mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
HIRE-SNN: Harnessing the Inherent Robustness of Energy-Efficient Deep Spiking Neural Networks by Training With Crafted Input Noise
Authors: Souvik Kundu, Massoud Pedram, Peter A. Beerel
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Low-latency deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) have become a promising alternative to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) because of their potential for increased energy efficiency on event-driven neuromorphic hardware. Neural networks, including SNNs, however, are subject to various adversarial attacks and must be trained to remain resilient against such attacks for many applications. Nevertheless, due to prohibitively high training costs associated with SNNs, analysis, and optimization of deep SNNs under various adversarial attacks have been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first present a detailed analysis of the inherent robustness of low-latency SNNs against popular gradient-based attacks, namely fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and projected gradient descent (PGD). Motivated by this analysis, to harness the model robustness against these attacks we present an SNN training algorithm that uses crafted input noise and incurs no additional training time. To evaluate the merits of our algorithm, we conducted extensive experiments with variants of VGG and ResNet on both CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. Compared to standard trained direct input SNNs, our trained models yield improved classification accuracy of up to 13.7% and 10.1% on FGSM and PGD attack-generated images, respectively, with negligible loss in clean image accuracy. Our models also outperform inherently-robust SNNs trained on rate-coded inputs with improved or similar classification performance on attack-generated im-ages while having up to 25x and  4.6x lower latency and computation energy, respectively.
CDNet: Centripetal Direction Network for Nuclear Instance Segmentation
Authors: Hongliang He, Zhongyi Huang, Yao Ding, Guoli Song, Lin Wang, Qian Ren, Pengxu Wei, Zhiqiang Gao, Jie Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Nuclear instance segmentation is a challenging task due to a large number of touching and overlapping nuclei in pathological images. Existing methods cannot effectively recognize the accurate boundary owing to neglecting the relationship between pixels (e.g., direction information). In this paper, we propose a novel Centripetal Direction Network (CDNet) for nuclear instance segmentation. Specifically, we define the centripetal direction feature as a class of adjacent directions pointing to the nuclear center to represent the spatial relationship between pixels within the nucleus. These direction features are then used to construct a direction difference map to represent the similarity within instances and the differences between instances. Finally, we propose a direction-guided refinement module, which acts as a plug-and-play module to effectively integrate auxiliary tasks and aggregate the features of different branches. Experiments on MoNuSeg and CPM17 datasets show that CDNet is significantly better than the other methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/honglianghe/CDNet.
3D Human Texture Estimation From a Single Image With Transformers
Authors: Xiangyu Xu, Chen Change Loy
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a Transformer-based framework for 3D human texture estimation from a single image. The proposed Transformer is able to effectively exploit the global information of the input image, overcoming the limitations of existing methods that are solely based on convolutional neural networks. In addition, we also propose a mask-fusion strategy to combine the advantages of the RGB-based and texture-flow-based models. We further introduce a part-style loss to help reconstruct high-fidelity colors without introducing unpleasant artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against state-of-the-art 3D human texture estimation approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The Surprising Effectiveness of Visual Odometry Techniques for Embodied PointGoal Navigation
Authors: Xiaoming Zhao, Harsh Agrawal, Dhruv Batra, Alexander G. Schwing
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: It is fundamental for personal robots to reliably navigate to a specified goal. To study this task, PointGoal navigation has been introduced in simulated Embodied AI environments. Recent advances solve this PointGoal navigation task with near-perfect accuracy (99.6% success) in photo-realistically simulated environments, assuming noiseless egocentric vision, noiseless actuation, and most importantly, perfect localization. However, under realistic noise models for visual sensors and actuation, and without access to a "GPS and Compass sensor," the 99.6%-success agents for PointGoal navigation only succeed with 0.3%. In this work, we demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of visual odometry for the task of PointGoal navigation in this realistic setting, i.e., with realistic noise models for perception and actuation and without access to GPS and Compass sensors. We show that integrating visual odometry techniques into navigation policies improves the state-of-the-art on the popular Habitat PointNav benchmark by a large margin, improving success from 64.5% to 71.7% while executing 6.4 times faster.
