mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Cops-Ref: A New Dataset and Task on Compositional Referring Expression Comprehension
Authors: Zhenfang Chen, Peng Wang, Lin Ma, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, Qi Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Referring expression comprehension (REF) aims at identifying a particular object in a scene by a natural language expression. It requires joint reasoning over the textual and visual domains to solve the problem. Some popular referring expression datasets, however, fail to provide an ideal test bed for evaluating the reasoning ability of the models, mainly because 1) their expressions typically describe only some simple distinctive properties of the object and 2) their images contain limited distracting information. To bridge the gap, we propose a new dataset for visual reasoning in context of referring expression comprehension with two main features. First, we design a novel expression engine rendering various reasoning logics that can be flexibly combined with rich visual properties to generate expressions with varying compositionality. Second, to better exploit the full reasoning chain embodied in an expression, we propose a new test setting by adding additional distracting images containing objects sharing similar properties with the referent, thus minimising the success rate of reasoning-free cross-domain alignment. We evaluate several state-of-the-art REF models, but find none of them can achieve promising performance. A proposed modular hard mining strategy performs the best but still leaves substantial room for improvement.
Learning Longterm Representations for Person Re-Identification Using Radio Signals
Authors: Lijie Fan, Tianhong Li, Rongyao Fang, Rumen Hristov, Yuan Yuan, Dina Katabi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Person Re-Identification (ReID) aims to recognize a person-of-interest across different places and times. Existing ReID methods rely on images or videos collected using RGB cameras. They extract appearance features like clothes, shoes, hair, etc. Such features, however, can change drastically from one day to the next, leading to inability to identify people over extended time periods. In this paper, we introduce RF-ReID, a novel approach that harnesses radio frequency (RF) signals for longterm person ReID. RF signals traverse clothes and reflect off the human body; thus they can be used to extract more persistent human-identifying features like body size and shape. We evaluate the performance of RF-ReID on longitudinal datasets that span days and weeks, where the person may wear different clothes across days. Our experiments demonstrate that RF-ReID outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-based ReID approaches for long term person ReID. Our results also reveal two interesting features: First since RF signals work in the presence of occlusions and poor lighting, RF-ReID allows for person ReID in such scenarios. Second, unlike photos and videos which reveal personal and private information, RF signals are more privacy-preserving, and hence can help extend person ReID to privacy-concerned domains, like healthcare.
DSNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search Without Parameter Retraining
Authors: Shoukang Hu, Sirui Xie, Hehui Zheng, Chunxiao Liu, Jianping Shi, Xunying Liu, Dahua Lin
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: If NAS methods are solutions, what is the problem? Most existing NAS methods require two-stage parameter optimization. However, performance of the same architecture in the two stages correlates poorly. In this work, we propose a new problem definition for NAS, task-specific end-to-end, based on this observation. We argue that given a computer vision task for which a NAS method is expected, this definition can reduce the vaguely-defined NAS evaluation to i) accuracy of this task and ii) the total computation consumed to finally obtain a model with satisfying accuracy. Seeing that most existing methods do not solve this problem directly, we propose DSNAS, an efficient differentiable NAS framework that simultaneously optimizes architecture and parameters with a low-biased Monte Carlo estimate. Child networks derived from DSNAS can be deployed directly without parameter retraining. Comparing with two-stage methods, DSNAS successfully discovers networks with comparable accuracy (74.4%) on ImageNet in 420 GPU hours, reducing the total time by more than 34%.
SESS: Self-Ensembling Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection
Authors: Na Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua, Gim Hee Lee
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The performance of existing point cloud-based 3D object detection methods heavily relies on large-scale high-quality 3D annotations. However, such annotations are often tedious and expensive to collect. Semi-supervised learning is a good alternative to mitigate the data annotation issue, but has remained largely unexplored in 3D object detection. Inspired by the recent success of self-ensembling technique in semi-supervised image classification task, we propose SESS, a self-ensembling semi-supervised 3D object detection framework. Specifically, we design a thorough perturbation scheme to enhance generalization of the network on unlabeled and new unseen data. Furthermore, we propose three consistency losses to enforce the consistency between two sets of predicted 3D object proposals, to facilitate the learning of structure and semantic invariances of objects. Extensive experiments conducted on SUN RGB-D and ScanNet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SESS in both inductive and transductive semi-supervised 3D object detection. Our SESS achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art fully-supervised method by using only 50% labeled data. Our code is available at https://github.com/Na-Z/sess.
