mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis
Authors: Ajay Jain, Matthew Tancik, Pieter Abbeel
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present DietNeRF, a 3D neural scene representation estimated from a few images. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) learn a continuous volumetric representation of a scene through multi-view consistency, and can be rendered from novel viewpoints by ray casting. While NeRF has an impressive ability to reconstruct geometry and fine details given many images, up to 100 for challenging 360 degree scenes, it often finds a degenerate solution to its image reconstruction objective when only a few input views are available. To improve few-shot quality, we propose DietNeRF. We introduce an auxiliary semantic consistency loss that encourages realistic renderings at novel poses. DietNeRF is trained on individual scenes to (1) correctly render given input views from the same pose, and (2) match high-level semantic attributes across different, random poses. Our semantic loss allows us to supervise DietNeRF from arbitrary poses. We extract these semantics using a pre-trained visual encoder such as CLIP, a Vision Transformer trained on hundreds of millions of diverse single-view, 2D photographs mined from the web with natural language supervision. In experiments, DietNeRF improves the perceptual quality of few-shot view synthesis when learned from scratch, can render novel views with as few as one observed image when pre-trained on a multi-view dataset, and produces plausible completions of completely unobserved regions. Our project website is available at https://www.ajayj.com/dietnerf.
CrossDet: Crossline Representation for Object Detection
Authors: Heqian Qiu, Hongliang Li, Qingbo Wu, Jianhua Cui, Zichen Song, Lanxiao Wang, Minjian Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Object detection aims to accurately locate and classify objects in an image, which requires precise object representations. Existing methods usually use rectangular anchor boxes or a set of points to represent objects. However, these methods either introduce background noise or miss the continuous appearance information inside the object, and thus cause incorrect detection results. In this paper, we propose a novel anchor-free object detection network, called CrossDet, which uses a set of growing cross lines along horizontal and vertical axes as object representations. An object can be flexibly represented as cross lines in different combinations. It not only can effectively reduce the interference of noise, but also takes into account the continuous object information, which is useful to enhance the discriminability of object features and find the object boundaries. Based on the learned cross lines, we propose a crossline extraction module to adaptively capture features of cross lines. Furthermore, we design a decoupled regression mechanism to regress the localization along the horizontal and vertical directions respectively, which helps to decrease the optimization difficulty because the optimization space is limited to a specific direction. Our method achieves consistently improvement on the PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO datasets. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Graph-to-3D: End-to-End Generation and Manipulation of 3D Scenes Using Scene Graphs
Authors: Helisa Dhamo, Fabian Manhardt, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Controllable scene synthesis consists of generating 3D information that satisfy underlying specifications. Thereby, these specifications should be abstract, i.e. allowing easy user interaction, whilst providing enough interface for detailed control. Scene graphs are representations of a scene, composed of objects (nodes) and inter-object relationships (edges), proven to be particularly suited for this task, as they allow for semantic control on the generated content. Previous works tackling this task often rely on synthetic data, and retrieve object meshes, which naturally limits the generation capabilities. To circumvent this issue, we instead propose the first work that directly generates shapes from a scene graph in an end-to-end manner. In addition, we show that the same model supports scene modification, using the respective scene graph as interface. Leveraging Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) we train a variational Auto-Encoder on top of the object and edge categories, as well as 3D shapes and scene layouts, allowing latter sampling of new scenes and shapes.
Universal and Flexible Optical Aberration Correction Using Deep-Prior Based Deconvolution
Authors: Xiu Li, Jinli Suo, Weihang Zhang, Xin Yuan, Qionghai Dai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: High quality imaging usually requires bulky and expensive lenses to compensate geometric and chromatic aberrations. This poses high constraints on the optical hash or low cost applications. Although one can utilize algorithmic reconstruction to remove the artifacts of low-end lenses, the degeneration from optical aberrations is spatially varying and the computation has to trade off efficiency for performance. For example, we need to conduct patch-wise optimization or train a large set of local deep neural networks to achieve high reconstruction performance across the whole image. In this paper, we propose a PSF aware plug-and-play deep network, which takes the aberrant image and PSF map as input and produces the latent high quality version via incorporating lens-specific deep priors, thus leading to a universal and flexible optical aberration correction method. Specifically, we pre-train a base model from a set of diverse lenses and then adapt it to a given lens by quickly refining the parameters, which largely alleviates the time and memory consumption of model learning. The approach is of high efficiency in both training and testing stages. Extensive results verify the promising applications of our proposed approach for compact low-end cameras.
