mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Ye Yuan, Kris Kitani
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep generative models are often used for human motion prediction as they are able to model multi-modal data distributions and characterize diverse human behavior. While much care has been taken into designing and learning deep generative models, how to efficiently produce diverse samples from a deep generative model after it has been trained is still an under-explored problem. To obtain samples from a pretrained generative model, most existing generative human motion prediction methods draw a set of independent Gaussian latent codes and convert them to motion samples. Clearly, this random sampling strategy is not guaranteed to produce diverse samples for two reasons: (1) The independent sampling cannot force the samples to be diverse; (2) The sampling is based solely on likelihood which may only produce samples that correspond to the major modes of the data distribution. To address these problems, we propose a novel sampling method, Diversifying Latent Flows (DLow), to produce a diverse set of samples from a pretrained deep generative model. Unlike random (independent) sampling, the proposed DLow sampling method samples a single random variable and then maps it with a set of learnable mapping functions to a set of correlated latent codes. The correlated latent codes are then decoded into a set of correlated samples. During training, DLow uses a diversity-promoting prior over samples as an objective to optimize the latent mappings to improve sample diversity. The design of the prior is highly flexible and can be customized to generate diverse motions with common features (e.g., similar leg motion but diverse upper-body motion). Our experiments demonstrate that DLow outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of sample diversity and accuracy."
GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Haozhe Xie, Hongxun Yao, Shangchen Zhou, Jiageng Mao, Shengping Zhang, Wenxiu Sun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Estimating the complete 3D point cloud from an incomplete one is a key problem in many vision and robotics applications. Mainstream methods (e.g., PCN and TopNet) use Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) to directly process point clouds, which may cause the loss of details because the structural and context of point clouds are not fully considered. To solve this problem, we introduce 3D grids as intermediate representations to regularize unordered point clouds. We therefore propose a novel Gridding Residual Network (GRNet) for point cloud completion. In particular, we devise two novel differentiable layers, named Gridding and Gridding Reverse, to convert between point clouds and 3D grids without losing structural information. We also present the differentiable Cubic Feature Sampling layer to extract features of neighboring points, which preserves context information. In addition, we design a new loss function, namely Gridding Loss, to calculate the L1 distance between the 3D grids of the predicted and ground truth point clouds, which is helpful to recover details. Experimental results indicate that the proposed GRNet performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on the ShapeNet, Completion3D, and KITTI benchmarks."
Gait Lateral Network: Learning Discriminative and Compact Representations for Gait Recognition
Authors: Saihui Hou, Chunshui Cao, Xu Liu, Yongzhen Huang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Gait recognition aims at identifying different people by the walking patterns, which can be conducted at a long distance without the cooperation of subjects. A key challenge for gait recognition is to learn representations from the silhouettes that are invariant to the factors such as clothing, carrying conditions and camera viewpoints. Besides being discriminative for identification, the gait representations should also be compact for storage to keep millions of subjects registered in the gallery. In this work, we propose a novel network named Gait Lateral Network (GLN) which can learn both discriminative and compact representations from the silhouettes for gait recognition. Specifically, GLN leverages the inherent feature pyramid in deep convolutional neural networks to enhance the gait representations. The silhouette-level and set-level features extracted by different stages are merged with the lateral connections in a top-down manner. Besides, GLN is equipped with a Compact Block which can significantly reduce the dimension of the gait representations without hindering the accuracy. Extensive experiments on CASIA-B and OUMVLP show that GLN can achieve state-of-the-art performance using the $256$-dimensional representations. Under the most challenging condition of walking in different clothes on CASIA-B, our method improves the rank-1 accuracy by $6.45\%$."
Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries
Authors: Xiaoming Li, Chaofeng Chen, Shangchen Zhou, Xianhui Lin, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent reference-based face restoration methods have received considerable attention due to their great capability in recovering high-frequency details on real low-quality images. However, most of these methods require a high-quality reference image of the same identity, making them only applicable in limited scenes. To address this issue, this paper suggests a deep face dictionary network (termed as DFDNet) to guide the restoration process of degraded observations. To begin with, we use K-means to generate deep dictionaries for perceptually significant face components (i.e., left/right eyes, nose and mouth) from high-quality images. Next, with the degraded input, we match and select the most similar component features from their corresponding dictionaries and transfer the high-quality details to the input via the proposed dictionary feature transfer (DFT) block. In particular, component AdaIN is leveraged to eliminate the style diversity between the input and dictionary features (e.g., illumination), and a confidence score is proposed to adaptively fuse the dictionary feature to the input. Finally, multi-scale dictionaries are adopted in a progressive manner to enable the coarse-to-fine restoration. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve plausible performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and more importantly, can generate realistic and promising results on real degraded images without requiring an identity-belonging reference. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/DFDNet."