Panoptic-DeepLab: A Simple, Strong, and Fast Baseline for Bottom-Up Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Bowen Cheng, Maxwell D. Collins, Yukun Zhu, Ting Liu, Thomas S. Huang, Hartwig Adam, Liang-Chieh Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this work, we introduce Panoptic-DeepLab, a simple, strong, and fast system for panoptic segmentation, aiming to establish a solid baseline for bottom-up methods that can achieve comparable performance of two-stage methods while yielding fast inference speed. In particular, Panoptic-DeepLab adopts the dual-ASPP and dual-decoder structures specific to semantic, and instance segmentation, respectively. The semantic segmentation branch is the same as the typical design of any semantic segmentation model (e.g., DeepLab), while the instance segmentation branch is class-agnostic, involving a simple instance center regression. As a result, our single Panoptic-DeepLab simultaneously ranks first at all three Cityscapes benchmarks, setting the new state-of-art of 84.2% mIoU, 39.0% AP, and 65.5% PQ on test set. Additionally, equipped with MobileNetV3, Panoptic-DeepLab runs nearly in real-time with a single 1025x2049 image (15.8 frames per second), while achieving a competitive performance on Cityscapes (54.1 PQ% on test set). On Mapillary Vistas test set, our ensemble of six models attains 42.7% PQ, outperforming the challenge winner in 2018 by a healthy margin of 1.5%. Finally, our Panoptic-DeepLab also performs on par with several top-down approaches on the challenging COCO dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a bottom-up approach could deliver state-of-the-art results on panoptic segmentation.
Spatio-Temporal Graph for Video Captioning With Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Boxiao Pan, Haoye Cai, De-An Huang, Kuan-Hui Lee, Adrien Gaidon, Ehsan Adeli, Juan Carlos Niebles
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
ACNe: Attentive Context Normalization for Robust Permutation-Equivariant Learning
Authors: Weiwei Sun, Wei Jiang, Eduard Trulls, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Kwang Moo Yi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many problems in computer vision require dealing with sparse, unordered data in the form of point clouds. Permutation-equivariant networks have become a popular solution - they operate on individual data points with simple perceptrons and extract contextual information with global pooling. This can be achieved with a simple normalization of the feature maps, a global operation that is unaffected by the order. In this paper, we propose Attentive Context Normalization (ACN), a simple yet effective technique to build permutation-equivariant networks robust to outliers. Specifically, we show how to normalize the feature maps with weights that are estimated within the network, excluding outliers from this normalization. We use this mechanism to leverage two types of attention: local and global - by combining them, our method is able to find the essential data points in high-dimensional space in order to solve a given task. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach, which we call Attentive Context Networks (ACNe), provides a significant leap in performance compared to the state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation, robust fitting, and point cloud classification under noise and outliers. Source code: https://github.com/vcg-uvic/acne.
ViBE: Dressing for Diverse Body Shapes
Authors: Wei-Lin Hsiao, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Body shape plays an important role in determining what garments will best suit a given person, yet today's clothing recommendation methods take a "one shape fits all" approach. These body-agnostic vision methods and datasets are a barrier to inclusion, ill-equipped to provide good suggestions for diverse body shapes. We introduce ViBE, a VIsual Body-aware Embedding that captures clothing's affinity with different body shapes. Given an image of a person, the proposed embedding identifies garments that will flatter her specific body shape. We show how to learn the embedding from an online catalog displaying fashion models of various shapes and sizes wearing the products, and we devise a method to explain the algorithm's suggestions for well-fitting garments. We apply our approach to a dataset of diverse subjects, and demonstrate its strong advantages over status quo body-agnostic recommendation, both according to automated metrics and human opinion.
