mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Human Trajectory Prediction via Counterfactual Analysis
Authors: Junlong Li, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou Guangyi Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Forecasting human trajectories in complex dynamic environments plays a critical role in autonomous vehicles and intelligent robots. Most existing methods learn to predict future trajectories by behavior clues from history trajectories and interaction clues from environments. However, the inherent bias between training and deployment environments is ignored. Hence, we propose a counterfactual analysis method for human trajectory prediction to investigate the causality between the predicted trajectories and input clues and alleviate the negative effects brought by environment bias. We first build a causal graph for trajectory forecasting with history trajectory, future trajectory, and the environment interactions. Then, we cut off the inference from the environment to trajectory by constructing the counterfactual intervention on the trajectory itself. Finally, we compare the factual and counterfactual trajectory clues to alleviate the effects of environment bias and highlight the trajectory clues. Our counterfactual analysis is a plug-and-play module that can be applied to any baseline prediction methods including RNN- and CNN-based ones. We show that our method achieves consistent improvement for different baselines and obtains state-of-the-art results on public pedestrian trajectory forecasting benchmarks.
Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-Identification
Authors: Guangyi Chen, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou Yongming Rao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Attention mechanism has demonstrated great potential in fine-grained visual recognition tasks. In this paper, we present a counterfactual attention learning method to learn more effective attention based on causal inference. Unlike most existing methods that learn visual attention based on conventional likelihood, we propose to learn the attention with counterfactual causality, which provides a tool to measure the attention quality and a powerful supervisory signal to guide the learning process. Specifically, we analyze the effect of the learned visual attention on network prediction through counterfactual intervention and maximize the effect to encourage the network to learn more useful attention for fine-grained image recognition. Empirically, we evaluate our method on a wide range of fine-grained visual recognition tasks where attention plays a crucial role, including fine-grained image categorization, person re-identification, and vehicle re-identification. The consistent improvement on all benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.
Effectively Leveraging Attributes for Visual Similarity
Authors: Zhongping Zhang, Yuan Shen, Ranjitha Kumar, Venkatesh Saligrama, Bryan A. Plummer Samarth Mishra
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Measuring similarity between two images often requires performing complex reasoning along different axes (e.g., color, texture, or shape). Insights into what might be important for measuring similarity can can be provided by annotated attributes, but prior work tends to view these annotations as complete, resulting in them using a simplistic approach of predicting attributes on single images, which are, in turn, used to measure similarity. However, it is impractical for a dataset to fully annotate every attribute that may be important. Thus, only representing images based on these incomplete annotations may miss out on key information. To address this issue, we propose the Pairwise Attribute-informed similarity Network (PAN), which breaks similarity learning into capturing similarity conditions and relevance scores from a joint representation of two images. This enables our model to identify that two images contain the same attribute, but can have it deemed irrelevant (e.g., due to fine-grained differences between them) and ignored for measuring similarity between the two images. Notably, while prior methods of using attribute annotations are often unable to outperform prior art, PAN obtains a 4-9% improvement on compatibility prediction between clothing items on Polyvore Outfits, a 5% gain on few shot classification of images using Caltech-UCSD Birds (CUB), and over 1% boost to Recall@1 on In-Shop Clothes Retrieval.
Anticipative Video Transformer
Authors: Kristen Grauman Rohit Girdhar
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose Anticipative Video Transformer (AVT), an end-to-end attention-based video modeling architecture that attends to the previously observed video in order to anticipate future actions. We train the model jointly to predict the next action in a video sequence, while also learning frame feature encoders that are predictive of successive future frames' features. Compared to existing temporal aggregation strategies, AVT has the advantage of both maintaining the sequential progression of observed actions while still capturing long-range dependencies--both critical for the anticipation task. Through extensive experiments, we show that AVT obtains the best reported performance on four popular action anticipation benchmarks: EpicKitchens-55, EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA Gaze+, and 50-Salads; and it wins first place in the EpicKitchens-100 CVPR'21 challenge.