Rehearsal Revealed: The Limits and Merits of Revisiting Samples in Continual Learning
Authors: Eli Verwimp, Matthias De Lange, Tinne Tuytelaars
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning from non-stationary data streams and overcoming catastrophic forgetting still poses a serious challenge for machine learning research. Rather than aiming to improve state-of-the-art, in this work we provide insight into the limits and merits of rehearsal, one of continual learning's most established methods. We hypothesize that models trained sequentially with rehearsal tend to stay in the same low-loss region after a task has finished, but are at risk of overfitting on its sample memory, hence harming generalization. We provide both conceptual and strong empirical evidence on three benchmarks for both behaviors, bringing novel insights into the dynamics of rehearsal and continual learning in general. Finally, we interpret important continual learning works in the light of our findings, allowing for a deeper understanding of their successes.
Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers
Authors: Ze Liu, Zheng Zhang, Yue Cao, Han Hu, Xin Tong
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, directly detecting 3D objects from 3D point clouds has received increasing attention. To extract object representation from an irregular point cloud, existing methods usually take a point grouping step to assign the points to an object candidate so that a PointNet-like network could be used to derive object features from the grouped points. However, the inaccurate point assignments caused by the hand-crafted grouping scheme decrease the performance of 3D object detection.  In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method for directly detecting 3D objects from the 3D point cloud. Instead of grouping local points to each object candidate, our method computes the feature of an object from all the points in the point cloud with the help of an attention mechanism in the Transformers, where the contribution of each point is automatically learned in the network training. With an improved attention stacking scheme, our method fuses object features in different stages and generates more accurate object detection results. With few bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection performance on two widely used benchmarks, ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D.
Discover the Unknown Biased Attribute of an Image Classifier
Authors: Zhiheng Li, Chenliang Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent works find that AI algorithms learn biases from data. Therefore, it is urgent and vital to identify biases in AI algorithms. However, the previous bias identification pipeline overly relies on human experts to conjecture potential biases (e.g., gender), which may neglect other underlying biases not realized by humans. To help human experts better find the AI algorithms' biases, we study a new problem in this work -- for a classifier that predicts a target attribute of the input image, discover its unknown biased attribute. To solve this challenging problem, we use a hyperplane in the generative model's latent space to represent an image attribute; thus, the original problem is transformed to optimizing the hyperplane's normal vector and offset. We propose a novel total-variation loss within this framework as the objective function and a new orthogonalization penalty as a constraint. The latter prevents trivial solutions in which the discovered biased attribute is identical with the target or one of the known-biased attributes. Extensive experiments on both disentanglement datasets and real-world datasets show that our method can discover biased attributes and achieve better disentanglement w.r.t. target attributes. Furthermore, the qualitative results show that our method can discover unnoticeable biased attributes for various object and scene classifiers, proving our method's generalizability for detecting biased attributes in diverse domains of images.
Learn To Cluster Faces via Pairwise Classification
Authors: Junfu Liu, Di Qiu, Pengfei Yan, Xiaolin Wei
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Face clustering plays an essential role in exploiting massive unlabeled face data. Recently, graph-based face clustering methods are getting popular for their satisfying performances. However, they usually suffer from excessive memory consumption especially on large-scale graphs, and rely on empirical thresholds to determine the connectivities between samples in inference, which restricts their applications in various real-world scenes. To address such problems, in this paper, we explore face clustering from the pairwise angle. Specifically, we formulate the face clustering task as a pairwise relationship classification task, avoiding the memory-consuming learning on large-scale graphs. The classifier can directly determine the relationship between samples and is enhanced by taking advantage of the contextual information. Moreover, to further facilitate the efficiency of our method, we propose a rank-weighted density to guide the selection of pairs sent to the classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on several public clustering benchmarks at the fastest speed and shows a great advantage in comparison with graph-based clustering methods on memory consumption.