Density-Based Clustering for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds
Authors: Syeda Mariam Ahmed, Chee Meng Chew
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Current 3D detection networks either rely on 2D object proposals or try to directly predict bounding box parameters from each point in a scene. While former methods are dependent on performance of 2D detectors, latter approaches are challenging due to the sparsity and occlusion in point clouds, making it difficult to regress accurate parameters. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for 3D object detection that is significant in two main aspects: a) cascaded modular approach that focuses the receptive field of each module on specific points in the point cloud, for improved feature learning and b) a class agnostic instance segmentation module that is initiated using unsupervised clustering. The objective of a cascaded approach is to sequentially minimize the number of points running through the network. While three different modules perform the tasks of background-foreground segmentation, class agnostic instance segmentation and object detection, through individually trained point based networks. We also evaluate bayesian uncertainty in modules, demonstrating the over all level of confidence in our prediction results. Performance of the network is evaluated on the SUN RGB-D benchmark dataset, that demonstrates an improvement as compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Diverse Image Generation via Self-Conditioned GANs
Authors: Steven Liu, Tongzhou Wang, David Bau, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce a simple but effective unsupervised method for generating diverse images. We train a class-conditional GAN model without using manually annotated class labels. Instead, our model is conditional on labels automatically derived from clustering in the discriminator's feature space. Our clustering step automatically discovers diverse modes, and explicitly requires the generator to cover them. Experiments on standard mode collapse benchmarks show that our method outperforms several competing methods when addressing mode collapse. Our method also performs well on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and Places365, improving both diversity and standard metrics (e.g., Frechet Inception Distance), compared to previous methods.
A Certifiably Globally Optimal Solution to Generalized Essential Matrix Estimation
Authors: Ji Zhao, Wanting Xu, Laurent Kneip
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a convex optimization approach for generalized essential matrix (GEM) estimation. The six-point minimal solver for the GEM has poor numerical stability and applies only for a minimal number of points. Existing non-minimal solvers for GEM estimation rely on either local optimization or relinearization techniques, which impedes high accuracy in common scenarios. Our proposed non-minimal solver minimizes the sum of squared residuals by reformulating the problem as a quadratically constrained quadratic program. The globally optimal solution is thus obtained by a semidefinite relaxation. The algorithm retrieves certifiably globally optimal solutions to the original non-convex problem in polynomial time. We also provide the necessary and sufficient conditions to recover the optimal GEM from the relaxed problems. The improved performance is demonstrated over experiments on both synthetic and real multi-camera systems.
Video Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Dahun Kim, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee, In So Kweon
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation has become a new standard of visual recognition task by unifying previous semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks in concert. In this paper, we propose and explore a new video extension of this task, called video panoptic segmentation. The task requires generating consistent panoptic segmentation as well as an association of instance ids across video frames. To invigorate research on this new task, we present two types of video panoptic datasets. The first is a re-organization of the synthetic VIPER dataset into the video panoptic format to exploit its large-scale pixel annotations. The second is a temporal extension on the Cityscapes val. set, by providing new video panoptic annotations (Cityscapes-VPS). Moreover, we propose a novel video panoptic segmentation network (VPSNet) which jointly predicts object classes, bounding boxes, masks, instance id tracking, and semantic segmentation in video frames. To provide appropriate metrics for this task, we propose a video panoptic quality (VPQ) metric and evaluate our method and several other baselines. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented two datasets. We achieve state-of-the-art results in image PQ on Cityscapes and also in VPQ on Cityscapes-VPS and VIPER datasets.
Structured Multi-Hashing for Model Compression
Authors: Elad Eban, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Hao Wu, Mark Sandler, Andrew Poon, Yerlan Idelbayev, Miguel A. Carreira-Perpinan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Despite the success of deep neural networks (DNNs), state-of-the-art models are too large to deploy on low-resource devices or common server configurations in which multiple models are held in memory. Model compression methods address this limitation by reducing the memory footprint, latency, or energy consumption of a model with minimal impact on accuracy. We focus on the task of reducing the number of learnable variables in the model. In this work we combine ideas from weight hashing and dimensionality reductions resulting in a simple and powerful structured multi-hashing method based on matrix products that allows direct control of model size of any deep network and is trained end-to-end. We demonstrate the strength of our approach by compressing models from the ResNet, EfficientNet, and MobileNet architecture families. Our method allows us to drastically decrease the number of variables while maintaining high accuracy. For instance, by applying our approach to EfficentNet-B4 (16M parameters) we reduce it to the size of B0 (5M parameters), while gaining over 3% in accuracy over B0 baseline. On the commonly used benchmark CIFAR10 we reduce the ResNet32 model by 75% with no loss in quality, and are able to do a 10x compression while still achieving above 90% accuracy.