Robust Neural Networks inspired by Strong Stability Preserving Runge-Kutta methods
Authors: Byungjoo Kim, Bryce Chudomelka, Jinyoung Park, Jaewoo Kang, Youngjoon Hong, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of fields. Recent works observe that a class of widely used neural networks can be viewed as the Euler method of numerical discretization. From the numerical discretization perspective, Strong Stability Preserving (SSP) methods are more advanced techniques than the explicit Euler method that produce both accurate and stable solutions. Motivated by the SSP property and a generalized Runge-Kutta method, we proposed Strong Stability Preserving networks (SSP networks) which improve robustness against adversarial attacks. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed networks improve the robustness against adversarial examples without any defensive methods. Further, the SSP networks are complementary with a state-of-the-art adversarial training scheme. Lastly, our experiments show that SSP networks suppress the blow-up of adversarial perturbations. Our results open up a way to study robust architectures of neural networks leveraging rich knowledge from numerical discretization literature."
Inequality-Constrained and Robust 3D Face Model Fitting
Authors: Evangelos Sariyanidi, Casey J. Zampella, Robert T. Schultz, Birkan Tunc
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Fitting 3D morphable models (3DMMs) on faces is a well-studied problem, motivated by various industrial and research applications. 3DMMs express a 3D facial shape as a linear sum of basis functions. The resulting shape, however, is a plausible face only when the basis coefficients take values within limited intervals. Methods based on unconstrained optimization address this issue with a weighted $ll_2$ penalty on coefficients; however, determining the weight of this penalty is difficult, and the existence of a unique weight that works universally is questionable. We propose a new formulation that does not require the tuning of any weight parameter. Specifically, we formulate 3DMM fitting as an inequality-constrained optimization problem, where the primary constraint is that basis coefficients should not exceed the interval that is learned when the 3DMM is constructed. We employ additional constraints to exploit sparse landmark detectors by enforcing the facial shape to be within the error bounds of a reliable detector. To enable operation ``in-the-wild'', we use a robust objective function, namely gradient correlation. Our approach performs comparably with deep learning (DL) methods on ``in-the-wild'' data, which have inexact ground truth, and better than DL methods on more controlled data with exact ground truth. Since our formulation does not require any learning, it enjoys a versatility that allows it to operate with multiple frames of arbitrary sizes. This study's results encourage further research on 3DMM fitting with inequality-constrained optimization methods, which remained unexplored compared to unconstrained methods."
Gabor Layers Enhance Network Robustness
Authors: Juan C. Pérez, Motasem Alfarra, Guillaume Jeanneret, Adel Bibi, Ali Thabet, Bernard Ghanem, Pablo Arbeláez
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We revisit the benefits of merging classical vision concepts with deep learning models. In particular, we explore the effect of replacing the first layers of various deep architectures with Gabor layers (i.e. convolutional layers with filters that are based on learnable Gabor parameters) on robustness against adversarial attacks. We observe that architectures with Gabor layers gain a consistent boost in robustness over regular models and maintain high generalizing test performance. We then exploit the analytical expression of Gabor filters to derive a compact expression for a Lipschitz constant of such filters, and harness this theoretical result to develop a regularizer we use during training to further enhance network robustness. We conduct extensive experiments with various architectures (LeNet, AlexNet, VGG16, and WideResNet) on several datasets (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100) and demonstrate large empirical robustness gains. Furthermore, we experimentally show how our regularizer provides consistent robustness improvements."
Conditional Image Repainting via Semantic Bridge and Piecewise Value Function
Authors: Shuchen Weng, Wenbo Li, Dawei Li, Hongxia Jin, Boxin Shi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study conditional image repainting where a model is trained to generate visual content conditioned on user inputs, and composite the generated content seamlessly onto a user provided image while preserving the semantics of users' inputs. The content generation community have been pursuing to lower the skill barriers. The usage of human language is the rose among horns for this purpose, because the language is friendly to users but poses great difficulties for the model in associating relevant words with the semantically ambiguous regions. To resolve this issue, we propose a delicate mechanism which bridges the semantic chasm between the language input and the generated visual content. The state-of-the-art image compositing techniques pose a latent ceiling of fidelity for the composited content during the adversarial training process. In this work, we improve the compositing by breaking through the latent ceiling using a novel piecewise value function. We demonstrate on two datasets that the proposed techniques can better assist tackling conditional image repainting compared to the existing ones."