DAE-GAN: Dynamic Aspect-Aware GAN for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Shulan Ruan, Yong Zhang, Kun Zhang, Yanbo Fan, Fan Tang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Text-to-image synthesis refers to generating an image from a given text description, the key goal of which lies in photo realism and semantic consistency. Previous methods usually generate an initial image with sentence embedding and then refine it with fine-grained word embedding. Despite the significant progress, the 'aspect' information (e.g., red eyes) contained in the text, referring to several words rather than a word that depicts 'a particular part or feature of something', is often ignored, which is highly helpful for synthesizing image details. How to make better utilization of aspect information in text-to-image synthesis still remains an unresolved challenge. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Aspect-awarE GAN (DAE-GAN) that represents text information comprehensively from multiple granularities, including sentence-level, word-level, and aspect-level. Moreover, inspired by human learning behaviors, we develop a novel Aspect-aware Dynamic Re-drawer (ADR) for image refinement, in which an Attended Global Refinement (AGR) module and an Aspect-aware Local Refinement (ALR) module are alternately employed. AGR utilizes word-level embedding to globally enhance the previously generated image, while ALR dynamically employs aspect-level embedding to refine image details from a local perspective. Finally, a corresponding matching loss function is designed to ensure the text-image semantic consistency at different levels. Extensive experiments on two well-studied and publicly available datasets (i.e., CUB-200 and COCO) demonstrate the superiority and rationality of our method.
Learning Facial Representations From the Cycle-Consistency of Face
Authors: Jia-Ren Chang, Yong-Sheng Chen, Wei-Chen Chiu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Faces manifest large variations in many aspects, such as identity, expression, pose, and face styling. Therefore, it is a great challenge to disentangle and extract these characteristics from facial images, especially in an unsupervised manner. In this work, we introduce cycle-consistency in facial characteristics as free supervisory signal to learn facial representations from unlabeled facial images. The learning is realized by superimposing the facial motion cycle-consistency and identity cycle-consistency constraints. The main idea of the facial motion cycle-consistency is that, given a face with expression, we can perform de-expression to a neutral face via the removal of facial motion and further perform re-expression to reconstruct back to the original face. The main idea of the identity cycle-consistency is to exploit both de-identity into mean face by depriving the given neutral face of its identity via feature re-normalization and re-identity into neutral face by adding the personal attributes to the mean face. At training time, our model learns to disentangle two distinct facial representations to be useful for performing cycle-consistent face reconstruction. At test time, we use the linear protocol scheme for evaluating facial representations on various tasks, including facial expression recognition and head pose regression. We also can directly apply the learnt facial representations to person recognition, frontalization and image-to-image translation. Our experiments show that the results of our approach is competitive with those of existing methods, demonstrating the rich and unique information embedded in the disentangled representations. Code is available at https://github.com/JiaRenChang/FaceCycle.
Towards Memory-Efficient Neural Networks via Multi-Level In Situ Generation
Authors: Jiaqi Gu, Hanqing Zhu, Chenghao Feng, Mingjie Liu, Zixuan Jiang, Ray T. Chen, David Z. Pan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown superior performance in a variety of tasks. As they rapidly evolve, their escalating computation and memory demands make it challenging to deploy them on resource-constrained edge devices. Though extensive efficient accelerator designs, from traditional electronics to emerging photonics, have been successfully demonstrated, they are still bottlenecked by expensive memory accesses due to tremendous gaps between the bandwidth/power/latency of electrical memory and computing cores. Previous solutions fail to fully-leverage the ultra-fast computational speed of emerging DNN accelerators to break through the critical memory bound. In this work, we propose a general and unified framework to trade expensive memory transactions with ultra-fast on-chip computations, directly translating to performance improvement. We are the first to jointly explore the intrinsic correlations and bit-level redundancy within DNN kernels and propose a multi-level in situ generation mechanism with mixed-precision bases to achieve on-the-fly recovery of high-resolution parameters with minimum hardware overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed joint method can boost the memory efficiency by 10-20x with comparable accuracy over four state-of-the-art designs when benchmarked on ResNet-18/DenseNet-121/MobileNetV2/V3 with various tasks.
Greedy Gradient Ensemble for Robust Visual Question Answering
Authors: Xinzhe Han, Shuhui Wang, Chi Su, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Language bias is a critical issue in Visual Question Answering (VQA), where models often exploit dataset biases for the final decision without considering the image information. As a result, they suffer from performance drop on out-of-distribution data and inadequate visual explanation. Based on experimental analysis for existing robust VQA methods, we stress the language bias in VQA that comes from two aspects, i.e., distribution bias and shortcut bias. We further propose a new de-bias framework, Greedy Gradient Ensemble (GGE), which combines multiple biased models for unbiased base model learning. With the greedy strategy, GGE forces the biased models to over-fit the biased data distribution in priority, thus makes the base model pay more attention to examples that are hard to solve by biased models.  The experiments demonstrate that our method makes better use of visual information and achieves state-of-the-art performance on diagnosing dataset VQA-CP without using extra annotations.