Maintaining Discrimination and Fairness in Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Bowen Zhao, Xi Xiao, Guojun Gan, Bin Zhang, Shu-Tao Xia
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been applied in class incremental learning, which aims to solve common real-world problems of learning new classes continually. One drawback of standard DNNs is that they are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a commonly used technique to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate it can indeed help the model to output more discriminative results within old classes. However, it cannot alleviate the problem that the model tends to classify objects into new classes, causing the positive effect of KD to be hidden and limited. We observed that an important factor causing catastrophic forgetting is that the weights in the last fully connected (FC) layer are highly biased in class incremental learning. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective solution motivated by the aforementioned observations to address catastrophic forgetting. Firstly, we utilize KD to maintain the discrimination within old classes. Then, to further maintain the fairness between old classes and new classes, we propose Weight Aligning (WA) that corrects the biased weights in the FC layer after normal training process. Unlike previous work, WA does not require any extra parameters or a validation set in advance, as it utilizes the information provided by the biased weights themselves. The proposed method is evaluated on ImageNet-1000, ImageNet-100, and CIFAR-100 under various settings. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively alleviate catastrophic forgetting and significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.
ZeroQ: A Novel Zero Shot Quantization Framework
Authors: Yaohui Cai, Zhewei Yao, Zhen Dong, Amir Gholami, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Quantization is a promising approach for reducing the inference time and memory footprint of neural networks. However, most existing quantization methods require access to the original training dataset for retraining during quantization. This is often not possible for applications with sensitive or proprietary data, e.g., due to privacy and security concerns. Existing zero-shot quantization methods use different heuristics to address this, but they result in poor performance, especially when quantizing to ultra-low precision. Here, we propose \OURS, a novel zero-shot quantization framework to address this. \OURS enables mixed-precision quantization without any access to the training or validation data. This is achieved by optimizing for a Distilled Dataset, which is engineered to match the statistics of batch normalization across different layers of the network. \OURS supports both uniform and mixed-precision quantization. For the latter, we introduce a novel Pareto frontier based method to automatically determine the mixed-precision bit setting for all layers, with no manual search involved. We extensively test our proposed method on a diverse set of models, including ResNet18/50/152, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNext, and InceptionV3 on ImageNet, as well as RetinaNet-ResNet50 on the Microsoft COCO dataset. In particular, we show that \OURS can achieve 1.71% higher accuracy on MobileNetV2, as compared to the recently proposed DFQ [??] method. Importantly, \OURS has a very low computational overhead, and it can finish the entire quantization process in less than 30s (0.5% of one epoch training time of ResNet50 on ImageNet). We have open-sourced the \OURS framework(https://github.com/amirgholami/ZeroQ).
Learning Visual Motion Segmentation Using Event Surfaces
Authors: Anton Mitrokhin, Zhiyuan Hua, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Event-based cameras have been designed for scene motion perception - their high temporal resolution and spatial data sparsity converts the scene into a volume of boundary trajectories and allows to track and analyze the evolution of the scene in time. Analyzing this data is computationally expensive, and there is substantial lack of theory on dense-in-time object motion to guide the development of new algorithms; hence, many works resort to a simple solution of discretizing the event stream and converting it to classical pixel maps, which allows for application of conventional image processing methods. In this work we present a Graph Convolutional neural network for the task of scene motion segmentation by a moving camera. We convert the event stream into a 3D graph in (x,y,t) space and keep per-event temporal information. The difficulty of the task stems from the fact that unlike in metric space, the shape of an object in (x,y,t) space depends on its motion and is not the same across the dataset. We discuss properties of of the event data with respect to this 3D recognition problem, and show that our Graph Convolutional architecture is superior to PointNet++. We evaluate our method on the state of the art event-based motion segmentation dataset - EV-IMO and perform comparisons to a frame-based method proposed by its authors. Our ablation studies show that increasing the event slice width improves the accuracy, and how subsampling and edge configurations affect the network performance.