Semantically Robust Unpaired Image Translation for Data With Unmatched Semantics Statistics
Authors: Bodi Yuan, Kangkang Wang, Hong Wu, David Clifford, Zhiqiang Yuan, Hao Su Zhiwei Jia
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many applications of unpaired image-to-image translation require the input contents to be preserved semantically during translations. Unaware of the inherently unmatched semantics distributions between source and target domains, existing distribution matching methods (i.e., GAN-based) can give undesired solutions. In specific, although producing visually reasonable outputs, the learned models usually flip the semantics of the inputs. To tackle this without using extra supervisions, we propose to enforce the translated outputs to be semantically invariant w.r.t. small perceptual variations of the inputs, a property we call ""semantic robustness"". By optimizing a robustness loss w.r.t. multi-scale feature space perturbations of the inputs, our method effectively reduces semantics flipping and produces translations that outperform existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Progressive Seed Generation Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Point Cloud Learning
Authors: Pyunghwan Ahn, Doyeon Kim, Haeil Lee, Junmo Kim Juyoung Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: With the development of 3D scanning technologies, 3D vision tasks have become a popular research area. Owing to the large amount of data acquired by sensors, unsupervised learning is essential for understanding and utilizing point clouds without an expensive annotation process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework and an effective auto-encoder architecture named "PSG-Net" for reconstruction-based learning of point clouds. Unlike existing studies that used fixed or random 2D points, our framework generates input-dependent point-wise features for the latent point set. PSG-Net uses the encoded input to produce point-wise features through the seed generation module and extracts richer features in multiple stages with gradually increasing resolution by applying the seed feature propagation module progressively. We prove the effectiveness of PSG-Net experimentally; PSG-Net shows state-of-the-art performances in point cloud reconstruction and unsupervised classification, and achieves comparable performance to counterpart methods in supervised completion.
Waypoint Models for Instruction-Guided Navigation in Continuous Environments
Authors: Aaron Gokaslan, Dhruv Batra, Stefan Lee, Oleksandr Maksymets Jacob Krantz
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Little inquiry has explicitly addressed the role of action spaces in language-guided visual navigation -- either in terms of its effect on navigation success or the efficiency with which a robotic agent could execute the resulting trajectory. Building on the recently released VLN-CE setting for instruction following in continuous environments, we develop a class of language-conditioned waypoint prediction networks to examine this question. We vary the expressivity of these models to explore a spectrum between low-level actions and continuous waypoint prediction. We measure task performance and estimated execution time on a profiled LoCoBot robot. We find more expressive models result in simpler, faster to execute trajectories, but lower-level actions can achieve better navigation metrics by approximating shortest paths better. Further, our models outperform prior work in VLN-CE and set a new state-of-the-art on the public leaderboard -- increasing success rate by 4% with our best model on this challenging task.
Rethinking Preventing Class-Collapsing in Metric Learning With Margin-Based Losses
Authors: Tete Xiao, Xiaolong Wang, Trevor Darrell Elad Levi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Metric learning seeks perceptual embeddings where visually similar instances are close and dissimilar instances are apart, but learned representations can be sub-optimal when the distribution of intra-class samples is diverse and distinct sub-clusters are present. Although theoretically with optimal assumptions, margin-based losses such as the triplet loss and margin loss have a diverse family of solutions. We theoretically prove and empirically show that under reasonable noise assumptions, margin-based losses tend to project all samples of a class with various modes onto a single point in the embedding space, resulting in a class collapse that usually renders the space ill-sorted for classification or retrieval. To address this problem, we propose a simple modification to the embedding losses such that each sample selects its nearest same-class counterpart in a batch as the positive element in the tuple. This allows for the presence of multiple sub-clusters within each class. The adaptation can be integrated into a wide range of metric learning losses. The proposed sampling method demonstrates clear benefits on various fine-grained image retrieval datasets over a variety of existing losses; qualitative retrieval results show that samples with similar visual patterns are indeed closer in the embedding space.
HiNet: Deep Image Hiding by Invertible Network
Authors: Xin Deng, Mai Xu, Jianyi Wang, Zhenyu Guan Junpeng Jing
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image hiding aims to hide a secret image into a cover image in an imperceptible way, and then recover the secret image perfectly at the receiver end. Capacity, invisibility and security are three primary challenges in image hiding task. This paper proposes a novel invertible neural network (INN) based framework, HiNet, to simultaneously overcome the three challenges in image hiding. For large capacity, we propose an inverse learning mechanism by simultaneously learning the image concealing and revealing processes. Our method is able to achieve the concealing of a full-size secret image into a cover image with the same size. For high invisibility, instead of pixel domain hiding, we propose to hide the secret information in wavelet domain. Furthermore, we propose a new low-frequency wavelet loss to constrain that secret information is hidden in high-frequency wavelet sub-bands, which significantly improves the hiding security. Experimental results show that our HiNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art image hiding methods, with more than 10 dB PSNR improvement in secret image recovery on ImageNet, COCO and DIV2K datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/TomTomTommi/HiNet.
