pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
UniCon: Unified Context Network for Robust Active Speaker Detection
Authors: Yuanhang Zhang, Susan Liang, Shuang Yang, Xiao Liu, Zhongqin Wu, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection, Audio-Visual Active Speaker Detection

We introduce a new efficient framework, the Unified Context Network (UniCon), for robust active speaker detection (ASD). Traditional methods for ASD usually operate on each candidate's pre-cropped face track separately and do not sufficiently consider the relationships among the candidates. This potentially limits performance, especially in challenging scenarios with low-resolution faces, multiple candidates, etc. Our solution is a novel, unified framework that focuses on jointly modeling multiple types of contextual information: spatial context to indicate the position and scale of each candidate's face, relational context to capture the visual relationships among the candidates and contrast audio-visual affinities with each other, and temporal context to aggregate long-term information and smooth out local uncertainties. Based on such information, our model optimizes all candidates in a unified process for robust and reliable ASD. A thorough ablation study is performed on several challenging ASD benchmarks under different settings. In particular, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin of about 15% mean Average Precision (mAP) absolute on two challenging subsets: one with three candidate speakers, and the other with faces smaller than 64 pixels. Together, our UniCon achieves 92.0% mAP on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker validation set, surpassing 90% for the first time on this challenging dataset at the time of submission. Project website: https://unicon-asd.github.io/.
Adaptive Normalized Representation Learning for Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing
Authors: Shubao Liu, Ke-Yue Zhang, Taiping Yao, Mingwei Bi, Shouhong Ding, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Face Anti-Spoofing, Representation Learning

With various face presentation attacks arising under unseen scenarios, face anti-spoofing (FAS) based on domain generalization (DG) has drawn growing attention due to its robustness. Most existing methods utilize DG frameworks to align the features to seek a compact and generalized feature space. However, little attention has been paid to the feature extraction process for the FAS task, especially the influence of normalization, which also has a great impact on the generalization of the learned representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel perspective of face anti-spoofing that focuses on the normalization selection in the feature extraction process. Concretely, an Adaptive Normalized Representation Learning (ANRL) framework is devised, which adaptively selects feature normalization methods according to the inputs, aiming to learn domain-agnostic and discriminative representation. Moreover, to facilitate the representation learning, Dual Calibration Constraints are designed, including Inter-Domain Compatible loss and Inter-Class Separable loss, which provide a better optimization direction for generalizable representation. Extensive experiments and visualizations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the SOTA competitors.
Object Wake-up: 3D Object Rigging from a Single Image
Authors: Ji Yang, Xinxin Zuo, Sen Wang, Zhenbo Yu, Xingyu Li, Bingbing Ni, Minglun Gong, Li Cheng
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Object, Object Reconstruction

Given a single image of a general object such as a chair, could we also restore its articulated 3D shape similar to human modeling, so as to animate its plausible articulations and diverse motions? This is an interesting new question that may have numerous downstream augmented reality and virtual reality applications. Comparing with previous efforts on object manipulation, our work goes beyond 2D manipulation and rigid deformation, and involves articulated manipulation. To achieve this goal, we propose an automated approach to build such 3D generic objects from single images and embed articulated skeletons in them. Specifically, our framework starts by reconstructing the 3D object from an input image. Afterwards, to extract skeletons for generic 3D objects, we develop a novel skeleton prediction method with a multi-head structure for skeleton probability field estimation by utilizing the deep implicit functions. A dataset of generic 3D objects with ground-truth annotated skeletons is collected. Empirically our approach is demonstrated with satisfactory performance on public datasets as well as our in-house dataset; our results surpass those of the state-of-the-arts by a noticeable margin on both 3D reconstruction and skeleton prediction.
Generalizable Mixed-Precision Quantization via Attribution Rank Preservation
Authors: Ziwei Wang, Han Xiao, Jiwen Lu, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Quantization

In this paper, we propose a generalizable mixed-precision quantization (GMPQ) method for efficient inference. Conventional methods require the consistency of datasets for bitwidth search and model deployment to guarantee the policy optimality, leading to heavy search cost on challenging largescale datasets in realistic applications. On the contrary, our GMPQ searches the mixed-quantization policy that can be generalized to largescale datasets with only a small amount of data, so that the search cost is significantly reduced without performance degradation. Specifically, we observe that locating network attribution correctly is general ability for accurate visual analysis across different data distribution. Therefore, despite of pursuing higher model accuracy and complexity, we preserve attribution rank consistency between the quantized models and their full-precision counterparts via efficient capacity-aware attribution imitation for generalizable mixed-precision quantization strategy search. Extensive experiments show that our method obtains competitive accuracy-complexity trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art mixed-precision networks in significantly reduced search cost. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/GMPQ.git.
Instance Similarity Learning for Unsupervised Feature Representation
Authors: Ziwei Wang, Yunsong Wang, Ziyi Wu, Jiwen Lu, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

