia Yukang Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose Scale-aware AutoAug to learn data augmentation policies for object detection. We define a new scale-aware search space, where both image- and box-level augmentations are designed for maintaining scale invariance. Upon this search space, we propose a new search metric, termed Pareto Scale Balance, to facilitate search with high efficiency. In experiments, Scale-aware AutoAug yields significant and consistent improvement on various object detectors (e.g., RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and FCOS), even compared with strong multi-scale training baselines. Our searched augmentation policies are transferable to other datasets and box-level tasks beyond object detection (e.g., instance segmentation and keypoint estimation) to improve performance. The search cost is much less than previous automated augmentation approaches for object detection. It is notable that our searched policies have meaningful patterns, which intuitively provide valuable insight for human data augmentation design.
Towards Robust Classification Model by Counterfactual and Invariant Data Generation
Authors: George Alexandru Adam, Anna Goldenberg Chun-Hao Chang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite the success of machine learning applications in science, industry, and society in general, many approaches are known to be non-robust, often relying on spurious correlations to make predictions. Spuriousness occurs when some features correlate with labels but are not causal; relying on such features prevents models from generalizing to unseen environments where such correlations break. In this work, we focus on image classification and propose two data generation processes to reduce spuriousness. Given human annotations of the subset of the features responsible (causal) for the labels (e.g. bounding boxes), we modify this causal set to generate a surrogate image that no longer has the same label (i.e. a counterfactual image). We also alter non-causal features to generate images still recognized as the original labels, which helps to learn a model invariant to these features. In several challenging datasets, our data generations outperform state-of-the-art methods in accuracy when spurious correlations break, and increase the saliency focus on causal features providing better explanations.
Fully Convolutional Networks for Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Hengshuang Zhao, Xiaojuan Qi, Liwei Wang, Zeming Li, Jian Sun, Jiaya Jia Yanwei Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we present a conceptually simple, strong, and efficient framework for panoptic segmentation, called Panoptic FCN. Our approach aims to represent and predict foreground things and background stuff in a unified fully convolutional pipeline. In particular, Panoptic FCN encodes each object instance or stuff category into a specific kernel weight with the proposed kernel generator and produces the prediction by convolving the high-resolution feature directly. With this approach, instance-aware and semantically consistent properties for things and stuff can be respectively satisfied in a simple generate-kernel-then-segment workflow. Without extra boxes for localization or instance separation, the proposed approach outperforms previous box-based and -free models with high efficiency on COCO, Cityscapes, and Mapillary Vistas datasets with single scale input. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-Research-Lab/PanopticFCN.
Benchmarking Representation Learning for Natural World Image Collections
Authors: Elijah Cole, Sara Beery, Kimberly Wilber, Serge Belongie, Oisin Mac Aodha Grant Van Horn
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent progress in self-supervised learning has resulted in models that are capable of extracting rich representations from image collections without requiring any explicit label supervision. However, to date the vast majority of these approaches have restricted themselves to training on standard benchmark datasets such as ImageNet. We argue that fine-grained visual categorization problems, such as plant and animal species classification, provide an informative testbed for self-supervised learning. In order to facilitate progress in this area we present two new natural world visual classification datasets, iNat2021 and NeWT. The former consists of 2.7M images from 10k different species uploaded by users of the citizen science application iNaturalist. We designed the latter, NeWT, in collaboration with domain experts with the aim of benchmarking the performance of representation learning algorithms on a suite of challenging natural world binary classification tasks that go beyond standard species classification. These two new datasets allow us to explore questions related to large-scale representation and transfer learning in the context of fine-grained categories. We provide a comprehensive analysis of feature extractors trained with and without supervision on ImageNet and iNat2021, shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses of different learned features across a diverse set of tasks. We find that features produced by standard supervised methods still outperform those produced by self-supervised approaches such as SimCLR. However, improved self-supervised learning methods are constantly being released and the iNat2021 and NeWT datasets are a valuable resource for tracking their progress.
