mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Generative Adversarial Registration for Improved Conditional Deformable Templates
Authors: Neel Dey, Mengwei Ren, Adrian V. Dalca, Guido Gerig
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deformable templates are essential to large-scale medical image registration, segmentation, and population analysis. Current conventional and deep network-based methods for template construction use only regularized registration objectives and often yield templates with blurry and/or anatomically implausible appearance, confounding downstream biomedical interpretation. We reformulate deformable registration and conditional template estimation as an adversarial game wherein we encourage realism in the moved templates with a generative adversarial registration framework conditioned on flexible image covariates. The resulting templates exhibit significant gain in specificity to attributes such as age and disease, better fit underlying group-wise spatiotemporal trends, and achieve improved sharpness and centrality. These improvements enable more accurate population modeling with diverse covariates for standardized downstream analyses and easier anatomical delineation for structures of interest.
Visual Graph Memory With Unsupervised Representation for Visual Navigation
Authors: Obin Kwon, Nuri Kim, Yunho Choi, Hwiyeon Yoo, Jeongho Park, Songhwai Oh
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel graph-structured memory for visual navigation, called visual graph memory (VGM), which consists of unsupervised image representations obtained from navigation history. The proposed VGM is constructed incrementally based on the similarities among the unsupervised representations of observed images, and these representations are learned from an unlabeled image dataset. We also propose a navigation framework that can utilize the proposed VGM to tackle visual navigation problems. By incorporating a graph convolutional network and the attention mechanism, the proposed agent refers to the VGM to navigate the environment while simultaneously building the VGM. Using the VGM, the agent can embed its navigation history and other useful task-related information. We validate our approach on the visual navigation tasks using the Habitat simulator with the Gibson dataset, which provides a photo-realistic simulation environment. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed navigation agent with VGM surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches on image-goal navigation tasks.
MGNet: Monocular Geometric Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Markus Schön, Michael Buchholz, Klaus Dietmayer
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce MGNet, a multi-task framework for monocular geometric scene understanding. We define monocular geometric scene understanding as the combination of two known tasks: Panoptic segmentation and self-supervised monocular depth estimation. Panoptic segmentation captures the full scene not only semantically, but also on an instance basis. Self-supervised monocular depth estimation uses geometric constraints derived from the camera measurement model in order to measure depth from monocular video sequences only. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the combination of these two tasks in one single model. Our model is designed with focus on low latency to provide fast inference in real-time on a single consumer-grade GPU. During deployment, our model produces dense 3D point clouds with instance aware semantic labels from single high-resolution camera images. We evaluate our model on two popular autonomous driving benchmarks, i.e., Cityscapes and KITTI, and show competitive performance among other real-time capable methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/markusschoen/MGNet.
Auto-Parsing Network for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering
Authors: Xu Yang, Chongyang Gao, Hanwang Zhang, Jianfei Cai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose an Auto-Parsing Network (APN) to discover and exploit the input data's hidden tree structures for improving the effectiveness of the Transformer-based vision-language systems. Specifically, we impose a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) parameterized by the attention operations on each self-attention layer to incorporate sparse assumption. We use this PGM to softly segment an input sequence into a few clusters where each cluster can be treated as the parent of the inside entities. By stacking these PGM constrained self-attention layers, the clusters in a lower layer compose into a new sequence, and the PGM in a higher layer will further segment this sequence. Iteratively, a sparse tree can be implicitly parsed, and this tree's hierarchical knowledge is incorporated into the transformed embeddings, which can be used for solving the target vision-language tasks. Specifically, we showcase that our APN can strengthen Transformer based networks in two major vision-language tasks: Captioning and Visual Question Answering. Also, a PGM probability-based parsing algorithm is developed by which we can discover what the hidden structure of input is during the inference.
F-Drop&Match: GANs With a Dead Zone in the High-Frequency Domain
Authors: Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Sekitoshi Kanai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks built from deep convolutional neural networks (GANs) lack the ability to exactly replicate the high-frequency components of natural images. To alleviate this issue, we introduce two novel training techniques called frequency dropping (F-Drop) and frequency matching (F-Match). The key idea of F-Drop is to filter out unnecessary high-frequency components from the input images of the discriminators. This simple modification prevents the discriminators from being confused by perturbations of the high-frequency components. In addition, F-Drop makes the GANs focus on fitting in the low-frequency domain, in which there are the dominant components of natural images. F-Match minimizes the difference between real and fake images in the frequency domain for generating more realistic images. F-Match is implemented as a regularization term in the objective functions of the generators; it penalizes the batch mean error in the frequency domain. F-Match helps the generators to fit in the high-frequency domain filtered out by F-Drop to the real image. We experimentally demonstrate that the combination of F-Drop and F-Match improves the generative performance of GANs in both the frequency and spatial domain on multiple image benchmarks.
