mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Locality Guidance for Improving Vision Transformers on Tiny Datasets
Authors: Kehan Li, Runyi Yu, Zhennan Wang, Li Yuan, Guoli Song, Jie Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "While the Vision Transformer (VT) architecture is becoming trendy in computer vision, pure VT models perform poorly on tiny datasets. To address this issue, this paper proposes the locality guidance for improving the performance of VTs on tiny datasets. We first analyze that the local information, which is of great importance for understanding images, is hard to be learned with limited data due to the high flexibility and intrinsic globality of the self-attention mechanism in VTs. To facilitate local information, we realize the locality guidance for VTs by imitating the features of an already trained convolutional neural network (CNN), inspired by the built-in local-to-global hierarchy of CNN. Under our dual-task learning paradigm, the locality guidance provided by a lightweight CNN trained on low-resolution images is adequate to accelerate the convergence and improve the performance of VTs to a large extent. Therefore, our locality guidance approach is very simple and efficient, and can serve as a basic performance enhancement method for VTs on tiny datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly improve VTs when training from scratch on tiny datasets and is compatible with different kinds of VTs and datasets. For example, our proposed method can boost the performance of various VTs on tiny datasets (e.g., 13.07% for DeiT, 8.98% for T2T and 7.85% for PVT), and enhance even stronger baseline PVTv2 by 1.86% to 79.30%, showing the potential of VTs on tiny datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/lkhl/tiny-transformers."
Neighborhood Collective Estimation for Noisy Label Identification and Correction
Authors: Jichang Li, Guanbin Li, Feng Liu, Yizhou Yu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Learning with noisy labels (LNL) aims at designing strategies to improve model performance and generalization by mitigating the effects of model overfitting to noisy labels. The key success of LNL lies in identifying as many clean samples as possible from massive noisy data, while rectifying the wrongly assigned noisy labels. Recent advances employ the predicted label distributions of individual samples to perform noise verification and noisy label correction, easily giving rise to confirmation bias. To mitigate this issue, we propose Neighborhood Collective Estimation, in which the predictive reliability of a candidate sample is re-estimated by contrasting it against its feature-space nearest neighbors. Specifically, our method is divided into two steps: 1) Neighborhood Collective Noise Verification to separate all training samples into a clean or noisy subset, 2) Neighborhood Collective Label Correction to relabel noisy samples, and then auxiliary techniques are used to assist further model optimization. Extensive experiments on four commonly used benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Clothing-1M and Webvision-1.0, demonstrate that our proposed method considerably outperforms state-of-the-art methods."
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning via Entropy-Regularized Data-Free Replay
Authors: Huan Liu, Li Gu, Zhixiang Chi, Yang Wang, Yuanhao Yu, Jun Chen, Jin Tang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) has been proposed aiming to enable a deep learning system to incrementally learn new classes with limited data. Recently, a pioneer claims that the commonly used replay-based method in class-incremental learning (CIL) is ineffective and thus not preferred for FSCIL. This has, if truth, a significant influence on the fields of FSCIL. In this paper, we show through empirical results that adopting the data replay is surprisingly favorable. However, storing and replaying old data can lead to a privacy concern. To address this issue, we alternatively propose using data-free replay that can synthesize data by a generator without accessing real data. In observing the the effectiveness of uncertain data for knowledge distillation, we impose entropy regularization in the generator training to encourage more uncertain examples. Moreover, we propose to relabel the generated data with one-hot-like labels. This modification allows the network to learn by solely minimizing the cross-entropy loss, which mitigates the problem of balancing different objectives in the conventional knowledge distillation approach. Finally, we show extensive experimental results and analysis on CIFAR-100, miniImageNet and CUB-200 to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed one."
Anti-Retroactive Interference for Lifelong Learning
Authors: Runqi Wang, Yuxiang Bao, Baochang Zhang, Jianzhuang Liu, Wentao Zhu, Guodong Guo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Humans can continuously learn new knowledge. However, machine learning models suffer from drastic dropping in performance on previous tasks after learning new tasks. Cognitive science points out that the competition of similar knowledge is an important cause of forgetting. In this paper, we design a paradigm for lifelong learning based on meta-learning and associative mechanism of the brain. It tackles the problem from two aspects: extracting knowledge and memorizing knowledge. First, we disrupt the sample’s background distribution through a background attack, which strengthens the model to extract the key features of each task. Second, according to the similarity between incremental knowledge and base knowledge, we design an adaptive fusion of incremental knowledge, which helps the model allocate capacity to the knowledge of different difficulties. It is theoretically analyzed that the proposed learning paradigm can make the models of different tasks converge to the same optimum. The proposed method is validated on the MNIST, CIFAR100, CUB200 and ImageNet100 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/bhrqw/ARI."
