mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Rethinking the Truly Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Kyungjune Baek, Yunjey Choi, Youngjung Uh, Jaejun Yoo, Hyunjung Shim
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Every recent image-to-image translation model inherently requires either image-level (i.e. input-output pairs) or set-level (i.e. domain labels) supervision. However, even set-level supervision can be a severe bottleneck for data collection in practice. In this paper, we tackle image-to-image translation in a fully unsupervised setting, i.e., neither paired images nor domain labels. To this end, we propose a truly unsupervised image-to-image translation model (TUNIT) that simultaneously learns to separate image domains and translates input images into the estimated domains. Experimental results show that our model achieves comparable or even better performance than the set-level supervised model trained with full labels, generalizes well on various datasets, and is robust against the choice of hyperparameters (e.g. the preset number of pseudo domains). Furthermore, TUNIT can be easily extended to semi-supervised learning with a few labeled data.
Point-Based Modeling of Human Clothing
Authors: Ilya Zakharkin, Kirill Mazur, Artur Grigorev, Victor Lempitsky
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a new approach to human clothing modeling based on point clouds. Within this approach, we learn a deep model that can predict point clouds of various outfits, for various human poses, and for various human body shapes. Notably, outfits of various types and topologies can be handled by the same model. Using the learned model, we can infer the geometry of new outfits from as little as a single image, and perform outfit retargeting to new bodies in new poses. We complement our geometric model with appearance modeling that uses the point cloud geometry as a geometric scaffolding and employs neural point-based graphics to capture outfit appearance from videos and to re-render the captured outfits. We validate both geometric modeling and appearance modeling aspects of the proposed approach against recently proposed methods and establish the viability of point-based clothing modeling.
Equivariant Imaging: Learning Beyond the Range Space
Authors: Dongdong Chen, Julián Tachella, Mike E. Davies
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In various imaging problems, we only have access to compressed measurements of the underlying signals, hindering most learning-based strategies which usually require pairs of signals and associated measurements for training. Learning only from compressed measurements is impossible in general, as the compressed observations do not contain information outside the range of the forward sensing operator. We propose a new end-to-end self-supervised framework that overcomes this limitation by exploiting the equivariances present in natural signals. Our proposed learning strategy performs as well as fully supervised methods. Experiments demonstrate the potential of this framework on inverse problems including sparse-view X-ray computed tomography on real clinical data and image inpainting on natural images. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/edongdongchen/EI.
Mitigating Intensity Bias in Shadow Detection via Feature Decomposition and Reweighting
Authors: Lei Zhu, Ke Xu, Zhanghan Ke, Rynson W.H. Lau
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While CNNs achieved remarkable progress in shadow detection, they tend to make mistakes in dark non-shadow regions and relatively bright shadow regions. They are also susceptible to brightness change. These two phenomenons reveal that deep shadow detectors heavily depend on the intensity cue, which we refer to as intensity bias. In this paper, we propose a novel feature decomposition and reweighting scheme to mitigate this intensity bias, in which multi-level integrated features are decomposed into intensity-variant and intensity-invariant components through self-supervision. By reweighting these two types of features, our method can reallocate the attention to the corresponding latent semantics and achieves balanced exploitation of them. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art shadow detectors.
Joint Representation Learning and Novel Category Discovery on Single- and Multi-Modal Data
Authors: Xuhui Jia, Kai Han, Yukun Zhu, Bradley Green
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of novel category discovery on single- and multi-modal data with labels from different but relevant categories. We present a generic, end-to-end framework to jointly learn a reliable representation and assign clusters to unlabelled data. To avoid over-fitting the learnt embedding to labelled data, we take inspiration from self-supervised representation learning by noise-contrastive estimation and extend it to jointly handle labelled and unlabelled data. In particular, we propose using category discrimination on labelled data and cross-modal discrimination on multi-modal data to augment instance discrimination used in conventional contrastive learning approaches. We further employ Winner-Take-All (WTA) hashing algorithm on the shared representation space to generate pairwise pseudo labels for unlabelled data to better predict cluster assignments. We thoroughly evaluate our framework on large-scale multi-modal video benchmarks Kinetics-400 and VGG-Sound, and image benchmarks CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet, obtaining state-of-the-art results.
