mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers From Scratch on ImageNet
Authors: Yunpeng Chen, Tao Wang, Weihao Yu, Yujun Shi, Zi-Hang Jiang, Francis E.H. Tay, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan Li Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transformers, which are popular for language modeling, have been explored for solving vision tasks recently, e.g., the Vision Transformer (ViT) for image classification. The ViT model splits each image into a sequence of tokens with fixed length and then applies multiple Transformer layers to model their global relation for classification. However, ViT achieves inferior performance to CNNs when trained from scratch on a midsize dataset like ImageNet. We find it is because: 1) the simple tokenization of input images fails to model the important local structure such as edges and lines among neighboring pixels, leading to low training sample efficiency; 2) the redundant attention backbone design of ViT leads to limited feature richness for fixed computation budgets and limited training samples. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new Tokens-To-Token Vision Transformer (T2T-ViT), which incorporates 1) a layer-wise Tokens-to-Token (T2T) transformation to progressively structurize the image to tokens by recursively aggregating neighboring Tokens into one Token (Tokens-to-Token), such that local structure represented by surrounding tokens can be modeled and tokens length can be reduced; 2) an efficient backbone with a deep-narrow structure for vision transformer motivated by CNN architecture design after empirical study. Notably, T2T-ViT reduces the parameter count and MACs of vanilla ViT by half, while achieving more than 3.0% improvement when trained from scratch on ImageNet. It also outperforms ResNets and achieves comparable performance with MobileNets by directly training on ImageNet. For example, T2T-ViT with comparable size to ResNet50 (21.5M parameters) can achieve 83.3% top1 accuracy in image resolution 384x384 on ImageNet.
Teacher-Student Adversarial Depth Hallucination To Improve Face Recognition
Authors: Alireza Sepas-Moghaddam, Michael Greenspan, Ali Etemad Hardik Uppal
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present the Teacher-Student Generative Adversarial Network (TS-GAN) to generate depth images from single RGB images in order to boost the performance of face recognition systems. For our method to generalize well across unseen datasets, we design two components in the architecture, a teacher and a student. The teacher, which itself consists of a generator and a discriminator, learns a latent mapping between input RGB and paired depth images in a supervised fashion. The student, which consists of two generators (one shared with the teacher) and a discriminator, learns from new RGB data with no available paired depth information, for improved generalization. The fully trained shared generator can then be used in runtime to hallucinate depth from RGB for downstream applications such as face recognition. We perform rigorous experiments to show the superiority of TS-GAN over other methods in generating synthetic depth images. Moreover, face recognition experiments demonstrate that our hallucinated depth along with the input RGB images boost performance across various architectures when compared to a single RGB modality by average values of +1.2%, +2.6%, and +2.6% for IIIT-D, EURECOM, and LFW datasets respectively. We make our implementation public at: https://github.com/hardik-uppal/teacher-student-gan.git.
Interaction via Bi-Directional Graph of Semantic Region Affinity for Scene Parsing
Authors: Hui Zhang, Jun Liu, Jiaxin Li, Zijian Feng, Xudong Jiang Henghui Ding
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we devote to address the challenging problem of scene parsing. Previous methods, though capture context to exploit global clues, handle scene parsing as a pixel-independent task. However, it is well known that pixels in an image are highly correlated with each other, especially those from the same semantic region, while treating pixels independently fails to take advantage of such correlations. In this work, we treat each respective region in an image as a whole, and capture the structure topology as well as the affinity among different regions. To this end, we first divide the entire feature maps to different regions and extract respective global features from them. Next, we construct a directed graph whose nodes are regional features, and the edge connecting every two nodes is the affinity between the regional features they represent. After that, we transfer the affinity-aware nodes in the directed graph back to corresponding regions of the image, which helps to model the region dependencies and mitigate unrealistic results. In addition, to further boost the correlation among pixels, we propose a region-level loss that evaluates all pixels in a region as a whole and motivates the network to learn the exclusive regional feature per class. With the proposed approach, we achieves new state-of-the-art segmentation results on PASCAL-Context, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff consistently.