PGT: A Progressive Method for Training Models on Long Videos
Authors: Gao Peng, Yizhuo Li, Cewu Lu Bo Pang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Convolutional video models have an order of magnitude larger computational complexity than their counterpart image-level models. Constrained by computational resources, there is no model or training method that can train long video sequences end-to-end. Currently, the main-stream method is to split a raw video into clips, leading to incomplete fragmentary temporal information flow. Inspired by natural language processing techniques dealing with long sentences, we propose to treat videos as serial fragments satisfying Markov property, and train it as a whole by progressively propagating information through the temporal dimension in multiple steps. This progressive training (PGT) method is able to train long videos end-to-end with limited resources and ensures the effective transmission of information. As a general and robust training method, we empirically demonstrate that it yields significant performance improvements on different models and datasets. As an illustrative example, the proposed method improves SlowOnly network by 3.7 mAP on Charades and 1.9 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics with negligible parameter and computation overhead. The code is attached in supplementary files and will be published with this paper.
Prioritized Architecture Sampling With Monto-Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Tao Huang, Yanxi Li, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Changshui Zhang, Chang Xu Xiu Su
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) methods significantly reduce the search cost by considering the whole search space as one network, which only needs to be trained once. However, current methods select each operation independently without considering previous layers. Besides, the historical information obtained with huge computation costs is usually used only once and then discarded. In this paper, we introduce a sampling strategy based on Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) with the search space modeled as a Monte Carlo tree (MCT), which captures the dependency among layers. Furthermore, intermediate results are stored in the MCT for future decisions and a better exploration-exploitation balance. Concretely, MCT is updated using the training loss as a reward to the architecture performance; for accurately evaluating the numerous nodes, we propose node communication and hierarchical node selection methods in the training and search stages, respectively, making better uses of the operation rewards and hierarchical information. Moreover, for a fair comparison of different NAS methods, we construct an open-source NAS benchmark of a macro search space evaluated on CIFAR-10, namely NAS-Bench-Macro. Extensive experiments on NAS-Bench-Macro and ImageNet demonstrate that our method significantly improves search efficiency and performance. For example, by only searching 20 architectures, our obtained architecture achieves 78.0% top-1 accuracy with 442M FLOPs on ImageNet. Code (Benchmark) is available at: https://github.com/xiusu/NAS-Bench-Macro.
HumanGPS: Geodesic PreServing Feature for Dense Human Correspondences
Authors: Danhang Tang, Mingsong Dou, Kaiwen Guo, Rohit Pandey, Cem Keskin, Ruofei Du, Deqing Sun, Sofien Bouaziz, Sean Fanello, Ping Tan, Yinda Zhang Feitong Tan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of building pixel-wise dense correspondences between human images under arbitrary camera viewpoints and body poses. Previous methods either assume small motions or rely on discriminative descriptors extracted from local patches, which cannot handle large motion or visually ambiguous body parts, e.g. left v.s. right hand. In contrast, we propose a deep learning framework that maps each pixel to a feature space, where the feature distances reflect the geodesic distances among pixels as if they were projected onto the surface of 3D human scans. To this end, we introduce novel loss functions to push features apart according to their geodesic distances on the surface inside and across images. Without any semantic annotation, the features automatically learn to differentiate visually similar parts and align different subjects into a unified feature space. Extensive experiments show that the learned features can produce accurate correspondences between images with remarkable generalization capabilities on both intra and inter subjects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of applications such as optical flow, non-rigid tracking, occlusions detection, and human dense pose regression.
Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Hongtao Xie, Yuxin Wang, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang Shancheng Fang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Linguistic knowledge is of great benefit to scene text recognition. However, how to effectively model linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from: 1) implicitly language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet for scene text recognition. Firstly, the autonomous suggests to block gradient flow between vision and language models to enforce explicitly language modeling. Secondly, a novel bidirectional cloze network (BCN) as the language model is proposed based on bidirectional feature representation. Thirdly, we propose an execution manner of iterative correction for language model which can effectively alleviate the impact of noise input. Additionally, based on the ensemble of iterative predictions, we propose a self-training method which can learn from unlabeled images effectively. Extensive experiments indicate that ABINet has superiority on low-quality images and achieves state-of-the-art results on several mainstream benchmarks. Besides, the ABINet trained with ensemble self-training shows promising improvement in realizing human-level recognition.
Generic Perceptual Loss for Modeling Structured Output Dependencies
Authors: Hao Chen, Yu Chen, Wei Yin, Chunhua Shen Yifan Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The perceptual loss has been widely used as an effective loss term in image synthesis tasks including image super-resolution [16], and style transfer [14]. It was believed that the success lies in the high-level perceptual feature representations extracted from CNNs pretrained with a large set of images. Here we reveal that what matters is the network structure instead of the trained weights. Without any learning, the structure of a deep network is sufficient to capture the dependencies between multiple levels of variable statistics using multiple layers of CNNs. This insight removes the requirements of pre-training and a particular network structure (commonly, VGG) that are previously assumed for the perceptual loss, thus enabling a significantly wider range of applications. To this end, we demonstrate that a randomly-weighted deep CNN can be used to model the structured dependencies of outputs. On a few dense per-pixel prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and instance segmentation, we show improved results of using the extended randomized perceptual loss, compared to the baselines using pixel-wise loss alone. We hope that this simple, extended perceptual loss may serve as a generic structured-output loss that is applicable to most structured output learning tasks.
Style-Based Point Generator With Adversarial Rendering for Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Chuxin Wang, Bo Zhang, Hao Yang, Dong Chen, Fang Wen Chulin Xie
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a novel Style-based Point Generator with Adversarial Rendering (SpareNet) for point cloud completion. Firstly, we present the channel-attentive EdgeConv to fully exploit the local structures as well as the global shape in point features. Secondly, we observe that the concatenation manner used by vanilla foldings limits its potential of generating a complex and faithful shape. Enlightened by the success of StyleGAN, we regard the shape feature as style code that modulates the normalization layers during the folding, which considerably enhances its capability. Thirdly, we realize that existing point supervisions, e.g., Chamfer Distance or Earth Mover's Distance, cannot faithfully reflect the perceptual quality of the reconstructed points. To address this, we propose to project the completed points to depth maps with a differentiable renderer and apply adversarial training to advocate the perceptual realism under different viewpoints. Comprehensive experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI prove the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance while offering superior visual quality.
Neural Architecture Search With Random Labels
Authors: Pengfei Hou, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Sun Xuanyang Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a new variant of neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm -- searching with random labels (RLNAS). The task sounds counter-intuitive for most existing NAS algorithms since random label provides few information on the performance of each candidate architecture. Instead, we propose a novel NAS framework based on ease-of-convergence hypothesis, which requires only random labels during searching. The algorithm involves two steps: first, we train a SuperNet using random labels; second, from the SuperNet we extract the sub-network whose weights change most significantly during the training. Extensive experiments are evaluated on multiple datasets (e.g. NAS-Bench-201 and ImageNet) and multiple search spaces (e.g. DARTS-like and MobileNet-like). Very surprisingly, RLNAS achieves comparable or even better results compared with state-of-the-art NAS methods such as PC-DARTS, Single Path One-Shot, even though the counterparts utilize full ground truth labels for searching. We hope our finding could inspire new understandings on the essential of NAS.
Towards Long-Form Video Understanding
Authors: Philipp Krahenbuhl Chao-Yuan Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Our world offers a never-ending stream of visual stimuli, yet today's vision systems only accurately recognize patterns within a few seconds. These systems understand the present, but fail to contextualize it in past or future events. In this paper, we study long-form video understanding. We introduce a framework for modeling long-form videos and develop evaluation protocols on large-scale datasets. We show that existing state-of-the-art short-term models are limited for long-form tasks. A novel object-centric transformer-based video recognition architecture performs significantly better on 7 diverse tasks. It also outperforms comparable state-of-the-art on the AVA dataset.