Rotation Averaging in a Split Second: A Primal-Dual Method and a Closed-Form for Cycle Graphs
Authors: Manuel Marques, João Paulo Costeira Gabriel Moreira
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A cornerstone of geometric reconstruction, rotation averaging seeks the set of absolute rotations that optimally explains a set of measured relative orientations between them. In spite of being an integral part of bundle adjustment and structure-from-motion, averaging rotations is both a nonconvex and high-dimensional optimization problem. In this paper, we address it from a maximum likelihood estimation standpoint and make a twofold contribution. Firstly, we set forth a novel initialization-free primal-dual method which we show empirically to converge to the global optimum. Further, we derive what is to our knowledge, the first optimal closed-form solution for rotation averaging in cycle graphs and contextualize this result within spectral graph theory. Our proposed methods achieve a significant gain both in precision and performance.
End-to-End Robust Joint Unsupervised Image Alignment and Clustering
Authors: Gregory Howe, Min Xu Xiangrui Zeng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Computing dense pixel-to-pixel image correspondences is a fundamental task of computer vision. Often, the objective is to align image pairs from the same semantic category for manipulation or segmentation purposes. Despite achieving superior performance, existing deep learning alignment methods cannot cluster images; consequently, clustering and pairing images needed to be a separate laborious and expensive step. Given a dataset with diverse semantic categories, we propose a multi-task model, Jim-Net, that can directly learn to cluster and align images without any pixel-level or image-level annotations. We design a pair-matching alignment unsupervised training algorithm that selectively matches and aligns image pairs from the clustering branch. Our unsupervised Jim-Net achieves comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art supervised methods on benchmark 2D image alignment dataset PF-PASCAL. Specifically, we apply Jim-Net to cryo-electron tomography, a revolutionary 3D microscopy imaging technique of native subcellular structures. After extensive evaluation on seven datasets, we demonstrate that Jim-Net enables systematic discovery and recovery of representative macromolecular structures in situ, which is essential for revealing molecular mechanisms underlying cellular functions. To our knowledge, Jim-Net is the first end-to-end model that can simultaneously align and cluster images, which significantly improves the performance as compared to performing each task alone.
BabelCalib: A Universal Approach to Calibrating Central Cameras
Authors: Kostiantyn Liepieshov, Jianhui Chen, Michal Perdoch, Christopher Zach, James Pritts Yaroslava Lochman
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing calibration methods occasionally fail for large field-of-view cameras due to the non-linearity of the underlying problem and the lack of good initial values for all parameters of the used camera model. This might occur because a simpler projection model is assumed in an initial step, or a poor initial guess for the internal parameters is pre-defined. A lot of the difficulties of general camera calibration lie in the use of a forward projection model. We side-step these challenges by first proposing a solver to calibrate the parameters in terms of a back-projection model and then regress the parameters for a target forward model. These steps are incorporated in a robust estimation framework to cope with outlying detections. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is very reliable and returns the most accurate calibration parameters as measured on the downstream task of absolute pose estimation on test sets. The code is released at https://github.com/ylochman/babelcalib
Curious Representation Learning for Embodied Intelligence
Authors: Chuang Gan, Phillip Isola Yilun Du
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-supervised visual representation learning has achieved remarkable success in recent years. By subverting the need for supervised labels, such approaches are able to utilize the numerous unlabeled images that exist on the Internet and in photographic datasets. Yet to build truly intelligent agents, we must construct representation learning algorithms that can learn not only from datasets but also learn in environments. An agent in a natural environment will not typically be fed curated data. Instead, it must explore its environment to acquire the data it will learn from. We propose a framework, curious representation learning (CRL), which jointly learns a reinforcement learning policy and a visual representation model. The policy is trained to maximize the error of the representation learner, and in doing so is incentivized to explore its environment. At the same time, the learned representation becomes stronger and stronger as the policy feeds it ever harder data to learn from. Our learned embodied representations enable promising transfer to downstream embodied semantic and language-guided navigation, performing better or comparable to ImageNet pretraining without using any supervision at all. In addition, despite being trained in simulation, our learned representations can obtain interpretable results on real images.