Towards Calibrated Hyper-Sphere Representation via Distribution Overlap Coefficient for Long-Tailed Learning
Authors: Hualiang Wang, Siming Fu, Xiaoxuan He, Hangxiang Fang, Zuozhu Liu, Haoji Hu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Long-tailed learning aims to tackle the crucial challenge that head classes dominate the training procedure under severe class imbalance in real-world scenarios. However, little attention has been given to how to quantify the dominance severity of head classes in the representation space. Motivated by this, we generalize the cosine-based classifiers to a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mixture model, denoted as vMF classifier, which enables to quantitatively measure representation quality upon the hyper-sphere space via calculating distribution overlap coefficient. To our knowledge, this is the first work to measure the representation quality of classifiers and features from the perspective of the distribution overlap coefficient. On top of it, we formulate the inter-class discrepancy and class feature consistency loss terms to alleviate the interference among the classifier weights and align features with classifier weights. Furthermore, a novel post-training calibration algorithm is devised to zero-costly boost the performance via inter-class overlap coefficients. Our models outperform previous work with a large margin and achieve state-of-the-art performance on long-tailed image classification, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks (e.g., we achieve 55.0% overall accuracy with ResNetXt-50 in ImageNet-LT). Our code is available at https://github.com/VipaiLab/vMF_OP."
Dynamic Metric Learning with Cross-Level Concept Distillation
Authors: Wenzhao Zheng, Yuanhui Huang, Borui Zhang, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "A good similarity metric should be consistent with the human perception of similarities: a sparrow is more similar to an owl if compared to a dog but is more similar to a dog if compared to a car. It depends on the semantic levels to determine if two images are from the same class. As most existing metric learning methods push away interclass samples and pull closer intraclass samples, it seems contradictory if the labels cross semantic levels. The core problem is that a negative pair on a finer semantic level can be a positive pair on a coarser semantic level, so pushing away this pair damages the class structure on the coarser semantic level. We identify the negative repulsion as the key obstacle in existing methods since a positive pair is always positive for coarser semantic levels but not for negative pairs. Our solution, cross-level concept distillation (CLCD), is simple in concept: we only pull closer positive pairs. To facilitate the cross-level semantic structure of the image representations, we propose a hierarchical concept refiner to construct multiple levels of concept embeddings of an image and then pull closer the distance of the corresponding concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CLCD method outperforms all other competing methods on the hierarchically labeled datasets."
MENet: A Memory-Based Network with Dual-Branch for Efficient Event Stream Processing
Authors: Linhui Sun, Yifan Zhang, Ke Cheng, Jian Cheng, Hanqing Lu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture per-pixel brightness change and trigger a stream of events instead of frame-based images. Each event stream is generally split into multiple sliding windows for subsequent processing. However, most existing event-based methods ignore the motion continuity between adjacent spatiotemporal windows, which will result in the loss of dynamic information and additional computational costs. To efficiently extract strong features for event streams containing dynamic information, this paper proposes a novel memory-based network with dual-branch, namely MENet. It contains a base branch with a full-sized event point-wise processing structure to extract the base features and an incremental branch equipped with a light-weighted network to capture the temporal dynamics between two adjacent spatiotemporal windows. For enhancing the features, especially in the incremental branch, a point-wise memory bank is designed, which sketches the representative information of event feature space. Compared with the base branch, the incremental branch reduces the computational complexity up to 5 times and improves the speed by 19 times. Experiments show that MENet significantly reduces the computational complexity compared with previous methods while achieving state-of-the-art performance on gesture recognition and object recognition."