E-ViL: A Dataset and Benchmark for Natural Language Explanations in Vision-Language Tasks
Authors: Maxime Kayser, Oana-Maria Camburu, Leonard Salewski, Cornelius Emde, Virginie Do, Zeynep Akata, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, there has been an increasing number of efforts to introduce models capable of generating natural language explanations (NLEs) for their predictions on vision-language (VL) tasks. Such models are appealing, because they can provide human-friendly and comprehensive explanations. However, there is a lack of comparison between existing methods, which is due to a lack of re-usable evaluation frameworks and a scarcity of datasets. In this work, we introduce e-ViL and e-SNLI-VE. e-ViL is a benchmark for explainable vision-language tasks that establishes a unified evaluation framework and provides the first comprehensive comparison of existing approaches that generate NLEs for VL tasks. It spans four models and three datasets and both automatic metrics and human evaluation are used to assess model-generated explanations. e-SNLI-VE is currently the largest existing VL dataset with NLEs (over 430k instances). We also propose a new model that combines UNITER, which learns joint embeddings of images and text, and GPT-2, a pre-trained language model that is well-suited for text generation. It surpasses the previous state of the art by a large margin across all datasets. Code and data are available here: https://github.com/maximek3/e-ViL.
Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval: Generalizing Across Classes and Domains
Authors: Soumava Paul, Titir Dutta, Soma Biswas
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, for the first time, we address the problem of universal cross-domain retrieval, where the test data can belong to classes or domains which are unseen during training. Due to dynamically increasing number of categories and practical constraint of training on every possible domain, which requires large amounts of data, generalizing to both unseen classes and domains is important. Towards that goal, we propose SnMpNet (Semantic Neighbourhood and Mixture Prediction Network), which incorporates two novel losses to account for the unseen classes and domains encountered during testing. Specifically, we introduce a novel Semantic Neighborhood loss to bridge the knowledge gap between seen and unseen classes and ensure that the latent space embedding of the unseen classes is semantically meaningful with respect to its neighboring classes. We also introduce a mix-up based supervision at image-level as well as semantic-level of the data for training with the Mixture Prediction loss, which helps in efficient retrieval when the query belongs to an unseen domain. These losses are incorporated on the SE-ResNet50 backbone to obtain SnMpNet. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, Sketchy Extended and DomainNet, and thorough comparisons with state-of-the-art justify the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Learning Unsupervised Metaformer for Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jhih-Ciang Wu, Ding-Jie Chen, Chiou-Shann Fuh, Tyng-Luh Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Anomaly detection (AD) aims to address the task of classification or localization of image anomalies. This paper addresses two pivotal issues of reconstruction-based approaches to AD in images, namely, model adaptation and reconstruction gap. The former generalizes an AD model to tackling a broad range of object categories, while the latter provides useful clues for localizing abnormal regions. At the core of our method is an unsupervised universal model, termed as Metaformer, which leverages both meta-learned model parameters to achieve high model adaptation capability and instance-aware attention to emphasize the focal regions for localizing abnormal regions, i.e., to explore the reconstruction gap at those regions of interest. We justify the effectiveness of our method with SOTA results on the MVTec AD dataset of industrial images and highlight the adaptation flexibility of the universal Metaformer with multi-class and few-shot scenarios.
Robust Object Detection via Instance-Level Temporal Cycle Confusion
Authors: Xin Wang, Thomas E. Huang, Benlin Liu, Fisher Yu, Xiaolong Wang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Trevor Darrell
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Building reliable object detectors that are robust to domain shifts, such as various changes in context, viewpoint, and object appearances, is critical for real-world applications. In this work, we study the effectiveness of auxiliary self-supervised tasks to improve the out-of-distribution generalization of object detectors. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy, we introduce a novel self-supervised task, instance-level temporal cycle confusion (CycConf), which operates on the region features of the object detectors. For each object, the task is to find the most different object proposals in the adjacent frame in a video and then cycle back to itself for self-supervision. CycConf encourages the object detector to explore invariant structures across instances under various motions, which leads to improved model robustness in unseen domains at test time. We observe consistent out-of-domain performance improvements when training object detectors in tandem with self-supervised tasks on various domain adaptation benchmarks with static images (Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, Sim10K) and large-scale video datasets (BDD100K and Waymo open data). The code and models are released at https://xinw.ai/cyc-conf.