Learnable Cost Volume Using the Cayley Representation
Authors: Taihong Xiao, Jinwei Yuan, Deqing Sun, Qifei Wang Xin-Yu Zhang, Kehan Xu, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Cost volume is an essential component of recent deep models for optical flow estimation and is usually constructed by calculating the inner product between two feature vectors. However, the standard inner product in the commonly-used cost volume may limit the representation capacity of flow models because it neglects the correlation among different channel dimensions and weighs each dimension equally. To address this issue, we propose a learnable cost volume (LCV) using an elliptical inner product, which generalizes the standard inner product by a positive definite kernel matrix. To guarantee its positive definiteness, we perform spectral decomposition on the kernel matrix and re-parameterize it via the Cayley representation. The proposed LCV is a lightweight module and can be easily plugged into existing models to replace the vanilla cost volume. Experimental results show that the LCV module not only improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art models on standard benchmarks, but also promotes their robustness against illumination change, noises, and adversarial perturbations of the input signals."
HALO: Hardware-Aware Learning to Optimize
Authors: Chaojian Li, Tianlong Chen, Haoran You, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: There has been an explosive demand for bringing machine learning (ML) powered intelligence into numerous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the effectiveness of such intelligent functionality requires in-situ continuous model adaptation for adapting to new data and environments, while the on-device computing and energy resources are usually extremely constrained. Neither traditional hand-crafted (e.g., SGD, Adagrad, and Adam) nor existing meta optimizers are specifically designed to meet those challenges, as the former requires tedious hyper-parameter tuning while the latter are often costly due to the meta algorithms’ own overhead. To this end, we propose hardware-aware learning to optimize (HALO), a practical meta optimizer dedicated to resource-efficient on-device adaptation. Our HALO optimizer features the following highlights: (1) faster adaptation speed (i.e., taking fewer data or iterations to reach a specified accuracy) by introducing a new regularizer to promote empirical generalization; and (2) lower per-iteration complexity, thanks to a stochastic structural sparsity regularizer being enforced. Furthermore, the optimizer itself is designed as a very light-weight RNN and thus incurs negligible overhead. Ablation studies and experiments on five datasets, six optimizees, and two state-of-the-art (SOTA) edge AI devices validate that, while always achieving a better accuracy (↑0.46% - ↑20.28%), HALO can greatly trim down the energy cost (up to ↓60%) in adaptation, quantified using an IoT device or SOTA simulator. Codes and pre-trained models are at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/HALO ."
Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling
Authors: Jia Zheng, Junfei Zhang, Jing Li, Rui Tang, Shenghua Gao, Zihan Zhou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in developing learning-based methods to detect and utilize salient semi-global or global structures, such as junctions, lines, planes, cuboids, smooth surfaces, and all types of symmetries, for 3D scene modeling and understanding. However, the ground truth annotations are often obtained via human labor, which is particularly challenging and inefficient for such tasks due to the large number of 3D structure instances (e.g., line segments) and other factors such as viewpoints and occlusions. In this paper, we present a new synthetic dataset, Structured3D, with the aim of providing large-scale photo-realistic images with rich 3D structure annotations for a wide spectrum of structured 3D modeling tasks. We take advantage of the availability of professional interior designs and automatically extract 3D structures from them. We generate high-quality images with an industry-leading rendering engine. We use our synthetic dataset in combination with real images to train deep networks for room layout estimation and demonstrate improved performance on benchmark datasets."