Sparse Needlets for Lighting Estimation With Spherical Transport Loss
Authors: Fangneng Zhan, Changgong Zhang, Wenbo Hu, Shijian Lu, Feiying Ma, Xuansong Xie, Ling Shao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Accurate lighting estimation is challenging yet critical to many computer vision and computer graphics tasks such as high-dynamic-range (HDR) relighting. Existing approaches model lighting in either frequency domain or spatial domain which is insufficient to represent the complex lighting conditions in scenes and tends to produce inaccurate estimation. This paper presents NeedleLight, a new lighting estimation model that represents illumination with needlets and allows lighting estimation in both frequency domain and spatial domain jointly. An optimal thresholding function is designed to achieve sparse needlets which trims redundant lighting parameters and demonstrates superior localization properties for illumination representation. In addition, a novel spherical transport loss is designed based on optimal transport theory which guides to regress lighting representation parameters with consideration of the spatial information. Furthermore, we propose a new metric that is concise yet effective by directly evaluating the estimated illumination maps rather than rendered images. Extensive experiments show that NeedleLight achieves superior lighting estimation consistently across multiple evaluation metrics as compared with state-of-the-art methods.
CANet: A Context-Aware Network for Shadow Removal
Authors: Zipei Chen, Chengjiang Long, Ling Zhang, Chunxia Xiao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage context-aware network named CANet for shadow removal, in which the contextual information from non-shadow regions is transferred to shadow regions at the embedded feature spaces. At Stage-I, we propose a contextual patch matching module to generate a set of potential matching pairs of shadow and non-shadow patches. Combined with the potential contextual relationships between shadow and non-shadow regions, our well-designed contextual feature transfer (CFT) mechanism can transfer contextual information from non-shadow to shadow regions at different scales. With the reconstructed feature maps, we remove shadows at L and A/B channels separately. At Stage-II, we use an encoder-decoder to refine current results and generate the final shadow removal results. We evaluate our proposed CANet on two benchmark datasets and some real-world shadow images with complex scenes. Extensive experiment results strongly demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed CANet and exhibit superior performance to state-of-the-arts.
Semantic Perturbations With Normalizing Flows for Improved Generalization
Authors: Oguz Kaan Yüksel, Sebastian U. Stich, Martin Jaggi, Tatjana Chavdarova
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation is a widely adopted technique for avoiding overfitting when training deep neural networks. However, this approach requires domain-specific knowledge and is often limited to a fixed set of hard-coded transformations. Recently, several works proposed to use generative models for generating semantically meaningful perturbations to train a classifier. However, because accurate encoding and decoding is critical, these methods, which use architectures that approximate the latent-variable inference, remained limited to pilot studies on small datasets. Exploiting the exactly reversible encoder-decoder structure of normalizing flows, we perform on-manifold perturbations in the latent space to define fully unsupervised data augmentations. We demonstrate that such perturbations match the performance of advanced data augmentation techniques---reaching 96.6% test accuracy for CIFAR-10 using ResNet-18 and outperform existing methods, particularly in low data regimes---yielding 10--25% relative improvement of test accuracy from classical training. We find that our latent adversarial perturbations adaptive to the classifier throughout its training are most effective, yielding the first test accuracy improvement results on real-world datasets---CIFAR-10/100---via latent-space perturbations.
Audio-Visual Floorplan Reconstruction
Authors: Senthil Purushwalkam, Sebastià Vicenc Amengual Garí, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Carl Schissler, Philip Robinson, Abhinav Gupta, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Given only a few glimpses of an environment, how much can we infer about its entire floorplan? Existing methods can map only what is visible or immediately apparent from context, and thus require substantial movements through a space to fully map it. We explore how both audio and visual sensing together can provide rapid floorplan reconstruction from limited viewpoints. Audio not only helps sense geometry outside the camera's field of view, but it also reveals the existence of distant freespace (e.g., a dog barking in another room) and suggests the presence of rooms not visible to the camera (e.g., a dishwasher humming in what must be the kitchen to the left). We introduce AV-Map, a novel multi-modal encoder-decoder framework that reasons jointly about audio and vision to reconstruct a floorplan from a short input video sequence. We train our model to predict both the interior structure of the environment and the associated rooms' semantic labels. Our results on 85 large real-world environments show the impact: with just a few glimpses spanning 26% of an area, we can estimate the whole area with 66% accuracy---substantially better than the state of the art approach for extrapolating visual maps.