Online Multi-Granularity Distillation for GAN Compression
Authors: Jie Wu, Xuefeng Xiao, Jianchao Yang Yuxi Ren
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have witnessed prevailing success in yielding outstanding images, however, they are burdensome to deploy on resource-constrained devices due to ponderous computational costs and hulking memory usage. Although recent efforts on compressing GANs have acquired remarkable results, they still exist potential model redundancies and can be further compressed. To solve this issue, we propose a novel online multi-granularity distillation (OMGD) scheme to obtain lightweight GANs, which contributes to generating high-fidelity images with low computational demands. We offer the first attempt to popularize single-stage online distillation for GAN-oriented compression, where the progressively promoted teacher generator helps to refine the discriminator-free based student generator. Complementary teacher generators and network layers provide comprehensive and multi-granularity concepts to enhance visual fidelity from diverse dimensions. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that OMGD successes to compress 40xMACs and 82.5xparameters on Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, without loss of image quality. It reveals that OMGD provides a feasible solution for the deployment of real-time image translation on resource-constrained devices. Our code and models are made public at: https://github.com/bytedance/OMGD
Influence-Balanced Loss for Imbalanced Visual Classification
Authors: Jongin Lim, Younghan Jeon, Jin Young Choi Seulki Park
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a balancing training method to address problems in imbalanced data learning. To this end, we derive a new loss used in the balancing training phase that alleviates the influence of samples that cause an overfitted decision boundary. The proposed loss efficiently improves the performance of any type of imbalance learning methods. In experiments on multiple benchmark data sets, we demonstrate the validity of our method and reveal that the proposed loss outperforms the state-of-the-art cost-sensitive loss methods. Furthermore, since our loss is not restricted to a specific task, model, or training method, it can be easily used in combination with other recent re-sampling, meta-learning, and cost-sensitive learning methods for class-imbalance problems. Our code is made available.
Consistency-Aware Graph Network for Human Interaction Understanding
Authors: Jiajun Meng, Dongyan Guo, Jianhua Zhang, Javen Qinfeng Shi, Shengyong Chen Zhenhua Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Compared with the progress made on human activity classification, much less success has been achieved on human interaction understanding (HIU). Apart from the latter task is much more challenging, the main cause is that recent approaches learn human interactive relations via shallow graphical models, which is inadequate to model complicated human interactions. In this paper, we propose a consistency-aware graph network, which combines the representative ability of graph network and the consistency-aware reasoning to facilitate the HIU task. Our network consists of three components, a backbone CNN to extract image features, a factor graph network to learn third-order interactive relations among participants, and a consistency-aware reasoning module to enforce labeling and grouping consistencies. Our key observation is that the consistency-aware-reasoning bias for HIU can be embedded into an energy function, minimizing which delivers consistent predictions. An efficient mean-field inference algorithm is proposed, such that all modules of our network could be trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that our approach achieves leading performance on three benchmarks. Code will be publicly available.
Where2Act: From Pixels to Actions for Articulated 3D Objects
Authors: Leonidas J. Guibas, Mustafa Mukadam, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani Kaichun Mo
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: One of the fundamental goals of visual perception is to allow agents to meaningfully interact with their environment. In this paper, we take a step towards that long-term goal -- we extract highly localized actionable information related to elementary actions such as pushing or pulling for articulated objects with movable parts. For example, given a drawer, our network predicts that applying a pulling force on the handle opens the drawer. We propose, discuss, and evaluate novel network architectures that given image and depth data, predict the set of actions possible at each pixel, and the regions over articulated parts that are likely to move under the force. We propose a learning-from-interaction framework with an online data sampling strategy that allows us to train the network in simulation (SAPIEN) and generalizes across categories. Check the website for code and data release.
Towers of Babel: Combining Images, Language, and 3D Geometry for Learning Multimodal Vision
Authors: Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Jin Sun, Noah Snavely Xiaoshi Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The abundance and richness of Internet photos of landmarks and cities has led to significant progress in 3D vision over the past two decades, including automated 3D reconstructions of the world's landmarks from tourist photos. However, a major source of information available for these 3D-augmented collections---language, e.g., from image captions---has been virtually untapped. In this work, we present WikiScenes, a new, large-scale dataset of landmark photo collections that contains descriptive text in the form of captions and hierarchical category names. WikiScenes forms a new testbed for multimodal reasoning involving images, text, and 3D geometry. We demonstrate the utility of WikiScenes for learning semantic concepts over images and 3D models. Our weakly-supervised framework connects images, 3D structure and semantics---utilizing the strong constraints provided by 3D geometry---to associate semantic concepts to image pixels and points in 3D space.