Influence Selection for Active Learning
Authors: Zhuoming Liu, Hao Ding, Huaping Zhong, Weijia Li, Jifeng Dai, Conghui He
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The existing active learning methods select the samples by evaluating the sample's uncertainty or its effect on the diversity of labeled datasets based on different task-specific or model-specific criteria. In this paper, we propose the Influence Selection for Active Learning(ISAL) which selects the unlabeled samples that can provide the most positive Influence on model performance. To obtain the Influence of the unlabeled sample in the active learning scenario, we design the Untrained Unlabeled sample Influence Calculation(UUIC) to estimate the unlabeled sample's expected gradient with which we calculate its Influence. To prove the effectiveness of UUIC, we provide both theoretical and experimental analyses. Since the UUIC just depends on the model gradients, which can be obtained easily from any neural network, our active learning algorithm is task-agnostic and model-agnostic. ISAL achieves state-of-the-art performance in different active learning settings for different tasks with different datasets. Compared with previous methods, our method decreases the annotation cost at least by 12%, 13% and 16% on CIFAR10, VOC2012 and COCO, respectively.
Visual Alignment Constraint for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Yuecong Min, Aiming Hao, Xiujuan Chai, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Vision-based Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) aims to recognize unsegmented signs from image streams. Overfitting is one of the most critical problems in CSLR training, and previous works show that the iterative training scheme can partially solve this problem while also costing more training time. In this study, we revisit the iterative training scheme in recent CSLR works and realize that sufficient training of the feature extractor is critical to solving the overfitting problem. Therefore, we propose a Visual Alignment Constraint (VAC) to enhance the feature extractor with alignment supervision. Specifically, the proposed VAC comprises two auxiliary losses: one focuses on visual features only, and the other enforces prediction alignment between the feature extractor and the alignment module. Moreover, we propose two metrics to reflect overfitting by measuring the prediction inconsistency between the feature extractor and the alignment module. Experimental results on two challenging CSLR datasets show that the proposed VAC makes CSLR networks end-to-end trainable and achieves competitive performance.
On the Hidden Treasure of Dialog in Video Question Answering
Authors: Deniz Engin, François Schnitzler, Ngoc Q. K. Duong, Yannis Avrithis
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: High-level understanding of stories in video such as movies and TV shows from raw data is extremely challenging. Modern video question answering (VideoQA) systems often use additional human-made sources like plot synopses, scripts, video descriptions or knowledge bases. In this work, we present a new approach to understand the whole story without such external sources. The secret lies in the dialog: unlike any prior work, we treat dialog as a noisy source to be converted into text description via dialog summarization, much like recent methods treat video. The input of each modality is encoded by transformers independently, and a simple fusion method combines all modalities, using soft temporal attention for localization over long inputs. Our model outperforms the state of the art on the KnowIT VQA dataset by a large margin, without using question-specific human annotation or human-made plot summaries. It even outperforms human evaluators who have never watched any whole episode before. Code is available at https://engindeniz.github.io/dialogsummary-videoqa
From Culture to Clothing: Discovering the World Events Behind a Century of Fashion Images
Authors: Wei-Lin Hsiao, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Fashion is intertwined with external cultural factors, but identifying these links remains a manual process limited to only the most salient phenomena. We propose a data-driven approach to identify specific cultural factors affecting the clothes people wear. Using large-scale datasets of news articles and vintage photos spanning a century, we present a multi-modal statistical model to detect influence relationships between happenings in the world and people's choice of clothing. Furthermore, on two image datasets we apply our model to improve the concrete vision tasks of visual style forecasting and photo timestamping. Our work is a first step towards a computational, scalable, and easily refreshable approach to link culture to clothing.