MonoIndoor: Towards Good Practice of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Environments
Authors: Pan Ji, Runze Li, Bir Bhanu, Yi Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-supervised depth estimation for indoor environments is more challenging than its outdoor counterpart in at least the following two aspects: (i) the depth range of indoor sequences varies a lot across different frames, making it difficult for the depth network to induce consistent depth cues, whereas the maximum distance in outdoor scenes mostly stays the same as the camera usually sees the sky; (ii) the indoor sequences contain much more rotational motions, which cause difficulties for the pose network, while the motions of outdoor sequences are pre-dominantly translational, especially for driving datasets such as KITTI. In this paper, special considerations are given to those challenges and a set of good practices are consolidated for improving the performance of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor environments. The proposed method mainly consists of two novel modules, i.e., a depth factorization module and a residual pose estimation module, each of which is designed to respectively tackle the aforementioned challenges. The effectiveness of each module is shown through a carefully conducted ablation study and the demonstration of the state-of-the-art performance on three indoor datasets, i.e., EuRoC, NYUv2 and 7-Scenes.
Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-Life 3D Category Reconstruction
Authors: Jeremy Reizenstein, Roman Shapovalov, Philipp Henzler, Luca Sbordone, Patrick Labatut, David Novotny
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Traditional approaches for learning 3D object categories have been predominantly trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets due to the unavailability of real 3D-annotated category-centric data. Our main goal is to facilitate advances in this field by collecting real-world data in a magnitude similar to the existing synthetic counterparts. The principal contribution of this work is thus a large-scale dataset, called Common Objects in 3D, with real multi-view images of object categories annotated with camera poses and ground truth 3D point clouds. The dataset contains a total of 1.5 million frames from nearly 19,000 videos capturing objects from 50 MS-COCO categories and, as such, it is significantly larger than alternatives both in terms of the number of categories and objects. We exploit this new dataset to conduct one of the first large-scale "in-the-wild" evaluations of several new-view-synthesis and category-centric 3D reconstruction methods. Finally, we contribute NerFormer - a novel neural rendering method that leverages the powerful Transformer to reconstruct an object given a small number of its views.
Reconstructing Hand-Object Interactions in the Wild
Authors: Zhe Cao, Ilija Radosavovic, Angjoo Kanazawa, Jitendra Malik
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the problem of understanding hand-object interactions from 2D images in the wild. This requires reconstructing both the hand and the object in 3D, which is challenging because of the mutual occlusion between the hand and the object. In this paper we make two main contributions: (1) a novel reconstruction technique, RHO (Reconstructing Hands and Objects), which reconstructs 3D models of both the hand and the object leveraging the 2D image cues and 3D contact priors; (2) a dataset MOW (Manipulating Objects in the Wild) of 500 examples of hand-object interaction images that have been "3Dfied" with the help of the RHO technique. Overall our dataset contains 121 distinct object categories, with a much greater diversity of manipulation actions, than in previous datasets.
TOOD: Task-Aligned One-Stage Object Detection
Authors: Chengjian Feng, Yujie Zhong, Yu Gao, Matthew R. Scott, Weilin Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: One-stage object detection is commonly implemented by optimizing two sub-tasks: object classification and localization, using heads with two parallel branches, which might lead to a certain level of spatial misalignment in predictions between the two tasks. In this work, we propose a Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection (TOOD) that explicitly aligns the two tasks in a learning-based manner. First, we design a novel Task-aligned Head (T-Head) which offers a better balance between learning task-interactive and task-specific features, as well as a greater flexibility to learn the alignment via a task-aligned predictor. Second, we propose Task Alignment Learning (TAL) to explicitly pull closer (or even unify) the optimal anchors for the two tasks during training via a designed sample assignment scheme and a task-aligned loss. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO, where TOOD achieves a 51.1 AP at single-model single-scale testing. This surpasses the recent one-stage detectors by a large margin, such as ATSS (47.7 AP), GFL (48.2 AP), and PAA (49.0 AP), with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Qualitative results also demonstrate the effectiveness of TOOD for better aligning the tasks of object classification and localization. Code is available at https://github.com/fcjian/TOOD.