Orthogonal Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Jiayun Wang, Yubei Chen, Rudrasis Chakraborty, Stella X. Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks are hindered by training instability and feature redundancy towards further performance improvement. A promising solution is to impose orthogonality on convolutional filters. We develop an efficient approach to impose filter orthogonality on a convolutional layer based on the doubly block-Toeplitz matrix representation of the convolutional kernel, instead of the common kernel orthogonality approach, which we show is only necessary but not sufficient for ensuring orthogonal convolutions. Our proposed orthogonal convolution requires no additional parameters and little computational overhead. It consistently outperforms the kernel orthogonality alternative on a wide range of tasks such as image classification and inpainting under supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised settings. It learns more diverse and expressive features with better training stability, robustness, and generalization. Our code is publicly available.
Just Go With the Flow: Self-Supervised Scene Flow Estimation
Authors: Himangi Mittal, Brian Okorn, David Held
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: When interacting with highly dynamic environments, scene flow allows autonomous systems to reason about the non-rigid motion of multiple independent objects. This is of particular interest in the field of autonomous driving, in which many cars, people, bicycles, and other objects need to be accurately tracked. Current state-of-the-art methods require annotated scene flow data from autonomous driving scenes to train scene flow networks with supervised learning. As an alternative, we present a method of training scene flow that uses two self-supervised losses, based on nearest neighbors and cycle consistency. These self-supervised losses allow us to train our method on large unlabeled autonomous driving datasets; the resulting method matches current state-of-the-art supervised performance using no real world annotations and exceeds state-of-the-art performance when combining our self-supervised approach with supervised learning on a smaller labeled dataset.
Set-Constrained Viterbi for Set-Supervised Action Segmentation
Authors: Jun Li, Sinisa Todorovic
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper is about weakly supervised action segmentation, where the ground truth specifies only a set of actions present in a training video, but not their true temporal ordering. Prior work typically uses a classifier that independently labels video frames for generating the pseudo ground truth, and multiple instance learning for training the classifier. We extend this framework by specifying an HMM, which accounts for co-occurrences of action classes and their temporal lengths, and by explicitly training the HMM on a Viterbi-based loss. Our first contribution is the formulation of a new set-constrained Viterbi algorithm (SCV). Given a video, the SCV generates the MAP action segmentation that satisfies the ground truth. This prediction is used as a framewise pseudo ground truth in our HMM training. Our second contribution in training is a new regularization of feature affinities between training videos that share the same action classes. Evaluation on action segmentation and alignment on the Breakfast, MPII Cooking2, Hollywood Extended datasets demonstrates our significant performance improvement for the two tasks over prior work.
Fast Sparse ConvNets
Authors: Erich Elsen, Marat Dukhan, Trevor Gale, Karen Simonyan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Historically, the pursuit of efficient inference has been one of the driving forces behind the research into new deep learning architectures and building blocks. Some of the recent examples include: the squeeze-and-excitation module, depthwise separable convolutions in Xception, and the inverted bottleneck in MobileNet v2. Notably, in all of these cases, the resulting building blocks enabled not only higher efficiency, but also higher accuracy, and found wide adoption in the field. In this work, we further expand the arsenal of efficient building blocks for neural network architectures; but instead of combining standard primitives (such as convolution), we advocate for the replacement of these dense primitives with their sparse counterparts. While the idea of using sparsity to decrease the parameter count is not new, the conventional wisdom is that this reduction in theoretical FLOPs does not translate into real-world efficiency gains. We aim to correct this misconception by introducing a family of efficient sparse kernels for several hardware platforms, which we plan to open source for the benefit of the community. Equipped with our efficient implementation of sparse primitives, we show that sparse versions of MobileNet v1 and MobileNet v2 architectures substantially outperform strong dense baselines on the efficiency-accuracy curve. On Snapdragon 835 our sparse networks outperform their dense equivalents by 1.3 - 2.4x - equivalent to approximately one entire generation of improvement. We hope that our findings will facilitate wider adoption of sparsity as a tool for creating efficient and accurate deep learning architectures.
Learning a Weakly-Supervised Video Actor-Action Segmentation Model With a Wise Selection
Authors: Jie Chen, Zhiheng Li, Jiebo Luo, Chenliang Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We address weakly-supervised video actor-action segmentation (VAAS), which extends general video object segmentation (VOS) to additionally consider action labels of the actors. The most successful methods on VOS synthesize a pool of pseudo-annotations (PAs) and then refine them iteratively. However, they face challenges as to how to select from a massive amount of PAs high-quality ones, how to set an appropriate stop condition for weakly-supervised training, and how to initialize PAs pertaining to VAAS. To overcome these challenges, we propose a general Weakly-Supervised framework with a Wise Selection of training samples and model evaluation criterion (WS^2). Instead of blindly trusting quality-inconsistent PAs, WS^2 employs a learning-based selection to select effective PAs and a novel region integrity criterion as a stopping condition for weakly-supervised training. In addition, a 3D-Conv GCAM is devised to adapt to the VAAS task. Extensive experiments show that WS^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both weakly-supervised VOS and VAAS tasks and is on par with the best fully-supervised method on VAAS.
Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Shuhao Cui, Shuhui Wang, Junbao Zhuo, Chi Su, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In unsupervised domain adaptation, rich domain-specific characteristics bring great challenge to learn domain-invariant representations. However, domain discrepancy is considered to be directly minimized in existing solutions, which is difficult to achieve in practice. Some methods alleviate the difficulty by explicitly modeling domain-invariant and domain-specific parts in the representations, but the adverse influence of the explicit construction lies in the residual domain-specific characteristics in the constructed domain-invariant representations. In this paper, we equip adversarial domain adaptation with Gradually Vanishing Bridge (GVB) mechanism on both generator and discriminator. On the generator, GVB could not only reduce the overall transfer difficulty, but also reduce the influence of the residual domain-specific characteristics in domain-invariant representations. On the discriminator, GVB contributes to enhance the discriminating ability, and balance the adversarial training process. Experiments on three challenging datasets show that our GVB methods outperform strong competitors, and cooperate well with other adversarial methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cuishuhao/GVB.
Deep Degradation Prior for Low-Quality Image Classification
Authors: Yang Wang, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha, Jing Zhang, Zhiwei Xiong
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: State-of-the-art image classification algorithms building upon convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonly trained on large annotated datasets of high-quality images. When applied to low-quality images, they will suffer a significant degradation in performance, since the structural and statistical properties of pixels in the neighborhood are obstructed by image degradation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel deep degradation prior for low-quality image classification. It is based on statistical observations that, in the deep representation space, image patches with structural similarity have uniform distribution even if they come from different images, and the distributions of corresponding patches in low- and high-quality images have uniform margins under the same degradation condition. Therefore, we propose a feature de-drifting module (FDM) to learn the mapping relationship between deep representations of low- and high- quality images, and leverage it as a deep degradation prior (DDP) for low-quality image classification. Since the statistical properties are independent to image content, deep degradation prior can be learned on a training set of limited images without supervision of semantic labels and served in a form of "plugging-in" module of the existing classification networks to improve their performance on degraded images. Evaluations on the benchmark dataset ImageNet-C demonstrate that our proposed DDP can improve the accuracy of the pre-trained network model by more than 20% under various degradation conditions. Even under the extreme setting that only 10 images from CUB-C dataset are used for the training of DDP, our method improves the accuracy of VGG16 on ImageNet-C from 37% to 55%.
Visual-Textual Capsule Routing for Text-Based Video Segmentation
Authors: Bruce McIntosh, Kevin Duarte, Yogesh S Rawat, Mubarak Shah
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Joint understanding of vision and natural language is a challenging problem with a wide range of applications in artificial intelligence. In this work, we focus on integration of video and text for the task of actor and action video segmentation from a sentence. We propose a capsule-based approach which performs pixel-level localization based on a natural language query describing the actor of interest. We encode both the video and textual input in the form of capsules, which provide a more effective representation in comparison with standard convolution based features. Our novel visual-textual routing mechanism allows for the fusion of video and text capsules to successfully localize the actor and action. The existing works on actor-action localization are mainly focused on localization in a single frame instead of the full video. Different from existing works, we propose to perform the localization on all frames of the video. To validate the potential of the proposed network for actor and action video localization, we extend an existing actor-action dataset (A2D) with annotations for all the frames. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our capsule network for text selective actor and action localization in videos. The proposed method also improves upon the performance of the existing state-of-the art works on single frame-based localization.
