pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GAN Cocktail: mixing GANs without dataset access
Authors: Omri Avrahami, Dani Lischinski, Ohad Fried
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Today's generative models are capable of synthesizing high-fidelity images, but each model specializes on a specific target domain. This raises the need for model merging: combining two or more pretrained generative models into a single unified one. In this work we tackle the problem of model merging, given two constraints that often come up in the real world: (1) no access to the original training data, and (2) without increasing the size of the neural network. To the best of our knowledge, model merging under these constraints has not been studied thus far. We propose a novel, two-stage solution. In the first stage, we transform the weights of all the models to the same parameter space by a technique we term model rooting. In the second stage, we merge the rooted models by averaging their weights and fine-tuning them for each specific domain, using only data generated by the original trained models. We demonstrate that our approach is superior to baseline methods and to existing transfer learning techniques, and investigate several applications.
Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss for Anomaly Detection
Authors: Tal Reiss, Yedid Hoshen
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Deep anomaly detection methods learn representations that separate between normal and anomalous images. Although self-supervised representation learning is commonly used, small dataset sizes limit its effectiveness. It was previously shown that utilizing external, generic datasets (e.g. ImageNet classification) can significantly improve anomaly detection performance. One approach is outlier exposure, which fails when the external datasets do not resemble the anomalies. We take the approach of transferring representations pre-trained on external datasets for anomaly detection. Anomaly detection performance can be significantly improved by fine-tuning the pre-trained representations on the normal training images. In this paper, we first demonstrate and analyze that contrastive learning, the most popular self-supervised learning paradigm cannot be naively applied to pre-trained features. The reason is that pre-trained feature initialization causes poor conditioning for standard contrastive objectives, resulting in bad optimization dynamics. Based on our analysis, we provide a modified contrastive objective, the Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss. Our method is highly effective and achieves a new state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance including $98.6\%$ ROC-AUC on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Burst Super-Resolution: Methods and Results
Authors: Goutam Bhat, Martin Danelljan, Radu Timofte, Kazutoshi Akita, Wooyeong Cho, Haoqiang Fan, Lanpeng Jia, Daeshik Kim, Bruno Lecouat, Youwei Li, Shuaicheng Liu, Ziluan Liu, Ziwei Luo, Takahiro Maeda, Julien Mairal, Christian Micheloni, Xuan Mo, Takeru Oba, Pavel Ostyakov, Jean Ponce, Sanghyeok Son, Jian Sun, Norimichi Ukita, Rao Muhammad Umer, Youliang Yan, Lei Yu, Magauiya Zhussip, Xueyi Zou
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

This paper reviews the NTIRE2021 challenge on burst super-resolution. Given a RAW noisy burst as input, the task in the challenge was to generate a clean RGB image with 4 times higher resolution. The challenge contained two tracks; Track 1 evaluating on synthetically generated data, and Track 2 using real-world bursts from mobile camera. In the final testing phase, 6 teams submitted results using a diverse set of solutions. The top-performing methods set a new state-of-the-art for the burst super-resolution task.
Active Speaker Detection as a Multi-Objective Optimization with Uncertainty-based Multimodal Fusion
Authors: Baptiste Pouthier, Laurent Pilati, Leela K. Gudupudi, Charles Bouveyron, Frederic Precioso
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection, Audio-Visual Active Speaker Detection

It is now well established from a variety of studies that there is a significant benefit from combining video and audio data in detecting active speakers. However, either of the modalities can potentially mislead audiovisual fusion by inducing unreliable or deceptive information. This paper outlines active speaker detection as a multi-objective learning problem to leverage best of each modalities using a novel self-attention, uncertainty-based multimodal fusion scheme. Results obtained show that the proposed multi-objective learning architecture outperforms traditional approaches in improving both mAP and AUC scores. We further demonstrate that our fusion strategy surpasses, in active speaker detection, other modality fusion methods reported in various disciplines. We finally show that the proposed method significantly improves the state-of-the-art on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset.
High Resolution Solar Image Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Ankan Dash, Junyi Ye, Guiling Wang
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We applied Deep Learning algorithm known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to perform solar image-to-image translation. That is, from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager(HMI) line of sight magnetogram images to SDO/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly(AIA) 0304-{\AA} images. The Ultraviolet(UV)/Extreme Ultraviolet(EUV) observations like the SDO/AIA0304-{\AA} images were only made available to scientists in the late 1990s even though the magenetic field observations like the SDO/HMI have been available since the 1970s. Therefore by leveraging Deep Learning algorithms like GANs we can give scientists access to complete datasets for analysis. For generating high resolution solar images we use the Pix2PixHD and Pix2Pix algorithms. The Pix2PixHD algorithm was specifically designed for high resolution image generation tasks, and the Pix2Pix algorithm is by far the most widely used image to image translation algorithm. For training and testing we used the data for the year 2012, 2013 and 2014. The results show that our deep learning models are capable of generating high resolution(1024 x 1024 pixels) AIA0304 images from HMI magnetograms. Specifically, the pixel-to-pixel Pearson Correlation Coefficient of the images generated by Pix2PixHD and original images is as high as 0.99. The number is 0.962 if Pix2Pix is used to generate images. The results we get for our Pix2PixHD model is better than the results obtained by previous works done by others to generate AIA0304 images. Thus, we can use these models to generate AIA0304 images when the AIA0304 data is not available which can be used for understanding space weather and giving researchers the capability to predict solar events such as Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections. As far as we know, our work is the first attempt to leverage Pix2PixHD algorithm for SDO/HMI to SDO/AIA0304 image-to-image translation.
3DB: A Framework for Debugging Computer Vision Models
Authors: Guillaume Leclerc, Hadi Salman, Andrew Ilyas, Sai Vemprala, Logan Engstrom, Vibhav Vineet, Kai Xiao, Pengchuan Zhang, Shibani Santurkar, Greg Yang, Ashish Kapoor, Aleksander Madry
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00