In this paper, we propose an instance similarity learning (ISL) method for unsupervised feature representation. Conventional methods assign close instance pairs in the feature space with high similarity, which usually leads to wrong pairwise relationship for large neighborhoods because the Euclidean distance fails to depict the true semantic similarity on the feature manifold. On the contrary, our method mines the feature manifold in an unsupervised manner, through which the semantic similarity among instances is learned in order to obtain discriminative representations. Specifically, we employ the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to mine the underlying feature manifold, where the generated features are applied as the proxies to progressively explore the feature manifold so that the semantic similarity among instances is acquired as reliable pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments on image classification demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/ISL.git.
WSDesc: Weakly Supervised 3D Local Descriptor Learning for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Lei LI, Hongbo Fu, Maks Ovsjanikov
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Point Cloud Registration

In this work, we present a novel method called WSDesc to learn 3D local descriptors in a weakly supervised manner for robust point cloud registration. Our work builds upon recent 3D CNN-based descriptor extractors, which leverage a voxel-based representation to parameterize local geometry of 3D points. Instead of using a predefined fixed-size local support in voxelization, we propose to learn the optimal support in a data-driven manner. To this end, we design a novel differentiable voxelization layer that can back-propagate the gradient to the support size optimization. To train the extracted descriptors, we propose a novel registration loss based on the deviation from rigidity of 3D transformations, and the loss is weakly supervised by the prior knowledge that the input point clouds have partial overlap, without requiring ground-truth alignment information. Through extensive experiments, we show that our learned descriptors yield superior performance on existing geometric registration benchmarks.
Unifying Global-Local Representations in Salient Object Detection with Transformer
Authors: Sucheng Ren, Qiang Wen, Nanxuan Zhao, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

The fully convolutional network (FCN) has dominated salient object detection for a long period. However, the locality of CNN requires the model deep enough to have a global receptive field and such a deep model always leads to the loss of local details. In this paper, we introduce a new attention-based encoder, vision transformer, into salient object detection to ensure the globalization of the representations from shallow to deep layers. With the global view in very shallow layers, the transformer encoder preserves more local representations to recover the spatial details in final saliency maps. Besides, as each layer can capture a global view of its previous layer, adjacent layers can implicitly maximize the representation differences and minimize the redundant features, making that every output feature of transformer layers contributes uniquely for final prediction. To decode features from the transformer, we propose a simple yet effective deeply-transformed decoder. The decoder densely decodes and upsamples the transformer features, generating the final saliency map with less noise injection. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms other FCN-based and transformer-based methods in five benchmarks by a large margin, with an average of 12.17% improvement in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Code will be available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/GLSTR.
SLAMP: Stochastic Latent Appearance and Motion Prediction
Authors: Adil Kaan Akan, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem, Fatma Güney
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, motion prediction, Prediction, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Motion is an important cue for video prediction and often utilized by separating video content into static and dynamic components. Most of the previous work utilizing motion is deterministic but there are stochastic methods that can model the inherent uncertainty of the future. Existing stochastic models either do not reason about motion explicitly or make limiting assumptions about the static part. In this paper, we reason about appearance and motion in the video stochastically by predicting the future based on the motion history. Explicit reasoning about motion without history already reaches the performance of current stochastic models. The motion history further improves the results by allowing to predict consistent dynamics several frames into the future. Our model performs comparably to the state-of-the-art models on the generic video prediction datasets, however, significantly outperforms them on two challenging real-world autonomous driving datasets with complex motion and dynamic background.
Efficient Fourier single-pixel imaging with Gaussian random sampling
Authors: Ziheng Qiu, Xinyi Guo, Tianao Lu, Pan Qi, Zibang Zhang, Jingang Zhong
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