Multi-Modal Multi-Action Video Recognition
Authors: Ju Liang, Qianqian Li, Haiyong Zheng, Zhaorui Gu, Junyu Dong, Bing Zheng Zhensheng Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-action video recognition is much more challenging due to the requirement to recognize multiple actions co-occurring simultaneously or sequentially. Modeling multi-action relations is beneficial and crucial to understand videos with multiple actions, and actions in a video are usually presented in multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-action relation model for videos, by leveraging both relational graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and video multi-modality. We first build multi-modal GCNs to explore modality-aware multi-action relations, fed by modality-specific action representation as node features, e.g., spatiotemporal features learned by 3D convolutional neural network (CNN), audio and textual embeddings queried from respective feature lexicons. We then joint both multi-modal CNN-GCN models and multi-modal feature representations for learning better relational action predictions. Ablation study, multi-action relation visualization, and boosts analysis, all show efficacy of our multi-modal multi-action relation modeling. Also our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale multi-action M-MiT benchmark. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/zhenglab/multi-action-video.
Cross-Patch Graph Convolutional Network for Image Denoising
Authors: Xueyang Fu, Zheng-Jun Zha Yao Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, deep learning-based image denoising methods have achieved significant improvements over traditional methods. Due to the hardware limitation, most deep learning-based image denoising methods utilize cropped small patches to train a convolutional neural network to infer the clean images. However, the real noisy images in practical are mostly of high resolution rather than the cropped small patches and the vanilla training strategies ignore the cross-patch contextual dependency in the whole image. In this paper, we propose Cross-Patch Net (CPNet), which is the first deep- learning-based real image denoising method for HR (high resolution) input. Furthermore, we design a novel loss guided by the noise level map to obtain better performance. Compared with the vanilla patch-based training strategies, our approach effectively exploits the cross-patch contextual dependency. effective method to generate realistic sRGB noisy images from their corresponding clean sRGB images for denoiser training. Denoising experiments on real-world sRGB images show the effectiveness of the proposed method. More importantly, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on practical sRGB noisy image denoising.
ISNet: Integrate Image-Level and Semantic-Level Context for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Bin Liu, Qi Chu, Nenghai Yu Zhenchao Jin
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Co-occurrent visual pattern makes aggregating contextual information a common paradigm to enhance the pixel representation for semantic image segmentation. The existing approaches focus on modeling the context from the perspective of the whole image, i.e., aggregating the image-level contextual information. Despite impressive, these methods weaken the significance of the pixel representations of the same category, i.e., the semantic-level contextual information. To address this, this paper proposes to augment the pixel representations by aggregating the image-level and semantic-level contextual information, respectively. First, an image-level context module is designed to capture the contextual information for each pixel in the whole image. Second, we aggregate the representations of the same category for each pixel where the category regions are learned under the supervision of the ground-truth segmentation. Third, we compute the similarities between each pixel representation and the image-level contextual information, the semantic-level contextual information, respectively. At last, a pixel representation is augmented by weighted aggregating both the image-level contextual information and the semantic-level contextual information with the similarities as the weights. Integrating the image-level and semantic-level context allows this paper to report state-of-the-art accuracy on four benchmarks, i.e., ADE20K, LIP, COCOStuff and Cityscapes.
Body-Face Joint Detection via Embedding and Head Hook
Authors: Jiangfan Deng, Xiaosong Qiu, Feng Zhou Junfeng Wan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians and their associated faces jointly is a challenging task.On one hand, body or face could be absent because of occlusion or non-frontal human pose.On the other hand, the association becomes difficult or even miss-leading in crowded scenes due to the lack of strong correlational evidence. This paper proposes Body-Face Joint (BFJ) detector, a novel framework for detecting bodies and their faces with accurate correspondance. We follow the classical multi-class detector design by detecting body and face in parallel but with two key contributions. First, we propose an Embedding Matching Loss (EML) to learn an associative embedding for matching body and face of the same person. Second, we introduce a novel concept, "head hook", to bridge the gap of matching body and faces spatially. With the new semantical and geometrical sources of information, BFJ greatly reduces the difficulty of detecting body and face in pairs. Since the problem is unexplored yet, we design a new metric named log-average miss matching rate (mMR^ -2 ) to evaluate the association performance and extend the CrowdHuman and CityPersons benchmarks by annotating each face box. Experiments show that our BFJ detector can maintain state-of-the-art performance in pedestrian detection on both one-stage and two-stage structures while greatly outperform various body-face association strategies. Code and datasets will be released soon.