Towards Inheritable Models for Open-Set Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jogendra Nath Kundu, Naveen Venkat, Ambareesh Revanur, Rahul M V, R. Venkatesh Babu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: There has been a tremendous progress in Domain Adaptation (DA) for visual recognition tasks. Particularly, open-set DA has gained considerable attention wherein the target domain contains additional unseen categories. Existing open-set DA approaches demand access to a labeled source dataset along with unlabeled target instances. However, this reliance on co-existing source and target data is highly impractical in scenarios where data-sharing is restricted due to its proprietary nature or privacy concerns. Addressing this, we introduce a practical DA paradigm where a source-trained model is used to facilitate adaptation in the absence of the source dataset in future. To this end, we formalize knowledge inheritability as a novel concept and propose a simple yet effective solution to realize inheritable models suitable for the above practical paradigm. Further, we present an objective way to quantify inheritability to enable the selection of the most suitable source model for a given target domain, even in the absence of the source data. We provide theoretical insights followed by a thorough empirical evaluation demonstrating state-of-the-art open-set domain adaptation performance.
Multi-Task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation
Authors: Gen Luo, Yiyi Zhou, Xiaoshuai Sun, Liujuan Cao, Chenglin Wu, Cheng Deng, Rongrong Ji
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) are two highly-related tasks, which both aim at identifying the referent according to a natural language expression. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-task Collaborative Network (MCN) to achieve a joint learning of REC and RES for the first time. In MCN, RES can help REC to achieve better language-vision alignment, while REC can help RES to better locate the referent. In addition, we address a key challenge in this multi-task setup, i.e., the prediction conflict, with two innovative designs namely, Consistency Energy Maximization (CEM) and Adaptive Soft Non-Located Suppression (ASNLS). Specifically, CEM enables REC and RES to focus on similar visual regions by maximizing the consistency energy between two tasks. ASNLS supresses the response of unrelated regions in RES based on the prediction of REC. To validate our model, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets of REC and RES, i.e., RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg. The experimental results report the significant performance gains of MCN over all existing methods, i.e., up to +7.13% for REC and +11.50% for RES over SOTA, which well confirm the validity of our model for joint REC and RES learning.
Where, What, Whether: Multi-Modal Learning Meets Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Yan Luo, Chongyang Zhang, Muming Zhao, Hao Zhou, Jun Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Pedestrian detection benefits greatly from deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, it is inherently hard for CNNs to handle situations in the presence of occlusion and scale variation. In this paper, we propose W^3Net, which attempts to address above challenges by decomposing the pedestrian detection task into Where, What and Whether problem directing against pedestrian localization, scale prediction and classification correspondingly. Specifically, for a pedestrian instance, we formulate its feature by three steps. i) We generate a bird view map, which is naturally free from occlusion issues, and scan all points on it to look for suitable locations for each pedestrian instance. ii) Instead of utilizing pre-fixed anchors, we model the interdependency between depth and scale aiming at generating depth-guided scales at different locations for better matching instances of different sizes. iii) We learn a latent vector shared by both visual and corpus space, by which false positives with similar vertical structure but lacking human partial features would be filtered out. We achieve state-of-the-art results on widely used datasets (Citypersons and Caltech). In particular. when evaluating on heavy occlusion subset, our results reduce MR^ -2  from 49.3% to 18.7% on Citypersons, and from 45.18% to 28.33% on Caltech.
Learning Depth-Guided Convolutions for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Mingyu Ding, Yuqi Huo, Hongwei Yi, Zhe Wang, Jianping Shi, Zhiwu Lu, Ping Luo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: 3D object detection from a single image without LiDAR is a challenging task due to the lack of accurate depth information. Conventional 2D convolutions are unsuitable for this task because they fail to capture local object and its scale information, which are vital for 3D object detection. To better represent 3D structure, prior arts typically transform depth maps estimated from 2D images into a pseudo-LiDAR representation, and then apply existing 3D point-cloud based object detectors. However, their results depend heavily on the accuracy of the estimated depth maps, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this work, instead of using pseudo-LiDAR representation, we improve the fundamental 2D fully convolutions by proposing a new local convolutional network (LCN), termed Depth-guided Dynamic-Depthwise-Dilated LCN (D4LCN), where the filters and their receptive fields can be automatically learned from image-based depth maps, making different pixels of different images have different filters. D4LCN overcomes the limitation of conventional 2D convolutions and narrows the gap between image representation and 3D point cloud representation. Extensive experiments show that D^4LCN outperforms existing works by large margins. For example, the relative improvement of D4LCN against the state-of-the-art on KITTI is 9.1% in the moderate setting. D4LCN ranks 1st on KITTI monocular 3D object detection benchmark at the time of submission (car, December 2019). The code is available at https://github.com/dingmyu/D4LCN
Your Local GAN: Designing Two Dimensional Local Attention Mechanisms for Generative Models
Authors: Giannis Daras, Augustus Odena, Han Zhang, Alexandros G. Dimakis
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce a new local sparse attention layer that preserves two-dimensional geometry and locality. We show that by just replacing the dense attention layer of SAGAN with our construction, we obtain very significant FID, Inception score and pure visual improvements. FID score is improved from 18.65 to 15.94 on ImageNet, keeping all other parameters the same. The sparse attention patterns that we propose for our new layer are designed using a novel information theoretic criterion that uses information flow graphs. We also present a novel way to invert Generative Adversarial Networks with attention. Our method uses the attention layer of the discriminator to create an innovative loss function. This allows us to visualize the newly introduced attention heads and show that they indeed capture interesting aspects of two-dimensional geometry of real images.