Out-of-Distribution Detection with Boundary Aware Learning
Authors: Sen Pei, Xin Zhang, Bin Fan, Gaofeng Meng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "There is an increasing need to determine whether inputs are out-of-distribution (OOD) for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world scenario. Typical neural classifiers are based on the closed-world assumption, where the training data and the test data are drawn i.i.d. from the same distribution, and as a result, give over-confident predictions even faced with OOD inputs. For tackling this problem, previous studies either use real outliers for training or generate synthetic OOD data under strong assumptions, which are either costly or intractable to generalize. In this paper, we propose boundary aware learning (BAL), a novel framework that can learn the distribution of OOD features adaptively. The key idea of BAL is to generate OOD features from trivial to hard progressively with a generator, meanwhile, a discriminator is trained for distinguishing these synthetic OOD features and in-distribution (ID) features. Benefiting from the adversarial training scheme, the discriminator can well separate ID and OOD features, allowing more robust OOD detection. The proposed BAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification benchmarks, reducing up to 13.9% FPR95 compared with previous methods."
Learning Hierarchy Aware Features for Reducing Mistake Severity
Authors: Ashima Garg, Depanshu Sani, Saket Anand
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Label hierarchies are often available apriori as part of biological taxonomy or language datasets WordNet. Several works exploit these to learn hierarchy aware features in order to improve the classifier to make semantically meaningful mistakes while maintaining or reducing the overall error. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for learning Hierarchy Aware Features (HAF) that leverages classifiers at each level of the hierarchy that are constrained to generate predictions consistent with the label hierarchy. The classifiers are trained by minimizing a Jensen-Shannon Divergence with target soft labels obtained from the fine-grained classifiers. Additionally, we employ a simple geometric loss that constrains the feature space geometry to capture the semantic structure of the label space. HAF is a training time approach that improves the mistakes while maintaining top-1 error, thereby, addressing the problem of cross-entropy loss that treats all mistakes as equal. We evaluate HAF on three hierarchical datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results on the iNaturalist-19 and CIFAR-100 datasets."
Learning to Detect Every Thing in an Open World
Authors: Kuniaki Saito, Ping Hu, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Many open-world applications require the detection of novel objects, yet state-of-the-art object detection and instance segmentation networks do not excel at this task. The key issue lies in their assumption that regions without any annotations should be suppressed as negatives, which teaches the model to treat any unannotated (hidden) objects as background. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet surprisingly powerful data augmentation and training scheme we call Learning to Detect Every Thing (LDET). To avoid suppressing hidden objects, we develop a new data augmentation method, BackErase, which pastes annotated objects on a background image sampled from a small region of the original image. Since training solely on such synthetically-augmented images suffers from domain shift, we propose a multi-domain training strategy that allows the model to generalize to real images. LDET leads to significant improvements on many datasets in the open-world instance segmentation task, outperforming baselines on cross-category generalization on COCO, as well as cross-dataset evaluation on UVO, Objects365, and Cityscapes."
KVT: k-NN Attention for Boosting Vision Transformers
Authors: Pichao Wang, Xue Wang, Fan Wang, Ming Lin, Shuning Chang, Hao Li, Rong Jin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have dominated computer vision for years, due to its ability in capturing locality and translation invariance. Recently, many vision transformer architectures have been proposed and they show promising performance. A key component in vision transformers is the fully-connected self-attention which is more powerful than CNNs in modelling long range dependencies. However, since the current dense self-attention uses all image patches (tokens) to compute attention matrix, it may neglect locality of images patches and involve noisy tokens (e.g., clutter background and occlusion), leading to a slow training process and potential degradation of performance. To address these problems, we propose the $k$-NN attention for boosting vision transformers. Specifically, instead of involving all the tokens for attention matrix calculation, we only select the top-$k$ similar tokens from the keys for each query to compute the attention map. The proposed $k$-NN attention naturally inherits the local bias of CNNs without introducing convolutional operations, as nearby tokens tend to be more similar than others. In addition, the $k$-NN attention allows for the exploration of long range correlation and at the same time filters out irrelevant tokens by choosing the most similar tokens from the entire image. Despite its simplicity, we verify, both theoretically and empirically, that $k$-NN attention is powerful in speeding up training and distilling noise from input tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted by using 11 different vision transformer architectures to verify that the proposed $k$-NN attention can work with any existing transformer architectures to improve its prediction performance. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/damo-cv/KVT}."