HighlightMe: Detecting Highlights From Human-Centric Videos
Authors: Uttaran Bhattacharya, Gang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Viswanathan Swaminathan, Dinesh Manocha
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a domain- and user-preference-agnostic approach to detect highlightable excerpts from human-centric videos. Our method works on the graph-based representation of multiple observable human-centric modalities in the videos, such as poses and faces. We use an autoencoder network equipped with spatial-temporal graph convolutions to detect human activities and interactions based on these modalities. We train our network to map the activity- and interaction-based latent structural representations of the different modalities to per-frame highlight scores based on the representativeness of the frames. We use these scores to compute which frames to highlight and stitch contiguous frames to produce the excerpts. We train our network on the large-scale AVA-Kinetics action dataset and evaluate it on four benchmark video highlight datasets: DSH, TVSum, PHD^2, and SumMe. We observe a 4-12% improvement in the mean average precision of matching the human-annotated highlights over state-of-the-art methods in these datasets, without requiring any user-provided preferences or dataset-specific fine-tuning.
Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos via Contextual Modeling and Model-Based Policy Learning
Authors: Jing Bi, Jiebo Luo, Chenliang Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning new skills by observing humans' behaviors is an essential capability of AI. In this work, we leverage instructional videos to study humans' decision-making processes, focusing on learning a model to plan goal-directed actions in real-life videos. In contrast to conventional action recognition, goal-directed actions are based on expectations of their outcomes requiring causal knowledge of potential consequences of actions. Thus, integrating the environment structure with goals is critical for solving this task. Previous works learn a single world model will fail to distinguish various tasks, resulting in an ambiguous latent space; planning through it will gradually neglect the desired outcomes since the global information of the future goal degrades quickly as the procedure evolves. We address these limitations with a new formulation of procedure planning and propose novel algorithms to model human behaviors through Bayesian Inference and model-based Imitation Learning. Experiments conducted on real-world instructional videos show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in reaching the indicated goals. Furthermore, the learned contextual information presents interesting features for planning in a latent space.
Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression Through Spatially-Adaptive Feature Transform
Authors: Myungseo Song, Jinyoung Choi, Bohyung Han
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a versatile deep image compression network based on Spatial Feature Transform (SFT), which takes a source image and a corresponding quality map as inputs and produce a compressed image with variable rates. Our model covers a wide range of compression rates using a single model, which is controlled by arbitrary pixel-wise quality maps. In addition, the proposed framework allows us to perform task-aware image compressions for various tasks, e.g., classification, by efficiently estimating optimized quality maps specific to target tasks for our encoding network. This is even possible with a pretrained network without learning separate models for individual tasks. Our algorithm achieves outstanding rate-distortion trade-off compared to the approaches based on multiple models that are optimized separately for several different target rates. At the same level of compression, the proposed approach successfully improves performance on image classification and text region quality preservation via task-aware quality map estimation without additional model training. The code is available at the project website https://github.com/micmic123/QmapCompression.
DeePSD: Automatic Deep Skinning and Pose Space Deformation for 3D Garment Animation
Authors: Hugo Bertiche, Meysam Madadi, Emilio Tylson, Sergio Escalera
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel solution to the garment animation problem through deep learning. Our contribution allows animating any template outfit with arbitrary topology and geometric complexity. Recent works develop models for garment edition, resizing and animation at the same time by leveraging the support body model (encoding garments as body homotopies). This leads to complex engineering solutions that suffer from scalability, applicability and compatibility. By limiting our scope to garment animation only, we are able to propose a simple model that can animate any outfit, independently of its topology, vertex order or connectivity. Our proposed architecture maps outfits to animated 3D models into the standard format for 3D animation (blend weights and blend shapes matrices), automatically providing of compatibility with any graphics engine. We also propose a methodology to complement supervised learning with an unsupervised physically based learning that implicitly solves collisions and enhances cloth quality.