Shape and Material Capture at Home
Authors: Jiaye Wu, Soumyadip Sengupta, David W. Jacobs Daniel Lichy
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we present a technique for estimating the geometry and reflectance of objects using only a camera, flashlight, and optionally a tripod. We propose a simple data capture technique in which the user goes around the object, illuminating it with a flashlight and capturing only a few images. Our main technical contribution is the introduction of a recursive neural architecture, which can predict geometry and reflectance at 2^kx2^k resolution given an input image at 2^kx2^k and estimated geometry and reflectance from the previous step at 2^(k-1)x2^(k-1). This recursive architecture, termed RecNet, is trained with 256x256 resolution but can easily operate on 1024x1024 images during inference. We show that our method produces more accurate surface normal and albedo, especially in regions of specular highlights and cast shadows, compared to previous approaches, given three or fewer input images.
Deep Polarization Imaging for 3D Shape and SVBRDF Acquisition
Authors: Yiming Lin, Abhijeet Ghosh Valentin Deschaintre
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel method for efficient acquisition of shape and spatially varying reflectance of 3D objects using polarization cues. Unlike previous works that have exploited polarization to estimate material or object appearance under certain constraints (known shape or multiview acquisition), we lift such restrictions by coupling polarization imaging with deep learning to achieve high quality estimate of 3D object shape (surface normals and depth) and SVBRDF using single-view polarization imaging under frontal flash illumination. In addition to acquired polarization images, we provide our deep network with strong novel cues related to shape and reflectance, in the form of a normalized Stokes map and an estimate of diffuse color. We additionally describe modifications to network architecture and training loss which provide further qualitative improvements. We demonstrate our approach to achieve superior results compared to recent works employing deep learning in conjunction with flash illumination.
Convolutional Neural Network Pruning With Structural Redundancy Reduction
Authors: Chengcheng Li, Xiangyang Wang Zi Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Convolutional neural network (CNN) pruning has become one of the most successful network compression approaches in recent years. Existing works on network pruning usually focus on removing the least important filters in the network to achieve compact architectures. In this study, we claim that identifying structural redundancy plays a more essential role than finding unimportant filters, theoretically and empirically. We first statistically model the network pruning problem in a redundancy reduction perspective and find that pruning in the layer(s) with the most structural redundancy outperforms pruning the least important filters across all layers. Based on this finding, we then propose a network pruning approach that identifies structural redundancy of a CNN and prunes filers in the selected layer(s) with the most redundancy. Experiments on various benchmark network architectures and datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.
T-vMF Similarity for Regularizing Intra-Class Feature Distribution
Authors: Takumi Kobayashi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) leverage large-scale training dataset to produce remarkable performance on various image classification tasks. It, however, is difficult to effectively train the CNNs on some realistic learning situations such as regarding class imbalance, small-scale and label noises. Regularizing CNNs works well on learning with such deteriorated training datasets by mitigating overfitting issues. In this work, we propose a method to effectively impose regularization on feature representation learning. By focusing on the angle between a feature and a classifier which is embedded in cosine similarity at the classification layer, we formulate a novel similarity beyond the cosine based on von Mises-Fisher distribution of directional statistics. In contrast to the cosine similarity, our similarity is compact while having heavy tail, which contributes to regularizing intra-class feature distribution to improve generalization performance. Through the experiments on some realistic learning situations such as of imbalance, small-scale and noisy labels, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for training CNNs, in comparison to the other regularization methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/tk1980/tvMF.