Generalizable Mixed-Precision Quantization via Attribution Rank Preservation
Authors: Ziwei Wang, Han Xiao, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a generalizable mixed-precision quantization (GMPQ) method for efficient inference. Conventional methods require the consistency of datasets for bitwidth search and model deployment to guarantee the policy optimality, leading to heavy search cost on challenging largescale datasets in realistic applications. On the contrary, our GMPQ searches the mixed-quantization policy that can be generalized to largescale datasets with only a small amount of data, so that the search cost is significantly reduced without performance degradation. Specifically, we observe that locating network attribution correctly is general ability for accurate visual analysis across different data distribution. Therefore, despite of pursuing higher model accuracy and complexity, we preserve attribution rank consistency between the quantized models and their full-precision counterparts via efficient capacity-aware attribution imitation for generalizable mixed-precision quantization strategy search. Extensive experiments show that our method obtains competitive accuracy-complexity trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art mixed-precision networks in significantly reduced search cost. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/GMPQ.git.
LabOR: Labeling Only if Required for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Inkyu Shin, Dong-Jin Kim, Jae Won Cho, Sanghyun Woo, Kwanyong Park, In So Kweon
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation has been actively studied to mitigate the domain gap between label-rich source data and unlabeled target data. Despite these efforts, UDA still has a long way to go to reach the fully supervised performance. To this end, we propose a Labeling Only if Required strategy, LabOR, where we introduce a human-in-the-loop approach to adaptively give scarce labels to points that a UDA model is uncertain about. In order to find the uncertain points, we generate an inconsistency mask using the proposed adaptive pixel selector and we label these segment-based regions to achieve near supervised performance with only a small fraction (about 2.2%) ground truth points, which we call "Segment based Pixel-Labeling (SPL)." To further reduce the efforts of the human annotator, we also propose "Point based Pixel-Labeling (PPL)," which finds the most representative points for labeling within the generated inconsistency mask. This reduces efforts from 2.2% segment label to 40 points label while minimizing performance degradation. Through extensive experimentation, we show the advantages of this new framework for domain adaptive semantic segmentation while minimizing human labor costs.
SPEC: Seeing People in the Wild With an Estimated Camera
Authors: Muhammed Kocabas, Chun-Hao P. Huang, Joachim Tesch, Lea Müller, Otmar Hilliges, Michael J. Black
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Due to the lack of camera parameter information for in-the-wild images, existing 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods make several simplifying assumptions: weak-perspective projection, large constant focal length, and zero camera rotation. These assumptions often do not hold and we show, quantitatively and qualitatively, that they cause errors in the reconstructed 3D shape and pose. To address this, we introduce SPEC, the first in-the-wild 3D HPS method that estimates the perspective camera from a single image and employs this to reconstruct 3D human bodies more accurately. First, we train a neural network to estimate the field of view, camera pitch, and roll given an input image. We employ novel losses that improve the calibration accuracy over previous work. We then train a novel network that concatenates the camera calibration to the image features and uses these together to regress 3D body shape and pose. SPEC is more accurate than the prior art on the standard benchmark (3DPW) as well as two new datasets with more challenging camera views and varying focal lengths. Specifically, we create a new photorealistic synthetic dataset (SPEC-SYN) with ground truth 3D bodies and a novel in-the-wild dataset (SPEC-MTP) with calibration and high-quality reference bodies. Code and datasets are available for research purposes at https://spec.is.tue.mpg.de/.
