pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GCCN: Global Context Convolutional Network
Authors: Ali Hamdi, Flora Salim, Du Yong Kim
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

In this paper, we propose Global Context Convolutional Network (GCCN) for visual recognition. GCCN computes global features representing contextual information across image patches. These global contextual features are defined as local maxima pixels with high visual sharpness in each patch. These features are then concatenated and utilised to augment the convolutional features. The learnt feature vector is normalised using the global context features using Frobenius norm. This straightforward approach achieves high accuracy in compassion to the state-of-the-art methods with 94.6% and 95.41% on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets, respectively. To explore potential impact of GCCN on other visual representation tasks, we implemented GCCN as a based model to few-shot image classification. We learn metric distances between the augmented feature vectors and their prototypes representations, similar to Prototypical and Matching Networks. GCCN outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods achieving 99.9%, 84.8% and 80.74% on Omniglot, MiniImageNet and CUB-200, respectively. GCCN has significantly improved on the accuracy of state-of-the-art prototypical and matching networks by up to 30% in different few-shot learning scenarios.
Reimagine BiSeNet for Real-Time Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Antonio Tavera, Carlo Masone, Barbara Caputo
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation models have reached remarkable performance across various tasks. However, this performance is achieved with extremely large models, using powerful computational resources and without considering training and inference time. Real-world applications, on the other hand, necessitate models with minimal memory demands, efficient inference speed, and executable with low-resources embedded devices, such as self-driving vehicles. In this paper, we look at the challenge of real-time semantic segmentation across domains, and we train a model to act appropriately on real-world data even though it was trained on a synthetic realm. We employ a new lightweight and shallow discriminator that was specifically created for this purpose. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a real-time adversarial approach for assessing the domain adaption problem in semantic segmentation. We tested our framework in the two standard protocol: GTA5 to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes. Code is available at: https://github.com/taveraantonio/RTDA.
UVO Challenge on Video-based Open-World Segmentation 2021: 1st Place Solution
Authors: Yuming Du, Wen Guo, Yang Xiao, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation

In this report, we introduce our (pretty straightforard) two-step "detect-then-match" video instance segmentation method. The first step performs instance segmentation for each frame to get a large number of instance mask proposals. The second step is to do inter-frame instance mask matching with the help of optical flow. We demonstrate that with high quality mask proposals, a simple matching mechanism is good enough for tracking. Our approach achieves the first place in the UVO 2021 Video-based Open-World Segmentation Challenge.
Projective Manifold Gradient Layer for Deep Rotation Regression
Authors: Jiayi Chen, Yingda Yin, Tolga Birdal, Baoquan Chen, Leonidas Guibas, He Wang
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: regression, Riemannian optimization

Regressing rotations on SO(3) manifold using deep neural networks is an important yet unsolved problem. The gap between the Euclidean network output space and the non-Euclidean SO(3) manifold imposes a severe challenge for neural network learning in both forward and backward passes. While several works have proposed different regression-friendly rotation representations, very few works have been devoted to improving the gradient backpropagating in the backward pass. In this paper, we propose a manifold-aware gradient that directly backpropagates into deep network weights. Leveraging Riemannian optimization to construct a novel projective gradient, our proposed regularized projective manifold gradient (RPMG) method helps networks achieve new state-of-the-art performance in a variety of rotation estimation tasks. Our proposed gradient layer can also be applied to other smooth manifolds such as the unit sphere. Our project page is at https://jychen18.github.io/RPMG.
Pixel-by-Pixel Cross-Domain Alignment for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Antonio Tavera, Fabio Cermelli, Carlo Masone, Barbara Caputo
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Cross-Domain Few-Shot, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper we consider the task of semantic segmentation in autonomous driving applications. Specifically, we consider the cross-domain few-shot setting where training can use only few real-world annotated images and many annotated synthetic images. In this context, aligning the domains is made more challenging by the pixel-wise class imbalance that is intrinsic in the segmentation and that leads to ignoring the underrepresented classes and overfitting the well represented ones. We address this problem with a novel framework called Pixel-By-Pixel Cross-Domain Alignment (PixDA). We propose a novel pixel-by-pixel domain adversarial loss following three criteria: (i) align the source and the target domain for each pixel, (ii) avoid negative transfer on the correctly represented pixels, and (iii) regularize the training of infrequent classes to avoid overfitting. The pixel-wise adversarial training is assisted by a novel sample selection procedure, that handles the imbalance between source and target data, and a knowledge distillation strategy, that avoids overfitting towards the few target images. We demonstrate on standard synthetic-to-real benchmarks that PixDA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in (1-5)-shot settings.
Cross-domain Trajectory Prediction with CTP-Net
Authors: Pingxuan Huang, Zhenhua Cui, Jing Li, Shenghua Gao, Bo Hu, Yanyan Fang
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Most pedestrian trajectory prediction methods rely on a huge amount of trajectories annotation, which is time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, a well-trained model may not effectively generalize to a new scenario captured by another camera. Therefore, it is desirable to adapt the model trained on an annotated source domain to the target domain. To achieve domain adaptation for trajectory prediction, we propose a Cross-domain Trajectory Prediction Network (CTP-Net). In this framework, encoders are used in both domains to encode the observed trajectories, then their features are aligned by a cross-domain feature discriminator. Further, considering the consistency between the observed and the predicted trajectories, a target domain offset discriminator is utilized to adversarially regularize the future trajectory predictions to be in line with the observed trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on domain adaptation for pedestrian trajectory prediction.
Occlusion-Robust Object Pose Estimation with Holistic Representation
Authors: Bo Chen, Tat-Jun Chin, Marius Klimavicius
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Object, Pose Estimation, Representation Learning