Structured Outdoor Architecture Reconstruction by Exploration and Classification
Authors: Fuyang Zhang, Xiang Xu, Nelson Nauata, Yasutaka Furukawa
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper presents an explore-and-classify framework for structured architectural reconstruction from aerial image. Starting from a potentially imperfect building reconstruction by an existing algorithm, our approach 1) explores the space of building models by modifying the reconstruction via heuristic actions; 2) learns to classify the correctness of building models while generating classification labels based on the ground-truth; and 3) repeat. At test time, we iterate exploration and classification, seeking for a result with the best classification score. We evaluate the approach using initial reconstructions by two baselines and two state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the reconstruction quality from every initial reconstruction.
MG-GAN: A Multi-Generator Model Preventing Out-of-Distribution Samples in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Patrick Dendorfer, Sven Elflein, Laura Leal-Taixé
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Pedestrian trajectory prediction is challenging due to its uncertain and multimodal nature. While generative adversarial networks can learn a distribution over future trajectories, they tend to predict out-of-distribution samples when the distribution of future trajectories is a mixture of multiple, possibly disconnected modes. To address this issue, we propose a multi-generator model for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Each generator specializes in learning a distribution over trajectories routing towards one of the primary modes in the scene, while a second network learns a categorical distribution over these generators, conditioned on the dynamics and scene input. This architecture allows us to effectively sample from specialized generators and to significantly reduce the out-of-distribution samples compared to single generator methods.
Rethinking Coarse-To-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring
Authors: Sung-Jin Cho, Seo-Won Ji, Jun-Pyo Hong, Seung-Won Jung, Sung-Jea Ko
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Coarse-to-fine strategies have been extensively used for the architecture design of single image deblurring networks. Conventional methods typically stack sub-networks with multi-scale input images and gradually improve sharpness of images from the bottom sub-network to the top sub-network, yielding inevitably high computational costs. Toward a fast and accurate deblurring network design, we revisit the coarse-to-fine strategy and present a multi-input multi-output U-net (MIMO-UNet). The MIMO-UNet has three distinct features. First, the single encoder of the MIMO-UNet takes multi-scale input images to ease the difficulty of training. Second, the single decoder of the MIMO-UNet outputs multiple deblurred images with different scales to mimic multi-cascaded U-nets using a single U-shaped network. Last, asymmetric feature fusion is introduced to merge multi-scale features in an efficient manner. Extensive experiments on the GoPro and RealBlur datasets demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computational complexity. Source code is available for research purposes at https://github.com/chosj95/MIMO-UNet.
Multi-Instance Pose Networks: Rethinking Top-Down Pose Estimation
Authors: Rawal Khirodkar, Visesh Chari, Amit Agrawal, Ambrish Tyagi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A key assumption of top-down human pose estimation approaches is their expectation of having a single person/instance present in the input bounding box. This often leads to failures in crowded scenes with occlusions. We propose a novel solution to overcome the limitations of this fundamental assumption. Our Multi-Instance Pose Network (MIPNet) allows for predicting multiple 2D pose instances within a given bounding box. We introduce a Multi-Instance Modulation Block (MIMB) that can adaptively modulate channel-wise feature responses for each instance and is parameter efficient. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by evaluating on COCO, CrowdPose, and OCHuman datasets. Specifically, we achieve 70.0 AP on CrowdPose and 42.5 AP on OCHuman test sets, a significant improvement of 2.4 AP and 6.5 AP over the prior art, respectively. When using ground truth bounding boxes for inference, MIPNet achieves an improvement of 0.7 AP on COCO, 0.9 AP on CrowdPose, and 9.1 AP on OCHuman validation sets compared to HRNet. Interestingly, when fewer, high confidence bounding boxes are used, HRNet's performance degrades (by 5 AP) on OCHuman, whereas MIPNet maintains a relatively stable performance (drop of 1 AP) for the same inputs.