BroadFace: Looking at Tens of Thousands of People at Once for Face Recognition
Authors: Yonghyun Kim, Wonpyo Park, Jongju Shin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The datasets of face recognition contain an enormous number of identities and instances. However, conventional methods have difficulty in reflecting the entire distribution of the datasets because a mini-batch of small size contains only a small portion of all identities. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a novel method called BroadFace, which is a learning process to consider a massive set of identities, comprehensively. In BroadFace, a linear classifier learns optimal decision boundaries among identities from a large number of embedding vectors accumulated over past iterations. By referring more instances at once, the optimality of the classifier is naturally increased on the entire datasets. Thus, the encoder is also globally optimized by referring the weight matrix of the classifier. Moreover, we propose a novel compensation method to increase the number of referenced instances in the training stage. BroadFace can be easily applied on many existing methods to accelerate a learning process and obtain a significant improvement in accuracy without extra computational burden at inference stage. We perform extensive ablation studies and experiments on various datasets to show the effectiveness of BroadFace, and also empirically prove the validity of our compensation method. BroadFace achieves the state-of-the-art results with significant improvements on nine datasets in 1:1 face verification and 1:N face identification tasks, and is also effective in image retrieval."
Interpretable Visual Reasoning via Probabilistic Formulation under Natural Supervision
Authors: Xinzhe Han, Shuhui Wang, Chi Su, Weigang Zhang, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Visual reasoning is crucial for visual question answering (VQA). However, without labelled programs, implicit reasoning under natural supervision is still quite challenging and previous models are hard to interpret. In this paper, we rethink implicit reasoning process in VQA, and propose a new formulation which maximizes the log-likelihood of joint distribution for the observed question and predicted answer. Accordingly, we derive a Temporal Reasoning Network (TRN) framework which models the implicit reasoning process as sequential planning in latent space. Our model is interpretable on both model design in probabilist and reasoning process via visualization. We experimentally demonstrate that TRN can support implicit reasoning across various datasets. The experiment results of our model are competitive to existing implicit reasoning models and surpass baseline by large margin on complicated reasoning tasks without extra computation cost in forward stage."
Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Using Weak Labels
Authors: Sujoy Paul, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Samuel Schulter, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Manmohan Chandraker
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for domain adaptation in semantic segmentation with image-level weak labels in the target domain. The weak labels may be obtained based on a model prediction for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), or from a human oracle in a new weakly-supervised domain adaptation (WDA) paradigm for semantic segmentation. Using weak labels is both practical and useful, since (i) collecting image-level target annotations is comparably cheap in WDA and incurs no cost in UDA, and (ii) it opens the opportunity for category-wise domain alignment. Our framework uses weak labels to enable the interplay between feature alignment and pseudo-labeling, improving both in the process of domain adaptation. Specifically, we develop a weak-label classification module to enforce the network to attend to certain categories, and then use such training signals to guide the proposed category-wise alignment method. In experiments, we show considerable improvements with respect to the existing state-of-the-arts in UDA and present a new benchmark in the WDA setting."
Knowledge Distillation Meets Self-Supervision
Authors: Guodong Xu, Ziwei Liu, Xiaoxiao Li, Chen Change Loy
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Knowledge distillation, which involves extracting the ""dark knowledge"" from a teacher network to guide the learning of a student network, has emerged as an important technique for model compression and transfer learning. Unlike previous works that exploit architecture-specific cues such as activation and attention for distillation, here we wish to explore a more general and model-agnostic approach for extracting ""richer dark knowledge"" from the pre-trained teacher model. We show that the seemingly different self-supervision task can serve as a simple yet powerful solution. For example, when performing contrastive learning between transformed entities, the noisy predictions of the teacher network reflect its intrinsic composition of semantic and pose information. By exploiting the similarity between those self-supervision signals as an auxiliary task, one can effectively transfer the hidden information from the teacher to the student. In this paper, we discuss practical ways to exploit those noisy self-supervision signals with selective transfer for distillation. We further show that self-supervision signals improve conventional distillation with substantial gains under few-shot and noisy-label scenarios. Given the richer knowledge mined from self-supervision, our knowledge distillation approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, i.e., CIFAR100 and ImageNet, under both similar-architecture and cross-architecture settings. The advantage is even more pronounced under the cross-architecture setting, where our method outperforms the state of the art CRD by an average of 2.3% in accuracy rate on CIFAR100 across six different teacher-student pairs."