CryoDRGN2: Ab Initio Neural Reconstruction of 3D Protein Structures From Real Cryo-EM Images
Authors: Ellen D. Zhong, Adam Lerer, Joseph H. Davis, Bonnie Berger
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Protein structure determination from cryo-EM data requires reconstructing a 3D volume (or distribution of volumes) from many noisy and randomly oriented 2D projection images. While the standard homogeneous reconstruction task aims to recover a single static structure, recently-proposed neural and non-neural methods can reconstruct distributions of structures, thereby enabling the study of protein complexes that possess intrinsic structural or conformational heterogeneity. These heterogeneous reconstruction methods, however, require fixed image poses, which are typically estimated from an upstream homogeneous reconstruction and are not guaranteed to be accurate under highly heterogeneous conditions. In this work we describe cryoDRGN2, an ab initio reconstruction algorithm, which can jointly estimate image poses and learn a neural model of a distribution of 3D structures on real heterogeneous cryo-EM data. To achieve this, we adapt search algorithms from the traditional cryo-EM literature, and describe the optimizations and design choices required to make such a search procedure computationally tractable in the neural model setting. We show that cryoDRGN2 is robust to the high noise levels of real cryo-EM images, trains faster than earlier neural methods, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on real cryo-EM datasets.
Generalized Shuffled Linear Regression
Authors: Feiran Li, Kent Fujiwara, Fumio Okura, Yasuyuki Matsushita
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We consider the shuffled linear regression problem where the correspondences between covariates and responses are unknown. While the existing formulation assumes an ideal underlying bijection in which all pieces of data should match, such an assumption barely holds in real-world applications due to either missing data or outliers. Therefore, in this work, we generalize the formulation of shuffled linear regression to a broader range of conditions where only part of the data should correspond. Moreover, we present a remarkably simple yet effective optimization algorithm with guaranteed global convergence. Distinct tasks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
AESOP: Abstract Encoding of Stories, Objects, and Pictures
Authors: Hareesh Ravi, Kushal Kafle, Scott Cohen, Jonathan Brandt, Mubbasir Kapadia
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Visual storytelling and story comprehension are uniquely human skills that play a central role in how we learn about and experience the world. Despite remarkable progress in recent years in synthesis of visual and textual content in isolation and learning effective joint visual-linguistic representations, existing systems still operate only at a superficial, factual level. With the goal of developing systems that are able to comprehend rich human-generated narratives, and co-create new stories, we introduce AESOP: a new dataset that captures the creative process associated with visual storytelling. Visual panels are composed of clip-art objects with specific attributes enabling a broad range of creative expression. Using AESOP, we propose foundational storytelling tasks that are generative variants of story cloze tests, to better measure the creative and causal reasoning ability required for visual storytelling. We further develop a generalized story completion framework that models stories as the co-evolution of visual and textual concepts. We benchmark the proposed approach with human baselines and evaluate using comprehensive qualitative and quantitative metrics. Our results highlight key insights related to the dataset, modelling and evaluation of visual storytelling for future research in this promising field of study.
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals
Authors: Wouter Van Gansbeke, Simon Vandenhende, Stamatios Georgoulis, Luc Van Gool
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Being able to learn dense semantic representations of images without supervision is an important problem in computer vision. However, despite its significance, this problem remains rather unexplored, with a few exceptions that considered unsupervised semantic segmentation on small-scale datasets with a narrow visual domain. In this paper, we make a first attempt to tackle the problem on datasets that have been traditionally utilized for the supervised case. To achieve this, we introduce a two-step framework that adopts a predetermined mid-level prior in a contrastive optimization objective to learn pixel embeddings. This marks a large deviation from existing works that relied on proxy tasks or end-to-end clustering. Additionally, we argue about the importance of having a prior that contains information about objects, or their parts, and discuss several possibilities to obtain such a prior in an unsupervised manner. Experimental evaluation shows that our method comes with key advantages over existing works. First, the learned pixel embeddings can be directly clustered in semantic groups using K-Means on PASCAL. Under the fully unsupervised setting, there is no precedent in solving the semantic segmentation task on such a challenging benchmark. Second, our representations can improve over strong baselines when transferred to new datasets, e.g. COCO and DAVIS. The code is available.