End-to-End Unsupervised Document Image Blind Denoising
Authors: Marcin Plata, Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad, Nigel P Duffy Mehrdad J. Gangeh
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Removing noise from scanned pages is a vital step before their submission to optical character recognition (OCR) system. Most available image denoising methods are supervised where the pairs of noisy/clean pages are required. However, this assumption is rarely met in real settings. Besides, there is no single model that can remove various noise types from documents. Here, we propose a unified end-to-end unsupervised deep learning model, for the first time, that can effectively remove multiple types of noise, including salt & pepper noise, blurred and/or faded text, as well as watermarks from documents at various levels of intensity. We demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves the quality of scanned images and the OCR of the pages on several test datasets.
Differentiable Dynamic Wirings for Neural Networks
Authors: Quanquan Li, Shaopeng Guo, Dapeng Chen, Aojun Zhou, Fengwei Yu, Ziwei Liu Kun Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A standard practice of deploying deep neural networks is to apply the same architecture to all the input instances. However, a fixed architecture may not be suitable for different data with high diversity. To boost the model capacity, existing methods usually employ larger convolutional kernels or deeper network layers, which incurs prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing Differentiable Dynamic Wirings (DDW), which learns the instance-aware connectivity that creates different wiring patterns for different instances. 1) Specifically, the network is initialized as a complete directed acyclic graph, where the nodes represent convolutional blocks and the edges represent the connection paths. 2) We generate edge weights by a learnable module, Router, and select the edges whose weights are larger than a threshold, to adjust the connectivity of the neural network structure. 3) Instead of using the same path of the network, DDW aggregates features dynamically in each node, which allows the network to have more representation power. To facilitate effective training, we further represent the network connectivity of each sample as an adjacency matrix. The matrix is updated to aggregate features in the forward pass, cached in the memory, and used for gradient computing in the backward pass. We validate the effectiveness of our approach with several mainstream architectures, including MobileNetV2, ResNet, ResNeXt, and RegNet. Extensive experiments are performed on ImageNet classification and COCO object detection, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization ability of our approach.
A Simple Framework for 3D Lensless Imaging With Programmable Masks
Authors: Yi Hua, Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan, M. Salman Asif Yucheng Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Lensless cameras provide a framework to build thin imaging systems by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude or phase mask near the sensor. Existing methods for lensless imaging can recover the depth and intensity of the scene, but they require solving computationally-expensive inverse problems. Furthermore, existing methods struggle to recover dense scenes with large depth variations. In this paper, we propose a lensless imaging system that captures a small number of measurements using different patterns on a programmable mask. In this context, we make three contributions. First, we present a fast recovery algorithm to recover textures on a fixed number of depth planes in the scene. Second, we consider the mask design problem, for programmable lensless cameras, and provide a design template for optimizing the mask patterns with the goal of improving depth estimation. Third, we use a refinement network as a post-processing step to identify and remove artifacts in the reconstruction. These modifications are evaluated extensively with experimental results on a lensless camera prototype to showcase the performance benefits of the optimized masks and recovery algorithms over the state of the art.
Dressing in Order: Recurrent Person Image Generation for Pose Transfer, Virtual Try-On and Outfit Editing
Authors: Daniel McKee, Svetlana Lazebnik Aiyu Cui
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We proposes a flexible person generation framework called Dressing in Order (DiOr), which supports 2D pose transfer, virtual try-on, and several fashion editing tasks. The key to DiOr is a novel recurrent generation pipeline to sequentially put garments on a person, so that trying on the same garments in different orders will result in different looks. Our system can produce dressing effects not achievable by existing work, including different interactions of garments (e.g., wearing a top tucked into the bottom or over it), as well as layering of multiple garments of the same type (e.g., jacket over shirt over t-shirt). DiOr explicitly encodes the shape and texture of each garment, enabling these elements to be edited separately. Joint training on pose transfer and inpainting helps with detail preservation and coherence of generated garments. Extensive evaluations show that DiOr outperforms other recent methods like ADGAN in terms of output quality, and handles a wide range of editing functions for which there is no direct supervision.