Fourier single-pixel imaging (FSI) is a branch of single-pixel imaging techniques. It uses Fourier basis patterns as structured patterns for spatial information acquisition in the Fourier domain. However, the spatial resolution of the image reconstructed by FSI mainly depends on the number of Fourier coefficients sampled. The reconstruction of a high-resolution image typically requires a number of Fourier coefficients to be sampled, and therefore takes a long data acquisition time. Here we propose a new sampling strategy for FSI. It allows FSI to reconstruct a clear and sharp image with a reduced number of measurements. The core of the proposed sampling strategy is to perform a variable density sampling in the Fourier space and, more importantly, the density with respect to the importance of Fourier coefficients is subject to a one-dimensional Gaussian function. Combined with compressive sensing, the proposed sampling strategy enables better reconstruction quality than conventional sampling strategies, especially when the sampling ratio is low. We experimentally demonstrate compressive FSI combined with the proposed sampling strategy is able to reconstruct a sharp and clear image of 256-by-256 pixels with a sampling ratio of 10%. The proposed method enables fast single-pixel imaging and provides a new approach for efficient spatial information acquisition.
O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning
Authors: Fenglin Liu, Xuancheng Ren, Xian Wu, Bang Yang, Shen Ge, Yuexian Zou, Xu sun
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Attribute, Caption Generation, Image Captioning, Text Generation, Video Captioning, Video Understanding

Video captioning combines video understanding and language generation. Different from image captioning that describes a static image with details of almost every object, video captioning usually considers a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects, e.g., the objects that stay in focus regardless of the changing background. Therefore, detecting and properly accommodating focused objects is critical in video captioning. To enforce the description of focused objects and achieve controllable video captioning, we propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach (O2NA), which performs caption generation in three steps: 1) identify the focused objects and predict their locations in the target caption; 2) generate the related attribute words and relation words of these focused objects to form a draft caption; and 3) combine video information to refine the draft caption to a fluent final caption. Since the focused objects are generated and located ahead of other words, it is difficult to apply the word-by-word autoregressive generation process; instead, we adopt a non-autoregressive approach. The experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., MSR-VTT and MSVD, demonstrate the effectiveness of O2NA, which achieves results competitive with the state-of-the-arts but with both higher diversity and higher inference speed.
Exploring Structure Consistency for Deep Model Watermarking
Authors: Jie Zhang, Dongdong Chen, Jing Liao, Han Fang, Zehua Ma, Weiming Zhang, Gang Hua, Nenghai Yu
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, model

The intellectual property (IP) of Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be easily ``stolen'' by surrogate model attack. There has been significant progress in solutions to protect the IP of DNN models in classification tasks. However, little attention has been devoted to the protection of DNNs in image processing tasks. By utilizing consistent invisible spatial watermarks, one recent work first considered model watermarking for deep image processing networks and demonstrated its efficacy in many downstream tasks. Nevertheless, it highly depends on the hypothesis that the embedded watermarks in the network outputs are consistent. When the attacker uses some common data augmentation attacks (e.g., rotate, crop, and resize) during surrogate model training, it will totally fail because the underlying watermark consistency is destroyed. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new watermarking methodology, namely ``structure consistency'', based on which a new deep structure-aligned model watermarking algorithm is designed. Specifically, the embedded watermarks are designed to be aligned with physically consistent image structures, such as edges or semantic regions. Experiments demonstrate that our method is much more robust than the baseline method in resisting data augmentation attacks for model IP protection. Besides that, we further test the generalization ability and robustness of our method to a broader range of circumvention attacks.
Simultaneous Semantic and Collision Learning for 6-DoF Grasp Pose Estimation
Authors: Yiming Li, Tao Kong, Ruihang Chu, Yifeng Li, Peng Wang, Lei LI
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Grasping in cluttered scenes has always been a great challenge for robots, due to the requirement of the ability to well understand the scene and object information. Previous works usually assume that the geometry information of the objects is available, or utilize a step-wise, multi-stage strategy to predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses. In this work, we propose to formalize the 6-DoF grasp pose estimation as a simultaneous multi-task learning problem. In a unified framework, we jointly predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses, instance semantic segmentation, and collision information. The whole framework is jointly optimized and end-to-end differentiable. Our model is evaluated on large-scale benchmarks as well as the real robot system. On the public dataset, our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (+4.08 AP). We also demonstrate the implementation of our model on a real robotic platform and show that the robot can accurately grasp target objects in cluttered scenarios with a high success rate. Project link: https://openbyterobotics.github.io/sscl
Learning to Design and Construct Bridge without Blueprint
Authors: Yunfei Li, Tao Kong, Lei LI, Yifeng Li, Yi Wu
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Motion Planning