Rational Polynomial Camera Model Warping for Deep Learning Based Satellite Multi-View Stereo Matching
Authors: Jian Gao, Jin Liu, Shunping Ji
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Satellite multi-view stereo (MVS) imagery is particularly suited for large-scale Earth surface reconstruction. Differing from the perspective camera model (pin-hole model) that is commonly used for close-range and aerial cameras, the cubic rational polynomial camera (RPC) model is the mainstream model for push-broom linear-array satellite cameras. However, the homography warping used in the prevailing learning based MVS methods is only applicable to pin-hole cameras. In order to apply the SOTA learning based MVS technology to the satellite MVS taskfor large-scale Earth surface reconstruction, RPC warping should be considered. In this work, we propose, for the first time, a rigorous RPC warping module. The rational polynomial coefficients are recorded as a tensor, and the RPC warping is formulated as a series of tensor transformations. Based on the RPC warping, we propose the deep learning based satellite MVS (SatMVS) framework for large-scale and wide depth range Earth surface reconstruction. We also introduce a large-scale satellite image dataset consisting of 519 5120x5120 images, which we call the TLC SatMVS dataset. The satellite images were acquired from a three-line camera (TLC) that catches triple-view images simultaneously, forming a valuable supplement to the existing open-source WorldView-3 datasets with single-scanline images. Experiments show that the proposed RPC warping module and the SatMVS framework can achieve a superior reconstruction accuracy compared to the pin-hole fitting method and conventional MVS methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WHU-GPCV/SatMVS.
A New Journey From SDRTV to HDRTV
Authors: Xiangyu Chen, Zhengwen Zhang, Jimmy S. Ren, Lynhoo Tian, Yu Qiao, Chao Dong
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Nowadays modern displays are capable to render video content with high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG). However, most available resources are still in standard dynamic range (SDR). Therefore, there is an urgent demand to transform existing SDR-TV contents into their HDR-TV versions. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of SDRTV-to-HDRTV task by modeling the formation of SDRTV/HDRTV content. Base on the analysis, we propose a three-step solution pipeline including adaptive global color mapping, local enhancement and highlight generation. Moreover, the above analysis inspires us to present a lightweight network that utilizes global statistics as guidance to conduct image-adaptive color mapping. In addition, we construct a dataset using HDR videos in HDR10 standard, named HDRTV1K, and select five metrics to evaluate the results of SDRTV-to-HDRTV algorithms. Furthermore, our final results achieve state-of-the-art performance in quantitative comparisons and visual quality. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/chxy95/HDRTVNet.
Point-Set Distances for Learning Representations of 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Trung Nguyen, Quang-Hieu Pham, Tam Le, Tung Pham, Nhat Ho, Binh-Son Hua
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning an effective representation of 3D point clouds requires a good metric to measure the discrepancy between two 3D point sets, which is non-trivial due to their irregularity. Most of the previous works resort to using the Chamfer discrepancy or Earth Mover's distance, but those metrics are either ineffective in measuring the differences between point clouds or computationally expensive. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study with extensive experiments on distance metrics for 3D point clouds. From this study, we propose to use sliced Wasserstein distance and its variants for learning representations of 3D point clouds. In addition, we introduce a new algorithm to estimate sliced Wasserstein distance that guarantees that the estimated value is close enough to the true one. Experiments show that the sliced Wasserstein distance and its variants allow the neural network to learn a more efficient representation compared to the Chamfer discrepancy. We demonstrate the efficiency of the sliced Wasserstein metric and its variants on several tasks in 3D computer vision including training a point cloud autoencoder, generative modeling, transfer learning, and point cloud registration.
ELLIPSDF: Joint Object Pose and Shape Optimization With a Bi-Level Ellipsoid and Signed Distance Function Description
Authors: Mo Shan, Qiaojun Feng, You-Yi Jau, Nikolay Atanasov
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Autonomous systems need to understand the semantics and geometry of their surroundings in order to comprehend and safely execute object-level task specifications. This paper proposes an expressive yet compact model for joint object pose and shape optimization, and an associated optimization algorithm to infer an object-level map from multi-view RGB-D camera observations. The model is expressive because it captures the identities, positions, orientations, and shapes of objects in the environment. It is compact because it relies on a low-dimensional latent representation of implicit object shape, allowing onboard storage of large multi-category object maps. Different from other works that rely on a single object representation format, our approach has a bi-level object model that captures both the coarse level scale as well as the fine level shape details. Our approach is evaluated on the large-scale real-world ScanNet dataset and compared against state-of-the-art methods.
ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisited
Authors: Tong He, Yuanlu Xu, Shunsuke Saito, Stefano Soatto, Tony Tung
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present ARCH++, an image-based method to reconstruct 3D avatars with arbitrary clothing styles. Our reconstructed avatars are animation-ready and highly realistic, in both the visible regions from input views and the unseen regions. While prior work shows great promise of reconstructing animatable clothed humans with various topologies, we observe that there exist fundamental limitations resulting in sub-optimal reconstruction quality. In this paper, we revisit the major steps of image-based avatar reconstruction and address the limitations with ARCH++. First, we introduce an end-to-end point based geometry encoder to better describe the semantics of the underlying 3D human body, in replacement of previous hand-crafted features. Second, in order to address the occupancy ambiguity caused by topological changes of clothed humans in the canonical pose, we propose a co-supervising framework with cross-space consistency to jointly estimate the occupancy in both the posed and canonical spaces. Last, we use image-to-image translation networks to further refine detailed geometry and texture on the reconstructed surface, which improves the fidelity and consistency across arbitrary viewpoints. In the experiments, we demonstrate improvements over the state of the art on both public benchmarks and user studies in reconstruction quality and realism.
Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation
Authors: Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Suchen Wang, Xudong Jiang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we address the challenging task of referring segmentation. The query expression in referring segmentation typically indicates the target object by describing its relationship with others. Therefore, to find the target one among all instances in the image, the model must have a holistic understanding of the whole image. To achieve this, we reformulate referring segmentation as a direct attention problem: finding the region in the image where the query language expression is most attended to. We introduce transformer and multi-head attention to build a network with an encoder-decoder attention mechanism architecture that "queries" the given image with the language expression. Furthermore, we propose a Query Generation Module, which produces multiple sets of queries with different attention weights that represent the diversified comprehensions of the language expression from different aspects. At the same time, to find the best way from these diversified comprehensions based on visual clues, we further propose a Query Balance Module to adaptively select the output features of these queries for a better mask generation. Without bells and whistles, our approach is light-weight and achieves new state-of-the-art performance consistently on three referring segmentation datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref. Our code is available at https://github.com/henghuiding/Vision-Language-Transformer.
Semantically Coherent Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Jingkang Yang, Haoqi Wang, Litong Feng, Xiaopeng Yan, Huabin Zheng, Wayne Zhang, Ziwei Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current out-of-distribution (OOD) detection benchmarks are commonly built by defining one dataset as in-distribution (ID) and all others as OOD. However, these benchmarks unfortunately introduce some unwanted and impractical goals, e.g., to perfectly distinguish CIFAR dogs from ImageNet dogs, even though they have the same semantics and negligible covariate shifts. These unrealistic goals will result in an extremely narrow range of model capabilities, greatly limiting their use in real applications. To overcome these drawbacks, we re-design the benchmarks and propose the semantically coherent out-of-distribution detection (SC-OOD). On the SC-OOD benchmarks, existing methods suffer from large performance degradation, suggesting that they are extremely sensitive to low-level discrepancy between data sources while ignoring their inherent semantics. To develop an effective SC-OOD detection approach, we leverage an external un- labeled set and design a concise framework featured by unsupervised dual grouping (UDG) for the joint modeling of ID and OOD data. The proposed UDG can not only enrich the semantic knowledge of the model by exploiting unlabeled data in an unsupervised manner but also distinguish ID/OOD samples to enhance ID classification and OOD detection tasks simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on SC-OOD benchmarks. Code and benchmarks are provided on our project page: https://jingkang50.github.io/projects/scood.
SCOUTER: Slot Attention-Based Classifier for Explainable Image Recognition
Authors: Liangzhi Li, Bowen Wang, Manisha Verma, Yuta Nakashima, Ryo Kawasaki, Hajime Nagahara
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence has been gaining attention in the past few years. However, most existing methods are based on gradients or intermediate features, which are not directly involved in the decision-making process of the classifier. In this paper, we propose a slot attention-based classifier called SCOUTER for transparent yet accurate classification. Two major differences from other attention-based methods include: (a) SCOUTER's explanation is involved in the final confidence for each category, offering more intuitive interpretation, and (b) all the categories have their corresponding positive or negative explanation, which tells "why the image is of a certain category" or "why the image is not of a certain category." We design a new loss tailored for SCOUTER that controls the model's behavior to switch between positive and negative explanations, as well as the size of explanatory regions. Experimental results show that SCOUTER can give better visual explanations in terms of various metrics while keeping good accuracy on small and medium-sized datasets.