Attack As the Best Defense: Nullifying Image-to-Image Translation GANs via Limit-Aware Adversarial Attack
Authors: Hsi-Wen Chen, Hong-Han Shuai, De-Nian Yang, Ming-Syan Chen Chin-Yuan Yeh
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Due to the great success of image-to-image (Img2Img) translation GANs, many applications with ethics issues arise, e.g., DeepFake and DeepNude, presenting a challenging problem to prevent the misuse of these techniques. In this work, we tackle the problem by a new adversarial attack scheme, namely the Nullifying Attack, which cancels the image translation process and proposes a corresponding framework, the Limit-Aware Self-Guiding Gradient Sliding Attack (LaS-GSA) under a black-box setting. In other words, by processing the image with the proposed LaS-GSA before publishing, any image translation functions can be nullified, which prevents the images from malicious manipulations. First, we introduce the limit-aware RGF and gradient sliding mechanism to estimate the gradient that adheres to the adversarial limit, i.e., the pixel value limitations of the adversarial example. We theoretically prove that our model is able to avoid the error caused by the projection operation in both the direction and the length. Then, an effective self-guiding prior is extracted solely from the threat model and the target image to efficiently leverage the prior information and guide the gradient estimation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaS-GSA requires fewer queries to nullify the image translation process with higher success rates than 4 state-of-the-art methods.
Benchmark Platform for Ultra-Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Beyond Human Performance
Authors: Yang Zhao, Yongsheng Gao, Xiaohui Yuan, Shengwu Xiong Xiaohan Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in fine-grained visual categorization. Such successful categorization at sub-ordinate level, e.g., different animal or plant species, however relies heavily on the visual differences that human can observe and the ground-truths are labelled on the basis of such human visual observation. In contrast, few research has been done for visual categorization at the ultra-fine-grained level, i.e., a granularity where even human experts can hardly identify the visual differences or are not yet able to give affirmative labels by inferring observed pattern differences. This paper reports our efforts towards mitigating this research gap. We introduce the ultra-fine-grained (UFG) image dataset, a large collection of 47,114 images from 3,526 categories. All the images in the proposed UFG image dataset are grouped into categories with different confirmed cultivar names. In addition, we perform an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art fine-grained classification methods on the proposed UFG image dataset as comparative baselines. The proposed UFG image dataset and evaluation protocols is intended to serve as a benchmark platform that can advance research of visual classification from approaching human performance to beyond human ability, via facilitating benchmark data of artificial intelligence (AI) not to be limited by the labels of human intelligence (HI). The dataset is available online at https://github.com/XiaohanYu-GU/Ultra-FGVC.
JEM++: Improved Techniques for Training JEM
Authors: Shihao Ji Xiulong Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Joint Energy-based Model (JEM) is a recently proposed hybrid model that retains strong discriminative power of modern CNN classifiers, while generating samples rivaling the quality of GAN-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a variety of new training procedures and architecture features to improve JEM's accuracy, training stability, and speed altogether. 1) We propose a proximal SGLD to generate samples in the proximity of samples from previous step, which improves the stability. 2) We further treat the approximate maximum likelihood learning of EBM as a multi-step differential game, and extend the YOPO framework to cut out redundant calculations during backpropagation, which accelerates the training substantially. 3) Rather than initializing SGLD chain from random noise, we introduce a new informative initialization that samples from a distribution estimated from training data. 4) This informative initialization allows us to enable batch normalization in JEM, which further releases the power of modern CNN architectures for hybrid modeling.
Contrast and Classify: Training Robust VQA Models
Authors: Abhinav Moudgil, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Harsh Agrawal Yash Kant
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have shown impressive performance on the VQA benchmark but remain sensitive to small linguistic variations in input questions. Existing approaches address this by augmenting the dataset with question paraphrases from visual question generation models or adversarial perturbations. These approaches use the combined data to learn an answer classifier by minimizing the standard cross-entropy loss. To more effectively leverage augmented data, we build on the recent success in contrastive learning. We propose a novel training paradigm (ConClaT) that optimizes both cross-entropy and contrastive losses. The contrastive loss encourages representations to be robust to linguistic variations in questions while the cross-entropy loss preserves the discriminative power of representations for answer prediction. We find that optimizing both losses -- either alternately or jointly -- is key to effective training. On the VQA-Rephrasings benchmark, which measures the VQA model's answer consistency across human paraphrases of a question, ConClaT improves Consensus Score by 1.63% over an improved baseline. In addition, on the standard VQA 2.0 benchmark, we improve the VQA accuracy by 0.78% overall. We also show that ConClaT is agnostic to the type of data-augmentation strategy used.