Binocular Mutual Learning for Improving Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Ziqi Zhou, Xi Qiu, Jiangtao Xie, Jianan Wu, Chi Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most of the few-shot learning methods learn to transfer knowledge from datasets with abundant labeled data (i.e., the base set). From the perspective of class space on base set, existing methods either focus on utilizing all classes under a global view by normal pretraining, or pay more attention to adopt an episodic manner to train meta-tasks within few classes in a local view. However, the interaction of the two views is rarely explored. As the two views capture complementary information, we naturally think of the compatibility of them for achieving further performance gains. Inspired by the mutual learning paradigm and binocular parallax, we propose a unified framework, namely Binocular Mutual Learning (BML), which achieves the compatibility of the global view and the local view through both intra-view and cross-view modeling. Concretely, the global view learns in the whole class space to capture rich inter-class relationships. Meanwhile, the local view learns in the local class space within each episode, focusing on matching positive pairs correctly. In addition, cross-view mutual interaction further promotes the collaborative learning and the implicit exploration of useful knowledge from each other. During meta-test, binocular embeddings are aggregated together to support decision-making, which greatly improve the accuracy of classification. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmarks including cross-domain validation confirm the effectiveness of our method.
Distilling Holistic Knowledge With Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Sheng Zhou, Yucheng Wang, Defang Chen, Jiawei Chen, Xin Wang, Can Wang, Jiajun Bu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at transferring knowledge from a larger well-optimized teacher network to a smaller learnable student network. Existing KD methods have mainly considered two types of knowledge, namely the individual knowledge and the relational knowledge. However, these two types of knowledge are usually modeled independently while the inherent correlations between them are largely ignored. It is critical for sufficient student network learning to integrate both individual knowledge and relational knowledge while reserving their inherent correlation. In this paper, we propose to distill the novel holistic knowledge based on an attributed graph constructed among instances. The holistic knowledge is represented as a unified graph-based embedding by aggregating individual knowledge from relational neighborhood samples with graph neural networks, the student network is learned by distilling the holistic knowledge in a contrastive manner. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted on benchmark datasets, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code has been published in https://github.com/wyc-ruiker/HKD
Towards Robustness of Deep Neural Networks via Regularization
Authors: Yao Li, Martin Renqiang Min, Thomas Lee, Wenchao Yu, Erik Kruus, Wei Wang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of deep neural networks against adversarial examples. Inspired by the observation that adversarial examples often lie outside the natural image data manifold and the intrinsic dimension of image data is much smaller than its pixel space dimension, we propose to embed high-dimensional input images into a low-dimensional space and apply regularization on the embedding space to push the adversarial examples back to the manifold. The proposed framework is called Embedding Regularized Classifier (ER-Classifier), which improves the adversarial robustness of the classifier through embedding regularization. Besides improving classification accuracy against adversarial examples, the framework can be combined with detection methods to detect adversarial examples. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that, our proposed framework achieves good performance against strong adversarial attack methods.
STEM: An Approach to Multi-Source Domain Adaptation With Guarantees
Authors: Van-Anh Nguyen, Tuan Nguyen, Trung Le, Quan Hung Tran, Dinh Phung
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MSDA) is more practical but challenging than the conventional unsupervised domain adaptation due to the involvement of diverse multiple data sources. Two fundamental challenges of MSDA are: (i) how to deal with the diversity in the multiple source domains and (ii) how to cope with the data shift between the target domain and the source domains. In this paper, to address the first challenge, we propose a theoretical-guaranteed approach to combine domain experts locally trained on its own source domain to achieve a combined multi-source teacher that globally predicts well on the mixture of source domains. To address the second challenge, we propose to bridge the gap between the target domain and the mixture of source domains in the latent space via a generator or feature extractor. Together with bridging the gap in the latent space, we train a student to mimic the predictions of the teacher expert on both source and target examples. In addition, our approach is guaranteed with rigorous theory offered insightful justifications of how each component influences the transferring performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances to the best of our knowledge.
Divide and Contrast: Self-Supervised Learning From Uncurated Data
Authors: Yonglong Tian, Olivier J. Hénaff, Aäron van den Oord
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-supervised learning holds promise in leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data, however much of its progress has thus far been limited to highly curated pre-training data such as ImageNet. We explore the effects of contrastive learning from larger, less-curated image datasets such as YFCC, and find there is indeed a large difference in the resulting representation quality. We hypothesize that this curation gap is due to a shift in the distribution of image classes---which is more diverse and heavy-tailed---resulting in less relevant negative samples to learn from. We test this hypothesis with a new approach, Divide and Contrast (DnC), which alternates between contrastive learning and clustering-based hard negative mining. When pretrained on less curated datasets, DnC greatly improves the performance of self-supervised learning on downstream tasks, while remaining competitive with the current state-of-the-art on curated datasets.