RetrievalFuse: Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction With a Database
Authors: Yawar Siddiqui, Justus Thies, Fangchang Ma, Qi Shan, Matthias Nießner, Angela Dai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: 3D reconstruction of large scenes is a challenging problem due to the high-complexity nature of the solution space, in particular for generative neural networks. In contrast to traditional generative learned models which encode the full generative process into a neural network and can struggle with maintaining local details at the scene level, we introduce a new method that directly leverages scene geometry from the training database. First, we learn to synthesize an initial estimate for a 3D scene, constructed by retrieving a top-k set of volumetric chunks from the scene database. These candidates are then refined to a final scene generation with an attention-based refinement that can effectively select the most consistent set of geometry from the candidates and combine them together to create an output scene, facilitating transfer of coherent structures and local detail from train scene geometry. We demonstrate our neural scene reconstruction with a database for the tasks of 3D super-resolution and surface reconstruction from sparse point clouds, showing that our approach enables generation of more coherent, accurate 3D scenes, improving on average by over 8% in IoU over state-of-the-art scene reconstruction.
Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Siyuan Huang, Yichen Xie, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: To date, various 3D scene understanding tasks still lack practical and generalizable pre-trained models, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D scene understanding tasks and their immerse variations due to camera views, lighting, occlusions, etc. In this paper, we tackle this immanent challenge by introducing a spatio-temporal representation learning (STRL) framework, capable of learning from unlabeled 3D point clouds in a self-supervised fashion. Inspired by how infants learn from visual data in-the-wild, we explore the rich spatio-temporal cues derived from the 3D data. Specifically, STRL takes two temporal-correlated frames from a 3D point cloud sequence as the input, transforms it with spatial data augmentation, and learns the invariant representation self-supervisedly. To corroborate the efficacy of STRL, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic, indoor, and outdoor datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with supervised learning methods, the learned self-supervised representation facilitates various models to attain comparable or even better performances while capable of generalizing pre-trained models to downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, 3D object detection, and 3D semantic segmentation. Moreover, spatio-temporal contextual cues embedded in 3D point clouds significantly improve the learned representations.
Learning To Know Where To See: A Visibility-Aware Approach for Occluded Person Re-Identification
Authors: Jinrui Yang, Jiawei Zhang, Fufu Yu, Xinyang Jiang, Mengdan Zhang, Xing Sun, Ying-Cong Chen, Wei-Shi Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) has gained an impressive progress in recent years. However, the occlusion is still a common and challenging problem for recent ReID methods. Several mainstream methods utilize extra cues (e.g., human pose information) to distinguish human parts from obstacles to alleviate the occlusion problem. Although achieving inspiring progress, these methods severely rely on the fine-grained extra cues, and are sensitive to the estimation error in the extra cues. In this paper, we show that existing methods may degrade if the extra information is sparse or noisy. Thus we propose a simple yet effective method that is robust to sparse and noisy pose information. This is achieved by discretizing pose information to the visibility label of body parts, so as to suppress the influence of occluded regions. We show in our experiments that leveraging pose information in this way is more effective and robust. Besides, our method can be embedded into most person ReID models easily. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model on common occluded person ReID datasets.
Focal Frequency Loss for Image Reconstruction and Synthesis
Authors: Liming Jiang, Bo Dai, Wayne Wu, Chen Change Loy
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image reconstruction and synthesis have witnessed remarkable progress thanks to the development of generative models. Nonetheless, gaps could still exist between the real and generated images, especially in the frequency domain. In this study, we show that narrowing gaps in the frequency domain can ameliorate image reconstruction and synthesis quality further. We propose a novel focal frequency loss, which allows a model to adaptively focus on frequency components that are hard to synthesize by down-weighting the easy ones. This objective function is complementary to existing spatial losses, offering great impedance against the loss of important frequency information due to the inherent bias of neural networks. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of focal frequency loss to improve popular models, such as VAE, pix2pix, and SPADE, in both perceptual quality and quantitative performance. We further show its potential on StyleGAN2.