Surrogate Gradient Field for Latent Space Manipulation
Authors: Yanghua Jin, Huachun Zhu Minjun Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can generate high-quality images from sampled latent codes. Recent works attempt to edit an image by manipulating its underlying latent code, but rarely go beyond the basic task of attribute adjustment. We propose the first method that enables manipulation with multidimensional condition such as keypoints and captions. Specifically, we design an algorithm that searches for a new latent code that satisfies the target condition based on the Surrogate Gradient Field (SGF) induced by an auxiliary mapping network. For quantitative comparison, we propose a metric to evaluate the disentanglement of manipulation methods. Thorough experimental analysis on the facial attribute adjustment task shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in disentanglement. We further apply our method to tasks of various condition modalities to demonstrate that our method can alter complex image properties such as keypoints and captions.
SCF-Net: Learning Spatial Contextual Features for Large-Scale Point Cloud Segmentation
Authors: Qiulei Dong, Fenghua Zhu, Yisheng Lv, Peijun Ye, Fei-Yue Wang Siqi Fan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: How to learn effective features from large-scale point clouds for semantic segmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Addressing this problem, we propose a learnable module that learns Spatial Contextual Features from large-scale point clouds, called SCF in this paper. The proposed module mainly consists of three blocks, including the local polar representation block, the dual-distance attentive pooling block, and the global contextual feature block. For each 3D point, the local polar representation block is firstly explored to construct a spatial representation that is invariant to the z-axis rotation, then the dual-distance attentive pooling block is designed to utilize the representations of its neighbors for learning more discriminative local features according to both the geometric and feature distances among them, and finally, the global contextual feature block is designed to learn a global context for each 3D point by utilizing its spatial location and the volume ratio of the neighborhood to the global point cloud. The proposed module could be easily embedded into various network architectures for point cloud segmentation, naturally resulting in a new 3D semantic segmentation network with an encoder-decoder architecture, called SCF-Net in this work. Extensive experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed SCF-Net performs better than several state-of-the-art methods in most cases.
UnsupervisedR&R: Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration via Differentiable Rendering
Authors: Luya Gao, Justin Johnson Mohamed El Banani
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Aligning partial views of a scene into a single whole is essential to understanding one's environment and is a key component of numerous robotics tasks such as SLAM and SfM. Recent approaches have proposed end-to-end systems that can outperform traditional methods by leveraging pose supervision. However, with the rising prevalence of cameras with depth sensors, we can expect a new stream of raw RGB-D data without the annotations needed for supervision. We propose UnsupervisedR&R: an end-to-end unsupervised approach to learning point cloud registration from raw RGB-D video. The key idea is to leverage differentiable alignment and rendering to enforce photometric and geometric consistency between frames. We evaluate our approach on indoor scene datasets and find that we outperform existing traditional approaches with classical and learned descriptors while being competitive with supervised geometric point cloud registration approaches.
ZeroScatter: Domain Transfer for Long Distance Imaging and Vision Through Scattering Media
Authors: Ethan Tseng, Mario Bijelic, Werner Ritter, Felix Heide Zheng Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Adverse weather conditions, including snow, rain, and fog, pose a major challenge for both human and computer vision. Handling these environmental conditions is essential for safe decision making, especially in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and drones. Most of today's supervised imaging and vision approaches, however, rely on training data collected in the real world that is biased towards good weather conditions, with dense fog, snow, and heavy rain as outliers in these datasets. Without training data, let alone paired data, existing autonomous vehicles often limit themselves to good conditions and stop when dense fog or snow is detected. In this work, we tackle the lack of supervised training data by combining synthetic and indirect supervision. We present ZeroScatter, a domain transfer method for converting RGB-only captures taken in adverse weather into clear daytime scenes. ZeroScatter exploits model-based, temporal, multi-view, multi-modal, and adversarial cues in a joint fashion, allowing us to train on unpaired, biased data. We assess the proposed method on in-the-wild captures, and the proposed method outperforms existing monocular descattering approaches by 2.8 dB PSNR on controlled fog chamber measurements.