We introduce 3DB: an extendable, unified framework for testing and debugging vision models using photorealistic simulation. We demonstrate, through a wide range of use cases, that 3DB allows users to discover vulnerabilities in computer vision systems and gain insights into how models make decisions. 3DB captures and generalizes many robustness analyses from prior work, and enables one to study their interplay. Finally, we find that the insights generated by the system transfer to the physical world. We are releasing 3DB as a library (https://github.com/3db/3db) alongside a set of example analyses, guides, and documentation: https://3db.github.io/3db/ .
Deep Medial Fields
Authors: Daniel Rebain, Ke Li, Vincent Sitzmann, Soroosh Yazdani, Kwang Moo Yi, Andrea Tagliasacchi
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry

Implicit representations of geometry, such as occupancy fields or signed distance fields (SDF), have recently re-gained popularity in encoding 3D solid shape in a functional form. In this work, we introduce medial fields: a field function derived from the medial axis transform (MAT) that makes available information about the underlying 3D geometry that is immediately useful for a number of downstream tasks. In particular, the medial field encodes the local thickness of a 3D shape, and enables O(1) projection of a query point onto the medial axis. To construct the medial field we require nothing but the SDF of the shape itself, thus allowing its straightforward incorporation in any application that relies on signed distance fields. Working in unison with the O(1) surface projection supported by the SDF, the medial field opens the door for an entirely new set of efficient, shape-aware operations on implicit representations. We present three such applications, including a modification to sphere tracing that renders implicit representations with better convergence properties, a fast construction method for memory-efficient rigid-body collision proxies, and an efficient approximation of ambient occlusion that remains stable with respect to viewpoint variations.
DoubleField: Bridging the Neural Surface and Radiance Fields for High-fidelity Human Reconstruction and Rendering
Authors: Ruizhi Shao, Hongwen Zhang, He Zhang, Mingjia Chen, YanPei Cao, Tao Yu, Yebin Liu
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Transfer Learning

We introduce DoubleField, a novel framework combining the merits of both surface field and radiance field for high-fidelity human reconstruction and rendering. Within DoubleField, the surface field and radiance field are associated together by a shared feature embedding and a surface-guided sampling strategy. Moreover, a view-to-view transformer is introduced to fuse multi-view features and learn view-dependent features directly from high-resolution inputs. With the modeling power of DoubleField and the view-to-view transformer, our method significantly improves the reconstruction quality of both geometry and appearance, while supporting direct inference, scene-specific high-resolution finetuning, and fast rendering. The efficacy of DoubleField is validated by the quantitative evaluations on several datasets and the qualitative results in a real-world sparse multi-view system, showing its superior capability for high-quality human model reconstruction and photo-realistic free-viewpoint human rendering. Data and source code will be made public for the research purpose. Please refer to our project page: http://www.liuyebin.com/dbfield/dbfield.html.
Pointwise visual field estimation from optical coherence tomography in glaucoma: a structure-function analysis using deep learning
Authors: Ruben Hemelings, Bart Elen, João Barbosa Breda, Erwin Bellon, Matthew B Blaschko, Patrick De Boever, Ingeborg Stalmans
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, regression

