mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning Causal Representation for Training Cross-Domain Pose Estimator via Generative Interventions
Authors: Yongkang Wong, Xiaofei Wu, Juwei Lu, Mohan Kankanhalli, Xiangdong Li, Weidong Geng Xiheng Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: 3D pose estimation has attracted increasing attention with the availability of high-quality benchmark datasets. However, prior works show that deep learning models tend to learn spurious correlations, which fail to generalize beyond the specific dataset they are trained on. In this work, we take a step towards training robust models for cross-domain pose estimation task, which brings together ideas from causal representation learning and generative adversarial networks. Specifically, this paper introduces a novel framework for causal representation learning which explicitly exploits the causal structure of the task. We consider changing domain as interventions on images under the data-generation process and steer the generative model to produce counterfactual features. This help the model learn transferable and causal relations across different domains. Our framework is able to learn with various types of unlabeled datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method on both human and hand pose estimation task. The experiment results show the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on most datasets for both domain adaptation and domain generalization settings.
Super-Resolving Cross-Domain Face Miniatures by Peeking at One-Shot Exemplar
Authors: Xin Yu, Yi Yang Peike Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Conventional face super-resolution methods usually assume testing low-resolution (LR) images lie in the same domain as the training ones. Due to different lighting conditions and imaging hardware, domain gaps between training and testing images inevitably occur in many real-world scenarios. Neglecting those domain gaps would lead to inferior face super-resolution (FSR) performance. However, how to transfer a trained FSR model to a target domain efficiently and effectively has not been investigated. To tackle this problem, we develop a Domain-Aware Pyramid-based Face Super-Resolution network, named DAP-FSR network. Our DAP-FSR is the first attempt to super-resolve LR faces from a target domain by exploiting only a pair of high-resolution (HR) and LR exemplar in the target domain. To be specific, our DAP-FSR firstly employs its encoder to extract the multi-scale latent representations of the input LR face. Considering only one target domain example is available, we propose to augment the target domain data by mixing the latent representations of the target domain face and source domain ones and then feed the mixed representations to the decoder of our DAP-FSR. The decoder will generate new face images resembling the target domain image style. The generated HR faces in turn are used to optimize our decoder to reduce the domain gap. By iteratively updating the latent representations and our decoder, our DAP-FSR will be adapted to the target domain, thus achieving authentic and high-quality upsampled HR faces. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superior performance of our DAP-FSR compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Webly Supervised Fine-Grained Recognition: Benchmark Datasets and an Approach
Authors: Yazhou Yao, Xiu-Shen Wei, Yongshun Zhang, Fumin Shen, Jianxin Wu, Jian Zhang, Heng Tao Shen Zeren Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning from the web can ease the extreme dependence of deep learning on large-scale manually labeled datasets. Especially for fine-grained recognition, which targets at distinguishing subordinate categories, it will significantly reduce the labeling costs by leveraging free web data. Despite its significant practical and research value, the webly supervised fine-grained recognition problem is not extensively studied in the computer vision community, largely due to the lack of high-quality datasets. To fill this gap, in this paper we construct two new benchmark webly supervised fine-grained datasets, termed WebFG-496 and WebiNat-5089, respectively. In concretely, WebFG-496 consists of three sub-datasets containing a total of 53,339 web training images with 200 species of birds (Web-bird), 100 types of aircrafts (Web-aircraft), and 196 models of cars (Web-car). For WebiNat-5089, it contains 5089 sub-categories and more than 1.1 million web training images, which is the largest webly supervised fine-grained dataset ever. As a minor contribution, we also propose a novel webly supervised method (termed "Peer-learning") for benchmarking these datasets. Comprehensive experimental results and analyses on two new benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance over the competing baseline models and states-of-the-art.
Towards Interpretable Deep Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Wei-Chen Chiu, Guanbin Li Zunzhi You
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep networks for Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) have achieved promising performance recently and it is of great importance to further understand the interpretability of these networks. Existing methods attempt to provide post-hoc explanations by investigating visual cues, which may not explore the internal representations learned by deep networks. In this paper, we find that some hidden units of the network are selective to certain ranges of depth, and thus such behavior can be served as a way to interpret the internal representations. Based on our observations, we quantify the interpretability of a deep MDE network by the depth selectivity of its hidden units. Moreover, we then propose a method to train interpretable MDE deep networks without changing their original architectures, by assigning a depth range for each unit to select. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to enhance the interpretability of deep MDE networks by largely improving the depth selectivity of their units, while not harming or even improving the depth estimation accuracy. We further provide comprehensive analysis to show the reliability of selective units, the applicability of our method on different models and layers, and a demonstration on monocular depth completion. We further provide comprehensive analysis to show the reliability of selective units, the applicability of our method on different layers, models, and datasets, and a demonstration on analysis of model error.
Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes Using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks
Authors: Zhihao Li, Songcen Xu, Mingkui Tan, Kui Jia Zhihao Liang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Instance segmentation in 3D scenes is fundamental in many applications of scene understanding. It is yet challenging due to the compound factors of data irregularity and uncertainty in the numbers of instances. State-of-the-art methods largely rely on a general pipeline that first learns point-wise features discriminative at semantic and instance levels, followed by a separate step of point grouping for proposing object instances. While promising, they have the shortcomings that (1) the second step is not supervised by the main objective of instance segmentation, and (2) their point-wise feature learning and grouping are less effective to deal with data irregularities, possibly resulting in fragmented segmentations. To address these issues, we propose in this work an end-to-end solution of Semantic Superpoint Tree Network (SSTNet) for proposing object instances from scene points. Key in SSTNet is an intermediate, semantic superpoint tree (SST), which is constructed based on the learned semantic features of superpoints, and which will be traversed and split at intermediate tree nodes for proposals of object instances. We also design in SSTNet a refinement module, termed CliqueNet, to prune superpoints that may be wrongly grouped into instance proposals. Experiments on the benchmarks of ScanNet and S3DIS show the efficacy of our proposed method. At the time of submission, SSTNet ranks top on the ScanNet (V2) leaderboard, with 2% higher of mAP than the second best method.
Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Tianfei Zhou, Fisher Yu, Jifeng Dai, Ender Konukoglu, Luc Van Gool Wenguan Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current semantic segmentation methods focus only on mining "local" context, i.e., dependencies between pixels within individual images, by context-aggregation modules (e.g., dilated convolution, neural attention) or structure-aware optimization criteria (e.g., IoU-like loss). However, they ignore "global" context of the training data, i.e., rich semantic relations between pixels across different images. Inspired by recent advance in unsupervised contrastive representation learning, we propose a pixel-wise contrastive algorithm for semantic segmentation in the fully supervised setting. The core idea is to enforce pixel embeddings belonging to a same semantic class to be more similar than embeddings from different classes. It raises a pixel-wise metric learning paradigm for semantic segmentation, by explicitly exploring the structures of labeled pixels, which were rarely explored before. Our method can be effortlessly incorporated into existing segmentation frameworks without extra overhead during testing. We experimentally show that, with famous segmentation models (i.e., DeepLabV3, HRNet, OCR) and backbones (i.e., ResNet, HRNet), our method brings performance improvements across diverse datasets (i.e., Cityscapes, PASCAL-Context, COCO-Stuff, CamVid). We expect this work will encourage our community to rethink the current de facto training paradigm in semantic segmentation.
Geometric Granularity Aware Pixel-To-Mesh
Authors: Bingbing Ni, Jinxian Liu, Dingyi Rong, Ye Qian, Wenjun Zhang Yue Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Pixel-to-mesh has wide applications, especially in virtual or augmented reality, animation and game industry. However, existing mesh reconstruction models perform unsatisfactorily in local geometry details due to ignoring mesh topology information during learning. Besides, most methods are constrained by the initial template, which cannot reconstruct meshes of various genus. In this work, we propose a geometric granularity-aware pixel-to-mesh framework with a fidelity-selection-and-guarantee strategy, which explicitly addresses both challenges. First, a geometry structure extractor is proposed for detecting local high structured parts and capturing local spatial feature. Second, we apply it to facilitate pixel-to-mesh mapping and resolve coarse details problem caused by the neglect of structural information in previous practices. Finally, a mesh edit module is proposed to encourage non-zero genus topology to emergence by fine-grained topology modification and a patching algorithm is introduced to repair the non-closed boundaries. Extensive experimental results, both quantitatively and visually have demonstrated the high reconstruction fidelity achieved by the proposed framework.