Graph Contrastive Clustering
Authors: Huasong Zhong, Jianlong Wu, Chong Chen, Jianqiang Huang, Minghua Deng, Liqiang Nie, Zhouchen Lin, Xian-Sheng Hua
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, some contrastive learning methods have been proposed to simultaneously learn representations and clustering assignments, achieving significant improvements. However, these methods do not take the category information and clustering objective into consideration, thus the learned representations are not optimal for clustering and the performance might be limited. Towards this issue, we first propose a novel graph contrastive learning framework, which is then applied to the clustering task and we come up with the Graph Constrastive Clustering (GCC) method. Different from basic contrastive clustering that only assumes an image and its augmentation should share similar representation and clustering assignments, we lift the instance-level consistency to the cluster-level consistency with the assumption that samples in one cluster and their augmentations should all be similar. Specifically, on the one hand, the graph Laplacian based contrastive loss is proposed to learn more discriminative and clustering-friendly features. On the other hand, a novel graph-based contrastive learning strategy is proposed to learn more compact clustering assignments. Both of them incorporate the latent category information to reduce the intra-cluster variance while increasing the inter-cluster variance. Experiments on six commonly used datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over the state-of-the-art methods.
LFI-CAM: Learning Feature Importance for Better Visual Explanation
Authors: Kwang Hee Lee, Chaewon Park, Junghyun Oh, Nojun Kwak
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Class Activation Mapping (CAM) is a powerful technique used to understand the decision making of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in computer vision. Recently, there have been attempts not only to generate better visual explanations, but also to improve classification performance using visual explanations. However, previous works still have their own drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, LFI-CAM***(Learning Feature Importance Class Activation Mapping), which is trainable for image classification and visual explanation in an end-to-end manner. LFI-CAM generates attention map for visual explanation during forward propagation, and simultaneously uses attention map to improve classification performance through the attention mechanism. Feature Importance Network (FIN) focuses on learning the feature importance instead of directly learning the attention map to obtain a more reliable and consistent attention map. We confirmed that LFI-CAM is optimized not only by learning the feature importance but also by enhancing the backbone feature representation to focus more on important features of the input image. Experiments show that LFI-CAM outperforms baseline models' accuracy on classification tasks as well as significantly improves on previous works in terms of attention map quality and stability over different hyper-parameters.
InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds Through Instance Multi-Level Contextual Referring
Authors: Zhihao Yuan, Xu Yan, Yinghong Liao, Ruimao Zhang, Sheng Wang, Zhen Li, Shuguang Cui
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Compared with the visual grounding on 2D images, the natural-language-guided 3D object localization on point clouds is more challenging. In this paper, we propose a new model, named InstanceRefer, to achieve a superior 3D visual grounding through the grounding-by-matching strategy. In practice, our model first predicts the target category from the language descriptions using a simple language classification model. Then based on the category, our model sifts out a small number of instance candidates (usually less than 20) from the panoptic segmentation on point clouds. Thus, the non-trivial 3D visual grounding task has been effectively re-formulated as a simplified instance-matching problem, considering that instance-level candidates are more rational than the redundant 3D object proposals. Subsequently, for each candidate, we perform the multi-level contextual inference, i.e., referring from instance attribute perception, instance-to-instance relation perception, and instance-to-background global localization perception, respectively. Eventually, the most relevant candidate is selected and localized by ranking confidence scores, which are obtained by the cooperative holistic visual-language feature matching. Experiments confirm that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-arts on ScanRefer online benchmark (ranked 1st place) and Nr3D/Sr3D datasets.