Calibrating Concepts and Operations: Towards Symbolic Reasoning on Real Images
Authors: Zhuowan Li, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Yixiao Zhang, Cihang Xie, Quan Hung Tran, Benjamin Van Durme, Alan Yuille
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While neural symbolic methods demonstrate impressive performance in visual question answering on synthetic images, their performance suffers on real images. We identify that the long-tail distribution of visual concepts and unequal importance of reasoning steps in real data are the two key obstacles that limit the models' real-world potentials. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm, Calibrating Concepts and Operations (CCO), which enables neural symbolic models to capture underlying data characteristics and to reason with hierarchical importance. Specifically, we introduce an executor with learnable concept embedding magnitudes for handling distribution imbalance, and an operation calibrator for highlighting important operations and suppressing redundant ones. Our experiments show CCO substantially boosts the performance of neural symbolic methods on real images. By evaluating models on the real world dataset GQA, CCO helps the neural symbolic method NSCL outperforms its vanilla counterpart by 9.1% (from 47.0% to 56.1%); this result also largely reduces the performance gap between symbolic and non-symbolic methods. Additionally, we create a perturbed test set for better understanding and analyzing model performance on real images. Code is available at https://lizw14.github.io/project/ccosr.
Vision-Language Navigation With Random Environmental Mixup
Authors: Chong Liu, Fengda Zhu, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang, Zongyuan Ge, Yi-Dong Shen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Vision-language Navigation (VLN) task requires an agent to perceive both the visual scene and natural language and navigate step-by-step. Large data bias makes the VLN task challenging, which is caused by the disparity ratio between small data scale and large navigation space. Previous works have proposed many data augmentation methods to reduce data bias. However, these works do not explicitly reduce the data bias across different house scenes. Therefore, the agent would be overfitting to the seen scenes and perform navigation poorly in the unseen scenes. To tackle this problem, we propose the random environmental mixup (REM) method, which generates augmentation data in cross-connected house scenes. This method consists of three steps: 1) we select the key viewpoints according to the room connection graph for each scene in the training split; 2) we cross-connect the key views of different scenes to construct augmented scenes; 3) we generate augmentation data triplets (environment, path, instruction) in the cross-connected scenes. Our experiments prove that the augmentation data helps the agent reduce its performance gap between the seen and unseen environment and improve its performance, making our model be the best existing approach on the standard benchmark.
Object Tracking by Jointly Exploiting Frame and Event Domain
Authors: Jiqing Zhang, Xin Yang, Yingkai Fu, Xiaopeng Wei, Baocai Yin, Bo Dong
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Inspired by the complementarity between conventional frame-based and bio-inspired event-based cameras, we propose a multi-modal based approach to fuse visual cues from the frame- and event-domain to enhance the single object tracking performance, especially in degraded conditions (e.g., scenes with high dynamic range, low light, and fast-motion objects). The proposed approach can effectively and adaptively combine meaningful information from both domains. Our approach's effectiveness is enforced by a novel designed cross-domain attention schemes, which can effectively enhance features based on self- and cross-domain attention schemes; The adaptiveness is guarded by a specially designed weighting scheme, which can adaptively balance the contribution of the two domains. To exploit event-based visual cues in single-object tracking, we construct a large-scale frame-event-based dataset, which we subsequently employ to train a novel frame-event fusion based model. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art frame-based tracking methods by at least 10.4% and 11.9% in terms of representative success rate and precision rate, respectively. Besides, the effectiveness of each key component of our approach is evidenced by our thorough ablation study.
Learning To Generate Scene Graph From Natural Language Supervision
Authors: Yiwu Zhong, Jing Shi, Jianwei Yang, Chenliang Xu, Yin Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning from image-text data has demonstrated recent success for many recognition tasks, yet is currently limited to visual features or individual visual concepts such as objects. In this paper, we propose one of the first methods that learn from image-sentence pairs to extract a graphical representation of localized objects and their relationships within an image, known as scene graph. To bridge the gap between images and texts, we leverage an off-the-shelf object detector to identify and localize object instances, match labels of detected regions to concepts parsed from captions, and thus create "pseudo" labels for learning scene graph. Further, we design a Transformer-based model to predict these "pseudo" labels via a masked token prediction task. Learning from only image-sentence pairs, our model achieves 30% relative gain over a latest method trained with human-annotated unlocalized scene graphs. Our model also shows strong results for weakly and fully supervised scene graph generation. In addition, we explore an open-vocabulary setting for detecting scene graphs, and present the first result for open-set scene graph generation.