Pixel Difference Networks for Efficient Edge Detection
Authors: Wenzhe Liu, Zitong Yu, Dewen Hu, Qing Liao, Qi Tian, Matti Pietikäinen, Li Liu Zhuo Su
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can achieve human-level performance in edge detection with the rich and abstract edge representation capacities. However, the high performance of CNN based edge detection is achieved with a large pretrained CNN backbone, which is memory and energy consuming. In addition, it is surprising that the previous wisdom from the traditional edge detectors, such as Canny, Sobel, and LBP are rarely investigated in the rapid-developing deep learning era. To address these issues, we propose a simple, lightweight yet effective architecture named Pixel Difference Network (PiDiNet) for efficient edge detection. Extensive experiments on BSDS500, NYUD, and Multicue are provided to demonstrate its effectiveness, and its high training and inference efficiency. Surprisingly, when training from scratch with only the BSDS500 and VOC datasets, PiDiNet can surpass the recorded result of human perception (0.807 vs. 0.803 in ODS F-measure) on the BSDS500 dataset with 100 FPS and less than 1M parameters. A faster version of PiDiNet with less than 0.1M parameters can still achieve comparable performance among state of the arts with 200 FPS. Results on the NYUD and Multicue datasets show similar observations. The codes are available at https://github.com/zhuoinoulu/pidinet.
Towards Understanding the Generative Capability of Adversarially Robust Classifiers
Authors: Jiacheng Ma, Jiacheng Sun, Zewei Chen, Rongxin Jiang, Yaowu Chen, Zhenguo Li Yao Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, some works found an interesting phenomenon that adversarially robust classifiers can generate good images comparable to generative models. We investigate this phenomenon from an energy perspective and provide a novel explanation. We reformulate adversarial example generation, adversarial training, and image generation in terms of an energy function. We find that adversarial training contributes to obtaining an energy function that is flat and has low energy around the real data, which is the key for generative capability. Based on our new understanding, we further propose a better adversarial training method, Joint Energy Adversarial Training (JEAT), which can generate high-quality images and achieve new state-of-the-art robustness under a wide range of attacks. The Inception Score of the images (CIFAR-10) generated by JEAT is 8.80, much better than original robust classifiers (7.50). In particular, we achieve new state-of-the-art robustness on CIFAR-10 (from 57.20% to 62.04%) and CIFAR-100 (from 30.03% to 30.18%) without extra training data.
Learning Efficient Photometric Feature Transform for Multi-View Stereo
Authors: Cihui Xie, Ruisheng Zhu, Xiaohe Ma, Ping Tan, Hongzhi Wu, Kun Zhou Kaizhang Kang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel framework to learn to convert the per-pixel photometric information at each view into spatially distinctive and view-invariant low-level features, which can be plugged into existing multi-view stereo pipeline for enhanced 3D reconstruction. Both the illumination conditions during acquisition and the subsequent per-pixel feature transform can be jointly optimized in a differentiable fashion. Our framework automatically adapts to and makes efficient use of the geometric information available in different forms of input data. High-quality 3D reconstructions of a variety of challenging objects are demonstrated on the data captured with an illumination multiplexing device, as well as a point light. Our results compare favorably with state-of-the-art techniques.
NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Authors: Aditya Prakash, Andreas Geiger Kashyap Chitta
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Efficient reasoning about the semantic, spatial, and temporal structure of a scene is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous driving. We present NEural ATtention fields (NEAT), a novel representation that enables such reasoning for end-to-end imitation learning models. NEAT is a continuous function which maps locations in Bird's Eye View (BEV) scene coordinates to waypoints and semantics, using intermediate attention maps to iteratively compress high-dimensional 2D image features into a compact representation. This allows our model to selectively attend to relevant regions in the input while ignoring information irrelevant to the driving task, effectively associating the images with the BEV representation. In a new evaluation setting involving adverse environmental conditions and challenging scenarios, NEAT outperforms several strong baselines and achieves driving scores on par with the privileged CARLA expert used to generate its training data. Furthermore, visualizing the attention maps for models with NEAT intermediate representations provides improved interpretability.