Practical object pose estimation demands robustness against occlusions to the target object. State-of-the-art (SOTA) object pose estimators take a two-stage approach, where the first stage predicts 2D landmarks using a deep network and the second stage solves for 6DOF pose from 2D-3D correspondences. Albeit widely adopted, such two-stage approaches could suffer from novel occlusions when generalising and weak landmark coherence due to disrupted features. To address these issues, we develop a novel occlude-and-blackout batch augmentation technique to learn occlusion-robust deep features, and a multi-precision supervision architecture to encourage holistic pose representation learning for accurate and coherent landmark predictions. We perform careful ablation tests to verify the impact of our innovations and compare our method to SOTA pose estimators. Without the need of any post-processing or refinement, our method exhibits superior performance on the LINEMOD dataset. On the YCB-Video dataset our method outperforms all non-refinement methods in terms of the ADD(-S) metric. We also demonstrate the high data-efficiency of our method. Our code is available at http://github.com/BoChenYS/ROPE
Improving Face Recognition with Large Age Gaps by Learning to Distinguish Children
Authors: Jungsoo Lee, Jooyeol Yun, Sunghyun Park, Yonggyu Kim, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Despite the unprecedented improvement of face recognition, existing face recognition models still show considerably low performances in determining whether a pair of child and adult images belong to the same identity. Previous approaches mainly focused on increasing the similarity between child and adult images of a given identity to overcome the discrepancy of facial appearances due to aging. However, we observe that reducing the similarity between child images of different identities is crucial for learning distinct features among children and thus improving face recognition performance in child-adult pairs. Based on this intuition, we propose a novel loss function called the Inter-Prototype loss which minimizes the similarity between child images. Unlike the previous studies, the Inter-Prototype loss does not require additional child images or training additional learnable parameters. Our extensive experiments and in-depth analyses show that our approach outperforms existing baselines in face recognition with child-adult pairs. Our code and newly-constructed test sets of child-adult pairs are available at https://github.com/leebebeto/Inter-Prototype.
Rethinking Generalization Performance of Surgical Phase Recognition with Expert-Generated Annotations
Authors: Seungbum Hong, Jiwon Lee, Bokyung Park, Ahmed A. Alwusaibie, Anwar H. Alfadhel, Sunghyun Park, Woo Jin Hyung, Min-Kook Choi
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Surgical phase recognition

As the area of application of deep neural networks expands to areas requiring expertise, e.g., in medicine and law, more exquisite annotation processes for expert knowledge training are required. In particular, it is difficult to guarantee generalization performance in the clinical field in the case of expert knowledge training where opinions may differ even among experts on annotations. To raise the issue of the annotation generation process for expertise training of CNNs, we verified the annotations for surgical phase recognition of laparoscopic cholecystectomy and subtotal gastrectomy for gastric cancer. We produce calibrated annotations for the seven phases of cholecystectomy by analyzing the discrepancies of previously annotated labels and by discussing the criteria of surgical phases. For gastrectomy for gastric cancer has more complex twenty-one surgical phases, we generate consensus annotation by the revision process with five specialists. By training the CNN-based surgical phase recognition networks with revised annotations, we achieved improved generalization performance over models trained with original annotation under the same cross-validation settings. We showed that the expertise data annotation pipeline for deep neural networks should be more rigorous based on the type of problem to apply clinical field.
Multi-Stream Attention Learning for Monocular Vehicle Velocity and Inter-Vehicle Distance Estimation
Authors: Kuan-Chih Huang, Yu-Kai Huang, Winston H. Hsu
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Autonomous Vehicles, object-detection, Object Detection