Background/Aims: Standard Automated Perimetry (SAP) is the gold standard to monitor visual field (VF) loss in glaucoma management, but is prone to intra-subject variability. We developed and validated a deep learning (DL) regression model that estimates pointwise and overall VF loss from unsegmented optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans. Methods: Eight DL regression models were trained with various retinal imaging modalities: circumpapillary OCT at 3.5mm, 4.1mm, 4.7mm diameter, and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) en face images to estimate mean deviation (MD) and 52 threshold values. This retrospective study used data from patients who underwent a complete glaucoma examination, including a reliable Humphrey Field Analyzer (HFA) 24-2 SITA Standard VF exam and a SPECTRALIS OCT scan using the Glaucoma Module Premium Edition. Results: A total of 1378 matched OCT-VF pairs of 496 patients (863 eyes) were included for training and evaluation of the DL models. Average sample MD was -7.53dB (from -33.8dB to +2.0dB). For 52 VF threshold values estimation, the circumpapillary OCT scan with the largest radius (4.7mm) achieved the best performance among all individual models (Pearson r=0.77, 95% CI=[0.72-0.82]). For MD, prediction averaging of OCT-trained models (3.5mm, 4.1mm, 4.7mm) resulted in a Pearson r of 0.78 [0.73-0.83] on the validation set and comparable performance on the test set (Pearson r=0.79 [0.75-0.82]). Conclusion: DL on unsegmented OCT scans accurately predicts pointwise and mean deviation of 24-2 VF in glaucoma patients. Automated VF from unsegmented OCT could be a solution for patients unable to produce reliable perimetry results.
CDN-MEDAL: Two-stage Density and Difference Approximation Framework for Motion Analysis
Authors: Synh Viet-Uyen Ha, Cuong Tien Nguyen, Hung Ngoc Phan, Nhat Minh Chung, Phuong Hoai Ha
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Background Subtraction

Background modeling and subtraction is a promising research area with a variety of applications for video surveillance. Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of effective learning-based deep neural networks in this area. However, the techniques have only provided limited descriptions of scenes' properties while requiring heavy computations, as their single-valued mapping functions are learned to approximate the temporal conditional averages of observed target backgrounds and foregrounds. On the other hand, statistical learning in imagery domains has been a prevalent approach with high adaptation to dynamic context transformation, notably using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) with its generalization capabilities. By leveraging both, we propose a novel method called CDN-MEDAL-net for background modeling and subtraction with two convolutional neural networks. The first architecture, CDN-GM, is grounded on an unsupervised GMM statistical learning strategy to describe observed scenes' salient features. The second one, MEDAL-net, implements a light-weighted pipeline of online video background subtraction. Our two-stage architecture is small, but it is very effective with rapid convergence to representations of intricate motion patterns. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is not only capable of effectively extracting regions of moving objects in unseen cases, but it is also very efficient.
Digital Taxonomist: Identifying Plant Species in Community Scientists' Photographs
Authors: Riccardo de Lutio, Yihang She, Stefano D'Aronco, Stefania Russo, Philipp Brun, Jan D. Wegner, Konrad Schindler
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Deep Learning

Automatic identification of plant specimens from amateur photographs could improve species range maps, thus supporting ecosystems research as well as conservation efforts. However, classifying plant specimens based on image data alone is challenging: some species exhibit large variations in visual appearance, while at the same time different species are often visually similar; additionally, species observations follow a highly imbalanced, long-tailed distribution due to differences in abundance as well as observer biases. On the other hand, most species observations are accompanied by side information about the spatial, temporal and ecological context. Moreover, biological species are not an unordered list of classes but embedded in a hierarchical taxonomic structure. We propose a multimodal deep learning model that takes into account these additional cues in a unified framework. Our Digital Taxonomist is able to identify plant species in photographs better than a classifier trained on the image content alone, the performance gained is over 6 percent points in terms of accuracy.
Learning Dynamics via Graph Neural Networks for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking
Authors: Yiding Yang, Zhou Ren, Haoxiang Li, Chunluan Zhou, Xinchao Wang, Gang Hua
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking, Pose Estimation, Video Understanding

Multi-person pose estimation and tracking serve as crucial steps for video understanding. Most state-of-the-art approaches rely on first estimating poses in each frame and only then implementing data association and refinement. Despite the promising results achieved, such a strategy is inevitably prone to missed detections especially in heavily-cluttered scenes, since this tracking-by-detection paradigm is, by nature, largely dependent on visual evidences that are absent in the case of occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel online approach to learning the pose dynamics, which are independent of pose detections in current fame, and hence may serve as a robust estimation even in challenging scenarios including occlusion. Specifically, we derive this prediction of dynamics through a graph neural network~(GNN) that explicitly accounts for both spatial-temporal and visual information. It takes as input the historical pose tracklets and directly predicts the corresponding poses in the following frame for each tracklet. The predicted poses will then be aggregated with the detected poses, if any, at the same frame so as to produce the final pose, potentially recovering the occluded joints missed by the estimator. Experiments on PoseTrack 2017 and PoseTrack 2018 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves results superior to the state of the art on both human pose estimation and tracking tasks.
Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation on complex scenes
Authors: Luca Barras, Samuel Chassot, Daniel Filipe Nunes Silva
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation methods have received a lot of attention in the last few years. Multiple techniques emerged tackling the initial challenge from different perspectives. Some focus on learning as much as possible from several target style images for translations while other make use of object detection in order to produce more realistic results on content-rich scenes. In this work, we assess how a method that has initially been developed for single object translation performs on more diverse and content-rich images. Our work is based on the FUNIT[1] framework and we train it with a more diverse dataset. This helps understanding how such method behaves beyond their initial frame of application. We present a way to extend a dataset based on object detection. Moreover, we propose a way to adapt the FUNIT framework in order to leverage the power of object detection that one can see in other methods.
FairCal: Fairness Calibration for Face Verification
Authors: Tiago Salvador, Stephanie Cairns, Vikram Voleti, Noah Marshall, Adam Oberman
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Attribute, Face Recognition, Face Verification, Fairness