Modulated Periodic Activations for Generalizable Local Functional Representations
Authors: Michaël Gharbi, Connelly Barnes, Eli Shechtman, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Manmohan Chandraker Ishit Mehta
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) make powerful functional representations for sampling and reconstruction problems involving low-dimensional signals like images,shapes and light fields. Recent works have significantly improved their ability to represent high-frequency content by using periodic activations or positional encodings. This often came at the expense of generalization: modern methods are typically optimized for a single signal. We present a new representation that generalizes to multiple instances and achieves state-of-the-art fidelity. We use a dual-MLP architecture to encode the signals. A synthesis network creates a functional mapping from a low-dimensional input(e.g. pixel-position) to the output domain (e.g. RGB color).A modulation network maps a latent code corresponding to the target signal to parameters that modulate the periodic activations of the synthesis network. We also propose a local-functional representation which enables generalization. The signal's domain is partitioned into a regular grid,with each tile represented by a latent code. At test time, the signal is encoded with high-fidelity by inferring (or directly optimizing) the latent code-book. Our approach produces generalizable functional representations of images, videos and shapes, and achieves higher reconstruction quality than prior works that are optimized for a single signal.
Neural Architecture Search for Joint Human Parsing and Pose Estimation
Authors: Yuhang Huang, Qian Bao, Junjie Zhang, Chi Su, Wu Liu Dan Zeng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Human parsing and pose estimation are crucial for the understanding of human behaviors. Since these tasks are closely related, employing one unified model to perform two tasks simultaneously allows them to benefit from each other. However, since human parsing is a pixel-wise classification process while pose estimation is usually a regression task, it is non-trivial to extract discriminative features for both tasks while modeling their correlation in the joint learning fashion. Recent studies have shown that Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has the ability to allocate efficient feature connections for specific tasks automatically. With the spirit of NAS, we propose to search for an efficient network architecture (NPPNet) to tackle two tasks at the same time. On the one hand, to extract task-specific features for the two tasks and lay the foundation for the further searching of feature interaction, we propose to search their encoder-decoder architectures, respectively. On the other hand, to ensure two tasks fully communicate with each other, we propose to embed NAS units in both multi-scale feature interaction and high-level feature fusion to establish optimal connections between two tasks. Experimental results on both parsing and pose estimation benchmark datasets have demonstrated that the searched model achieves state-of-the-art performances on both tasks.
Fast Light-Field Disparity Estimation With Multi-Disparity-Scale Cost Aggregation
Authors: Xuemei Hu, Zhou Xue, Weizhu Xu, Tao Yue Zhicong Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Light field images contain both angular and spatial information of captured light rays. The rich information of light fields enables straightforward disparity recovery capability but demands high computational cost as well. In this paper, we design a lightweight disparity estimation model with physical-based multi-disparity-scale cost volume aggregation for fast disparity estimation. By introducing a sub-network of edge guidance, we significantly improve the recovery of geometric details near edges and improve the overall performance. We test the proposed model extensively on both synthetic and real-captured datasets, which provide both densely and sparsely sampled light fields. Finally, we significantly reduce computation cost and GPU memory consumption, while achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art disparity estimation methods for light fields. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zcong17huang/FastLFnet.
SemIE: Semantically-Aware Image Extrapolation
Authors: Soumya Ranjan Dash, Abhishek Bhatia, Aniruddha Mahapatra, Hrituraj Singh, Kuldeep Kulkarni Bholeshwar Khurana
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a semantically-aware novel paradigm to perform image extrapolation that enables the addition of new object instances. All previous methods are limited in their capability of extrapolation to merely extending the already existing objects in the image. However, our proposed approach focuses not only on (i) extending the already present objects but also on (ii) adding new objects in the extended region based on the context. To this end, for a given image, we first obtain an object segmentation map using a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation method. The, thus, obtained segmentation map is fed into a network to compute the extrapolated semantic segmentation and the corresponding panoptic segmentation maps. The input image and the obtained segmentation maps are further utilized to generate the final extrapolated image. We conduct experiments on Cityscapes and ADE20K bedroom datasets and show that our method outperforms all baselines in terms of FID, and similarity object co-occurrence statistics.