Photon-Starved Scene Inference Using Single Photon Cameras
Authors: Mohit Gupta Bhavya Goyal
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Scene understanding under low-light conditions is a challenging problem. This is due to the small number of photons captured by the camera and the resulting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Single-photon cameras (SPCs) are an emerging sensing modality that are capable of capturing images with high sensitivity. Despite having minimal read-noise, images captured by SPCs in photon-starved conditions still suffer from strong shot noise, preventing reliable scene inference. We propose photon scale-space -- a collection of high-SNR images spanning a wide range of photons-per-pixel (PPP) levels (but same scene content) as guides to train inference model on low photon flux images. We develop training techniques that push images with different illumination levels closer to each other in feature representation space. The key idea is that having a spectrum of different brightness levels during training enables effective guidance, and increases robustness to shot noise even in extreme noise cases. Based on the proposed approach, we demonstrate, via simulations and real experiments with a SPAD camera, high-performance on various inference tasks such as image classification and monocular depth estimation under ultra low-light, down to <1 PPP.
Towards Learning Spatially Discriminative Feature Representations
Authors: Jiayu Xiao, Yizeng Han, Qisen Yang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang Chaofei Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The backbone of traditional CNN classifier is generally considered as a feature extractor, followed by a linear layer which performs the classification. We propose a novel loss function, termed as CAM-loss, to constrain the embedded feature maps with the class activation maps (CAMs) which indicate the spatially discriminative regions of an image for particular categories. CAM-loss drives the backbone to express the features of target category and suppress the features of non-target categories or background, so as to obtain more discriminative feature representations. It can be simply applied in any CNN architecture with neglectable additional parameters and calculations. Experimental results show that CAM-loss is applicable to a variety of network structures and can be combined with mainstream regularization methods to improve the performance of image classification. The strong generalization ability of CAM-loss is validated in the transfer learning and few shot learning tasks. Based on CAM-loss, we also propose a novel CAAM-CAM matching knowledge distillation method. This method directly uses the CAM generated by the teacher network to supervise the CAAM generated by the student network, which effectively improves the accuracy and convergence rate of the student network.
Pyramid Spatial-Temporal Aggregation for Video-Based Person Re-Identification
Authors: Pingping Zhang, Shang Gao, Xia Geng, Hu Lu, Dong Wang Yingquan Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Video-based person re-identification aims to associate the video clips of the same person across multiple non-overlapping cameras. Spatial-temporal representations can provide richer and complementary information between frames, which are crucial to distinguish the target person when occlusion occurs. This paper proposes a novel Pyramid Spatial-Temporal Aggregation (PSTA) framework to aggregate the frame-level features progressively and fuse the hierarchical temporal features into a final video-level representation. Thus, short-term and long-term temporal information could be well exploited by different hierarchies. Furthermore, a Spatial-Temporal Aggregation Module (STAM) is proposed to enhance the aggregation capability of PSTA. It mainly consists of two novel attention blocks: Spatial Reference Attention (SRA) and Temporal Reference Attention (TRA). SRA explores the spatial correlations within a frame to determine the attention weight of each location. While TRA extends SRA with the correlations between adjacent frames, temporal consistency information can be fully explored to suppress the interference features and strengthen the discriminative ones. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSTA, and our full model reaches 91.5% and 98.3% Rank-1 accuracy on MARS and DukeMTMC-VID benchmarks.
Context Decoupling Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ruizhou Sun, Guosheng Lin, Qingyao Wu Yukun Su
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation is vital for deep learning neural networks. By providing massive training samples, it helps to improve the generalization ability of the model. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a challenging problem that has been deeply studied in recent years, conventional data augmentation approaches for WSSS usually employ geometrical transformations, random cropping, and color jittering. However, merely increasing the same contextual semantic data does not bring much gain to the networks to distinguish the objects, e.g., the correct image-level classification of "aeroplane" may be not only due to the recognition of the object itself but also its co-occurrence context like "sky", which will cause the model to focus less on the object features. To this end, we present a Context Decoupling Augmentation (CDA) method, to change the inherent context in which the objects appear and thus drive the network to remove the dependence between object instances and contextual information. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset with several alternative network architectures demonstrate that CDA can boost various popular WSSS methods to the new state-of-the-art by a large margin.