Efficient Neighbourhood Consensus Networks via Submanifold Sparse Convolutions
Authors: Ignacio Rocco, Relja Arandjelović, Josef Sivic
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this work we target the problem of estimating accurately localised correspondences between a pair of images. We adopt the recent Neighbourhood Consensus Networks that have demonstrated promising performance for difficult correspondence problems and propose modifications to overcome their main limitations: large memory consumption, large inference time and poorly localised correspondences. Our proposed modifications can reduce the memory footprint and execution time more than $10 imes$, with equivalent results. This is achieved by sparsifying the correlation tensor containing tentative matches, and its subsequent processing with a 4D CNN using submanifold sparse convolutions. Localisation accuracy is significantly improved by processing the input images in higher resolution, which is possible due to the reduced memory footprint, and by a novel two-stage correspondence relocalisation module. The proposed Sparse-NCNet method obtains state-of-the art results on the HPatches Sequences and InLoc visual localisation benchmarks, and competitive results on the Aachen Day-Night benchmark."
Reconstructing the Noise Variance Manifold for Image Denoising
Authors: Ioannis Marras, Grigorios G. Chrysos, Ioannis Alexiou, Gregory Slabaugh, Stefanos Zafeiriou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in many low-level vision problems like image denoising. Although the conditional image generation techniques have led to large improvements in this task, there has been little effort in providing conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) with an explicit way of understanding the image noise for object-independent denoising reliable for real-world applications. The task of leveraging structures in the target space is unstable due to the complexity of patterns in natural scenes, so the presence of unnatural artifacts or over-smoothed image areas cannot be avoided. To fill the gap, in this work we introduce the idea of a cGAN which explicitly leverages structure in the image noise variance space. By learning directly a low dimensional manifold of the image noise variance, the generator promotes the removal from the noisy image only that information which spans this manifold. This idea brings many advantages while it can be appended at the end of any denoiser to significantly improve its performance. Based on our experiments, our model substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art architectures, resulting in denoised images with less oversmoothing and better detail."
Occlusion-Aware Depth Estimation with Adaptive Normal Constraints
Authors: Xiaoxiao Long, Lingjie Liu, Christian Theobalt, Wenping Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a new learning-based method for multi-frame depth estimation from a color video, which is a fundamental problem in scene understanding, robot navigation or handheld 3D reconstruction. While recent learning-based methods estimate depth at high accuracy, 3D point clouds exported from their depth maps often fail to preserve important geometric feature (e.g., corners, edges, planes) of man-made scenes. Widely-used pixel-wise depth errors do not specifically penalize inconsistency on these features. These inaccuracies are particularly severe when subsequent depth reconstructions are accumulated in an attempt to scan a full environment with man-made objects with this kind of features. Our depth estimation algorithm therefore introduces a Combined Normal Map (CNM) constraint, which is designed to better preserve high-curvature features and global planar regions. In order to further improve the depth estimation accuracy, we introduce a new occlusion-aware strategy that aggregates initial depth predictions from multiple adjacent views into one final depth map and occlusion probability map for the current reference view. With the CNM constraint and the occlusion-aware loss, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of depth estimation accuracy, and preserves essential geometric features of man-made indoor scenes much better than other algorithms."
VisualEchoes: Spatial Image Representation Learning through Echolocation
Authors: Ruohan Gao, Changan Chen, Ziad Al-Halah, Carl Schissler, Kristen Grauman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Several animal species (e.g., bats, dolphins, and whales) and even visually impaired humans have the remarkable ability to perform echolocation: a biological sonar used to perceive spatial layout and locate objects in the world. We explore the spatial cues contained in echoes and how they can benefit vision tasks that require spatial reasoning. First we capture echo responses in photo-realistic 3D indoor scene environments. Then we propose a novel interaction-based representation learning framework that learns useful visual features via echolocation. We show that the learned image features are useful for multiple downstream vision tasks requiring spatial reasoning---monocular depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and visual navigation---with results comparable or even better than heavily supervised pre-training. Our work opens a new path for representation learning for embodied agents, where supervision comes from interacting with the physical world."
Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval
Authors: Andrew Brown, Weidi Xie, Vicky Kalogeiton, Andrew Zisserman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end, we introduce an objective that optimises instead a smoothed approximation of AP, coined Smooth-AP. Smooth-AP is a plug-and-play objective function that allows for end-to-end training of deep networks with a simple and elegant implementation. We also present an analysis for why directly optimising the ranking based metric of AP offers benefits over other deep metric learning losses. We apply Smooth-AP to standard retrieval benchmarks: Stanford Online products and VehicleID, and also evaluate on larger-scale datasets: INaturalist for fine-grained category retrieval, and VGGFace2 and IJB-C for face retrieval. In all cases, we improve the performance over the state-of-the-art, especially for larger-scale datasets, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of Smooth-AP to real-world scenarios. "
Naive-Student: Leveraging Semi-Supervised Learning in Video Sequences for Urban Scene Segmentation
Authors: Liang-Chieh Chen, Raphael Gontijo Lopes, Bowen Cheng, Maxwell D. Collins, Ekin D. Cubuk, Barret Zoph, Hartwig Adam, Jonathon Shlens
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Supervised learning in large discriminative models is a mainstay for modern computer vision. Such an approach necessitates investing in large-scale human-annotated datasets for achieving state-of-the-art results. In turn, the efficacy of supervised learning may be limited by the size of the human annotated dataset. This limitation is particularly notable for image segmentation tasks, where the expense of human annotation is especially large, yet large amounts of unlabeled data may exist. In this work, we ask if we may leverage semi-supervised learning in unlabeled video sequences and extra images to improve the performance on urban scene segmentation, simultaneously tackling semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation. The goal of this work is to avoid the construction of sophisticated, learned architectures specific to label propagation (e.g., patch matching and optical flow). Instead, we simply predict pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data and train subsequent models with both human-annotated and pseudo-labeled data. The procedure is iterated for several times. As a result, our Naive-Student model, trained with such simple yet effective iterative semi-supervised learning, attains state-of-the-art results at all three Cityscapes benchmarks, reaching the performance of 67.8% PQ, 42.6% AP, and 85.2% mIOU on the test set. We view this work as a notable step towards building a simple procedure to harness unlabeled video sequences and extra images to surpass state-of-the-art performance on core computer vision tasks."
Spatially Aware Multimodal Transformers for TextVQA
Authors: Yash Kant, Dhruv Batra, Peter Anderson, Alexander Schwing, Devi Parikh, Jiasen Lu, Harsh Agrawal
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Textual cues are essential for everyday tasks like buying groceries and using public transport. To develop this assistive technology, we study the TextVQA task, i.e., reasoning about text in images to answer a question. Existing approaches are limited in their use of spatial relations and rely on fully-connected transformer-like architectures to implicitly learn the spatial structure of a scene. In contrast, we propose a novel spatially aware self-attention layer such that each visual entity only looks at neighboring entities defined by a spatial graph. Further, each head in our multi-head self-attention layer focuses on a different subset of relations. Our approach has two advantages: (1) each head considers local context instead of dispersing the attention amongst all visual entities; (2) we avoid learning redundant features. We show that our model improves the absolute accuracy of current state-of-the-art methods on TextVQA by 2.2% overall over an improved baseline, and 4.62% on questions that involve spatial reasoning and can be answered correctly using OCR tokens. Similarly on ST-VQA, we improve the absolute accuracy by 4.2%. We further show that spatially aware self-attention improves visual grounding."
Every Pixel Matters: Center-aware Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detector
Authors: Cheng-Chun Hsu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Yen-Yu Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A domain adaptive object detector aims to adapt itself to unseen domains that may contain variations of object appearance, viewpoints or backgrounds. Most existing solutions adopt feature alignment either on the image level or instance level. However, image-level alignment on global features may tangle foreground/background pixels at the same time, while instance-level alignment using proposals may suffer from the background noise. Different from existing solutions, we propose a domain adaptation framework that accounts for each pixel, especially via predicting pixel-wise objectness and centerness. Specifically, the proposed method carries out center-aware alignment by paying more attention to foreground pixels, hence achieving better adaptation across domains. We demonstrate our method on numerous adaptation settings with extensive experimental results and show favorable performance against existing state-of-the-art algorithms."
Pyramid Multi-view Stereo Net with Self-adaptive View Aggregation
Authors: Hongwei Yi, Zizhuang Wei, Mingyu Ding, Runze Zhang, Yisong Chen, Guoping Wang, Yu-Wing Tai
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient pyramid multi-view stereo (MVS) net with self-adaptive view aggregation for accurate and complete dense point cloud reconstruction. Different from using mean square variance to generate cost volume in previous deep-learning based MVS methods, our VA-MVSNet incorporates the cost variances in different views with small extra memory consumption by introducing two novel self-adaptive view aggregation: pixel-wise view aggregation and voxel-wise view aggregation. To further boost the robustness and completeness of 3D point cloud reconstruction, we extend VA-MVSNet with pyramid multi-scale images input as PVA-MVSNet, where multi-metric constraints are leveraged to aggregate the reliable depth estimation at the coarser scale to fill in the mismatched regions at the finer scale. Experimental results show that our approach establishes a new state-of-the-art on the DTU dataset with significant improvements in the completeness and overall quality, and has strong generalization by achieving a comparable performance as the state-of-the-art methods on the Tanks and Temples benchmark. The codebase is available at \hyperlink{https://github.com/yhw-yhw/D2HC-RMVSNet}{https://github.com/yhw-yhw/D2HC-RMVSNet}."