Registration Based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chaoqin Huang, Haoyan Guan, Aofan Jiang, Ya Zhang, Michael Spratling, Yan-Feng Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper considers few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD), a practical yet under-studied setting for anomaly detection (AD), where only a limited number of normal images are provided for each category at training. So far, existing FSAD studies follow the one-model-per-category learning paradigm used for standard AD, and the inter-category commonality has not been explored. Inspired by how humans detect anomalies, i.e., comparing an image in question to normal images, we here leverage registration, an image alignment task that is inherently generalizable across categories, as the proxy task, to train a category-agnostic anomaly detection model. During testing, the anomalies are identified by comparing the registered features of the test image and its corresponding support (normal) images. As far as we know, this is the first FSAD method that trains a single generalizable model and requires no re-training or parameter fine-tuning for new categories. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art FSAD methods by 3%-8% in AUC on the MVTec and MPDD benchmarks. Source code is available at: https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/RegAD"
Improving Robustness by Enhancing Weak Subnets
Authors: Yong Guo, David Stutz, Bernt Schiele
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Despite their success, deep networks have been shown to be highly susceptible to perturbations, often causing significant drops in accuracy. In this paper, we investigate model robustness on perturbed inputs by studying the performance of internal sub-networks (subnets). Interestingly, we observe that most subnets show particularly poor robustness against perturbations. More importantly, these weak subnets are correlated with the overall lack of robustness. Tackling this phenomenon, we propose a new training procedure that identifies and enhances weak subnets (EWS) to improve robustness. Specifically, we develop a search algorithm to find particularly weak subnets and explicitly strengthen them via knowledge distillation from the full network. We show that EWS greatly improves both robustness against corrupted images as well as accuracy on clean data. Being complementary to popular data augmentation methods, EWS consistently improves robustness when combined with these approaches. To highlight the flexibility of our approach, we combine EWS also with popular adversarial training methods resulting in improved adversarial robustness."
Learning Invariant Visual Representations for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Tian Zhang, Kongming Liang, Ruoyi Du, Xian Sun, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions using knowledge learned from seen attribute-object compositions in the training set. Previous works mainly project an image and a composition into a common embedding space to measure their compatibility score. However, both attributes and objects share the visual representations learned above, leading the model to exploit spurious correlations and bias towards seen pairs. Instead, we reconsider CZSL as an out-of-distribution generalization problem. If an object is treated as a domain, we can learn object-invariant features to recognize the attributes attached to any object reliably. Similarly, attribute-invariant features can also be learned when recognizing the objects with attributes as domains. Specifically, we propose an invariant feature learning framework to align different domains at the representation and gradient levels to capture the intrinsic characteristics associated with the tasks. Experiments on two CZSL benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art."
Improving Covariance Conditioning of the SVD Meta-Layer by Orthogonality
Authors: Yue Song, Nicu Sebe, Wei Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Inserting an SVD meta-layer into neural networks is prone to make the covariance ill-conditioned, which could harm the model in the training stability and generalization abilities. In this paper, we systematically study how to improve the covariance conditioning by enforcing orthogonality to the Pre-SVD layer. Existing orthogonal treatments on the weights are first investigated. However, these techniques can improve the conditioning but would hurt the performance. To avoid such a side effect, we propose the Nearest Orthogonal Gradient (NOG) and Optimal Learning Rate (OLR). The effectiveness of our methods is validated in two applications: decorrelated Batch Normalization (BN) and Global Covariance Pooling (GCP). Extensive experiments on visual recognition demonstrate that our methods can simultaneously improve the covariance conditioning and generalization. Moreover, the combinations with orthogonal weight can further boost the performances."
Out-of-Distribution Detection with Semantic Mismatch under Masking
Authors: Yijun Yang, Ruiyuan Gao, Qiang Xu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper proposes a novel out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework named MOODCat for image classifiers. MOODCat masks a random portion of the input image and uses a generative model to synthesize the masked image to a new image conditioned on the classification result. It then calculates the semantic difference between the original image and the synthesized one for OOD detection. Compared to existing solutions, MOODCat naturally learns the semantic information of the in-distribution data with the proposed mask and conditional synthesis strategy, which is critical to identify OODs. Experimental results demonstrate that MOODCat outperforms state-of-the-art OOD detection solutions by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/MOODCat."