Vehicle velocity and inter-vehicle distance estimation are essential for ADAS (Advanced driver-assistance systems) and autonomous vehicles. To save the cost of expensive ranging sensors, recent studies focus on using a low-cost monocular camera to perceive the environment around the vehicle in a data-driven fashion. Existing approaches treat each vehicle independently for perception and cause inconsistent estimation. Furthermore, important information like context and spatial relation in 2D object detection is often neglected in the velocity estimation pipeline. In this paper, we explore the relationship between vehicles of the same frame with a global-relative-constraint (GLC) loss to encourage consistent estimation. A novel multi-stream attention network (MSANet) is proposed to extract different aspects of features, e.g., spatial and contextual features, for joint vehicle velocity and inter-vehicle distance estimation. Experiments show the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach. MSANet outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both the KITTI dataset and TuSimple velocity dataset.
Multimodal Semi-Supervised Learning for 3D Objects
Authors: Zhimin Chen, Longlong Jing, Yang Liang, YingLi Tian, Bing Li
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, Retrieval

In recent years, semi-supervised learning has been widely explored and shows excellent data efficiency for 2D data. There is an emerging need to improve data efficiency for 3D tasks due to the scarcity of labeled 3D data. This paper explores how the coherence of different modelities of 3D data (e.g. point cloud, image, and mesh) can be used to improve data efficiency for both 3D classification and retrieval tasks. We propose a novel multimodal semi-supervised learning framework by introducing instance-level consistency constraint and a novel multimodal contrastive prototype (M2CP) loss. The instance-level consistency enforces the network to generate consistent representations for multimodal data of the same object regardless of its modality. The M2CP maintains a multimodal prototype for each class and learns features with small intra-class variations by minimizing the feature distance of each object to its prototype while maximizing the distance to the others. Our proposed framework significantly outperforms all the state-of-the-art counterparts for both classification and retrieval tasks by a large margin on the modelNet10 and ModelNet40 datasets.
ProtoShotXAI: Using Prototypical Few-Shot Architecture for Explainable AI
Authors: Samuel Hess, Gregory Ditzler
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Unexplainable black-box models create scenarios where anomalies cause deleterious responses, thus creating unacceptable risks. These risks have motivated the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to improve trust by evaluating local interpretability in black-box neural networks. Unfortunately, the ground truth is unavailable for the model's decision, so evaluation is limited to qualitative assessment. Further, interpretability may lead to inaccurate conclusions about the model or a false sense of trust. We propose to improve XAI from the vantage point of the user's trust by exploring a black-box model's latent feature space. We present an approach, ProtoShotXAI, that uses a Prototypical few-shot network to explore the contrastive manifold between nonlinear features of different classes. A user explores the manifold by perturbing the input features of a query sample and recording the response for a subset of exemplars from any class. Our approach is the first locally interpretable XAI model that can be extended to, and demonstrated on, few-shot networks. We compare ProtoShotXAI to the state-of-the-art XAI approaches on MNIST, Omniglot, and ImageNet to demonstrate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that ProtoShotXAI provides more flexibility for model exploration. Finally, ProtoShotXAI also demonstrates novel explainabilty and detectabilty on adversarial samples.
Learning Text-Image Joint Embedding for Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval with Deep Feature Engineering
Authors: Zhongwei Xie, Ling Liu, Yanzhao Wu, Luo Zhong, Lin Li
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Feature Engineering, Retrieval, Triplet