Transformer-Based Dual Relation Graph for Multi-Label Image Recognition
Authors: Ke Yan, Yifan Zhao, Xiaowei Guo, Feiyue Huang, Jia Li Jiawei Zhao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The simultaneous recognition of multiple objects in one image remains a challenging task, spanning multiple events in the recognition field such as various object scales, inconsistent appearances, and confused inter-class relationships. Recent research efforts mainly resort to the statistic label co-occurrences and linguistic word embedding to enhance the unclear semantics. Different from these researches, in this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based Dual Relation learning framework, constructing complementary relationships by exploring two aspects of correlation, i.e., structural relation graph and semantic relation graph. The structural relation graph aims to capture long-range correlations from object context, by developing a cross-scale transformer-based architecture. The semantic graph dynamically models the semantic meanings of image objects with explicit semantic-aware constraints. In addition, we also incorporate the learnt structural relationship into the semantic graph, constructing a joint relation graph for robust representations. With the collaborative learning of these two effective relation graphs, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art on two popular multi-label recognition benchmarks, i.e.   MS-COCO and VOC 2007 dataset.
Self-Supervised Transfer Learning for Hand Mesh Recovery From Binocular Images
Authors: Sihan Wang, Yi Sun, Xiaohong Ma Zheng Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Traditional methods for RGB hand mesh recovery usually need to train a separate model for each dataset with the corresponding ground truth and are hardly adapted to new scenarios without the ground truth for supervision. To address the problem, we propose a self-supervised framework for hand mesh estimation, where we pre-learn hand priors from existing hand datasets and transfer the priors to new scenarios without any landmark annotations. The proposed approach takes binocular images as input and mainly relies on left-right consistency constraints including appearance consensus and shape consistency to train the model to estimate the hand mesh in new scenarios. We conduct experiments on the widely used stereo hand dataset, and the experimental results verify that our model can get comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art methods even without the corresponding landmark annotations. To further evaluate our model, we collect a large real binocular dataset. The experimental results on the collected real dataset also verify the effectiveness of our model qualitatively.
Faster Multi-Object Segmentation Using Parallel Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization
Authors: Patrick M. Jensen, Anders N. Christensen, Anders B. Dahl, Vedrana A. Dahl Niels Jeppesen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce a parallel version of the Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (QPBO) algorithm for solving binary optimization tasks, such as image segmentation. The original QPBO implementation by Kolmogorov and Rother relies on the Boykov-Kolmogorov (BK) maxflow/mincut algorithm and performs well for many image analysis tasks. However, the serial nature of their QPBO algorithm results in poor utilization of modern hardware. By redesigning the QPBO algorithm to work with parallel maxflow/mincut algorithms, we significantly reduce solve time of large optimization tasks. We compare our parallel QPBO implementation to other state-of-the-art solvers and benchmark them on two large segmentation tasks and a substantial set of small segmentation tasks. The results show that our parallel QPBO algorithm is over 20 times faster than the serial QPBO algorithm on the large tasks and over three times faster for the majority of the small tasks. Although we focus on image segmentation, our algorithm is generic and can be used for any QPBO problem. Our implementation and experimental results are available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5201620
Partial Off-Policy Learning: Balance Accuracy and Diversity for Human-Oriented Image Captioning
Authors: Yali Li, Shengjin Wang Jiahe Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Human-oriented image captioning with both high diversity and accuracy is a challenging task in vision+language modeling. The reinforcement learning (RL) based frameworks promote the accuracy of image captioning, yet seriously hurt the diversity. In contrast, other methods based on variational auto-encoder (VAE) or generative adversarial network (GAN) can produce diverse yet less accurate captions. In this work, we devote our attention to promote the diversity of RL-based image captioning. To be specific, we devise a partial off-policy learning scheme to balance accuracy and diversity. First, we keep the model exposed to varied candidate captions by sampling from the initial state before RL launched. Second, a novel criterion named max-CIDEr is proposed to serve as the reward for promoting diversity. We combine the above-mentioned off-policy strategy with the on-policy one to moderate the exploration effect, further balancing the diversity and accuracy for human-like image captioning. Experiments show that our method locates the closest to human performance in the diversity-accuracy space, and achieves the highest Pearson correlation as 0.337 with human performance.
Prior to Segment: Foreground Cues for Weakly Annotated Classes in Partially Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Sindi Shkodrani, Anil S. Baslamisli, Nóra Baka David Biertimpel
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Instance segmentation methods require large datasets with expensive and thus limited instance-level mask labels. Partially supervised instance segmentation aims to improve mask prediction with limited mask labels by utilizing the more abundant weak box labels. In this work, we show that a class agnostic mask head, commonly used in partially supervised instance segmentation, has difficulties learning a general concept of foreground for the weakly annotated classes using box supervision only. To resolve this problem, we introduce an object mask prior (OMP) that provides the mask head with the general concept of foreground implicitly learned by the box classification head under the supervision of all classes. This helps the class agnostic mask head to focus on the primary object in a region of interest (RoI) and improves generalization to the weakly annotated classes. We test our approach on the COCO dataset using different splits of strongly and weakly supervised classes. Our approach significantly improves over the Mask R-CNN baseline and obtains competitive performance with the state-of-the-art, while offering a much simpler architecture.