Contextually Plausible and Diverse 3D Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Sadegh Aliakbarian, Fatemeh Saleh, Lars Petersson, Stephen Gould, Mathieu Salzmann
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle the task of diverse 3D human motion prediction, that is, forecasting multiple plausible future 3D poses given a sequence of observed 3D poses. In this context, a popular approach consists of using a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). However, existing approaches that do so either fail to capture the diversity in human motion, or generate diverse but semantically implausible continuations of the observed motion. In this paper, we address both of these problems by developing a new variational framework that accounts for both diversity and context of the generated future motion. To this end, and in contrast to existing approaches, we condition the sampling of the latent variable that acts as source of diversity on the representation of the past observation, thus encouraging it to carry relevant information. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach yields motions not only of higher quality while retaining diversity, but also that preserve the contextual information contained in the observed motion.
BN-NAS: Neural Architecture Search With Batch Normalization
Authors: Boyu Chen, Peixia Li, Baopu Li, Chen Lin, Chuming Li, Ming Sun, Junjie Yan, Wanli Ouyang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Model training and evaluation are two main time-consuming processes during neural architecture search (NAS). Although weight-sharing based methods have been proposed to reduce the number of trained networks, these methods still need to train the supernet for hundreds of epochs and evaluate thousands of subnets to find the optimal network architecture. In this paper, we propose NAS with Batch Normalization (BN), which we refer to as BN-NAS, to accelerate both the evaluation and training process. For fast evaluation, we propose a novel BN-based indicator that predicts subnet performance at a very early training stage. We further improve the training efficiency by only training the BN parameters during the supernet training. This is based on our observation that training the whole supernet is not necessary while training only BN parameters accelerates network convergence for network architecture search. Extensive experiments show that our method can significantly shorten the time of training supernet by more than 10 times and evaluating subnets by more than 600,000 times without losing accuracy.
Condensing a Sequence to One Informative Frame for Video Recognition
Authors: Zhaofan Qiu, Ting Yao, Yan Shu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Video is complex due to large variations in motion and rich content in fine-grained visual details. Abstracting useful information from such information-intensive media requires exhaustive computing resources. This paper studies a two-step alternative that first condenses the video sequence to an informative "frame" and then exploits off-the-shelf image recognition system on the synthetic frame. A valid question is how to define "useful information" and then distill it from a video sequence down to one synthetic frame. This paper presents a novel Informative Frame Synthesis (IFS) architecture that incorporates three objective tasks, i.e., appearance reconstruction, video categorization, motion estimation, and two regularizers, i.e., adversarial learning, color consistency. Each task equips the synthetic frame with one ability, while each regularizer enhances its visual quality. With these, by jointly learning the frame synthesis in an end-to-end manner, the generated frame is expected to encapsulate the required spatio-temporal information useful for video analysis. Extensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale Kinetics dataset. When comparing to baseline methods that map video sequence to a single image, IFS shows superior performance. More remarkably, IFS consistently demonstrates evident improvements on image-based 2D networks and clip-based 3D networks, and achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods with less computational cost.
The Benefit of Distraction: Denoising Camera-Based Physiological Measurements Using Inverse Attention
Authors: Ewa M. Nowara, Daniel McDuff, Ashok Veeraraghavan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Attention networks perform well on diverse computer vision tasks. The core idea is that the signal of interest is stronger in some pixels ("foreground"), and by selectively focusing computation on these pixels, networks can extract subtle information buried in noise and other sources of corruption. Our paper is based on one key observation: in many real-world applications, many sources of corruption, such as illumination and motion, are often shared between the "foreground" and the "background" pixels. Can we utilize this to our advantage? We propose the utility of inverse attention networks, which focus on extracting information about these shared sources of corruption. We show that this helps to effectively suppress shared covariates and amplify signal information, resulting in improved performance. We illustrate this on the task of camera-based physiological measurement where the signal of interest is weak and global illumination variations and motion act as significant shared sources of corruption. We perform experiments on three datasets and show that our approach of inverse attention produces state-of-the-art results, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by up to 5.8 dB, reducing heart rate and breathing rate estimation errors by as much as 30 %, recovering subtle waveform dynamics, and generalizing from RGB to NIR videos without retraining.