Enhancing Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning via Multi-Level Feature Optimization
Authors: Yuxi Li, Huabin Liu, John See, Shuangrui Ding, Xian Liu, Dian Li, Weiyao Lin Rui Qian
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The crux of self-supervised video representation learning is to build general features from unlabeled videos. However, most recent works have mainly focused on high-level semantics and neglected lower-level representations and their temporal relationship which are crucial for general video understanding. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-level feature optimization framework to improve the generalization and temporal modeling ability of learned video representations. Concretely, high-level features obtained from naive and prototypical contrastive learning are utilized to build distribution graphs, guiding the process of low-level and mid-level feature learning. We also devise a simple temporal modeling module from multi-level features to enhance motion pattern learning. Experiments demonstrate that multi-level feature optimization with the graph constraint and temporal modeling can greatly improve the representation ability in video understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/shvdiwnkozbw/Video-Representation-via-Multi-level-Optimization.
LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-Based 3D Detector
Authors: Shaoshuai Shi, Xiaogang Wang, Hongsheng Li Xiaoyang Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Stereo-based 3D detection aims at detecting 3D object bounding boxes from stereo images using intermediate depth maps or implicit 3D geometry representations, which provides a low-cost solution for 3D perception. However, its performance is still inferior compared with LiDAR-based detection algorithms. To detect and localize accurate 3D bounding boxes, LiDAR-based models can encode accurate object boundaries and surface normal directions from LiDAR point clouds. However, the detection results of stereo-based detectors are easily affected by the erroneous depth features due to the limitation of stereo matching. To solve the problem, we propose LIGA-Stereo (LiDAR Geometry Aware Stereo Detector) to learn stereo-based 3D detectors under the guidance of high-level geometry-aware representations of LiDAR-based detection models. In addition, we found existing voxel-based stereo detectors failed to learn semantic features effectively from indirect 3D supervisions. We attach an auxiliary 2D detection head to provide direct 2D semantic supervisions. Experiment results show that the above two strategies improved the geometric and semantic representation capabilities. Compared with the state-of-the-art stereo detector, our method has improved the 3D detection performance of cars, pedestrians, cyclists by 10.44%, 5.69%, 5.97% mAP respectively on the official KITTI benchmark. The gap between stereo-based and LiDAR-based 3D detectors is further narrowed.
Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation With Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning From a Class-Wise Memory Bank
Authors: Alberto Sabater, David Ferstl, Luis Montesano, Ana C. Murillo Iñigo Alonso
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This work presents a novel approach for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. The key element of this approach is our contrastive learning module that enforces the segmentation network to yield similar pixel-level feature representations for same-class samples across the whole dataset. To achieve this, we maintain a memory bank which is continuously updated with relevant and high-quality feature vectors from labeled data. In an end-to-end training, the features from both labeled and unlabeled data are optimized to be similar to same-class samples from the memory bank. Our approach not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art for semi-supervised semantic segmentation but also for semi-supervised domain adaptation on well-known public benchmarks, with larger improvements on the most challenging scenarios, i.e., less available labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/Shathe/SemiSeg-Contrastive
End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach
Authors: Alexander Liniger, Dengxin Dai, Fisher Yu, Luc Van Gool Zhejun Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving commonly rely on expert demonstrations. Although humans are good drivers, they are not good coaches for end-to-end algorithms that demand dense on-policy supervision. On the contrary, automated experts that leverage privileged information can efficiently generate large scale on-policy and off-policy demonstrations. However, existing automated experts for urban driving make heavy use of hand-crafted rules and perform suboptimally even on driving simulators, where ground-truth information is available. To address these issues, we train a reinforcement learning expert that maps bird's-eye view images to continuous low-level actions. While setting a new performance upper-bound on CARLA, our expert is also a better coach that provides informative supervision signals for imitation learning agents to learn from. Supervised by our reinforcement learning coach, a baseline end-to-end agent with monocular camera-input achieves expert-level performance. Our end-to-end agent achieves a 78% success rate while generalizing to a new town and new weather on the NoCrash-dense benchmark and state-of-the-art performance on the more challenging CARLA LeaderBoard.