Autonomous assembly has been a desired functionality of many intelligent robot systems. We study a new challenging assembly task, designing and constructing a bridge without a blueprint. In this task, the robot needs to first design a feasible bridge architecture for arbitrarily wide cliffs and then manipulate the blocks reliably to construct a stable bridge according to the proposed design. In this paper, we propose a bi-level approach to tackle this task. At the high level, the system learns a bridge blueprint policy in a physical simulator using deep reinforcement learning and curriculum learning. A policy is represented as an attention-based neural network with object-centric input, which enables generalization to different numbers of blocks and cliff widths. For low-level control, we implement a motion-planning-based policy for real-robot motion control, which can be directly combined with a trained blueprint policy for real-world bridge construction without tuning. In our field study, our bi-level robot system demonstrates the capability of manipulating blocks to construct a diverse set of bridges with different architectures.
Poison Ink: Robust and Invisible Backdoor Attack
Authors: Jie Zhang, Dongdong Chen, Qidong Huang, Jing Liao, Weiming Zhang, Huamin Feng, Gang Hua, Nenghai Yu
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Backdoor Attack, Data Poisoning

Recent research shows deep neural networks are vulnerable to different types of attacks, such as adversarial attack, data poisoning attack and backdoor attack. Among them, backdoor attack is the most cunning one and can occur in almost every stage of deep learning pipeline. Therefore, backdoor attack has attracted lots of interests from both academia and industry. However, most existing backdoor attack methods are either visible or fragile to some effortless pre-processing such as common data transformations. To address these limitations, we propose a robust and invisible backdoor attack called "Poison Ink". Concretely, we first leverage the image structures as target poisoning areas, and fill them with poison ink (information) to generate the trigger pattern. As the image structure can keep its semantic meaning during the data transformation, such trigger pattern is inherently robust to data transformations. Then we leverage a deep injection network to embed such trigger pattern into the cover image to achieve stealthiness. Compared to existing popular backdoor attack methods, Poison Ink outperforms both in stealthiness and robustness. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate Poison Ink is not only general to different datasets and network architectures, but also flexible for different attack scenarios. Besides, it also has very strong resistance against many state-of-the-art defense techniques.
Comparison of Lossless Image Formats
Authors: David Barina
Date: 2021-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Video Compression

In recent years, a bag with image and video compression formats has been torn. However, most of them are focused on lossy compression and only marginally support the lossless mode. In this paper, I will focus on lossless formats and the critical question: "Which one is the most efficient?" It turned out that FLIF is currently the most efficient format for lossless image compression. This finding is in contrast to that FLIF developers stopped its development in favor of JPEG XL.
Tikhonov Regularization of Circle-Valued Signals
Authors: Laurent Condat
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00

It is common to have to process signals or images whose values are cyclic and can be represented as points on the complex circle, like wrapped phases, angles, orientations, or color hues. We consider a Tikhonov-type regularization model to smoothen or interpolate circle-valued signals defined on arbitrary graphs. We propose a convex relaxation of this nonconvex problem as a semidefinite program, and an efficient algorithm to solve it.
VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search
Authors: Shaunak Mishra, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Gaurav Srivastava, Maxim Sviridenko
Date: 2021-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Keyword Extraction, Marketing, Sentence

Numerous online stock image libraries offer high quality yet copyright free images for use in marketing campaigns. To assist advertisers in navigating such third party libraries, we study the problem of automatically fetching relevant ad images given the ad text (via a short textual query for images). Motivated by our observations in logged data on ad image search queries (given ad text), we formulate a keyword extraction problem, where a keyword extracted from the ad text (or its augmented version) serves as the ad image query. In this context, we propose VisualTextRank: an unsupervised method to (i) augment input ad text using semantically similar ads, and (ii) extract the image query from the augmented ad text. VisualTextRank builds on prior work on graph based context extraction (biased TextRank in particular) by leveraging both the text and image of similar ads for better keyword extraction, and using advertiser category specific biasing with sentence-BERT embeddings. Using data collected from the Verizon Media Native (Yahoo Gemini) ad platform's stock image search feature for onboarding advertisers, we demonstrate the superiority of VisualTextRank compared to competitive keyword extraction baselines (including an $11\%$ accuracy lift over biased TextRank). For the case when the stock image library is restricted to English queries, we show the effectiveness of VisualTextRank on multilingual ads (translated to English) while leveraging semantically similar English ads. Online tests with a simplified version of VisualTextRank led to a 28.7% increase in the usage of stock image search, and a 41.6% increase in the advertiser onboarding rate in the Verizon Media Native ad platform.