Collaborative and Adversarial Learning of Focused and Dispersive Representations for Semi-Supervised Polyp Segmentation
Authors: Huisi Wu, Guilian Chen, Zhenkun Wen, Jing Qin
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Automatic polyp segmentation from colonoscopy images is an essential step in computer aided diagnosis for colorectal cancer. Most of polyp segmentation methods reported in recent years are based on fully supervised deep learning. However, annotation for polyp images by physicians during the diagnosis is time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we present a novel semi-supervised polyp segmentation via collaborative and adversarial learning of focused and dispersive representations learning model, where focused and dispersive extraction module are used to deal with the diversity of location and shape of polyps. In addition, confidence maps produced by a discriminator in an adversarial training framework shows the effectiveness of leveraging unlabeled data and improving the performance of segmentation network. Consistent regularization is further employed to optimize the segmentation networks to strengthen the representation of the outputs of focused and dispersive extraction module. We also propose an auxiliary adversarial learning method to better leverage unlabeled examples to further improve semantic segmentation accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on two famous polyp datasets: Kvasir-SEG and CVC-Clinic DB. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation models based on adversarial training and even some advanced fully supervised models. Codes will be released upon publication.
Active Domain Adaptation via Clustering Uncertainty-Weighted Embeddings
Authors: Viraj Prabhu, Arjun Chandrasekaran, Kate Saenko, Judy Hoffman
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains is critical to their real-world utility. In practice, it may be feasible to get some target data labeled, but to be cost-effective it is desirable to select a maximally-informative subset via active learning (AL). We study the problem of AL under a domain shift, called Active Domain Adaptation (Active DA). We demonstrate how existing AL approaches based solely on model uncertainty or diversity sampling are less effective for Active DA. We propose Clustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings (CLUE), a novel label acquisition strategy for Active DA that performs uncertainty-weighted clustering to identify target instances for labeling that are both uncertain under the model and diverse in feature space. CLUE consistently outperforms competing label acquisition strategies for Active DA and AL across learning settings on 6 diverse domain shifts for image classification.
Detail Me More: Improving GAN's Photo-Realism of Complex Scenes
Authors: Raghudeep Gadde, Qianli Feng, Aleix M. Martinez
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative models can synthesize photo-realistic images of a single object. For example, for human faces, algorithms learn to model the local shape and shading of the face components, i.e., changes in the brows, eyes, nose, mouth, jaw line, etc. This is possible because all faces have two brows, two eyes, a nose and a mouth, approximately in the same location. The modeling of complex scenes is however much more challenging because the scene components and their location vary from image to image. For example, living rooms contain a varying number of products belonging to many possible categories and locations, e.g., a lamp may or may not be present in an endless number of possible locations. In the present work, we propose to add a "broker" module in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to solve this problem. The broker is tasked to mediate the use of multiple discriminators in the appropriate image locales. For example, if a lamp is detected or wanted in a specific area of the scene, the broker assigns a fine-grained lamp discriminator to that image patch. This allows the generator to learn the shape and shading models of the lamp. The resulting multi-fine-grained optimization problem is able to synthesize complex scenes with almost the same level of photo-realism as single object images. We demonstrate the generability of the proposed approach on several GAN algorithms (BigGAN, ProGAN, StyleGAN, StyleGAN2), image resolutions (256x256 to 1024x1024), and datasets. Our approach yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art GAN algorithms.
Rethinking Self-Supervised Correspondence Learning: A Video Frame-Level Similarity Perspective
Authors: Jiarui Xu, Xiaolong Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning a good representation for space-time correspondence is the key for various computer vision tasks, including tracking object bounding boxes and performing video object pixel segmentation. To learn generalizable representation for correspondence in large-scale, a variety of self-supervised pretext tasks are proposed to explicitly perform object-level or patch-level similarity learning. Instead of following the previous literature, we propose to learn correspondence using Video Frame-level Similarity (VFS) learning, i.e, simply learning from comparing video frames. Our work is inspired by the recent success in image-level contrastive learning and similarity learning for visual recognition. Our hypothesis is that if the representation is good for recognition, it requires the convolutional features to find correspondence between similar objects or parts. Our experiments show surprising results that VFS surpasses state-of-the-art self-supervised approaches for both OTB visual object tracking and DAVIS video object segmentation. We perform detailed analysis on what matters in VFS and reveals new properties on image and frame level similarity learning.