Data-Free Neural Architecture Search via Recursive Label Calibration
Authors: Zechun Liu, Zhiqiang Shen, Yun Long, Eric Xing, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Chas Leichner
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper aims to explore the feasibility of neural architecture search (NAS) given only a pre-trained model without using any original training data. This is an important circumstance for privacy protection, bias avoidance, etc., in real-world scenarios. To achieve this, we start by synthesizing usable data through recovering the knowledge from a pre-trained deep neural network. Then we use the synthesized data and their predicted soft labels to guide NAS. We identify that the quality of the synthesized data will substantially affect the NAS results. Particularly, we find NAS requires the synthesized images to possess enough semantics, diversity, and a minimal domain gap from the natural images. To meet these requirements, we propose recursive label calibration to encode more relative semantics in images, as well as regional update strategy to enhance the diversity. Further, we use input and feature-level regularization to mimic the original data distribution in latent space and reduce the domain gap. We instantiate our proposed framework with three popular NAS algorithms: DARTS, ProxylessNAS and SPOS. Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that the architectures discovered by searching with our synthetic data achieve accuracy that is comparable to, or even higher than, architectures discovered by searching from the original ones, for the first time, deriving the conclusion that NAS can be done effectively with no need of access to the original or called natural data if the synthesis method is well designed. Code and models are availabel at: https://github.com/liuzechun/Data-Free-NAS."
Learning from Multiple Annotator Noisy Labels via Sample-Wise Label Fusion
Authors: Zhengqi Gao, Fan-Keng Sun, Mingran Yang, Sucheng Ren, Zikai Xiong, Marc Engeler, Antonio Burazer, Linda Wildling, Luca Daniel, Duane S. Boning
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Data lies at the core of modern deep learning. The impressive performance of supervised learning is built upon a base of massive accurately labeled data. However, in some real-world applications, accurate labeling might not be viable; instead, multiple noisy labels (instead of one accurate label) are provided by several annotators for each data sample. Learning a classifier on such a noisy training dataset is a challenging task. Previous approaches usually assume that all data samples share the same set of parameters related to annotator errors, while we demonstrate that label error learning should be both annotator and data sample dependent. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel learning algorithm. The proposed method displays superiority compared with several state-of-the-art baseline methods on MNIST, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-100. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhengqigao/Learning-from-Multiple-Annotator-Noisy-Labels."
Acknowledging the Unknown for Multi-Label Learning with Single Positive Labels
Authors: Donghao Zhou, Pengfei Chen, Qiong Wang, Guangyong Chen, Pheng-Ann Heng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Due to the difficulty of collecting exhaustive multi-label annotations, multi-label datasets often contain partial labels. We consider an extreme of this weakly supervised learning problem, called single positive multi-label learning (SPML), where each multi-label training image has only one positive label. Traditionally, all unannotated labels are assumed as negative labels in SPML, which introduces false negative labels and causes model training to be dominated by assumed negative labels. In this work, we choose to treat all unannotated labels from an alternative perspective, i.e. acknowledging they are unknown. Hence, we propose entropy-maximization (EM) loss to attain a special gradient regime for providing proper supervision signals. Moreover, we propose asymmetric pseudo-labeling (APL), which adopts asymmetric-tolerance strategies and a self-paced procedure, to cooperate with EM loss and then provide more precise supervision. Experiments show that our method significantly improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art results on all four benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/SPML-AckTheUnknown."
AutoMix: Unveiling the Power of Mixup for Stronger Classifiers
Authors: Zicheng Liu, Siyuan Li, Di Wu, Zihan Liu, Zhiyuan Chen, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Data mixing augmentation have proved to be effective for improving the generalization ability of deep neural networks. While early methods mix samples by hand-crafted policies (\textit{e.g.}, linear interpolation), recent methods utilize saliency information to match the mixed samples and labels via complex offline optimization. However, there arises a trade-off between precise mixing policies and optimization complexity. To address this challenge, we propose a novel automatic mixup (AutoMix) framework, where the mixup policy is parameterized and serves the ultimate classification goal directly. Specifically, AutoMix reformulates the mixup classification into two sub-tasks (\textit{i.e.}, mixed sample generation and mixup classification) with corresponding sub-networks and solves them in a bi-level optimization framework. For the generation, a learnable lightweight mixup generator, Mix Block, is designed to generate mixed samples by modeling patch-wise relationships under the direct supervision of the corresponding mixed labels. To prevent the degradation and instability of bi-level optimization, we further introduce a momentum pipeline to train AutoMix in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on nine image benchmarks prove the superiority of AutoMix compared with state-of-the-arts in various classification scenarios and downstream tasks."