Parallel Detection-and-Segmentation Learning for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Yunhang Shen, Liujuan Cao, Zhiwei Chen, Baochang Zhang, Chi Su, Yongjian Wu, Feiyue Huang, Rongrong Ji
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Weakly supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) with only image-level labels has recently drawn much attention. To date, bottom-up WSIS methods refine discriminative cues from classifiers with sophisticated multi-stage training procedures, which also suffer from inconsistent object boundaries. And top-down WSIS methods are formulated as cascade detection-to-segmentation pipeline, in which the quality of segmentation learning heavily depends on pseudo masks generated from detectors. In this paper, we propose a unified parallel detection-and-segmentation learning (PDSL) framework to learn instance segmentation with only image-level labels, which draws inspiration from both top-down and bottom-up instance segmentation approaches. The detection module is the same as the typical design of any weakly supervised object detection, while the segmentation module leverages self-supervised learning to model class-agnostic foreground extraction, following by self-training to refine class-specific segmentation. We further design instance-activation correlation module to improve the coherence between detection and segmentation branches. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.
IntraTomo: Self-Supervised Learning-Based Tomography via Sinogram Synthesis and Prediction
Authors: Guangming Zang, Ramzi Idoughi, Rui Li, Peter Wonka, Wolfgang Heidrich
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose IntraTomo, a powerful framework that combines the benefits of learning-based and model-based approaches for solving highly ill-posed inverse problems in the Computed Tomography (CT) context. IntraTomo is composed of two core modules: a novel sinogram prediction module, and a geometry refinement module, which are applied iteratively. In the first module, the unknown density field is represented as a continuous and differentiable function, parameterized by a deep neural network. This network is learned, in a self-supervised fashion, from the incomplete or/and degraded input sinogram. After getting estimated through the sinogram prediction module, the density field is consistently refined in the second module using local and non-local geometrical priors. With these two core modules, we show that IntraTomo significantly outperforms existing approaches on several ill-posed inverse problems, such as limited angle tomography with a range of 45 degrees, sparse view tomographic reconstruction with as few as eight views, or super-resolution tomography with eight times increased resolution. The experiments on simulated and real data show that our approach can achieve results of unprecedented quality.
Towards Real-World X-Ray Security Inspection: A High-Quality Benchmark and Lateral Inhibition Module for Prohibited Items Detection
Authors: Renshuai Tao, Yanlu Wei, Xiangjian Jiang, Hainan Li, Haotong Qin, Jiakai Wang, Yuqing Ma, Libo Zhang, Xianglong Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Prohibited items detection in X-ray images often plays an important role in protecting public safety, which often deals with color-monotonous and luster-insufficient objects, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. Till now, there have been rare studies touching this topic due to the lack of specialized high-quality datasets. In this work, we first present a High-quality X-ray (HiXray) security inspection image dataset, which contains 102,928 common prohibited items of 8 categories. It is the largest dataset of high quality for prohibited items detection, gathered from the real-world airport security inspection and annotated by professional security inspectors. Besides, for accurate prohibited item detection, we further propose the Lateral Inhibition Module (LIM) inspired by the fact that humans recognize these items by ignoring irrelevant information and focusing on identifiable characteristics, especially when objects are overlapped with each other. Specifically, LIM, the elaborately designed flexible additional module, suppresses the noisy information flowing maximumly by the Bidirectional Propagation (BP) module and activates the most identifiable charismatic, boundary, from four directions by Boundary Activation (BA) module. We evaluate our method extensively on HiXray and OPIXray and the results demonstrate that it outperforms SOTA detection methods.
Differentiable Surface Rendering via Non-Differentiable Sampling
Authors: Forrester Cole, Kyle Genova, Avneesh Sud, Daniel Vlasic, Zhoutong Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF.