Event Stream Super-Resolution via Spatiotemporal Constraint Learning
Authors: Siqi Li, Yutong Feng, Yipeng Li, Yu Jiang, Changqing Zou, Yue Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that respond to brightness changes asynchronously and output in the form of event streams instead of frame-based images. They own outstanding advantages compared with traditional cameras: higher temporal resolution, higher dynamic range, and lower power consumption. However, the spatial resolution of existing event cameras is insufficient and challenging to be enhanced at the hardware level while maintaining the asynchronous philosophy of circuit design. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the algorithm of event stream super-resolution, which is a non-trivial task due to the sparsity and strong spatio-temporal correlation of the events from an event camera. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework based on spiking neural network for event stream super-resolution, which can generate high-resolution (HR) event stream from the input low-resolution (LR) event stream. A spatiotemporal constraint learning mechanism is proposed to learn the spatial and temporal distributions of the event stream simultaneously. We validate our method on four large-scale datasets and the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The satisfying results on two downstream applications, i.e. object classification and image reconstruction, further demonstrate the usability of our method. To prove the application potential of our method, we deploy it on a mobile platform. The high-quality HR event stream generated by our real-time system demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.
PrimitiveNet: Primitive Instance Segmentation With Local Primitive Embedding Under Adversarial Metric
Authors: Jingwei Huang, Yanfeng Zhang, Mingwei Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present PrimitiveNet, a novel approach for high-resolution primitive instance segmentation from point clouds on a large scale. Our key idea is to transform the global segmentation problem into easier local tasks. We train a high-resolution primitive embedding network to predict explicit geometry features and implicit latent features for each point. The embedding is jointly trained with an adversarial network as a primitive discriminator to decide whether points are from the same primitive instance in local neighborhoods. Such local supervision encourages the learned embedding and discriminator to describe local surface properties and robustly distinguish different instances. At inference time, network predictions are followed by a region growing method to finalize the segmentation. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-arts based on mean average precision by a significant margin (46.3%) on ABC dataset [??]. We can process extremely large real scenes covering more than 0.1km^2. Ablation studies highlight the contribution of our core designs. Finally, our method can improve geometry processing algorithms to abstract scans as lightweight models.
FuseFormer: Fusing Fine-Grained Information in Transformers for Video Inpainting
Authors: Rui Liu, Hanming Deng, Yangyi Huang, Xiaoyu Shi, Lewei Lu, Wenxiu Sun, Xiaogang Wang, Jifeng Dai, Hongsheng Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transformer, as a strong and flexible architecture for modelling long-range relations, has been widely explored in vision tasks. However, when used in video inpainting that requires fine-grained representation, existed method still suffers from yielding blurry edges in detail due to the hard patch splitting. Here we aim to tackle this problem by proposing FuseFormer, a Transformer model designed for video inpainting via fine-grained feature fusion based on novel Soft Split and Soft Composition operations. The soft split divides feature map into many patches with given overlapping interval. On the contrary, the soft composition operates by stitching different patches into a whole feature map where pixels in overlapping regions are summed up. These two modules are first used in tokenization before Transformer layers and de-tokenization after Transformer layers, for effective mapping between tokens and features. Therefore, sub-patch level information interaction is enabled for more effective feature propagation between neighboring patches, resulting in synthesizing vivid content for hole regions in videos. Moreover, in FuseFormer, we elaborately insert the soft composition and soft split into the feed-forward network, enabling the 1D linear layers to have the capability of modelling 2D structure. And, the sub-patch level feature fusion ability is further enhanced. In both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our proposed FuseFormer surpasses state-of-the-art methods. We also conduct detailed analysis to examine its superiority.
FASA: Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation
Authors: Yuhang Zang, Chen Huang, Chen Change Loy
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent methods for long-tailed instance segmentation still struggle on rare object classes with few training data. We propose a simple yet effective method, Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation (FASA), that addresses the data scarcity issue by augmenting the feature space especially for rare classes. Both the Feature Augmentation (FA) and feature sampling components are adaptive to the actual training status -- FA is informed by the feature mean and variance of observed real samples from past iterations, and we sample the generated virtual features in a loss-adapted manner to avoid over-fitting. FASA does not require any elaborate loss design, and removes the need for inter-class transfer learning that often involves large cost and manually-defined head/tail class groups. We show FASA is a fast, generic method that can be easily plugged into standard or long-tailed segmentation frameworks, with consistent performance gains and little added cost. FASA is also applicable to other tasks like long-tailed classification with state-of-the-art performance.