Temporal-Wise Attention Spiking Neural Networks for Event Streams Classification
Authors: Man Yao, Huanhuan Gao, Guangshe Zhao, Dingheng Wang, Yihan Lin, Zhaoxu Yang, Guoqi Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: How to effectively and efficiently deal with spatio-temporal event streams, where the events are generally sparse and non-uniform and have the us temporal resolution, is of great value and has various real-life applications. Spiking neural network (SNN), as one of the brain-inspired event-triggered computing models, has the potential to extract effective spatio-temporal features from the event streams. However, when aggregating individual events into frames with a new higher temporal resolution, existing SNN models do not attach importance to that the serial frames have different signal-to-noise ratios since event streams are sparse and non-uniform. This situation interferes with the performance of existing SNNs. In this work, we propose a temporal-wise attention SNN (TA-SNN) model to learn frame-based representation for processing event streams. Concretely, we extend the attention concept to temporal-wise input to judge the significance of frames for the final decision at the training stage, and discard the irrelevant frames at the inference stage. We demonstrate that TA-SNN models improve the accuracy of event streams classification tasks. We also study the impact of multiple-scale temporal resolutions for frame-based representation. Our approach is tested on three different classification tasks: gesture recognition, image classification, and spoken digit recognition. We report the state-of-the-art results on these tasks, and get the essential improvement of accuracy (almost 19%) for gesture recognition with only 60 ms.
Encoder-Decoder With Multi-Level Attention for 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation
Authors: Ziniu Wan, Zhengjia Li, Maoqing Tian, Jianbo Liu, Shuai Yi, Hongsheng Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: 3D human shape and pose estimation is the essential task for human motion analysis, which is widely used in many 3D applications. However, existing methods cannot simultaneously capture the relations at multiple levels, including spatial-temporal level and human joint level. Therefore they fail to make accurate predictions in some hard scenarios when there is cluttered background, occlusion, or extreme pose. To this end, we propose Multi-level Attention Encoder-Decoder Network (MAED), including a Spatial-Temporal Encoder (STE) and a Kinematic Topology Decoder (KTD) to model multi-level attentions in a unified framework. STE consists of a series of cascaded blocks based on Multi-Head Self-Attention, and each block uses two parallel branches to learn spatial and temporal attention respectively. Meanwhile, KTD aims at modeling the joint level attention. It regards pose estimation as a top-down hierarchical process similar to SMPL kinematic tree. With the training set of 3DPW, MAED outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 6.2, 7.2, and 2.4 mm of PA-MPJPE on the three widely used benchmarks 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziniuwan/maed.
Adaptive Hierarchical Graph Reasoning With Semantic Coherence for Video-and-Language Inference
Authors: Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Linchao Zhu, Haochen Shi, Xuanwen Huang, Fei Wu, Yi Yang, Yueting Zhuang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Video-and-Language Inference is a recently proposed task for joint video-and-language understanding. This new task requires a model to draw inference on whether a natural language statement entails or contradicts a given video clip. In this paper, we study how to address three critical challenges for this task: judging the global correctness of the statement involved multiple semantic meanings, joint reasoning over video and subtitles, and modeling long-range relationships and complex social interactions. First, we propose an adaptive hierarchical graph network that achieves in-depth understanding of the video over complex interactions. Specifically, it performs joint reasoning over video and subtitles in three hierarchies, where the graph structure is adaptively adjusted according to the semantic structures of the statement. Secondly, we introduce semantic coherence learning to explicitly encourage the semantic coherence of the adaptive hierarchical graph network from three hierarchies. The semantic coherence learning can further improve the alignment between vision and linguistics, and the coherence across a sequence of video segments. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline by a large margin.
Transductive Few-Shot Classification on the Oblique Manifold
Authors: Guodong Qi, Huimin Yu, Zhaohui Lu, Shuzhao Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Few-shot learning (FSL) attempts to learn with limited data. In this work, we perform the feature extraction in the Euclidean space and the geodesic distance metric on the Oblique Manifold (OM). Specially, for better feature extraction, we propose a non-parametric Region Self-attention with Spatial Pyramid Pooling (RSSPP), which realizes a trade-off between the generalization and the discriminative ability of the single image feature. Then, we embed the feature to OM as a point. Furthermore, we design an Oblique Distance-based Classifier (ODC) that achieves classification in the tangent spaces which better approximate OM locally by learnable tangency points. Finally, we introduce a new method for parameters initialization and a novel loss function in the transductive settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the popular benchmarks: mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet, and Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB).