Context Aware Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Authors: Xikun Zhang, Chang Xu, Dacheng Tao
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Graph convolutional models have gained impressive successes on skeleton based human action recognition task. As graph convolution is a local operation, it cannot fully investigate non-local joints that could be vital to recognizing the action. For example, actions like typing and clapping request the cooperation of two hands, which are distant from each other in a human skeleton graph. Multiple graph convolutional layers thus tend to be stacked together to increase receptive field, which brings in computational inefficiency and optimization difficulty. But there is still no guarantee that distant joints (e.g. two hands) can be well integrated. In this paper, we propose a context aware graph convolutional network (CA-GCN). Besides the computation of localized graph convolution, CA-GCN considers a context term for each vertex by integrating information of all other vertices. Long range dependencies among joints are thus naturally integrated in context information, which then eliminates the need of stacking multiple layers to enlarge receptive field and greatly simplifies the network. Moreover, we further propose an advanced CA-GCN, in which asymmetric relevance measurement and higher level representation are utilized to compute context information for more flexibility and better performance. Besides the joint features, our CA-GCN could also be extended to handle graphs with edge (limb) features. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the importance of context information and the effectiveness of the proposed CA-GCN in skeleton based action recognition.
Probabilistic Video Prediction From Noisy Data With a Posterior Confidence
Authors: Yunbo Wang, Jiajun Wu, Mingsheng Long, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study a new research problem of probabilistic future frames prediction from a sequence of noisy inputs, which is useful because it is difficult to guarantee the quality of input frames in practical spatiotemporal prediction applications. It is also challenging because it involves two levels of uncertainty: the perceptual uncertainty from noisy observations and the dynamics uncertainty in forward modeling. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem with an end-to-end trainable model named Bayesian Predictive Network (BP-Net). Unlike previous work in stochastic video prediction that assumes spatiotemporal coherence and therefore fails to deal with perceptual uncertainty, BP-Net models both levels of uncertainty in an integrated framework. Furthermore, unlike previous work that can only provide unsorted estimations of future frames, BP-Net leverages a differentiable sequential importance sampling (SIS) approach to make future predictions based on the inference of underlying physical states, thereby providing sorted prediction candidates in accordance with the SIS importance weights, i.e., the confidences. Our experiment results demonstrate that BP-Net remarkably outperforms existing approaches on predicting future frames from noisy data.
Generalizing Hand Segmentation in Egocentric Videos With Uncertainty-Guided Model Adaptation
Authors: Minjie Cai, Feng Lu, Yoichi Sato
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Although the performance of hand segmentation in egocentric videos has been significantly improved by using CNNs, it still remains a challenging issue to generalize the trained models to new domains, e.g., unseen environments. In this work, we solve the hand segmentation generalization problem without requiring segmentation labels in the target domain. To this end, we propose a Bayesian CNN-based model adaptation framework for hand segmentation, which introduces and considers two key factors: 1) prediction uncertainty when the model is applied in a new domain and 2) common information about hand shapes shared across domains. Consequently, we propose an iterative self-training method for hand segmentation in the new domain, which is guided by the model uncertainty estimated by a Bayesian CNN. We further use an adversarial component in our framework to utilize shared information about hand shapes to constrain the model adaptation process. Experiments on multiple egocentric datasets show that the proposed method significantly improves the generalization performance of hand segmentation.