MaxViT: Multi-axis Vision Transformer
Authors: Zhengzhong Tu, Hossein Talebi, Han Zhang, Feng Yang, Peyman Milanfar, Alan Bovik, Yinxiao Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Transformers have recently gained significant attention in the computer vision community. However, the lack of scalability of self-attention mechanisms with respect to image size has limited their wide adoption in state-of-the-art vision backbones. In this paper we introduce an efficient and scalable attention model we call multi-axis attention, which consists of two aspects: blocked local and dilated global attention. These design choices allow global-local spatial interactions on arbitrary input resolutions with only linear complexity. We also present a new architectural element by effectively blending our proposed attention model with convolutions, and accordingly propose a simple hierarchical vision backbone, dubbed MaxViT, by simply repeating the basic building block over multiple stages. Notably, MaxViT is able to ”see” globally throughout the entire network, even in earlier, high-resolution stages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a broad spectrum of vision tasks. On image classification, MaxViT achieves state-of-the-art performance under various settings: without extra data, MaxViT attains 86.5% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy; with ImageNet-21K pre-training, our model achieves 88.7% top-1 accuracy. For downstream tasks, MaxViT as a backbone delivers favorable performance on object detection as well as visual aesthetic assessment. We also show that our proposed model expresses strong generative modeling capability on ImageNet, demonstrating the superior potential of MaxViT blocks as a universal vision module. The source code and trained models will be available at https://github.com/google-research/maxvit."
ScalableViT: Rethinking the Context-Oriented Generalization of Vision Transformer
Authors: Rui Yang, Hailong Ma, Jie Wu, Yansong Tang, Xuefeng Xiao, Min Zheng, Xiu Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The vanilla self-attention mechanism inherently relies on pre-defined and steadfast computational dimensions. Such inflexibility restricts it from possessing context-oriented generalization that can bring more contextual cues and graphic representations. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Scalable Self-Attention (SSA) mechanism that leverages two scaling factors to release dimensions of query, key, and value matrices while unbinding them with the input. This scalability fetches context-oriented generalization and enhances object sensitivity, which pushes the whole network into a more effective trade-off state between precision and cost. Furthermore, we propose an Interactive Window-based Self-Attention (IWSA), which establishes interaction between non-overlapping regions by re-merging independent value tokens and aggregating spatial information from adjacent windows. By stacking the SSA and IWSA alternately, the Scalable Vision Transformer (ScalableViT) achieves state-of-the-art performance in general-purpose vision tasks. For example, ScalableViT-S outperforms Twins-SVT-S by 1.4% and Swin-T by 1.8% on ImageNet-1K classification."
Three Things Everyone Should Know about Vision Transformers
Authors: Hugo Touvron, Matthieu Cord, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Jakob Verbeek, Hervé Jégou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "After their initial success in natural language processing, transformer architectures have rapidly gained traction in computer vision, providing state-of-the-art results for tasks such as image classification, detection, segmentation, and video analysis. We offer three insights based on simple and easy to implement variants of vision transformers. (1) The residual layers of vision transformers, which are usually processed sequentially, can to some extent be processed efficiently in parallel without noticeably affecting the accuracy. (2) Fine-tuning the weights of the attention layers is sufficient to adapt vision transformers to a higher resolution and to other classification tasks. This saves compute, reduces the peak memory consumption at fine-tuning time, and allows sharing the majority of weights across tasks. (3) Adding MLP-based patch pre-processing layers improves Bert-like self-supervised training based on patch masking. We evaluate the impact of these design choices using the ImageNet-1k dataset, and also report result on the ImageNet-v2 test set. Transfer performance is measured across six smaller datasets."
DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT
Authors: Hugo Touvron, Matthieu Cord, Hervé Jégou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "A Vision Transformer (ViT) is a simple neural architecture amenable to serve several computer vision tasks. It has limited built-in architectural priors, in contrast to more recent architectures that incorporate priors either about the input data or of specific tasks. Recent works show that ViTs benefit from self-supervised pre-training, in particular BerT-like pre-training like BeiT. In this paper, we revisit the supervised training of ViTs. Our procedure builds upon and simplifies a recipe introduced for training ResNet-50. It includes a new simple data-augmentation procedure with only 3 augmentations, closer to the practice in self-supervised learning. Our evaluations on Image classification (ImageNet-1k with and without pre-training on ImageNet-21k), transfer learning and semantic segmentation show that our procedure outperforms by a large margin previous fully supervised training recipes for ViT. It also reveals that the performance of our ViT trained with supervision is comparable to that of more recent architectures. Our results could serve as better baselines for recent self-supervised approaches demonstrated on ViT."