Distillation-Guided Image Inpainting
Authors: Maitreya Suin, Kuldeep Purohit, A. N. Rajagopalan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image inpainting methods have shown significant improvements by using deep neural networks recently. However, many of these techniques often create distorted structures or blurry inconsistent textures. The problem is rooted in the encoder layers' ineffectiveness in building a complete and faithful embedding of the missing regions from scratch. Existing solutions like course-to-fine, progressive refinement, structural guidance, etc., suffer from huge computational overheads owing to multiple generator networks, limited ability of handcrafted features, and sub-optimal utilization of the information present in the ground truth. We propose a distillation-based approach for inpainting, where we provide direct feature-level supervision while training. We deploy cross and self-distillation techniques and design a dedicated completion-block in encoder to produce more accurate encoding of the holes. Next, we demonstrate how an inpainting network's attention module can improve by leveraging a distillation-based attention transfer technique and enhancing coherence by using a pixel-adaptive global-local feature fusion. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets to validate our method. Along with achieving significant improvements over previous SOTA methods, the proposed approach's effectiveness is also demonstrated through its ability to improve existing inpainting works.
Real-Time Instance Segmentation With Discriminative Orientation Maps
Authors: Wentao Du, Zhiyu Xiang, Shuya Chen, Chengyu Qiao, Yiman Chen, Tingming Bai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Although instance segmentation has made considerable advancement over recent years, it's still a challenge to design high accuracy algorithms with real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a real-time instance segmentation framework termed OrienMask. Upon the one-stage object detector YOLOv3, a mask head is added to predict some discriminative orientation maps, which are explicitly defined as spatial offset vectors for both foreground and background pixels. Thanks to the discrimination ability of orientation maps, masks can be recovered without the need for extra foreground segmentation. All instances that match with the same anchor size share a common orientation map. This special sharing strategy reduces the amortized memory utilization for mask predictions but without loss of mask granularity. Given the surviving box predictions after NMS, instance masks can be concurrently constructed from the corresponding orientation maps with low complexity. Owing to the concise design for mask representation and its effective integration with the anchor-based object detector, our method is qualified under real-time conditions while maintaining competitive accuracy. Experiments on COCO benchmark show that OrienMask achieves 34.8 mask AP at the speed of 42.7 fps evaluated with a single RTX 2080 Ti. Code is available at github.com/duwt/OrienMask.
Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Robin Strudel, Ricardo Garcia, Ivan Laptev, Cordelia Schmid
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image segmentation is often ambiguous at the level of individual image patches and requires contextual information to reach label consensus. In this paper we introduce Segmenter, a transformer model for semantic segmentation. In contrast to convolution-based methods, our approach allows to model global context already at the first layer and throughout the network. We build on the recent Vision Transformer (ViT) and extend it to semantic segmentation. To do so, we rely on the output embeddings corresponding to image patches and obtain class labels from these embeddings with a point-wise linear decoder or a mask transformer decoder. We leverage models pre-trained for image classification and show that we can fine-tune them on moderate sized datasets available for semantic segmentation. The linear decoder allows to obtain excellent results already, but the performance can be further improved by a mask transformer generating class masks. We conduct an extensive ablation study to show the impact of the different parameters, in particular the performance is better for large models and small patch sizes. Segmenter attains excellent results for semantic segmentation. It outperforms the state of the art on both ADE20K and Pascal Context datasets and is competitive on Cityscapes.
IDARTS: Interactive Differentiable Architecture Search
Authors: Song Xue, Runqi Wang, Baochang Zhang, Tian Wang, Guodong Guo, David Doermann
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) improves the efficiency of architecture search by learning the architecture and network parameters end-to-end. However, the intrinsic relationship between the architecture's parameters is neglected, leading to a sub-optimal optimization process. The reason lies in the fact that the gradient descent method used in DARTS ignores the coupling relationship of the parameters and therefore degrades the optimization. In this paper, we address this issue by formulating DARTS as a bilinear optimization problem and introducing an Interactive Differentiable Architecture Search (IDARTS). We first develop a backtracking backpropagation process, which can decouple the relationships of different kinds of parameters and train them in the same framework. The backtracking method coordinates the training of different parameters that fully explore their interaction and optimize training. We present experiments on the CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets that demonstrate the efficacy of the IDARTS approach by achieving a top-1 accuracy of 76.52% on ImageNet without additional search cost vs. 75.8% with the state-of-the-art PC-DARTS.