Interpretation of Emergent Communication in Heterogeneous Collaborative Embodied Agents
Authors: Saim Wani, Unnat Jain, Alexander G. Schwing, Svetlana Lazebnik, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang Shivansh Patel
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Communication between embodied AI agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Despite its use, it is still unclear whether the learned communication is interpretable and grounded in perception. To study the grounding of emergent forms of communication, we first introduce the collaborative multi-object navigation task 'CoMON.' In this task, an 'oracle agent' has detailed environment information in the form of a map. It communicates with a 'navigator agent' that perceives the environment visually and is tasked to find a sequence of goals. To succeed at the task, effective communication is essential. CoMON hence serves as a basis to study different communication mechanisms between heterogeneous agents, that is, agents with different capabilities and roles. We study two common communication mechanisms and analyze their communication patterns through an egocentric and spatial lens. We show that the emergent communication can be grounded to the agent observations and the spatial structure of the 3D environment.
A Dark Flash Normal Camera
Authors: Jason Lawrence, Supreeth Achar Zhihao Xia
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Casual photography is often performed in uncontrolled lighting that can result in low quality images and degrade the performance of downstream processing. We consider the problem of estimating surface normal and reflectance maps of scenes depicting people despite these conditions by supplementing the available visible illumination with a single near infrared (NIR) light source and camera, a so-called "dark flash image". Our method takes as input a single color image captured under arbitrary visible lighting and a single dark flash image captured under controlled front-lit NIR lighting at the same viewpoint, and computes a normal map, a diffuse albedo map, and a specular intensity map of the scene. Since ground truth normal and reflectance maps of faces are difficult to capture, we propose a novel training technique that combines information from two readily available and complementary sources: a stereo depth signal and photometric shading cues. We evaluate our method over a range of subjects and lighting conditions and describe two applications: optimizing stereo geometry and filling the shadows in an image.
Dynamic CT Reconstruction From Limited Views With Implicit Neural Representations and Parametric Motion Fields
Authors: Hyojin Kim, Rushil Anirudh, K. Aditya Mohan, Kyle Champley, Jingu Kang, Suren Jayasuriya Albert W. Reed
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reconstructing dynamic, time-varying scenes with computed tomography (4D-CT) is a challenging and ill-posed problem common to industrial and medical settings. Existing 4D-CT reconstructions are designed for sparse sampling schemes that require fast CT scanners to capture multiple, rapid revolutions around the scene in order to generate high quality results. However, if the scene is moving too fast, then the sampling occurs along a limited view and is difficult to reconstruct due to spatiotemporal ambiguities. In this work, we design a reconstruction pipeline using implicit neural representations coupled with a novel parametric motion field warping to perform limited view 4D-CT reconstruction of rapidly deforming scenes. Importantly, we utilize a differentiable analysis-by-synthesis approach to compare with captured x-ray sinogram data in a self-supervised fashion. Thus, our resulting optimization method requires no training data to reconstruct the scene. We demonstrate that our proposed system robustly reconstructs scenes containing deformable and periodic motion and validate against state-of-the-art baselines. Further, we demonstrate an ability to reconstruct continuous spatiotemporal representations of our scenes and upsample them to arbitrary volumes and frame rates post-optimization. This research opens a new avenue for implicit neural representations in computed tomography reconstruction in general. Code is available at https://github.com/awreed/DynamicCTReconstruction.