MixSKD: Self-Knowledge Distillation from Mixup for Image Recognition
Authors: Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Helong Zhou, Linhang Cai, Xiang Zhi, Jiwen Wu, Yongjun Xu, Qian Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Unlike the conventional Knowledge Distillation (KD), Self-KD allows a network to learn knowledge from itself without any guidance from extra networks. This paper proposes to perform Self-KD from image Mixture (MixSKD), which integrates these two techniques into a unified framework. MixSKD mutually distills feature maps and probability distributions between the random pair of original images and their mixup images in a meaningful way. Therefore, it guides the network to learn cross-image knowledge by modelling supervisory signals from mixup images. Moreover, we construct a self-teacher network by aggregating multi-stage feature maps for providing soft labels to supervise the backbone classifier, further improving the efficacy of self-boosting. Experiments on image classification and transfer learning to object detection and semantic segmentation demonstrate that MixSKD outperforms other state-of-the-art Self-KD and data augmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/winycg/Self-KD-Lib."
Self-Feature Distillation with Uncertainty Modeling for Degraded Image Recognition
Authors: Zhou Yang, Weisheng Dong, Xin Li, Jinjian Wu, Leida Li, Guangming Shi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Despite the remarkable performance on high-quality (HQ) data, the accuracy of deep image recognition models degrades rapidly in the presence of low-quality (LQ) images. Both feature de-drifting and quality agnostic models have been developed to make the features extracted from degraded images closer to those of HQ images. In these methods, the L2-norm is usually used as a constraint. It treats each pixel in the feature equally and may result in relatively poor reconstruction performance in some difficult regions. To address this issue, we propose a novel self-feature distillation method with uncertainty modeling for better producing HQ-like features from low-quality observations in this paper. Specifically, in a standard recognition model, we use the HQ features to distill the corresponding degraded ones and conduct uncertainty modeling according to the diversity of degradation sources to adaptively increase the weights of feature regions that are difficult to recover in the distillation loss. Experiments demonstrate that our method can extract HQ-like features better even when the inputs are degraded images, which makes the model more robust than other approaches."
Novel Class Discovery without Forgetting
Authors: K J Joseph, Sujoy Paul, Gaurav Aggarwal, Soma Biswas, Piyush Rai, Kai Han, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Humans possess an innate ability to identify and differentiate instances that they are not familiar with, by leveraging and adapting the knowledge that they have acquired so far. Importantly, they achieve this without deteriorating the performance on their earlier learning. Inspired by this, we identify and formulate a new, pragmatic problem setting of NCDwF: Novel Class Discovery without Forgetting, which tasks a machine learning model to incrementally discover novel categories of instances from unlabeled data, while maintaining its performance on the previously seen categories. We propose 1) a method to generate pseudo-latent representations which act as a proxy for (no longer available) labeled data, thereby alleviating forgetting, 2) a mutual-information based regularizer which enhances unsupervised discovery of novel classes, and 3) a simple Known Class Identifier which aids generalized inference when the testing data contains instances form both seen and unseen categories. We introduce experimental protocols based on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1000 to measure the trade-off between knowledge retention and novel class discovery. Our extensive evaluations reveal that existing models catastrophically forget previously seen categories while identifying novel categories, while our method is able to effectively balance between the competing objectives. We hope our work will attract further research into this newly identified pragmatic problem setting."
SAFA: Sample-Adaptive Feature Augmentation for Long-Tailed Image Classification
Authors: Yan Hong, Jianfu Zhang, Zhongyi Sun, Ke Yan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Imbalanced datasets with long-tailed distribution widely exist in practice, posing great challenges for deep networks on how to handle the biased predictions between head (majority, frequent) classes and tail (minority, rare) classes. Feature space of tail classes learned by deep networks is usually under-represented, causing heterogeneous performance among different classes. Existing methods augment tail-class features to compensate tail classes on feature space, but these methods fail to generalize on test phase. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel Sample-Adaptive Feature Augmentation (SAFA) to augment features for tail classes resulting in ameliorating the classifier performance. SAFA aims to extract diverse and transferable semantic directions from head classes, and adaptively translate tail-class features along extracted semantic directions for augmentation. SAFA leverages a recycling training scheme ensuring augmented features are sample-specific. Contrastive loss ensures the transferable semantic directions are class-irrelevant and mode seeking loss is adopted to produce diverse tail-class features and enlarge the feature space of tail classes. The proposed SAFA as a plug-in is convenient and versatile to be combined with different methods during training phase without additional computational burden at test time. By leveraging SAFA, we obtain outstanding results on CIFAR-LT-10, CIFAR-LT-100, Places-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018."