Interpolation-Aware Padding for 3D Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Peng-Shuai Wang, Yang Liu Yu-Qi Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Sparse voxel-based 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for various 3D vision tasks. Sparse voxel-based 3D CNNs create sparse non-empty voxels from input point clouds and perform standard convolution operations on them only. We propose a simple and effective padding scheme --- interpolation-aware padding to pad a few empty voxels adjacent to the non-empty voxels and involving them in the CNN computation so that all neighboring voxels exist when computing point-wise features via the trilinear interpolation. For fine-grained 3D vision tasks where point-wise features are essential, like semantic segmentation and 3D detection, our network achieves higher prediction accuracy than the existing networks using the nearest neighbor interpolation or normalized trilinear interpolation with the zero-padding or the octree-padding scheme. Through extensive comparisons on various 3D segmentation and detection tasks, we demonstrate the superiority of 3D sparse CNNs with our sparse padding scheme in conjunction with feature interpolation.
Active Learning for Lane Detection: A Knowledge Distillation Approach
Authors: Chao Wang, Jianzhuang Liu, Zhen Yang Fengchao Peng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Lane detection is a key task for autonomous driving vehicles. Currently, lane detection relies on a huge amount of annotated images, which is a heavy burden. Active learning has been proposed to reduce annotation in many computer vision tasks, but no effort has been made for lane detection. Through experiments, we find that existing active learning methods perform poorly for lane detection, and the reasons are twofold. On one hand, most methods evaluate data uncertainties based on entropy, which is undesirable in lane detection because it encourages to select images with very few lanes or even no lane at all. On the other hand, existing methods are not aware of the noise of lane annotations, which is caused by heavy occlusion and unclear lane marks. In this paper, we build a novel knowledge distillation framework and evaluate the uncertainty of images based on the knowledge learnt by the student model. We show that the proposed uncertainty metric overcomes the above two problems. To reduce data redundancy, we explore the influence sets of image samples, and propose a new diversity metric for data selection. Finally we incorporate the uncertainty and diversity metrics, and develop a greedy algorithm for data selection. The experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art on the lane detection benchmarks. In addition, we extend this method to common 2D object detection and the results show that it is also effective.
Once Quantization-Aware Training: High Performance Extremely Low-Bit Architecture Search
Authors: Feng Liang, Ruihao Gong, Yuhang Li, Chuming Li, Chen Lin, Fengwei Yu, Junjie Yan, Wanli Ouyang Mingzhu Shen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Quantization Neural Networks (QNN) have attracted a lot of attention due to their high efficiency. To enhance the quantization accuracy, prior works mainly focus on designing advanced quantization algorithms but still fail to achieve satisfactory results under the extremely low-bit case. In this work, we take an architecture perspective to investigate the potential of high-performance QNN. Therefore, we propose to combine Network Architecture Search methods with quantization to enjoy the merits of the two sides. However, a naive combination inevitably faces unacceptable time consumption or unstable training problem. To alleviate these problems, we first propose the joint training of architecture and quantization with a shared step size to acquire a large number of quantized models. Then a bit-inheritance scheme is introduced to transfer the quantized models to the lower bit, which further reduces the time cost and meanwhile improves the quantization accuracy. Equipped with this overall framework, dubbed as Once Quantization-Aware Training (OQAT), our searched model family, OQATNets, achieves a new state-of-the-art compared with various architectures under different bit-widths. In particular, OQAT-2bit-M achieves 61.6% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy, outperforming 2-bit counterpart MobileNetV3 by a large margin of 9% with 10% less computation cost. A series of quantization-friendly architectures are identified easily and extensive analysis can be made to summarize the interaction between quantization and neural architectures. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/LaVieEnRoseSMZ/OQA
Learn To Match: Automatic Matching Network Design for Visual Tracking
Authors: Yihao Liu, Xiao Wang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu Zhipeng Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Siamese tracking has achieved groundbreaking performance in recent years, where the essence is the efficient matching operator cross-correlation and its variants. Besides the remarkable success, it is important to note that the heuristic matching network design relies heavily on expert experience. Moreover, we experimentally find that one sole matching operator is difficult to guarantee stable tracking in all challenging environments. Thus, in this work, we introduce six novel matching operators, namely Concatenation, Pointwise-Addition, Pairwise-Relation, FiLM, Simple-Transformer and Transductive-Guidance, to explore more feasibility on matching operator selection. The analyses reveal these operators' selective adaptability on different environment degradation types, which inspires us to combine them to explore complementary features. To this end, we propose binary channel manipulation (BCM) to search for the optimal combination of these operators. BCM determines to retrain or discard one operator by learning its contribution to other tracking steps. By inserting the learned matching networks to a strong baseline tracker Ocean, our model achieves favorable gains by 67.2 -> 71.4, 52.6 -> 58.3, 70.3 -> 76.0 AUC on OTB100, LaSOT, and TrackingNet, respectively. Notably, Our tracker runs at real-time speed of 50 / 100 FPS using PyTorch / TensorRT.
Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection
Authors: Gong Cheng, Jiabao Wang, Xiwen Yao, Junwei Han Xingxing Xie
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art two-stage detectors generate oriented proposals through time-consuming schemes. This diminishes the detectors' speed, thereby becoming the computational bottleneck in advanced oriented object detection systems. This work proposes an effective and simple oriented object detection framework, termed Oriented R-CNN, which is a general two-stage oriented detector with promising accuracy and efficiency. To be specific, in the first stage, we propose an oriented Region Proposal Network (oriented RPN) that directly generates high-quality oriented proposals in a nearly cost-free manner. The second stage is oriented R-CNN head for refining oriented Regions of Interest (oriented RoIs) and recognizing them. Without tricks, oriented R-CNN with ResNet50 achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on two commonly-used datasets for oriented object detection including DOTA (75.87% mAP) and HRSC2016 (96.50% mAP), while having a speed of 15.1 FPS with the image size of 1024x1024 on a single RTX 2080Ti. We hope our work could inspire rethinking the design of oriented detectors and serve as a baseline for oriented object detection. Code is available at https: //github.com/jbwang1997/OBBDetection.
TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding With Transformers
Authors: Zhengyuan Yang, Tianlang Chen, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li Jiajun Deng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we present a neat yet effective transformer-based framework for visual grounding, namely TransVG, to address the task of grounding a language query to the corresponding region onto an image. The state-of-the-art methods, including two-stage or one-stage ones, rely on a complex module with manually-designed mechanisms to perform the query reasoning and multi-modal fusion. However, the involvement of certain mechanisms in fusion module design, such as query decomposition and image scene graph, makes the models easily overfit to datasets with specific scenarios, and limits the plenitudinous interaction between the visual-linguistic context. To avoid this caveat, we propose to establish the multi-modal correspondence by leveraging transformers, and empirically show that the complex fusion modules (e.g., modular attention network, dynamic graph, and multi-modal tree) can be replaced by a simple stack of transformer encoder layers with higher performance. Moreover, we re-formulate the visual grounding as a direct coordinates regression problem and avoid making predictions out of a set of candidates (i.e., region proposals or anchor boxes). Extensive experiments are conducted on five widely used datasets, and a series of state-of-the-art records are set by our TransVG. We build the benchmark of transformer-based visual grounding framework and make the code available at https://github.com/djiajunustc/TransVG.
Airbert: In-Domain Pretraining for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Makarand Tapaswi, Shizhe Chen, Ivan Laptev, Cordelia Schmid Pierre-Louis Guhur
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to enable embodied agents to navigate in realistic environments using natural language instructions. Given the scarcity of domain-specific training data and the high diversity of image and language inputs, the generalization of VLN agents to unseen environments remains challenging. Recent methods explore pretraining to improve generalization, however, the use of generic image-caption datasets or existing small-scale VLN environments is suboptimal and results in limited improvements. In this work, we introduce BnB, a large-scale and diverse in-domain VLN dataset. We first collect image-caption (IC) pairs from hundreds of thousands of listings from online rental marketplaces. Using IC pairs we next propose automatic strategies to generate millions of VLN path-instruction (PI) pairs. We further propose a shuffling loss that improves the learning of temporal order inside PI pairs. We use BnB to pretrain our Airbert model that can be adapted to discriminative and generative settings and show that it outperforms state of the art for Room-to-Room (R2R) navigation and Remote Referring Expression (REVERIE) benchmarks. Moreover, our in-domain pretraining significantly increases performance on a challenging few-shot VLN evaluation, where we train the model only on VLN instructions from a few houses.
