pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Audio-visual Generalised Zero-shot Learning with Cross-modal Attention and Language
Authors: Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Lukas Riesch, A. Sophia Koepke, Zeynep Akata
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: GZSL Video Classification, Zero-Shot Learning, ZSL Video Classification

Learning to classify video data from classes not included in the training data, i.e. video-based zero-shot learning, is challenging. We conjecture that the natural alignment between the audio and visual modalities in video data provides a rich training signal for learning discriminative multi-modal representations. Focusing on the relatively underexplored task of audio-visual zero-shot learning, we propose to learn multi-modal representations from audio-visual data using cross-modal attention and exploit textual label embeddings for transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes. Taking this one step further, in our generalised audio-visual zero-shot learning setting, we include all the training classes in the test-time search space which act as distractors and increase the difficulty while making the setting more realistic. Due to the lack of a unified benchmark in this domain, we introduce a (generalised) zero-shot learning benchmark on three audio-visual datasets of varying sizes and difficulty, VGGSound, UCF, and ActivityNet, ensuring that the unseen test classes do not appear in the dataset used for supervised training of the backbone deep models. Comparing multiple relevant and recent methods, we demonstrate that our proposed AVCA model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ExplainableML/AVCA-GZSL}.
On the pitfalls of entropy-based uncertainty for multi-class semi-supervised segmentation
Authors: Martin Van Waerebeke, Gregory Lodygensky, Jose Dolz
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an appealing strategy to train deep models with limited supervision. Most prior literature under this learning paradigm resorts to dual-based architectures, typically composed of a teacher-student duple. To drive the learning of the student, many of these models leverage the aleatoric uncertainty derived from the entropy of the predictions. While this has shown to work well in a binary scenario, we demonstrate in this work that this strategy leads to suboptimal results in a multi-class context, a more realistic and challenging setting. We argue, indeed, that these approaches underperform due to the erroneous uncertainty approximations in the presence of inter-class overlap. Furthermore, we propose an alternative solution to compute the uncertainty in a multi-class setting, based on divergence distances and which account for inter-class overlap. We evaluate the proposed solution on a challenging multi-class segmentation dataset and in two well-known uncertainty-based segmentation methods. The reported results demonstrate that by simply replacing the mechanism used to compute the uncertainty, our proposed solution brings substantial improvement on tested setups.
Kubric: A scalable dataset generator
Authors: Klaus Greff, Francois Belletti, Lucas Beyer, Carl Doersch, Yilun Du, Daniel Duckworth, David J. Fleet, Dan Gnanapragasam, Florian Golemo, Charles Herrmann, Thomas Kipf, Abhijit Kundu, Dmitry Lagun, Issam Laradji, Hsueh-Ti, Liu, Henning Meyer, Yishu Miao, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Cengiz Oztireli, Etienne Pot, Noha Radwan, Daniel Rebain, Sara Sabour, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Matan Sela, Vincent Sitzmann, Austin Stone, Deqing Sun, Suhani Vora, Ziyu Wang, Tianhao Wu, Kwang Moo Yi, Fangcheng Zhong, Andrea Tagliasacchi
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Fairness, NeRF, Optical Flow Estimation

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.
An Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Approach for Multimodal 2D Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions
Authors: George Eskandar, Robert A. Marsden, Pavithran Pandiyan, Mario Döbler, Karim Guirguis, Bin Yang
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Multi-target Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Integrating different representations from complementary sensing modalities is crucial for robust scene interpretation in autonomous driving. While deep learning architectures that fuse vision and range data for 2D object detection have thrived in recent years, the corresponding modalities can degrade in adverse weather or lighting conditions, ultimately leading to a drop in performance. Although domain adaptation methods attempt to bridge the domain gap between source and target domains, they do not readily extend to heterogeneous data distributions. In this work, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework, which adapts a 2D object detector for RGB and lidar sensors to one or more target domains featuring adverse weather conditions. Our proposed approach consists of three components. First, a data augmentation scheme that simulates weather distortions is devised to add domain confusion and prevent overfitting on the source data. Second, to promote cross-domain foreground object alignment, we leverage the complementary features of multiple modalities through a multi-scale entropy-weighted domain discriminator. Finally, we use carefully designed pretext tasks to learn a more robust representation of the target domain data. Experiments performed on the DENSE dataset show that our method can substantially alleviate the domain gap under the single-target domain adaptation (STDA) setting and the less explored yet more general multi-target domain adaptation (MTDA) setting.
Cartoon-texture evolution for two-region image segmentation
Authors: Laura Antonelli, Valentina De Simone, Marco Viola
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Two-region image segmentation is the process of dividing an image into two regions of interest, i.e., the foreground and the background. To this aim, Chan et al. [Chan, Esedo\=glu, Nikolova, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 66(5), 1632-1648, 2006] designed a model well suited for smooth images. One drawback of this model is that it may produce a bad segmentation when the image contains oscillatory components. Based on a cartoon-texture decomposition of the image to be segmented, we propose a new model that is able to produce an accurate segmentation of images also containing noise or oscillatory information like texture. The novel model leads to a non-smooth constrained optimization problem which we solve by means of the ADMM method. The convergence of the numerical scheme is also proved. Several experiments on smooth, noisy, and textural images show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Weakly Supervised Learning of Keypoints for 6D Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Meng Tian, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Keypoint Detection, Object, Pose Estimation, Weakly-supervised Learning