Defending Multimodal Fusion Models Against Single-Source Adversaries
Authors: Wan-Yi Lin, Manash Barman, Filipe Condessa, Zico Kolter Karren Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Beyond achieving high performance across many vision tasks, multimodal models are expected to be robust to single-source faults due to the availability of redundant information between modalities. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of multimodal neural networks against worst-case (i.e., adversarial) perturbations on a single modality. We first show that standard multimodal fusion models are vulnerable to single-source adversaries: an attack on any single modality can overcome the correct information from multiple unperturbed modalities and cause the model to fail. This surprising vulnerability holds across diverse multimodal tasks and necessitates a solution. Motivated by this finding, we propose an adversarially robust fusion strategy that trains the model to compare information coming from all the input sources, detect inconsistencies in the perturbed modality compared to the other modalities, and only allow information from the unperturbed modalities to pass through. Our approach significantly improves on state-of-the-art methods in single-source robustness, achieving gains of 7.8-25.2% on action recognition, 19.7-48.2% on object detection, and 1.6-6.7% on sentiment analysis, without degrading performance on unperturbed (i.e., clean) data.
Generalized Domain Adaptation
Authors: Go Irie, Daiki Ikami, Takashi Shibata Yu Mitsuzumi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many variants of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problems have been proposed and solved individually. Its side effect is that a method that works for one variant is often ineffective for or not even applicable to another, which has prevented practical applications. In this paper, we give a general representation of UDA problems, named Generalized Domain Adaptation (GDA). GDA covers the major variants as special cases, which allows us to organize them in a comprehensive framework. Moreover, this generalization leads to a new challenging setting where existing methods fail, such as when domain labels are unknown, and class labels are only partially given to each domain. We propose a novel approach to the new setting. The key to our approach is self-supervised class-destructive learning, which enables the learning of class-invariant representations and domain-adversarial classifiers without using any domain labels. Extensive experiments using three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art UDA methods in the new setting and that it is competitive in existing UDA variations as well.
AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis
Authors: Chun-Hao P. Huang, Joachim Tesch, David T. Hoffmann, Shashank Tripathi, Michael J. Black Priyanka Patel
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While the accuracy of 3D human pose estimation from images has steadily improved on benchmark datasets, the best methods still fail in many real-world scenarios. This suggests that there is a domain gap between current datasets and common scenes containing people. To obtain ground-truth 3D pose, current datasets limit the complexity of clothing, environmental conditions, number of subjects, and occlusion. Moreover, current datasets evaluate sparse 3D joint locations corresponding to the major joints of the body, ignoring the hand pose and the face shape. To evaluate the current state-of-the-art methods on more challenging images, and to drive the field to address new problems, we introduce AGORA, a synthetic dataset with high realism and highly accurate ground truth. Here we use 4240 commercially-available, high-quality, textured human scans in diverse poses and natural clothing; this includes 257 scans of children. We create reference 3D poses and body shapes by fitting the SMPL-X body model (with face and hands) to the 3D scans, taking into account clothing. We create around 14K training and 3K test images by rendering between 5 and 15 people per image using either image-based lighting or rendered 3D environments, taking care to make the images physically plausible and photoreal. In total, AGORA consists of 173K individual person crops. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art methods for 3D human pose estimation on this dataset and find that most methods perform poorly on images of children. Hence, we extend the SMPL-X model to better capture the shape of children. Additionally, we fine-tune methods on AGORA and show improved performance on both AGORA and 3DPW, confirming the realism of the dataset. We provide all the registered 3D reference training data, rendered images, and a web-based evaluation site at https://agora.is.tue.mpg.de/.