iNAS: Integral NAS for Device-Aware Salient Object Detection
Authors: Yu-Chao Gu, Shang-Hua Gao, Xu-Sheng Cao, Peng Du, Shao-Ping Lu, Ming-Ming Cheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing salient object detection (SOD) models usually focus on either backbone feature extractors or saliency heads, ignoring their relations. A powerful backbone could still achieve sub-optimal performance with a weak saliency head and vice versa. Moreover, the balance between model performance and inference latency poses a great challenge to model design, especially when considering different deployment scenarios. Considering all components in an integral neural architecture search (iNAS) space, we propose a flexible device-aware search scheme that only trains the SOD model once and quickly finds high-performance but low-latency models on multiple devices. An evolution search with latency-group sampling (LGS) is proposed to explore the entire latency area of our enlarged search space. Models searched by iNAS achieve similar performance with SOTA methods but reduce the 3.8x, 3.3x, 2.6x, 1.9x latency on Huawei Nova6 SE, Intel Core CPU, the Jetson Nano, and Nvidia Titan Xp. The code is released at https://mmcheng.net/inas/.
Pyramid R-CNN: Towards Better Performance and Adaptability for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jiageng Mao, Minzhe Niu, Haoyue Bai, Xiaodan Liang, Hang Xu, Chunjing Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a flexible and high-performance framework, named Pyramid R-CNN, for two-stage 3D object detection from point clouds. Current approaches generally rely on the points or voxels of interest for RoI feature extraction on the second stage, but cannot effectively handle the sparsity and non-uniform distribution of those points, and this may result in failures in detecting objects that are far away. To resolve the problems, we propose a novel second-stage module, named pyramid RoI head, to adaptively learn the features from the sparse points of interest. The pyramid RoI head consists of three key components. Firstly, we propose the RoI-grid Pyramid, which addresses the sparsity problem by extensively collecting points of interest for each RoI in a pyramid manner. Secondly, we propose RoI-grid Attention, a new operation that can encode richer information from sparse points by incorporating conventional attention-based and graph-based point operators into a unified formulation. Thirdly, we propose the Density-Aware Radius Prediction (DARP) module, which can adapt to different point density levels by dynamically adjusting the focusing range of RoIs. Combining the three components, our pyramid RoI head is robust to the sparse and imbalanced circumstances, and can be applied upon various 3D backbones to consistently boost the detection performance. Extensive experiments show that Pyramid R-CNN outperforms the state-of-the-art 3D detection models by a large margin on both the KITTI dataset and the Waymo Open dataset.
Graph-BAS3Net: Boundary-Aware Semi-Supervised Segmentation Network With Bilateral Graph Convolution
Authors: Huimin Huang, Lanfen Lin, Yue Zhang, Yingying Xu, Jing Zheng, XiongWei Mao, Xiaohan Qian, Zhiyi Peng, Jianying Zhou, Yen-Wei Chen, Ruofeng Tong
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have attracted much attentions in medical image segmentation by leveraging unlabeled data, which challenge in acquiring massive pixel-wise annotated samples. However, most of the existing SSLs neglected the geometric shape constraint in object, leading to unsatisfactory boundary and non-smooth of object. In this paper, we propose a novel boundary-aware semi-supervised medical image segmentation network, named Graph-BAS3Net, which incorporates the boundary information and learns duality constraints between semantics and geometrics in the graph domain. Specifically, the proposed method consists of two components: a multi-task learning framework BAS3Net and a graph-based cross-task module BGCM. The BAS3Net improves the existing GAN-based SSL by adding a boundary detection task, which encodes richer features of object shape and surface. Moreover, the BGCM further explores the co-occurrence relations between the semantics segmentation and boundary detection task, so that the network learns stronger semantic and geometric correspondences from both labeled and unlabeled data. Experimental results on the LiTS dataset and COVID-19 dataset confirm that our proposed Graph-BAS3 Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised segmentation task.
The Animation Transformer: Visual Correspondence via Segment Matching
Authors: Evan Casey, Víctor Pérez, Zhuoru Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Visual correspondence is a fundamental building block on the way to building assistive tools for hand-drawn animation. However, while a large body of work has focused on learning visual correspondences at the pixel-level, few approaches have emerged to learn correspondence at the level of line enclosures (segments) that naturally occur in hand-drawn animation. Exploiting this structure in animation has numerous benefits: it avoids the memory complexity of pixel attention over high resolution images and enables the use of real-world animation datasets that contain correspondence information at the level of per-segment colors. To that end, we propose the Animation Transformer (AnT) which uses a Transformer-based architecture to learn the spatial and visual relationships between segments across a sequence of images. By leveraging a forward match loss and a cycle consistency loss our approach attains excellent results compared to state-of-the-art pixel approaches on challenging datasets from real animation productions that lack ground-truth correspondence labels.
CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification
Authors: Chun-Fu (Richard) Chen, Quanfu Fan, Rameswar Panda
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The recently developed vision transformer (ViT) has achieved promising results on image classification compared to convolutional neural networks. Inspired by this, in this paper, we study how to learn multi-scale feature representations in transformer models for image classification. To this end, we propose a dual-branch transformer to combine image patches (i.e., tokens in a transformer) of different sizes to produce stronger image features. Our approach processes small-patch and large-patch tokens with two separate branches of different computational complexity and these tokens are then fused purely by attention multiple times to complement each other. Furthermore, to reduce computation, we develop a simple yet effective token fusion module based on cross attention, which uses a single token for each branch as a query to exchange information with other branches. Our proposed cross-attention only requires linear time for both computational and memory complexity instead of quadratic time otherwise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs better than or on par with several concurrent works on vision transformer, in addition to efficient CNN models. For example, on the ImageNet1K dataset, with some architectural changes, our approach outperforms the recent DeiT by a large margin of 2% with a small to moderate increase in FLOPs and model parameters. Our source codes and models are available at https://github.com/IBM/CrossViT.
Weak Adaptation Learning: Addressing Cross-Domain Data Insufficiency With Weak Annotator
Authors: Shichao Xu, Lixu Wang, Yixuan Wang, Qi Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data quantity and quality are crucial factors for data-driven learning methods. In some target problem domains, there are not many data samples available, which could significantly hinder the learning process. While data from similar domains may be leveraged to help through domain adaptation, obtaining high-quality labeled data for those source domains themselves could be difficult or costly. To address such challenges on data insufficiency for classification problem in a target domain, we propose a weak adaptation learning (WAL) approach that leverages unlabeled data from a similar source domain, a low-cost weak annotator that produces labels based on task-specific heuristics, labeling rules, or other methods (albeit with inaccuracy), and a small amount of labeled data in the target domain. Our approach first conducts a theoretical analysis on the error bound of the trained classifier with respect to the data quantity and the performance of the weak annotator, and then introduces a multi-stage weak adaptation learning method to learn an accurate classifier by lowering the error bound. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in learning an accurate classifier with limited labeled data in the target domain and unlabeled data in the source domain.
Building-GAN: Graph-Conditioned Architectural Volumetric Design Generation
Authors: Kai-Hung Chang, Chin-Yi Cheng, Jieliang Luo, Shingo Murata, Mehdi Nourbakhsh, Yoshito Tsuji
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Volumetric design is the first and critical step for professional building design, where architects not only depict the rough 3D geometry of the building but also specify the programs to form a 2D layout on each floor. Though 2D layout generation for a single story has been widely studied, there is no developed method for multi-story buildings. This paper focuses on volumetric design generation conditioned on an input program graph. Instead of outputting dense 3D voxels, we propose a new 3D representation named voxel graph that is both compact and expressive for building geometries. Our generator is a cross-modal graph neural network that uses a pointer mechanism to connect the input program graph and the output voxel graph, and the whole pipeline is trained using the adversarial framework. The generated designs are evaluated qualitatively by a user study and quantitatively using three metrics: quality, diversity, and connectivity accuracy. We show that our model generates realistic 3D volumetric designs and outperforms previous methods and baselines.
Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Inference
Authors: Jingshan Xu, Chuanwei Zhou, Zhen Cui, Chunyan Xu, Yuge Huang, Pengcheng Shen, Shaoxin Li, Jian Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a progressive segmentation inference (PSI) framework to tackle with scribble-supervised semantic segmentation. In virtue of latent contextual dependency, we encapsulate two crucial cues, contextual pattern propagation and semantic label diffusion, to enhance and refine pixel-level segmentation results from partially known seeds. In contextual pattern propagation, different-granular contextual patterns are correlated and leveraged to properly diffuse pattern information based on graphical model, so as to increase the inference confidence of pixel label prediction. Further, depending on high confidence scores of estimated pixels, the initial annotated seeds are progressively spread over the image through dynamically learning an adaptive decision strategy. The two cues are finally modularized to form a close-looping update process during pixel-wise label inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed progressive segmentation inference can benefit from the combination of spatial and semantic context cues, and meantime achieve the state-of-the-art performance on two public scribble segmentation datasets.