CAPTRA: CAtegory-Level Pose Tracking for Rigid and Articulated Objects From Point Clouds
Authors: He Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yuzhe Qin, Yueqi Duan, Qingnan Fan, Baoquan Chen, Hao Su, Leonidas J. Guibas Yijia Weng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we tackle the problem of category-level online pose tracking for objects from point cloud sequences. For the first time, we propose a unified framework that can handle 9DoF object pose tracking for novel rigid object instances as well as per-part pose tracking for articulated objects from known categories. Here the 9DoF pose, comprising 6D pose and 3D size, is equivalent to a 3D amodal bounding box representation with free 6D pose. Given the depth point cloud at the current frame and the estimated pose from the last frame, our novel end-to-end pipeline learns to accurately update the pose. Our pipeline is composed of three modules: 1) a pose canonicalization module that normalizes the pose of the input depth point cloud; 2) RotationNet, a module that directly regresses small interframe delta rotations; and 3) CoordinateNet, a module that predicts the normalized coordinates and segmentation, enabling analytical computation of the 3D size and translation. Leveraging the small pose regime in the pose-canonicalized point clouds, our method integrates the best of both worlds by combining dense coordinate prediction and direct rotation regression, thus yielding an end-to-end differentiable pipeline optimized for 9DoF pose accuracy (without using non-differentiable RANSAC). Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on category-level rigid object pose and articulated object pose benchmarks at the fastest FPS  12.
X-World: Accessibility, Vision, and Autonomy Meet
Authors: Minglan Zheng, Matthew Boyd, Eshed Ohn-Bar Jimuyang Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: An important issue facing vision-based intelligent systems today is the lack of accessibility-aware development. A main reason for this issue is the absence of any large-scale, standardized vision benchmarks that incorporate relevant tasks and scenarios related to people with disabilities. This lack of representation hinders even preliminary analysis with respect to underlying pose, appearance, and occlusion characteristics of diverse pedestrians. What is the impact of significant occlusion from a wheelchair on instance segmentation quality? How can interaction with mobility aids, e.g., a long and narrow walking cane, be recognized robustly? To begin addressing such questions, we introduce X-World, an accessibility-centered development environment for vision-based autonomous systems. We tackle inherent data scarcity by leveraging a simulation environment to spawn dynamic agents with various mobility aids. The simulation supports generation of ample amounts of finely annotated, multi-modal data in a safe, cheap, and privacy-preserving manner. Our analysis highlights novel challenges introduced by our benchmark and tasks, as well as numerous opportunities for future developments. We further broaden our analysis using a complementary real-world evaluation benchmark of in-situ navigation by pedestrians with disabilities. Our contributions provide an initial step towards widespread deployment of vision-based agents that can perceive and model the interaction needs of diverse people with disabilities.
Target Adaptive Context Aggregation for Video Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Limin Wang, Zhifeng Li, Gangshan Wu Yao Teng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper deals with a challenging task of video scene graph generation (VidSGG), which could serve as a structured video representation for high-level understanding tasks. We present a new detect-to-track paradigm for this task by decoupling the context modeling for relation prediction from the complicated low-level entity tracking. Specifically, we design an efficient method for frame-level VidSGG, termed as Target Adaptive Context Aggregation Network (TRACE), with a focus on capturing spatio-temporal context information for relation recognition. Our TRACE framework streamlines the VidSGG pipeline with a modular design, and presents two unique blocks of Hierarchical Relation Tree (HRTree) construction and Target-adaptive Context Aggregation. More specific, our HRTree first provides an adpative structure for organizing possible relation candidates efficiently, and guides context aggregation module to effectively capture spatio-temporal structure information. Then, we obtain a contextualized feature representation for each relation candidate and build a classification head to recognize its relation category. Finally, we provide a simple temporal association strategy to track TRACE detected results to yield the video-level VidSGG. We perform experiments on two VidSGG benchmarks: ImageNet-VidVRD and Action Genome, and the results demonstrate that our TRACE achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The code and models are made available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/TRACE.
Learnable Boundary Guided Adversarial Training
Authors: Shu Liu, Liwei Wang, Jiaya Jia Jiequan Cui
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Previous adversarial training raises model robustness under the compromise of accuracy on natural data. In this paper, we reduce natural accuracy degradation. We use the model logits from one clean model to guide learning of another one robust model, taking into consideration that logits from the well trained clean model embed the most discriminative features of natural data, e.g., generalizable classifier boundary. Our solution is to constrain logits from the robust model that takes adversarial examples as input and makes it similar to those from the clean model fed with corresponding natural data. It lets the robust model inherit the classifier boundary of the clean model. Moreover, we observe such boundary guidance can not only preserve high natural accuracy but also benefit model robustness, which gives new insights and facilitates progress for the adversarial community. Finally, extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet testify to the effectiveness of our method. We achieve new state-of-the-art robustness on CIFAR-100 without additional real or synthetic data with auto-attack benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/LBGAT.