State-of-the-art approaches for 6D object pose estimation require large amounts of labeled data to train the deep networks. However, the acquisition of 6D object pose annotations is tedious and labor-intensive in large quantity. To alleviate this problem, we propose a weakly supervised 6D object pose estimation approach based on 2D keypoint detection. Our method trains only on image pairs with known relative transformations between their viewpoints. Specifically, we assign a set of arbitrarily chosen 3D keypoints to represent each unknown target 3D object and learn a network to detect their 2D projections that comply with the relative camera viewpoints. During inference, our network first infers the 2D keypoints from the query image and a given labeled reference image. We then use these 2D keypoints and the arbitrarily chosen 3D keypoints retained from training to infer the 6D object pose. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art fully supervised approaches.
Towards Unbiased Multi-label Zero-Shot Learning with Pyramid and Semantic Attention
Authors: Ziming Liu, Song Guo, Jingcai Guo, Yuanyuan Xu, Fushuo Huo
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-label zero-shot learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Multi-label zero-shot learning extends conventional single-label zero-shot learning to a more realistic scenario that aims at recognizing multiple unseen labels of classes for each input sample. Existing works usually exploit attention mechanism to generate the correlation among different labels. However, most of them are usually biased on several major classes while neglect most of the minor classes with the same importance in input samples, and may thus result in overly diffused attention maps that cannot sufficiently cover minor classes. We argue that disregarding the connection between major and minor classes, i.e., correspond to the global and local information, respectively, is the cause of the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of unbiased multi-label zero-shot learning, by considering various class-specific regions to calibrate the training process of the classifier. Specifically, Pyramid Feature Attention (PFA) is proposed to build the correlation between global and local information of samples to balance the presence of each class. Meanwhile, for the generated semantic representations of input samples, we propose Semantic Attention (SA) to strengthen the element-wise correlation among these vectors, which can encourage the coordinated representation of them. Extensive experiments on the large-scale multi-label zero-shot benchmarks NUS-WIDE and Open-Image demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses other representative methods by significant margins.
Graph Neural Networks for Image Classification and Reinforcement Learning using Graph representations
Authors: Naman Goyal, David Steiner
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Rubik's Cube

In this paper, we will evaluate the performance of graph neural networks in two distinct domains: computer vision and reinforcement learning. In the computer vision section, we seek to learn whether a novel non-redundant representation for images as graphs can improve performance over trivial pixel to node mapping on a graph-level prediction graph, specifically image classification. For the reinforcement learning section, we seek to learn if explicitly modeling solving a Rubik's cube as a graph problem can improve performance over a standard model-free technique with no inductive bias.
Multi-Modal Attribute Extraction for E-Commerce
Authors: Aloïs De la Comble, Anuvabh Dutt, Pablo Montalvo, Aghiles Salah
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Extraction, Descriptive, Navigate