Diverse Image Style Transfer via Invertible Cross-Space Mapping
Authors: Lei Zhao, Huiming Zhang, Zhizhong Wang, Zhiwen Zuo, Ailin Li, Wei Xing, Dongming Lu Haibo Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image style transfer aims to transfer the styles of artworks onto arbitrary photographs to create novel artistic images. Although style transfer is inherently an underdetermined problem, existing approaches usually assume a deterministic solution, thus failing to capture the full distribution of possible outputs. To address this limitation, we propose a Diverse Image Style Transfer (DIST) framework which achieves significant diversity by enforcing an invertible cross-space mapping. Specifically, the framework consists of three branches: disentanglement branch, inverse branch, and stylization branch. Among them, the disentanglement branch factorizes artworks into content space and style space; the inverse branch encourages the invertible mapping between the latent space of input noise vectors and the style space of generated artistic images; the stylization branch renders the input content image with the style of an artist. Armed with these three branches, our approach is able to synthesize significantly diverse stylized images without loss of quality. We conduct extensive experiments and comparisons to evaluate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Variational Attention: Propagating Domain-Specific Knowledge for Multi-Domain Learning in Crowd Counting
Authors: Zhaoyi Yan, Ke Li, Pengyu Li, Biao Wang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang Binghui Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In crowd counting, due to the problem of laborious labelling, it is perceived intractability of collecting a new large-scale dataset which has plentiful images with large diversity in density, scene, etc. Thus, for learning a general model, training with data from multiple different datasets might be a remedy and be of great value. In this paper, we resort to the multi-domain joint learning and propose a simple but effective Domain-specific Knowledge Propagating Network (DKPNet) for unbiasedly learning the knowledge from multiple diverse data domains at the same time. It is mainly achieved by proposing the novel Variational Attention(VA) technique for explicitly modeling the attention distributions for different domains. And as an extension to VA, Intrinsic Variational Attention(InVA) is proposed to handle the problems of over-lapped domains and sub-domains. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of our DKPNet over several popular datasets, including ShanghaiTech A/B, UCF-QNRF and NWPU.
Pri3D: Can 3D Priors Help 2D Representation Learning?
Authors: Saining Xie, Benjamin Graham, Angela Dai, Matthias Nießner Ji Hou
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent advances in 3D perception have shown impressive progress in understanding geometric structures of 3D shapes and even scenes. Inspired by these advances in geometric understanding, we aim to imbue image-based perception with representations learned under geometric constraints. We introduce an approach to learn view-invariant, geometry-aware representations for network pre-training, based on multi-view RGB-D data, that can then be effectively transferred to downstream 2D tasks. We propose to employ contrastive learning under both multi-view image constraints and image-geometry constraints to encode 3D priors into learned 2D representations. This results not only in improvement over 2D-only representation learning on the image-based tasks of semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection on real-world indoor datasets, but moreover, provides significant improvement in the low data regime. We show a significant improvement of 6.0% on semantic segmentation on full data as well as 11.9% on 20% data against our baselines on ScanNet.
PoGO-Net: Pose Graph Optimization With Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Haibin Ling Xinyi Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Accurate camera pose estimation or global camera re-localization is a core component in Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and SLAM systems. Given pair-wise relative camera poses, pose-graph optimization (PGO) involves solving for an optimized set of globally-consistent absolute camera poses. In this work, we propose a novel PGO scheme fueled by graph neural networks (GNN), namely PoGO-Net, to conduct the absolute camera pose regression leveraging multiple rotation averaging (MRA). Specifically, PoGO-Net takes a noisy view-graph as the input, where the nodes and edges are designed to encode the geometric constraints and local graph consistency. Besides, we address the outlier edge removal by exploiting an implicit edge-dropping scheme where the noisy or corrupted edges are effectively filtered out with parameterized networks. Furthermore, we introduce a joint loss function embedding MRA formulation such that the robust inference is capable of achieving real-time performances even for large-scale scenes. Our proposed network is trained end-to-end on public benchmarks, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in extensive experiments that demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our proposed network.
Federated Learning for Non-IID Data via Unified Feature Learning and Optimization Objective Alignment
Authors: Yong Luo, Yan Bai, Bo Du, Ling-Yu Duan Lin Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) aims to establish a shared model across decentralized clients under the privacy-preserving constraint. Despite certain success, it is still challenging for FL to deal with non-IID (non-independent and identical distribution) client data, which is a general scenario in real-world FL tasks. It has been demonstrated that the performance of FL will be reduced greatly under the non-IID scenario, since the discrepant data distributions will induce optimization inconsistency and feature divergence issues. Besides, naively minimizing an aggregate loss function in this scenario may have negative impacts on some clients and thus deteriorate their personal model performance. To address these issues, we propose a Unified Feature learning and Optimization objectives alignment method (FedUFO) for non-IID FL. In particular, an adversary module is proposed to reduce the divergence on feature representation among different clients, and two consensus losses are proposed to reduce the inconsistency on optimization objectives from two perspectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FedUFO can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches, including the competitive one data-sharing method. Besides, FedUFO can enable more reasonable and balanced model performance among different clients.
Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping
Authors: Hala Lamdouar, Erika Lu, Andrew Zisserman, Weidi Xie Charig Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Animals have evolved highly functional visual systems to understand motion, assisting perception even under complex environments. In this paper, we work towards developing a computer vision system able to segment objects by exploiting motion cues, i.e. motion segmentation. To achieve this, we introduce a simple variant of the Transformer to segment optical flow frames into primary objects and the background, which can be trained in a self-supervised manner, i.e. without using any manual annotations. Despite using only optical flow, and no appearance information, as input, our approach achieves superior results compared to previous state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on public benchmarks (DAVIS2016, SegTrackv2, FBMS59), while being an order of magnitude faster. On a challenging camouflage dataset (MoCA), we significantly outperform other self-supervised approaches, and are competitive with the top supervised approach, highlighting the importance of motion cues and the potential bias towards appearance in existing video segmentation models.
End-to-End Piece-Wise Unwarping of Document Images
Authors: Kunwar Yashraj Singh, Jon Wu, Erhan Bas, Vijay Mahadevan, Rahul Bhotika, Dimitris Samaras Sagnik Das
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Document unwarping attempts to undo the physical deformation of the paper and recover a 'flatbed' scanned document-image for downstream tasks such as OCR. Current state-of-the-art relies on global unwarping of the document which is not robust to local deformation changes. Moreover, a global unwarping often produces spurious warping artifacts in less warped regions to compensate for severe warps present in other parts of the document. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end trainable piece-wise unwarping method that predicts local deformation fields and stitches them together with global information to obtain an improved unwarping. The proposed piece-wise formulation results in 4% improvement in terms of multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and shows better performance in terms of OCR metrics, character error rate (CER) and word error rate (WER) compared to the state-of-the-art.
4D Cloud Scattering Tomography
Authors: Yoav Y. Schechner, Eshkol Eytan Roi Ronen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We derive computed tomography (CT) of a time-varying volumetric scattering object, using a small number of moving cameras. We focus on passive tomography of dynamic clouds, as clouds have a major effect on the Earth's climate. State of the art scattering CT assumes a static object. Existing 4D CT methods rely on a linear image formation model and often on significant priors. In this paper, the angular and temporal sampling rates needed for a proper recovery are discussed. Spatiotemporal CT is achieved using gradient-based optimization, which accounts for the correlation time of the dynamic object content. We demonstrate this in physics-based simulations and on experimental real-world data.
Weakly Supervised Representation Learning With Coarse Labels
Authors: Qi Qian, Hao Li, Rong Jin, Juhua Hu Yuanhong Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: With the development of computational power and techniques for data collection, deep learning demonstrates a superior performance over most existing algorithms on visual benchmark data sets. Many efforts have been devoted to studying the mechanism of deep learning. One important observation is that deep learning can learn the discriminative patterns from raw materials directly in a task-dependent manner. Therefore, the representations obtained by deep learning outperform hand-crafted features significantly. However, for some real-world applications, it is too expensive to collect the task-specific labels, such as visual search in online shopping. Compared to the limited availability of these task-specific labels, their coarse-class labels are much more affordable, but representations learned from them can be suboptimal for the target task. To mitigate this challenge, we propose an algorithm to learn the fine-grained patterns for the target task, when only its coarse-class labels are available. More importantly, we provide a theoretical guarantee for this. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of learned representations on the target task, when only coarse-class information is available for training.
Asymmetric Bilateral Motion Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation
Authors: Chul Lee, Chang-Su Kim Junheum Park
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel video frame interpolation algorithm based on asymmetric bilateral motion estimation (ABME), which synthesizes an intermediate frame between two input frames. First, we predict symmetric bilateral motion fields to interpolate an anchor frame. Second, we estimate asymmetric bilateral motions fields from the anchor frame to the input frames. Third, we use the asymmetric fields to warp the input frames backward and reconstruct the intermediate frame. Last, to refine the intermediate frame, we develop a new synthesis network that generates a set of dynamic filters and a residual frame using local and global information. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent performance on various datasets. The source codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/JunHeum/ABME.