SPL-MLL: Selecting Predictable Landmarks for Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Junbing Li, Changqing Zhang, Pengfei Zhu, Baoyuan Wu, Lei Chen, Qinghua Hu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Although significant progress achieved, multi-label classification is still challenging due to the complexity of correlations among different labels. Furthermore, modeling the relationships between input and some (dull) classes further increases the difficulty of accurately predicting all possible labels. In this work, we propose to select a small subset of labels as landmarks which are easy to predict according to input (predictable) and can well recover the other possible labels (representative). Different from existing methods which separate the landmark selection and landmark prediction in the 2-step manner, the proposed algorithm, termed Selecting Predictable Landmarks for MultiLabel Learning (SPL-MLL), jointly conducts landmark selection, landmark prediction, and label recovery in a unified framework, to ensure both the representativeness and predictableness for selected landmarks. We employ the Alternating Direction Method (ADM) to solve our problem. Empirical studies on real-world datasets show that our method achieves superior classification performance over other state-of-the-art methods."
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Adversarial Consistency Loss
Authors: Yihao Zhao, Ruihai Wu, Hao Dong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Unpaired image-to-image translation is a class of vision problems whose goal is to find the mapping between different image domains using unpaired training data. Cycle-consistency loss is a widely used constraint for such problems. However, due to the strict pixel-level constraint, it cannot perform geometric changes, remove large objects, or ignore irrelevant texture. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial-consistency loss for image-to-image translation. This loss does not require the translated image to be translated back to be a specific source image but can encourage the translated images to retain important features of the source images and overcome the drawbacks of cycle-consistency loss noted above. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging tasks: glasses removal, male-to-female translation, and selfie-to-anime translation."
Discriminability Distillation in Group Representation Learning
Authors: Manyuan Zhang, Guanglu Song, Hang Zhou, Yu Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Learning group representation is a commonly concerned issue in tasks where the basic unit is a group, set, or sequence. Previously, the research community tries to tackle it by aggregating the elements in a group based on an extit{indicator} either defined by humans such as the extit{quality} and extit{saliency}, or generated by a black box such as the attention score. This article provides a more essential and explicable view. We claim the most significant indicator to show whether the group representation can be benefited from one of its element is not the quality or an inexplicable score, but the extit{discriminability w.r.t.} the model. We explicitly design the extit{discrimiability} using embedded class centroids on a proxy set. We show the discrimiability knowledge has good properties that can be distilled by a light-weight distillation network and can be generalized on the unseen target set. The whole procedure is denoted as extit{discriminability distillation learning} (DDL). The proposed DDL can be flexibly plugged into many group-based recognition tasks without influencing the original training procedures. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks have proven the effectiveness of DDL for both accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, it pushes forward the state-of-the-art results on these tasks by an impressive margin."
Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention
Authors: Vasileios Choutas, Georgios Pavlakos, Timo Bolkart, Dimitrios Tzionas, Michael J. Black
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: To understand how people look, interact, or perform tasks, we need to quickly and accurately capture their 3D body, face, and hands together from an RGB image. Most existing methods focus only on parts of the body. A few recent approaches reconstruct full expressive 3D humans from images using 3D body models that include the face and hands. These methods are optimization-based and thus slow, prone to local optima, and require 2D keypoints as input. We address these limitations by introducing ExPose (EXpressive POse and Shape rEgression), which directly regresses the body, face, and hands, in SMPL-X format, from an RGB image. This is a hard problem due to the high dimensionality of the body and the lack of expressive training data. Additionally, hands and faces are much smaller than the body, occupying very few image pixels. This makes hand and face estimation hard when body images are downscaled for neural networks. We make three main contributions. First, we account for the lack of training data by curating a dataset of SMPL-X fits on in-the-wild images. Second, we observe that body estimation localizes the face and hands reasonably well. We introduce body-driven attention for face and hand regions in the original image to extract higher-resolution crops that are fed to dedicated refinement modules. Third, these modules exploit part-specific knowledge from existing face and hand-only datasets. ExPose estimates expressive 3D humans more accurately than existing optimization methods at a small fraction of the computational cost. Our data, model and code are available for research at https://expose.is.tue.mpg.de."