Improve Unsupervised Pretraining for Few-Label Transfer
Authors: Suichan Li, Dongdong Chen, Yinpeng Chen, Lu Yuan, Lei Zhang, Qi Chu, Bin Liu, Nenghai Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Unsupervised pretraining has achieved great success and many recently works have shown unsupervised pretraining can achieve comparable or even slightly better transfer performance than supervised pretraining on downstream target datasets. But in this paper, we find this conclusion may not hold when the target dataset has very few labeled samples for finetuning, ie, few-label transfer. We analyze the possible reason from the clustering perspective: 1) The clustering quality of target samples is of great importance to few-label transfer; 2) Though contrastive learning is essentially to learn how to cluster, its clustering quality is still inferior to supervised pretraining due to lack of label supervision. Based on the analysis, we interestingly discover that only involving some unlabeled target domain into the unsupervised pretraining can improve the clustering quality, subsequently reducing the transfer performance gap with supervised pretraining. This finding also motivates us to propose a new progressive few-label transfer algorithm for real applications, which aims to maximize the transfer performance under a limited annotation budget. To support our analysis and proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on nine different target datasets. Experimental results show our proposed method can significantly boost the few-label transfer performance of unsupervised pretraining.
Image Inpainting via Conditional Texture and Structure Dual Generation
Authors: Xiefan Guo, Hongyu Yang, Di Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep generative approaches have recently made considerable progress in image inpainting by introducing structure priors. Due to the lack of proper interaction with image texture during structure reconstruction, however, current solutions are incompetent in handling the cases with large corruptions, and they generally suffer from distorted results. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream network for image inpainting, which models the structure-constrained texture synthesis and texture-guided structure reconstruction in a coupled manner so that they better leverage each other for more plausible generation. Furthermore, to enhance the global consistency, a Bi-directional Gated Feature Fusion (Bi-GFF) module is designed to exchange and combine the structure and texture information and a Contextual Feature Aggregation (CFA) module is developed to refine the generated contents by region affinity learning and multi-scale feature aggregation. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the CelebA, Paris StreetView and Places2 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiefan-Guo/CTSDG.
Geometry-Aware Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Object Point Clouds
Authors: Longkun Zou, Hui Tang, Ke Chen, Kui Jia
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The point cloud representation of an object can have a large geometric variation in view of inconsistent data acquisition procedure, which thus leads to domain discrepancy due to diverse and uncontrollable shape representation cross datasets. To improve discrimination on unseen distribution of point-based geometries in a practical and feasible perspective, this paper proposes a new method of geometry-aware self-training (GAST) for unsupervised domain adaptation of object point cloud classification. Specifically, this paper aims to learn a domain-shared representation of semantic categories, via two novel self-supervised geometric learning tasks as feature regularization. On one hand, the representation learning is empowered by a linear mixup of point cloud samples with their self-generated rotation labels, to capture a global topological configuration of local geometries. On the other hand, a diverse point distribution across datasets can be normalized with a novel curvature-aware distortion localization. Experiments on the PointDA-10 dataset show that our GAST method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
Robustness and Generalization via Generative Adversarial Training
Authors: Omid Poursaeed, Tianxing Jiang, Harry Yang, Serge Belongie, Ser-Nam Lim
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in various computer vision tasks, they often fail to generalize to subtle variations of input images. Several defenses have been proposed to improve the robustness against these variations. However, current defenses can only withstand the specific attack used in training, and the models often remain vulnerable to other input variations. Moreover, these methods often degrade performance of the model on clean images. In this paper, we present Generative Adversarial Training, an approach to simultaneously improve the model's generalization and robustness to unseen adversarial attacks. Instead of altering a single pre-defined aspect of images, we generate a spectrum of low-level, mid-level and high-level changes using generative models with a disentangled latent space. Adversarial training with these examples enable the model to withstand a wide range of attacks by observing a variety of input alterations during training. We show that our approach not only improves performance of the model on clean images but also makes it robust against unforeseen attacks and outperforms prior work. We validate effectiveness of our method by demonstrating results on various tasks such as classification, semantic segmentation and object detection.