Internal Video Inpainting by Implicit Long-Range Propagation
Authors: Tengfei Wang, Qifeng Chen Hao Ouyang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for video inpainting by adopting an internal learning strategy. Unlike previous methods that use optical flow for cross-frame context propagation to inpaint unknown regions, we show that this can be achieved implicitly by fitting a convolutional neural network to known regions. Moreover, to handle challenging sequences with ambiguous backgrounds or long-term occlusion, we design two regularization terms to preserve high-frequency details and long-term temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on the DAVIS dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art inpainting quality quantitatively and qualitatively. We further extend the proposed method to another challenging task: learning to remove an object from a video giving a single object mask in only one frame in a 4K video.
Ask Your Neurons: A Neural-Based Approach to Answering Questions About Images
Authors: Marcus Rohrbach, Mario Fritz Mateusz Malinowski
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We address a question answering task on real-world images that is set up as a Visual Turing Test. By combining latest advances in image representation and natural language processing, we propose Neural-Image-QA, an end-to-end formulation to this problem for which all parts are trained jointly. In contrast to previous efforts, we are facing a multi-modal problem where the language output (answer) is conditioned on visual and natural language input (image and question). Our approach Neural-Image-QA doubles the performance of the previous best approach on this problem. We provide additional insights into the problem by analyzing how much information is contained only in the language part for which we provide a new human baseline. To study human consensus, which is related to the ambiguities inherent in this challenging task, we propose two novel metrics and collect additional answers which extends the original DAQUAR dataset to DAQUAR-Consensus.
Segment-Phrase Table for Semantic Segmentation, Visual Entailment and Paraphrasing
Authors: Fereshteh Sadeghi, Santosh K. Divvala, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yejin Choi, Ali Farhadi Hamid Izadinia
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We introduce Segment-Phrase Table (SPT), a large collection of bijective associations between textual phrases and their corresponding segmentations. Leveraging recent progress in object recognition and natural language semantics, we show how we can successfully build a high-quality segment-phrase table using minimal human supervision. More importantly, we demonstrate the unique value unleashed by this rich bimodal resource, for both vision as well as natural language understanding. First, we show that fine-grained textual labels facilitate contextual reasoning that helps in satisfying semantic constraints across image segments. This feature enables us to achieve state-of-the-art segmentation results on benchmark datasets. Next, we show that the association of high-quality segmentations to textual phrases aids in richer semantic understanding and reasoning of these textual phrases. Leveraging this feature, we motivate the problem of visual entailment and visual paraphrasing,  and demonstrate its utility on a large dataset.
Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-Like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books
Authors: Ryan Kiros, Rich Zemel, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Raquel Urtasun, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler Yukun Zhu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Books are a rich source of both fine-grained information, how a character, an object or a scene looks like, as well as high-level semantics, what someone is thinking, feeling and how these states evolve through a story. This paper aims to align books to their movie releases in order to provide rich descriptive explanations for visual content that go semantically far beyond the captions available in the current datasets. To align movies and books we propose a neural sentence embedding that is trained in an unsupervised way from a large corpus of books, as well as a video-text neural embedding for computing similarities between movie clips and sentences in the book. We propose a context-aware CNN to combine information from multiple sources. We demonstrate good quantitative performance for movie/book alignment and show several qualitative examples that showcase the diversity of tasks our model can be used for.
Learning Query and Image Similarities With Ranking Canonical Correlation Analysis
Authors: Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo Ting Yao
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: One of the fundamental problems in image search is to learn the ranking functions, i.e., similarity between the query and image. The research on this topic has evolved through two paradigms: feature-based vector model and image ranker learning. The former relies on the image surrounding texts, while the latter learns a ranker based on human labeled query-image pairs. Each of the paradigms has its own limitation. The vector model is sensitive to the quality of text descriptions, and the learning paradigm is difficult to be scaled up as human labeling is always too expensive to obtain. We demonstrate in this paper that the above two limitations can be well mitigated by jointly exploring subspace learning and the use of click-through data. Specifically, we propose a novel Ranking Canonical Correlation Analysis (RCCA) for learning query and image similarities. RCCA initially finds a common subspace between query and image views by maximizing their correlations, and further simultaneously learns a bilinear query-image similarity function and adjusts the subspace to preserve the preference relations implicit in the click-through data. Once the subspace is finalized, query-image similarity can be computed by the bilinear similarity function on their mappings in this subspace. On a large-scale click-based image dataset with 11.7 million queries and one million images, RCCA is shown to be powerful for image search with superior performance over several state-of-the-art methods on both keyword-based and query-by-example tasks.