Memory-Augmented Dynamic Neural Relational Inference
Authors: Frederic Z. Zhang, Javen Qinfeng Shi, Anton van den Hengel Dong Gong
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Dynamic interacting systems are prevalent in vision tasks. These interactions are usually difficult to observe and measure directly, and yet understanding latent interactions is essential for performing inference tasks on dynamic systems like forecasting. Neural relational inference (NRI) techniques are thus introduced to explicitly estimate interpretable relations between the entities in the system for trajectory prediction. However, NRI assumes static relations; thus, dynamic neural relational inference (DNRI) was proposed to handle dynamic relations using LSTM. Unfortunately, the older information will be washed away when the LSTM updates the latent variable as a whole, which is why DNRI struggles with modeling long-term dependences and forecasting long sequences. This motivates us to propose a memory-augmented dynamic neural relational inference method, which maintains two associative memory pools: one for the interactive relations and the other for the individual entities. The two memory pools help retain useful relation features and node features for the estimation in the future steps. Our model dynamically estimates the relations by learning better embeddings and utilizing the long-range information stored in the memory. With the novel memory modules and customized structures, our memory-augmented DNRI can update and access the memory adaptively as required. The memory pools also serve as global latent variables across time to maintain detailed long-term temporal relations readily available for other components to use. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method on modeling dynamic relations and forecasting complex trajectories.
Physics-Based Differentiable Depth Sensor Simulation
Authors: Rajat Vikram Singh Benjamin Planche
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Gradient-based algorithms are crucial to modern computer-vision and graphics applications, enabling learning-based optimization and inverse problems. For example, photorealistic differentiable rendering pipelines for color images have been proven highly valuable to applications aiming to map 2D and 3D domains. However, to the best of our knowledge, no effort has been made so far towards extending these gradient-based methods to the generation of depth (2.5D) images, as simulating structured-light depth sensors implies solving complex light transport and stereo-matching problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end differentiable simulation pipeline for the generation of realistic 2.5D scans, built on physics-based 3D rendering and custom block-matching algorithms. Each module can be differentiated w.r.t sensor and scene parameters; e.g., to automatically tune the simulation for new devices over some provided scans or to leverage the pipeline as a 3D-to-2.5D transformer within larger computer-vision applications. Applied to the training of deep-learning methods for various depth-based recognition tasks (classification, pose estimation, semantic segmentation), our simulation greatly improves the performance of the resulting models on real scans, thereby demonstrating the fidelity and value of its synthetic depth data compared to previous static simulations and learning-based domain adaptation schemes.
Temporal Action Detection With Multi-Level Supervision
Authors: Qi Dai, Judy Hoffman, Kate Saenko, Trevor Darrell, Huijuan Xu Baifeng Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training temporal action detection in videos requires large amounts of labeled data, yet such annotation is expensive to collect. Incorporating unlabeled or weakly-labeled data to train action detection model could help reduce annotation cost. In this work, we first introduce the Semi-supervised Action Detection (SSAD) task with a mixture of labeled and unlabeled data and analyze different types of errors in the proposed SSAD baselines which are directly adapted from the semi-supervised classification literature. Identifying that the main source of error is action incompleteness (i.e., missing parts of actions), we alleviate it by designing an unsupervised foreground attention (UFA) module utilizing the conditional independence between foreground and background motion. Then we incorporate weakly-labeled data into SSAD and propose Omni-supervised Action Detection (OSAD) with three levels of supervision. To overcome the accompanying action-context confusion problem in OSAD baselines, an information bottleneck (IB) is designed to suppress the scene information in non-action frames while preserving the action information. We extensively benchmark against the baselines for SSAD and OSAD on our created data splits in THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UFA and IB methods. Lastly, the benefit of our full OSAD-IB model under limited annotation budgets is shown by exploring the optimal annotation strategy for labeled, unlabeled and weakly-labeled data.