AutoSpace: Neural Architecture Search With Less Human Interference
Authors: Daquan Zhou, Xiaojie Jin, Xiaochen Lian, Linjie Yang, Yujing Xue, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms still require expert knowledge and effort to design a search space for network construction. In this paper, we consider automating the search space design to minimize human interference, which however faces two challenges: the explosive complexity of the exploration space and the expensive computation cost to evaluate the quality of different search spaces. To solve them, we propose a novel differentiable evolutionary framework named AutoSpace, which evolves the search space to an optimal one with following novel techniques: a differentiable fitness scoring function to efficiently evaluate the performance of cells and a reference architecture to speedup the evolution procedure and avoid falling into sub-optimal solutions. The framework is generic and compatible with additional computational constraints, making it feasible to learn specialized search spaces that fit different computational budgets. With the learned search space, the performance of recent NAS algorithms can be improved significantly compared with using manually de-signed spaces. Remarkably, the models generated from the new search space achieve 77.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet under the mobile setting (MAdds<=500M), outperforming previous SOTA EfficientNet-B0 by 0.7%. https://github.com/zhoudaquan/AutoSpace.git
Evolving Search Space for Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Yuanzheng Ci, Chen Lin, Ming Sun, Boyu Chen, Hongwen Zhang, Wanli Ouyang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Automation of neural architecture design has been a coveted alternative to human experts. Various search methods have been proposed aiming to find the optimal architecture in the search space. One would expect the search results to improve when the search space grows larger since it would potentially contain more performant candidates. Surprisingly, we observe that enlarging search space is unbeneficial or even detrimental to existing NAS methods such as DARTS, ProxylessNAS, and SPOS. This counterintuitive phenomenon suggests that enabling existing methods to large search space regimes is non-trivial. However, this problem is less discussed in the literature. We present a Neural Search-space Evolution (NSE) scheme, the first neural architecture search scheme designed especially for large space neural architecture search problems. The necessity of a well-designed search space with constrained size is a tacit consent in existing methods, and our NSE aims at minimizing such necessity. Specifically, the NSE starts with a search space subset, then evolves the search space by repeating two steps: 1) search an optimized space from the search space subset, 2) refill this subset from a large pool of operations that are not traversed. We further extend the flexibility of obtainable architectures by introducing a learnable multi-branch setting. With the proposed method, we achieve 77.3% top-1 retrain accuracy on ImageNet with 333M FLOPs, which yielded a state-of-the-art performance among previous auto-generated architectures that do not involve knowledge distillation or weight pruning. When the latency constraint is adopted, our result also performs better than the previous best-performing mobile models with a 77.9% Top-1 retrain accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/orashi/NSE_NAS.
THDA: Treasure Hunt Data Augmentation for Semantic Navigation
Authors: Oleksandr Maksymets, Vincent Cartillier, Aaron Gokaslan, Erik Wijmans, Wojciech Galuba, Stefan Lee, Dhruv Batra
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Can general-purpose neural models learn to navigate? For PointGoal navigation (""go to x, y""), the answer is a clear `yes' -- mapless neural models composed of task-agnostic components (CNNs and RNNs) trained with large-scale model-free reinforcement learning achieve near-perfect performance. However, for ObjectGoal navigation (""find a TV""), this is an open question; one we tackle in this paper. The current best-known result on ObjectNav with general-purpose models is 6% success rate. First, we show that the key problem is overfitting. Large-scale training results in 94% success rate on training environments and only 8% in validation. We observe that this stems from agents memorizing environment layouts during training -- sidestepping the need for exploration and directly learning shortest paths to nearby goal objects. We show that this is a natural consequence of optimizing for the task metric (which in fact penalizes exploration), is enabled by powerful observation encoders, and is possible due to the finite set of training environment configurations. Informed by our findings, we introduce Treasure Hunt Data Augmentation (THDA) to address overfitting in ObjectNav. THDA inserts 3D scans of household objects at arbitrary scene locations and uses them as ObjectNav goals -- augmenting and greatly expanding the set of training layouts. Taken together with our other proposed changes, we improve the state of art on the Habitat ObjectGoal Navigation benchmark by 90% (from 14% success rate to 27%) and path efficiency by 48% (from 7.5 SPL to 11.1 SPL).