Exploring Inter-Channel Correlation for Diversity-Preserved Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Li Liu, Qingle Huang, Sihao Lin, Hongwei Xie, Bing Wang, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Knowledge Distillation has shown very promising ability in transferring learned representation from the larger model (teacher) to the smaller one (student). Despite many efforts, prior methods ignore the important role of retaining inter-channel correlation of features, leading to the lack of capturing intrinsic distribution of the feature space and sufficient diversity properties of features in the teacher network. To solve the issue, we propose the novel Inter-Channel Correlation for Knowledge Distillation (ICKD), with which the diversity and homology of the feature space of the student network can align with that of the teacher network. The correlation between these two channels is interpreted as diversity if they are irrelevant to each other, otherwise homology. Then the student is required to mimic the correlation within its own embedding space. In addition, we introduce the grid-level inter-channel correlation, making it capable of dense prediction tasks. Extensive experiments on two vision tasks, including ImageNet classification and Pascal VOC segmentation, demonstrate the superiority of our ICKD, which consistently outperforms many existing methods, advancing the state-of-the-art in the fields of Knowledge Distillation. To our knowledge, we are the first method based on knowledge distillation boosts ResNet18 beyond 72% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification. Code is available at: https://github.com/ADLab-AutoDrive/ICKD.
Class-Incremental Learning for Action Recognition in Videos
Authors: Jaeyoo Park, Minsoo Kang, Bohyung Han
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle catastrophic forgetting problem in the context of class-incremental learning for video recognition, which has not been explored actively despite the popularity of continual learning. Our framework addresses this challenging task by introducing time-channel importance maps and exploiting the importance maps for learning the representations of incoming examples via knowledge distillation. We also incorporate a regularization scheme in our objective function, which encourages individual features obtained from different time steps in a video to be uncorrelated and eventually improves accuracy by alleviating catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate the proposed approach on brand-new splits of class-incremental action recognition benchmarks constructed upon the UCF101, HMDB51, and Something-Something V2 datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in comparison to the existing continual learning methods that are originally designed for image data.
Procrustean Training for Imbalanced Deep Learning
Authors: Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Wei-Lun Chao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Neural networks trained with class-imbalanced data are known to perform poorly on minor classes of scarce training data. Several recent works attribute this to over-fitting to minor classes. In this paper, we provide a novel explanation of this issue. We found that a neural network tends to first under-fit the minor classes by classifying most of their data into the major classes in early training epochs. To correct these wrong predictions, the neural network then must focus on pushing features of minor class data across the decision boundaries between major and minor classes, leading to much larger gradients for features of minor classes. We argue that such an under-fitting phase over-emphasizes the competition between major and minor classes, hinders the neural network from learning the discriminative knowledge that can be generalized to test data, and eventually results in over-fitting. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning strategy to equalize the training progress across classes. We mix features of the major class data with those of other data in a mini-batch, intentionally weakening their features to prevent a neural network from fitting them first. We show that this strategy can largely balance the training accuracy and feature gradients across classes, effectively mitigating the under-fitting then over-fitting problem for minor class data. On several benchmark datasets, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy, especially for the challenging step-imbalanced cases.
Dynamic Network Quantization for Efficient Video Inference
Authors: Ximeng Sun, Rameswar Panda, Chun-Fu (Richard) Chen, Aude Oliva, Rogerio Feris, Kate Saenko
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep convolutional networks have recently achieved great success in video recognition, yet their practical realization remains a challenge due to the large amount of computational resources required to achieve robust recognition. Motivated by the effectiveness of quantization for boosting efficiency, in this paper, we propose a dynamic network quantization framework, that selects optimal precision for each frame conditioned on the input for efficient video recognition. Specifically, given a video clip, we train a very lightweight network in parallel with the recognition network, to produce a dynamic policy indicating which numerical precision to be used per frame in recognizing videos. We train both networks effectively using standard backpropagation with a loss to achieve both competitive performance and resource efficiency required for video recognition. Extensive experiments on four challenging diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach provides significant savings in computation and memory usage while outperforming the existing state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://cs-people.bu.edu/sunxm/VideoIQ/project.html.