FACIAL: Synthesizing Dynamic Talking Face With Implicit Attribute Learning
Authors: Yifan Zhao, Yifei Huang, Ming Zeng, Saifeng Ni, Madhukar Budagavi, Xiaohu Guo Chenxu Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a talking face generation method that takes an audio signal as input and a short target video clip as reference, and synthesizes a photo-realistic video of the target face with natural lip motions, head poses, and eye blinks that are in-sync with the input audio signal. We note that the synthetic face attributes include not only explicit ones such as lip motions that have high correlations with speech, but also implicit ones such as head poses and eye blinks that have only weak correlation with the input audio. To model such complicated relationships among different face attributes with input audio, we propose a FACe Implicit Attribute Learning Generative Adversarial Network (FACIAL-GAN), which integrates the phonetics-aware, context-aware, and identity-aware information to synthesize the 3D face animation with realistic motions of lips, head poses, and eye blinks. Then, our Rendering-to-Video network takes the rendered face images and the attention map of eye blinks as input to generate the photo-realistic output video frames. Experimental results and user studies show our method can generate realistic talking face videos with not only synchronized lip motions, but also natural head movements and eye blinks, with better qualities than the results of state-of-the-art methods.
Unsupervised Deep Video Denoising
Authors: Sreyas Mohan, Joshua L. Vincent, Ramon Manzorro, Peter A. Crozier, Mitesh M. Khapra, Eero P. Simoncelli, Carlos Fernandez-Granda Dev Yashpal Sheth
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for video denoising are typically trained with supervision, assuming the availability of clean videos. However, in many applications, such as microscopy, noiseless videos are not available. To address this, we propose an Unsupervised Deep Video Denoiser (UDVD), a CNN architecture designed to be trained exclusively with noisy data. The performance of UDVD is comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art, even when trained only on a single short noisy video. We demonstrate the promise of our approach in real-world imaging applications by denoising raw video, fluorescence-microscopy and electron-microscopy data. In contrast to many current approaches to video denoising, UDVD does not require explicit motion compensation. This is advantageous because motion compensation is computationally expensive, and can be unreliable when the input data are noisy. A gradient-based analysis reveals that UDVD automatically tracks the motion of objects in the input noisy videos. Thus, the network learns to perform implicit motion compensation, even though it is only trained for denoising.
Making Higher Order MOT Scalable: An Efficient Approximate Solver for Lifted Disjoint Paths
Authors: Timo Kaiser, Paul Swoboda, Michal Rolinek, Bodo Rosenhahn, Roberto Henschel Andrea Hornakova
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present an efficient approximate message passing solver for the lifted disjoint paths problem (LDP), a natural but NP-hard model for multiple object tracking (MOT). Our tracker scales to very large instances that come from long and crowded MOT sequences. Our approximate solver enables us to process the MOT15/16/17 benchmarks without sacrificing solution quality and allows for solving MOT20, which has been out of reach up to now for LDP solvers due to its size and complexity. On all these four standard MOT benchmarks we achieve performance comparable or better than current state-of-the-art methods including a tracker based on an optimal LDP solver.
TMCOSS: Thresholded Multi-Criteria Online Subset Selection for Data-Efficient Autonomous Driving
Authors: Harikrishna Patibandla, Suparna Bhattacharya, Kshounis Bera, Niloy Ganguly, Sourangshu Bhattacharya Soumi Das
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training vision-based Autonomous driving models is a challenging problem with enormous practical implications. One of the main challenges is the requirement of storage and processing of vast volumes of (possibly redundant) driving video data. In this paper, we study the problem of data-efficient training of autonomous driving systems. We argue that in the context of an edge-device deployment, multi-criteria online video frame subset selection is an appropriate technique for developing such frameworks. We study existing convex optimization based solutions and show that they are unable to provide solution with high weightage to loss of selected video frames. We design a novel multi-criteria online subset selection algorithm, TMCOSS, which uses a thresholded concave function of selection variables. Extensive experiments using driving simulator CARLA show that we are able to drop 80% of the frames, while succeeding to complete 100% of the episodes. We also show that TMCOSS improves performance on the crucial affordance 'Relative Angle' during turns, on inclusion of bucket-specific relative angle loss (BL), leading to selection of more frames in those parts. TMCOSS also achieves an 80% reduction in number of training video frames, on real-world videos from the standard BDD and Cityscapes datasets, for the tasks of drivable area segmentation, and semantic segmentation.