Dual Adversarial Network: Toward Real-world Noise Removal and Noise Generation
Authors: Zongsheng Yue, Qian Zhao, Lei Zhang, Deyu Meng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Real-world image noise removal is a long-standing yet very challenging task in computer vision. The success of deep neural network in denoising stimulates the research of noise generation, aiming at synthesizing more pairs of clean-noisy images to facilitate the training of deep. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework to simultaneously deal with the noise removal and noise generation tasks. Instead of only inferring the posterior distribution of the latent clean image conditioned on the observed noisy image in traditional MAP framework, it learns the joint distribution of the clean-noisy image pairs. Specifically, we approximate the joint distribution with two different factorized forms, which can be formulated as a denoiser mapping the noisy image to the clean one and a generator mapping the clean to the noisy one. The learned joint distribution implicitly contains all the information between the noisy and clean images, avoiding the necessity of manually designing the image priors and noise assumptions as traditional. Besides, the performance of our denoiser can be further improved by augmenting the original training dataset with the learned generator. Moreover, we propose two metrics to assess the quality of the generated noisy image, for which, to the best of our knowledge, such metrics are first proposed along this research line. Extensive experiments have conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-arts in terms of both the real noise removal and noise generation tasks."
Linguistic Structure Guided Context Modeling for Referring Image Segmentation
Authors: Tianrui Hui, Si Liu, Shaofei Huang, Guanbin Li, Sansi Yu, Faxi Zhang, Jizhong Han
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Referring image segmentation aims to predict the foreground mask of the object referred by a natural language sentence. Multimodal context of the sentence is crucial to distinguish the referent from the background. Existing methods either insuﬃciently or redundantly model the multimodal context. To tackle this problem, we propose a “gather-propagate-distribute” scheme to model multimodal context by crossmodal interaction and implement this scheme as a novel Linguistic Structure guided Context Modeling (LSCM) module. Our LSCM module builds a Dependency Parsing Tree suppressed Word Graph (DPT-WG) which guides all the words to include valid multimodal context of the sentence while excluding disturbing ones through three steps over the multimodal feature, i.e., gathering, constrained propagation and distributing. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms all the previous state-of-the-arts."
Federated Visual Classification with Real-World Data Distribution
Authors: Tzu-Ming Harry Hsu, Hang Qi, Matthew Brown
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Federated Learning enables visual models to be trained on-device, bringing advantages for user privacy (data need never leave the device), but challenges in terms of data diversity and quality. Whilst typical models in the datacenter are trained using data that are independent and identically distributed (IID), data at source are typically far from IID. Furthermore, differing quantities of data are typically available at each device (imbalance). In this work, we characterize the effect these real-world data distributions have on distributed learning, using as a benchmark the standard Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm. To do so, we introduce two new large-scale datasets for species and landmark classification, with realistic per-user data splits that simulate real-world edge learning scenarios. We also develop two new algorithms (FedVC, FedIR) that intelligently resample and reweight over the client pool, bringing large improvements in accuracy and stability in training. The datasets are made available online."
Robust Re-Identification by Multiple Views Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Angelo Porrello, Luca Bergamini, Simone Calderara
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: To achieve robustness in Re-Identification, standard methods leverage tracking information in a Video-To-Video fashion. However, these solutions face a large drop in performance for single image queries (e.g., Image-To-Video setting). Recent works address this severe degradation by transferring temporal information from a Video-based network to an Image-based one. In this work, we devise a training strategy that allows the transfer of a superior knowledge, arising from a set of views depicting the target object. Our proposal - Views Knowledge Distillation (VKD) - pins this visual variety as a supervision signal within a teacher-student framework, where the teacher educates a student who observes fewer views. As a result, the student outperforms not only its teacher but also the current state-of-the-art in Image-To-Video by a wide margin (6.3% mAP on MARS, 8.6% on Duke-Video-ReId and 5% on VeRi-776). A thorough analysis - on Person, Vehicle and Animal Re-ID - investigates the properties of VKD from a qualitatively and quantitatively perspective. Code is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/VKD."