Online-Trained Upsampler for Deep Low Complexity Video Compression
Authors: Jan P. Klopp, Keng-Chi Liu, Shao-Yi Chien, Liang-Gee Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep learning for image and video compression has demonstrated promising results both as a standalone technology and a hybrid combination with existing codecs. However, these systems still come with high computational costs. Deep learning models are typically applied directly in pixel space, making them expensive when resolutions become large. In this work, we propose an online-trained upsampler to augment an existing codec. The upsampler is a small neural network trained on an isolated group of frames. Its parameters are signalled to the decoder. This hybrid solution has a small scope of only 10s or 100s of frames and allows for a low complexity both on the encoding and the decoding side. Our algorithm works in offline and in zero-latency settings. Our evaluation employs the popular x265 codec on several high-resolution datasets ranging from Full HD to 8K. We demonstrate rate savings between 8.6% and 27.5% and provide ablation studies to show the impact of our design decisions. In comparison to similar works, our approach performs favourably.
DTMNet: A Discrete Tchebichef Moments-Based Deep Neural Network for Multi-Focus Image Fusion
Authors: Bin Xiao, Haifeng Wu, Xiuli Bi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Compared with traditional methods, the deep learning-based multi-focus image fusion methods can effectively improve the performance of image fusion tasks. However, the existing deep learning-based methods encounter a common issue of a large number of parameters, which leads to the deep learning models with high time complexity and low fusion efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel discrete Tchebichef moment-based Deep neural network, termed as DTMNet, for multi-focus image fusion. The proposed DTMNet is an end-to-end deep neural network with only one convolutional layer and three fully connected layers. The convolutional layer is fixed with DTM coefficients (DTMConv) to extract high/low-frequency information without learning parameters effectively. The three fully connected layers have learnable parameters for feature classification. Therefore, the proposed DTMNet for multi-focus image fusion has a small number of parameters (0.01M paras vs. 4.93M paras of regular CNN) and high computational efficiency (0.32s vs. 79.09s by regular CNN to fuse an image). In addition, a large-scale multi-focus image dataset is synthesized for training and verifying the deep learning model. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive with or even outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-focus image fusion methods in terms of subjective visual perception and objective evaluation metrics.
Interactive Prototype Learning for Egocentric Action Recognition
Authors: Xiaohan Wang, Linchao Zhu, Heng Wang, Yi Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Egocentric video recognition is a challenging task that requires to identify both the actor's motion and the active object that the actor interacts with. Recognizing the active object is particularly hard due to the cluttered background with distracting objects, the frequent field of view changes, severe occlusion, etc. To improve the active object classification, most existing methods use object detectors or human gaze information, which are computationally expensive or require labor-intensive annotations. To avoid these additional costs, we propose an end-to-end Interactive Prototype Learning (IPL) framework to learn better active object representations by leveraging the motion cues from the actor. First, we introduce a set of verb prototypes to disentangle active object features from distracting object features. Each prototype corresponds to a primary motion pattern of an egocentric action, offering a distinctive supervision signal for active object feature learning. Second, we design two interactive operations to enable the extraction of active object features, i.e., noun-to-verb assignment and verb-to-noun selection. These operations are parameter-efficient and can learn judicious location-aware features on top of 3D CNN backbones. We demonstrate that the IPL framework can generalize to different backbones and outperform the state-of-the-art on three large-scale egocentric video datasets, i.e., EPIC-KITCHENS-55, EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA.
MBA-VO: Motion Blur Aware Visual Odometry
Authors: Peidong Liu, Xingxing Zuo, Viktor Larsson, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Motion blur is one of the major challenges remaining for visual odometry methods. In low-light conditions where longer exposure times are necessary, motion blur can appear even for relatively slow camera motions. In this paper we present a novel hybrid visual odometry pipeline with direct approach that explicitly models and estimates the camera's local trajectory within exposure time. This allows us to actively compensate for any motion blur that occurs due to the camera motion. In addition, we also contribute a novel benchmarking dataset for motion blur aware visual odometry. In experiments we show that by directly modeling the image formation process we are able to improve robustness of the visual odometry, while keeping comparable accuracy as that for images without motion blur.