Despite being widely used, face recognition models suffer from bias: the probability of a false positive (incorrect face match) strongly depends on sensitive attributes such as the ethnicity of the face. As a result, these models can disproportionately and negatively impact minority groups, particularly when used by law enforcement. The majority of bias reduction methods have several drawbacks: they use an end-to-end retraining approach, may not be feasible due to privacy issues, and often reduce accuracy. An alternative approach is post-processing methods that build fairer decision classifiers using the features of pre-trained models, thus avoiding the cost of retraining. However, they still have drawbacks: they reduce accuracy (AGENDA, PASS, FTC), or require retuning for different false positive rates (FSN). In this work, we introduce the Fairness Calibration (FairCal) method, a post-training approach that simultaneously: (i) increases model accuracy (improving the state-of-the-art), (ii) produces fairly-calibrated probabilities, (iii) significantly reduces the gap in the false positive rates, (iv) does not require knowledge of the sensitive attribute, and (v) does not require retraining, training an additional model, or retuning. We apply it to the task of Face Verification, and obtain state-of-the-art results with all the above advantages.
HERS Superpixels: Deep Affinity Learning for Hierarchical Entropy Rate Segmentation
Authors: Hankui Peng, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Superpixels

Superpixels serve as a powerful preprocessing tool in numerous computer vision tasks. By using superpixel representation, the number of image primitives can be largely reduced by orders of magnitudes. With the rise of deep learning in recent years, a few works have attempted to feed deeply learned features / graphs into existing classical superpixel techniques. However, none of them are able to produce superpixels in near real-time, which is crucial to the applicability of superpixels in practice. In this work, we propose a two-stage graph-based framework for superpixel segmentation. In the first stage, we introduce an efficient Deep Affinity Learning (DAL) network that learns pairwise pixel affinities by aggregating multi-scale information. In the second stage, we propose a highly efficient superpixel method called Hierarchical Entropy Rate Segmentation (HERS). Using the learned affinities from the first stage, HERS builds a hierarchical tree structure that can produce any number of highly adaptive superpixels instantaneously. We demonstrate, through visual and numerical experiments, the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to various state-of-the-art superpixel methods.
Efficient Training of Visual Transformers with Small Datasets
Authors: Yahui Liu, Enver Sangineto, Wei Bi, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri, Marco De Nadai
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Visual Transformers (VTs) are emerging as an architectural paradigm alternative to Convolutional networks (CNNs). Differently from CNNs, VTs can capture global relations between image elements and they potentially have a larger representation capacity. However, the lack of the typical convolutional inductive bias makes these models more data-hungry than common CNNs. In fact, some local properties of the visual domain which are embedded in the CNN architectural design, in VTs should be learned from samples. In this paper, we empirically analyse different VTs, comparing their robustness in a small training-set regime, and we show that, despite having a comparable accuracy when trained on ImageNet, their performance on smaller datasets can be largely different. Moreover, we propose a self-supervised task which can extract additional information from images with only a negligible computational overhead. This task encourages the VTs to learn spatial relations within an image and makes the VT training much more robust when training data are scarce. Our task is used jointly with the standard (supervised) training and it does not depend on specific architectural choices, thus it can be easily plugged in the existing VTs. Using an extensive evaluation with different VTs and datasets, we show that our method can improve (sometimes dramatically) the final accuracy of the VTs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yhlleo/VTs-Drloc.
Unsupervised Action Segmentation for Instructional Videos
Authors: AJ Piergiovanni, Anelia Angelova, Michael S. Ryoo, Irfan Essa
Date: 2021-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Segmentation, Segmentation, Unsupervised Action Segmentation

In this paper we address the problem of automatically discovering atomic actions in unsupervised manner from instructional videos, which are rarely annotated with atomic actions. We present an unsupervised approach to learn atomic actions of structured human tasks from a variety of instructional videos based on a sequential stochastic autoregressive model for temporal segmentation of videos. This learns to represent and discover the sequential relationship between different atomic actions of the task, and which provides automatic and unsupervised self-labeling.