pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multimodal Clustering Networks for Self-supervised Learning from Unlabeled Videos
Authors: Brian Chen, Andrew Rouditchenko, Kevin Duarte, Hilde Kuehne, Samuel Thomas, Angie Boggust, Rameswar Panda, Brian Kingsbury, Rogerio Feris, David Harwath, James Glass, Michael Picheny, Shih-Fu Chang
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Action Localization, Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Long Video Retrieval (Background Removed), Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning, Temporal Action Localization, Text to Video Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Multimodal self-supervised learning is getting more and more attention as it allows not only to train large networks without human supervision but also to search and retrieve data across various modalities. In this context, this paper proposes a self-supervised training framework that learns a common multimodal embedding space that, in addition to sharing representations across different modalities, enforces a grouping of semantically similar instances. To this end, we extend the concept of instance-level contrastive learning with a multimodal clustering step in the training pipeline to capture semantic similarities across modalities. The resulting embedding space enables retrieval of samples across all modalities, even from unseen datasets and different domains. To evaluate our approach, we train our model on the HowTo100M dataset and evaluate its zero-shot retrieval capabilities in two challenging domains, namely text-to-video retrieval, and temporal action localization, showing state-of-the-art results on four different datasets.
Exploiting Explanations for Model Inversion Attacks
Authors: Xuejun Zhao, Wencan Zhang, Xiaokui Xiao, Brian Y. Lim
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), model

The successful deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in many domains from healthcare to hiring requires their responsible use, particularly in model explanations and privacy. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provides more information to help users to understand model decisions, yet this additional knowledge exposes additional risks for privacy attacks. Hence, providing explanation harms privacy. We study this risk for image-based model inversion attacks and identified several attack architectures with increasing performance to reconstruct private image data from model explanations. We have developed several multi-modal transposed CNN architectures that achieve significantly higher inversion performance than using the target model prediction only. These XAI-aware inversion models were designed to exploit the spatial knowledge in image explanations. To understand which explanations have higher privacy risk, we analyzed how various explanation types and factors influence inversion performance. In spite of some models not providing explanations, we further demonstrate increased inversion performance even for non-explainable target models by exploiting explanations of surrogate models through attention transfer. This method first inverts an explanation from the target prediction, then reconstructs the target image. These threats highlight the urgent and significant privacy risks of explanations and calls attention for new privacy preservation techniques that balance the dual-requirement for AI explainability and privacy.
Appearance-based Gaze Estimation With Deep Learning: A Review and Benchmark
Authors: Yihua Cheng, Haofei Wang, Yiwei Bao, Feng Lu
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Gaze Estimation

Human gaze provides valuable information on human focus and intentions, making it a crucial area of research. Recently, deep learning has revolutionized appearance-based gaze estimation. However, due to the unique features of gaze estimation research, such as the unfair comparison between 2D gaze positions and 3D gaze vectors and the different pre-processing and post-processing methods, there is a lack of a definitive guideline for developing deep learning-based gaze estimation algorithms. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the appearance-based gaze estimation methods using deep learning. Firstly, we survey the existing gaze estimation algorithms along the typical gaze estimation pipeline: deep feature extraction, deep learning model design, personal calibration and platforms. Secondly, to fairly compare the performance of different approaches, we summarize the data pre-processing and post-processing methods, including face/eye detection, data rectification, 2D/3D gaze conversion and gaze origin conversion. Finally, we set up a comprehensive benchmark for deep learning-based gaze estimation. We characterize all the public datasets and provide the source code of typical gaze estimation algorithms. This paper serves not only as a reference to develop deep learning-based gaze estimation methods, but also a guideline for future gaze estimation research. The project web page can be found at https://phi-ai.buaa.edu.cn/Gazehub.
Clean Images are Hard to Reblur: Exploiting the Ill-Posed Inverse Task for Dynamic Scene Deblurring
Authors: Seungjun Nah, Sanghyun Son, Jaerin Lee, Kyoung Mu Lee
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Deblurring

The goal of dynamic scene deblurring is to remove the motion blur in a given image. Typical learning-based approaches implement their solutions by minimizing the L1 or L2 distance between the output and the reference sharp image. Recent attempts adopt visual recognition features in training to improve the perceptual quality. However, those features are primarily designed to capture high-level contexts rather than low-level structures such as blurriness. Instead, we propose a more direct way to make images sharper by exploiting the inverse task of deblurring, namely, reblurring. Reblurring amplifies the remaining blur to rebuild the original blur, however, a well-deblurred clean image with zero-magnitude blur is hard to reblur. Thus, we design two types of reblurring loss functions for better deblurring. The supervised reblurring loss at training stage compares the amplified blur between the deblurred and the sharp images. The self-supervised reblurring loss at inference stage inspects if there noticeable blur remains in the deblurred. Our experimental results on large-scale benchmarks and real images demonstrate the effectiveness of the reblurring losses in improving the perceptual quality of the deblurred images in terms of NIQE and LPIPS scores as well as visual sharpness.
CAGAN: Text-To-Image Generation with Combined Attention GANs
Authors: Henning Schulze, Dogucan Yaman, Alexander Waibel
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Generating images according to natural language descriptions is a challenging task. Prior research has mainly focused to enhance the quality of generation by investigating the use of spatial attention and/or textual attention thereby neglecting the relationship between channels. In this work, we propose the Combined Attention Generative Adversarial Network (CAGAN) to generate photo-realistic images according to textual descriptions. The proposed CAGAN utilises two attention models: word attention to draw different sub-regions conditioned on related words; and squeeze-and-excitation attention to capture non-linear interaction among channels. With spectral normalisation to stabilise training, our proposed CAGAN improves the state of the art on the IS and FID on the CUB dataset and the FID on the more challenging COCO dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that judging a model by a single evaluation metric can be misleading by developing an additional model adding local self-attention which scores a higher IS, outperforming the state of the art on the CUB dataset, but generates unrealistic images through feature repetition.
CompOFA: Compound Once-For-All Networks for Faster Multi-Platform Deployment
Authors: Manas Sahni, Shreya Varshini, Alind Khare, Alexey Tumanov
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Diversity, GPU