To improve users' experience as they navigate the myriad of options offered by online marketplaces, it is essential to have well-organized product catalogs. One key ingredient to that is the availability of product attributes such as color or material. However, on some marketplaces such as Rakuten-Ichiba, which we focus on, attribute information is often incomplete or even missing. One promising solution to this problem is to rely on deep models pre-trained on large corpora to predict attributes from unstructured data, such as product descriptive texts and images (referred to as modalities in this paper). However, we find that achieving satisfactory performance with this approach is not straightforward but rather the result of several refinements, which we discuss in this paper. We provide a detailed description of our approach to attribute extraction, from investigating strong single-modality methods, to building a solid multimodal model combining textual and visual information. One key component of our multimodal architecture is a novel approach to seamlessly combine modalities, which is inspired by our single-modality investigations. In practice, we notice that this new modality-merging method may suffer from a modality collapse issue, i.e., it neglects one modality. Hence, we further propose a mitigation to this problem based on a principled regularization scheme. Experiments on Rakuten-Ichiba data provide empirical evidence for the benefits of our approach, which has been also successfully deployed to Rakuten-Ichiba. We also report results on publicly available datasets showing that our model is competitive compared to several recent multimodal and unimodal baselines.
Depth-SIMS: Semi-Parametric Image and Depth Synthesis
Authors: Valentina Musat, Daniele De Martini, Matthew Gadd, Paul Newman
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion, Image Generation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper we present a compositing image synthesis method that generates RGB canvases with well aligned segmentation maps and sparse depth maps, coupled with an in-painting network that transforms the RGB canvases into high quality RGB images and the sparse depth maps into pixel-wise dense depth maps. We benchmark our method in terms of structural alignment and image quality, showing an increase in mIoU over SOTA by 3.7 percentage points and a highly competitive FID. Furthermore, we analyse the quality of the generated data as training data for semantic segmentation and depth completion, and show that our approach is more suited for this purpose than other methods.
Screentone-Preserved Manga Retargeting
Authors: Minshan Xie, Menghan Xia, Xueting Liu, Tien-Tsin Wong
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

As a popular comic style, manga offers a unique impression by utilizing a rich set of bitonal patterns, or screentones, for illustration. However, screentones can easily be contaminated with visual-unpleasant aliasing and/or blurriness after resampling, which harms its visualization on displays of diverse resolutions. To address this problem, we propose the first manga retargeting method that synthesizes a rescaled manga image while retaining the screentone in each screened region. This is a non-trivial task as accurate region-wise segmentation remains challenging. Fortunately, the rescaled manga shares the same region-wise screentone correspondences with the original manga, which enables us to simplify the screentone synthesis problem as an anchor-based proposals selection and rearrangement problem. Specifically, we design a novel manga sampling strategy to generate aliasing-free screentone proposals, based on hierarchical grid-based anchors that connect the correspondences between the original and the target rescaled manga. Furthermore, a Recurrent Proposal Selection Module (RPSM) is proposed to adaptively integrate these proposals for target screentone synthesis. Besides, to deal with the translation insensitivity nature of screentones, we propose a translation-invariant screentone loss to facilitate the training convergence. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method, and notably compelling results are achieved compared to existing alternative techniques.
FloorGenT: Generative Vector Graphic Model of Floor Plans for Robotics
Authors: Ludvig Ericson, Patric Jensfelt
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00

Floor plans are the basis of reasoning in and communicating about indoor environments. In this paper, we show that by modelling floor plans as sequences of line segments seen from a particular point of view, recent advances in autoregressive sequence modelling can be leveraged to model and predict floor plans. The line segments are canonicalized and translated to sequence of tokens and an attention-based neural network is used to fit a one-step distribution over next tokens. We fit the network to sequences derived from a set of large-scale floor plans, and demonstrate the capabilities of the model in four scenarios: novel floor plan generation, completion of partially observed floor plans, generation of floor plans from simulated sensor data, and finally, the applicability of a floor plan model in predicting the shortest distance with partial knowledge of the environment.
Self-supervised Implicit Glyph Attention for Text Recognition
Authors: Tongkun Guan, Chaochen Gu, Jingzheng Tu, Xue Yang, Qi Feng, Yudi Zhao, Xiaokang Yang, Wei Shen
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition, Text Segmentation

The attention mechanism has become the \emph{de facto} module in scene text recognition (STR) methods, due to its capability of extracting character-level representations. These methods can be summarized into implicit attention based and supervised attention based, depended on how the attention is computed, i.e., implicit attention and supervised attention are learned from sequence-level text annotations and or character-level bounding box annotations, respectively. Implicit attention, as it may extract coarse or even incorrect spatial regions as character attention, is prone to suffering from an alignment-drifted issue. Supervised attention can alleviate the above issue, but it is character category-specific, which requires extra laborious character-level bounding box annotations and would be memory-intensive when handling languages with larger character categories. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel attention mechanism for STR, self-supervised implicit glyph attention (SIGA). SIGA delineates the glyph structures of text images by jointly self-supervised text segmentation and implicit attention alignment, which serve as the supervision to improve attention correctness without extra character-level annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that SIGA performs consistently and significantly better than previous attention-based STR methods, in terms of both attention correctness and final recognition performance on publicly available context benchmarks and our contributed contextless benchmarks.
Spatio-temporal Gait Feature with Global Distance Alignment
Authors: Yifan Chen, Yang Zhao, Xuelong Li
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition

Gait recognition is an important recognition technology, because gait is not easy to camouflage and does not need cooperation to recognize subjects. However, many existing methods are inadequate in preserving both temporal information and fine-grained information, thus reducing its discrimination. This problem is more serious when the subjects with similar walking postures are identified. In this paper, we try to enhance the discrimination of spatio-temporal gait features from two aspects: effective extraction of spatio-temporal gait features and reasonable refinement of extracted features. Thus our method is proposed, it consists of Spatio-temporal Feature Extraction (SFE) and Global Distance Alignment (GDA). SFE uses Temporal Feature Fusion (TFF) and Fine-grained Feature Extraction (FFE) to effectively extract the spatio-temporal features from raw silhouettes. GDA uses a large number of unlabeled gait data in real life as a benchmark to refine the extracted spatio-temporal features. GDA can make the extracted features have low inter-class similarity and high intra-class similarity, thus enhancing their discrimination. Extensive experiments on mini-OUMVLP and CASIA-B have proved that we have a better result than some state-of-the-art methods.
Adversarial Texture for Fooling Person Detectors in the Physical World
Authors: Zhanhao Hu, Siyuan Huang, Xiaopei Zhu, Fuchun Sun, Bo Zhang, Xiaolin Hu
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1

Nowadays, cameras equipped with AI systems can capture and analyze images to detect people automatically. However, the AI system can make mistakes when receiving deliberately designed patterns in the real world, i.e., physical adversarial examples. Prior works have shown that it is possible to print adversarial patches on clothes to evade DNN-based person detectors. However, these adversarial examples could have catastrophic drops in the attack success rate when the viewing angle (i.e., the camera's angle towards the object) changes. To perform a multi-angle attack, we propose Adversarial Texture (AdvTexture). AdvTexture can cover clothes with arbitrary shapes so that people wearing such clothes can hide from person detectors from different viewing angles. We propose a generative method, named Toroidal-Cropping-based Expandable Generative Attack (TC-EGA), to craft AdvTexture with repetitive structures. We printed several pieces of cloth with AdvTexure and then made T-shirts, skirts, and dresses in the physical world. Experiments showed that these clothes could fool person detectors in the physical world.
L2CS-Net: Fine-Grained Gaze Estimation in Unconstrained Environments
Authors: Ahmed A. Abdelrahman, Thorsten Hempel, Aly Khalifa, Ayoub Al-Hamadi
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Gaze Estimation, Gaze Prediction

Human gaze is a crucial cue used in various applications such as human-robot interaction and virtual reality. Recently, convolution neural network (CNN) approaches have made notable progress in predicting gaze direction. However, estimating gaze in-the-wild is still a challenging problem due to the uniqueness of eye appearance, lightning conditions, and the diversity of head pose and gaze directions. In this paper, we propose a robust CNN-based model for predicting gaze in unconstrained settings. We propose to regress each gaze angle separately to improve the per-angel prediction accuracy, which will enhance the overall gaze performance. In addition, we use two identical losses, one for each angle, to improve network learning and increase its generalization. We evaluate our model with two popular datasets collected with unconstrained settings. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 3.92{\deg} and 10.41{\deg} on MPIIGaze and Gaze360 datasets, respectively. We make our code open source at https://github.com/Ahmednull/L2CS-Net.
Joint brain tumor segmentation from multi MR sequences through a deep convolutional neural network
Authors: Farzaneh Dehghani, Alireza Karimian, Hossein Arabi
Date: 2022-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is highly contributive in diagnosing and treatment planning. The manual brain tumor delineation is a time-consuming and tedious task and varies depending on the radiologists skill. Automated brain tumor segmentation is of high importance, and does not depend on either inter or intra-observation. The objective of this study is to automate the delineation of brain tumors from the FLAIR, T1 weighted, T2 weighted, and T1 weighted contrast-enhanced MR sequences through a deep learning approach, with a focus on determining which MR sequence alone or which combination thereof would lead to the highest accuracy therein.