Exploring and Distilling Posterior and Prior Knowledge for Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Xian Wu, Shen Ge, Wei Fan, Yuexian Zou Fenglin Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Automatically generating radiology reports can improve current clinical practice in diagnostic radiology. On one hand, it can relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing; On the other hand, it can remind radiologists of abnormalities and avoid the misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis. Yet, this task remains a challenging job for data-driven neural networks, due to the serious visual and textual data biases. To this end, we propose a Posterior-and-Prior Knowledge Exploring-and-Distilling approach (PPKED) to imitate the working patterns of radiologists, who will first examine the abnormal regions and assign the disease topic tags to the abnormal regions, and then rely on the years of prior medical knowledge and prior working experience accumulations to write reports. Thus, the PPKED includes three modules: Posterior Knowledge Explorer (PoKE), Prior Knowledge Explorer (PrKE) and Multi-domain Knowledge Distiller (MKD). In detail, PoKE explores the posterior knowledge, which provides explicit abnormal visual regions to alleviate visual data bias; PrKE explores the prior knowledge from the prior medical knowledge graph (medical knowledge) and prior radiology reports (working experience) to alleviate textual data bias. The explored knowledge is distilled by the MKD to generate the final reports. Evaluated on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray datasets, our method is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art models on these two datasets.
Rotation Coordinate Descent for Fast Globally Optimal Rotation Averaging
Authors: Shin-Fang Chng, Tat-Jun Chin, Anders Eriksson, Ian Reid Alvaro Parra
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Under mild conditions on the noise level of the measurements, rotation averaging satisfies strong duality, which enables global solutions to be obtained via semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. However, generic solvers for SDP are rather slow in practice, even on rotation averaging instances of moderate size, thus developing specialised algorithms is vital. In this paper, we present a fast algorithm that achieves global optimality called rotation coordinate descent (RCD). Unlike block coordinate descent (BCD) which solves SDP by updating the semidefinite matrix in a row-by-row fashion, RCD directly maintains and updates all valid rotations throughout the iterations. This obviates the need to store a large dense semidefinite matrix. We mathematically prove the convergence of our algorithm and empirically show its superior efficiency over state-of-the-art global methods on a variety of problem configurations. Maintaining valid rotations also facilitates incorporating local optimisation routines for further speed-ups. Moreover, our algorithm is simple to implement.
Extreme Rotation Estimation Using Dense Correlation Volumes
Authors: Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely, Hadar Averbuch-Elor Ruojin Cai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a technique for estimating the relative 3D rotation of an RGB image pair in an extreme setting, where the images have little or no overlap. We observe that, even when images do not overlap, there may be rich hidden cues as to their geometric relationship, such as light source directions, vanishing points, and symmetries present in the scene. We propose a network design that can automatically learn such implicit cues by comparing all pairs of points between the two input images. Our method therefore constructs dense feature correlation volumes and processes these to predict relative 3D rotations. Our predictions are formed over a fine-grained discretization of rotations, bypassing difficulties associated with regressing 3D rotations. We demonstrate our approach on a large variety of extreme RGB image pairs, including indoor and outdoor images captured under different lighting conditions and geographic locations. Our evaluation shows that our model can successfully estimate relative rotations among non-overlapping images without compromising performance over overlapping image pairs.
Capsule Network Is Not More Robust Than Convolutional Network
Authors: Volker Tresp, Han Hu Jindong Gu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The Capsule Network is widely believed to be more robust than Convolutional Networks. However, there lack comprehensive comparisons between these two networks, and it is also unknown which components in the CapsNet affect its robustness. In this paper, we first carefully examine the special designs in CapsNet differing from that of a ConvNet, commonly used for image classification. The examination reveals 5 major new/different components in CapsNet: a transformation process, a dynamic routing layer, a squashing function, a marginal loss other than cross-entropy loss, and an additional class-conditional reconstruction loss for regularization. Along with these major differences, we comprehensively ablate their behavior on 3 kinds of robustness, including affine transformation, overlapping digits, and semantic representation. The study reveals that some designs which are thought critical to CapsNet actually can harm its robustness, i.e., the dynamic routing layer and the transformation process, while others are beneficial for the robustness. Based on these findings, we propose enhanced ConvNets simply by introducing the essential components behind the CapsNet's success. The proposed simple ConvNets can achieve better robustness than the CapsNet.