Negative Samples Are at Large: Leveraging Hard-Distance Elastic Loss for Re-identification
Authors: Hyungtae Lee, Sungmin Eum, Heesung Kwon
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We present a Momentum Re-identification (MoReID) framework that can leverage a very large number of negative samples in training for general re-identification task. The design of this framework is inspired by Momentum Contrast (MoCo), which uses a dictionary to store current and past batches to build a large set of encoded samples. As we find it less effective to use past positive samples which may be highly inconsistent to the encoded feature property formed with the current positive samples, MoReID is designed to use only a large number of negative samples stored in the dictionary. However, if we train the model using the widely used Triplet loss that uses only one sample to represent a set of positive/negative samples, it is hard to effectively leverage the enlarged set of negative samples acquired by the MoReID framework. To maximize the advantage of using the scaled-up negative sample set, we newly introduce Hard-distance Elastic loss (HE loss), which is capable of using more than one hard sample to represent a large number of samples. Our experiments demonstrate that a large number of negative samples provided by MoReID framework can be utilized at full capacity only with the HE loss, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy on three re-ID benchmarks, VeRi-776, Market-1501, and VeRi-Wild."
Discrete-Constrained Regression for Local Counting Models
Authors: Haipeng Xiong, Angela Yao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Local counts, or the number of objects in a local area, is a continuous value by nature. Yet recent state-of-the-art methods show that formulating counting as a classification task performs better than regression. Through a series of experiments on carefully controlled synthetic data, we show that this counter-intuitive result is caused by imprecise ground truth local counts. Factors such as biased dot annotations and incorrectly matched Gaussian kernels used to generate ground truth counts introduce deviations from the true local counts. Standard continuous regression is highly sensitive to these errors, explaining the performance gap between classification and regression. To mitigate the sensitivity, we loosen the regression formulation from a continuous scale to a discrete ordering and propose a novel discrete-constrained (DC) regression. Applied to crowd counting, DC-regression is more accurate than both classification and standard regression on three public benchmarks. A similar advantage also holds for the age estimation task, verifying the overall effectiveness of DC-regression. Code is available at https://github.com/xhp-hust-2018-2011/dcreg."
Breadcrumbs: Adversarial Class-Balanced Sampling for Long-Tailed Recognition
Authors: Bo Liu, Haoxiang Li, Hao Kang, Gang Hua, Nuno Vasconcelos
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The problem of long-tailed recognition, where the number of examples per class is highly unbalanced, is considered. While training with class-balanced sampling has been shown effective for this problem, it is known to over-fit to few-shot classes. It is hypothesized that this is due to the repeated sampling of examples and can be addressed by feature space augmentation. A new feature augmentation strategy, EMANATE, based on back-tracking of features across epochs during training, is proposed. It is shown that, unlike class-balanced sampling, this is an adversarial augmentation strategy. A new sampling procedure, Breadcrumb, is then introduced to implement adversarial class-balanced sampling without extra computation. Experiments on three popular long-tailed recognition datasets show that Breadcrumb training produces classifiers that outperform existing solutions to the problem."
Chairs Can Be Stood On: Overcoming Object Bias in Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Guangzhi Wang, Yangyang Guo, Yongkang Wong, Mohan Kankanhalli
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Detecting Human-Object Interaction (HOI) in images is an important step towards high-level visual comprehension. Existing work often shed light on improving either human and object detection, or interaction recognition. However, due to the limitation of datasets, these methods tend to fit well on frequent interactions conditioned on the detected objects, yet largely ignoring the rare ones, which is referred to as the object bias problem in this paper. In this work, we for the first time, uncover the problem from two aspects: unbalanced interaction distribution and biased model learning. To overcome the object bias problem, we propose a novel plug-and-play Object-wise Debiasing Memory (ODM) method for re-balancing the distribution of interactions under detected objects. Equipped with carefully designed read and write strategies, the proposed ODM allows rare interaction instances to be more frequently sampled for training, thereby alleviating the object bias induced by the unbalanced interaction distribution. We apply this method to three advanced baselines and conduct experiments on the HICO-DET and HOI-COCO datasets. To quantitatively study the object bias problem, we advocate a new protocol for evaluating model performance. As demonstrated in the experimental results, our method brings consistent and significant improvements over baselines, especially on rare interactions under each object. In addition, when evaluating under the conventional standard setting, our method achieves new state-of-the-art on the two benchmarks."