This paper introduces a two-phase deep feature engineering framework for efficient learning of semantics enhanced joint embedding, which clearly separates the deep feature engineering in data preprocessing from training the text-image joint embedding model. We use the Recipe1M dataset for the technical description and empirical validation. In preprocessing, we perform deep feature engineering by combining deep feature engineering with semantic context features derived from raw text-image input data. We leverage LSTM to identify key terms, deep NLP models from the BERT family, TextRank, or TF-IDF to produce ranking scores for key terms before generating the vector representation for each key term by using word2vec. We leverage wideResNet50 and word2vec to extract and encode the image category semantics of food images to help semantic alignment of the learned recipe and image embeddings in the joint latent space. In joint embedding learning, we perform deep feature engineering by optimizing the batch-hard triplet loss function with soft-margin and double negative sampling, taking into account also the category-based alignment loss and discriminator-based alignment loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SEJE approach with deep feature engineering significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
Model Inspired Autoencoder for Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Jianjun Liu, Zebin Wu, Liang Xiao, Xiao-Jun Wu
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

This paper focuses on hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution that aims to fuse a low-spatial-resolution HSI and a high-spatial-resolution multispectral image to form a high-spatial-resolution HSI (HR-HSI). Existing deep learning-based approaches are mostly supervised that rely on a large number of labeled training samples, which is unrealistic. The commonly used model-based approaches are unsupervised and flexible but rely on hand-craft priors. Inspired by the specific properties of model, we make the first attempt to design a model inspired deep network for HSI super-resolution in an unsupervised manner. This approach consists of an implicit autoencoder network built on the target HR-HSI that treats each pixel as an individual sample. The nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) of the target HR-HSI is integrated into the autoencoder network, where the two NMF parts, spectral and spatial matrices, are treated as decoder parameters and hidden outputs respectively. In the encoding stage, we present a pixel-wise fusion model to estimate hidden outputs directly, and then reformulate and unfold the model's algorithm to form the encoder network. With the specific architecture, the proposed network is similar to a manifold prior-based model, and can be trained patch by patch rather than the entire image. Moreover, we propose an additional unsupervised network to estimate the point spread function and spectral response function. Experimental results conducted on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
DIML/CVL RGB-D Dataset: 2M RGB-D Images of Natural Indoor and Outdoor Scenes
Authors: Jaehoon Cho, Dongbo Min, Youngjung Kim, Kwanghoon Sohn
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00

This manual is intended to provide a detailed description of the DIML/CVL RGB-D dataset. This dataset is comprised of 2M color images and their corresponding depth maps from a great variety of natural indoor and outdoor scenes. The indoor dataset was constructed using the Microsoft Kinect v2, while the outdoor dataset was built using the stereo cameras (ZED stereo camera and built-in stereo camera). Table I summarizes the details of our dataset, including acquisition, processing, format, and toolbox. Refer to Section II and III for more details.
Wide and Narrow: Video Prediction from Context and Motion
Authors: Jaehoon Cho, Jiyoung Lee, Changjae Oh, Wonil Song, Kwanghoon Sohn
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Video Prediction

Video prediction, forecasting the future frames from a sequence of input frames, is a challenging task since the view changes are influenced by various factors, such as the global context surrounding the scene and local motion dynamics. In this paper, we propose a new framework to integrate these complementary attributes to predict complex pixel dynamics through deep networks. We present global context propagation networks that iteratively aggregate the non-local neighboring representations to preserve the contextual information over the past frames. To capture the local motion pattern of objects, we also devise local filter memory networks that generate adaptive filter kernels by storing the prototypical motion of moving objects in the memory. The proposed framework, utilizing the outputs from both networks, can address blurry predictions and color distortion. We conduct experiments on Caltech pedestrian and UCF101 datasets, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results. Especially for multi-step prediction, we obtain an outstanding performance in quantitative and qualitative evaluation.
MHAttnSurv: Multi-Head Attention for Survival Prediction Using Whole-Slide Pathology Images
Authors: Shuai Jiang, Arief A. Suriawinata, Saeed Hassanpour
Date: 2021-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, Prediction, Prognosis, Survival Prediction, whole slide images

In pathology, whole-slide images (WSI) based survival prediction has attracted increasing interest. However, given the large size of WSIs and the lack of pathologist annotations, extracting the prognostic information from WSIs remains a challenging task. Previous studies have used multiple instance learning approaches to combine the information from multiple randomly sampled patches, but different visual patterns may contribute differently to prognosis prediction. In this study, we developed a multi-head attention approach to focus on various parts of a tumor slide, for more comprehensive information extraction from WSIs. We evaluated our approach on four cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. Our model achieved an average c-index of 0.640, outperforming two existing state-of-the-art approaches for WSI-based survival prediction, which have an average c-index of 0.603 and 0.619 on these datasets. Visualization of our attention maps reveals each attention head focuses synergistically on different morphological patterns.