The emergence of CNNs in mainstream deployment has necessitated methods to design and train efficient architectures tailored to maximize the accuracy under diverse hardware & latency constraints. To scale these resource-intensive tasks with an increasing number of deployment targets, Once-For-All (OFA) proposed an approach to jointly train several models at once with a constant training cost. However, this cost remains as high as 40-50 GPU days and also suffers from a combinatorial explosion of sub-optimal model configurations. We seek to reduce this search space -- and hence the training budget -- by constraining search to models close to the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier. We incorporate insights of compound relationships between model dimensions to build CompOFA, a design space smaller by several orders of magnitude. Through experiments on ImageNet, we demonstrate that even with simple heuristics we can achieve a 2x reduction in training time and 216x speedup in model search/extraction time compared to the state of the art, without loss of Pareto optimality! We also show that this smaller design space is dense enough to support equally accurate models for a similar diversity of hardware and latency targets, while also reducing the complexity of the training and subsequent extraction algorithms.
Analyzing Green View Index and Green View Index best path using Google Street View and deep learning
Authors: Jiahao Zhang, Anqi Hu
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Semantic Segmentation

As an important part of urban landscape research, analyzing and studying street-level greenery can increase the understanding of a city's greenery, contributing to better urban living environment planning and design. Planning the best path of urban greenery is a means to effectively maximize the use of urban greenery, which plays a positive role in the physical and mental health of urban residents and the path planning of visitors. In this paper, we used Google Street View (GSV) to obtain street view images of Osaka City. The semantic segmentation model is adopted to segment the street view images and analyze the Green View Index (GVI) of Osaka City. Based on the GVI, we take advantage of the adjacency matrix and Floyd-Warshall Algorithm to calculate Green View Index best path, solving the limitations of ArcGIS software. Our analysis not only allows the calculation of specific routes for the GVI best paths but also realizes the visualization and integration of neighborhood urban greenery. By summarizing all the data, we can conduct an intuitive feeling and objective analysis of the street-level greenery in the research area. Based on this, such as urban residents and visitors can maximize the available natural resources for a better life. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Jackieam/GVI-Best-Path.
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal: Model Extraction Attacks Against Image Translation Models
Authors: Sebastian Szyller, Vasisht Duddu, Tommi Gröndahl, N. Asokan
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, image-classification, Image Classification, Model extraction, SSIM, Style Transfer, Super-Resolution, Translation

Machine learning models are typically made available to potential client users via inference APIs. Model extraction attacks occur when a malicious client uses information gleaned from queries to the inference API of a victim model $F_V$ to build a surrogate model $F_A$ with comparable functionality. Recent research has shown successful model extraction of image classification, and natural language processing models. In this paper, we show the first model extraction attack against real-world generative adversarial network (GAN) image translation models. We present a framework for conducting such attacks, and show that an adversary can successfully extract functional surrogate models by querying $F_V$ using data from the same domain as the training data for $F_V$. The adversary need not know $F_V$'s architecture or any other information about it beyond its intended task. We evaluate the effectiveness of our attacks using three different instances of two popular categories of image translation: (1) Selfie-to-Anime and (2) Monet-to-Photo (image style transfer), and (3) Super-Resolution (super resolution). Using standard performance metrics for GANs, we show that our attacks are effective. Furthermore, we conducted a large scale (125 participants) user study on Selfie-to-Anime and Monet-to-Photo to show that human perception of the images produced by $F_V$ and $F_A$ can be considered equivalent, within an equivalence bound of Cohen's d = 0.3. Finally, we show that existing defenses against model extraction attacks (watermarking, adversarial examples, poisoning) do not extend to image translation models.
PatchGuard++: Efficient Provable Attack Detection against Adversarial Patches
Authors: Chong Xiang, Prateek Mittal
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00

An adversarial patch can arbitrarily manipulate image pixels within a restricted region to induce model misclassification. The threat of this localized attack has gained significant attention because the adversary can mount a physically-realizable attack by attaching patches to the victim object. Recent provably robust defenses generally follow the PatchGuard framework by using CNNs with small receptive fields and secure feature aggregation for robust model predictions. In this paper, we extend PatchGuard to PatchGuard++ for provably detecting the adversarial patch attack to boost both provable robust accuracy and clean accuracy. In PatchGuard++, we first use a CNN with small receptive fields for feature extraction so that the number of features corrupted by the adversarial patch is bounded. Next, we apply masks in the feature space and evaluate predictions on all possible masked feature maps. Finally, we extract a pattern from all masked predictions to catch the adversarial patch attack. We evaluate PatchGuard++ on ImageNette (a 10-class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet, and CIFAR-10 and demonstrate that PatchGuard++ significantly improves the provable robustness and clean performance.
Vision-based Driver Assistance Systems: Survey, Taxonomy and Advances
Authors: Jonathan Horgan, Ciarán Hughes, John McDonald, Senthil Yogamani
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Survey

Vision-based driver assistance systems is one of the rapidly growing research areas of ITS, due to various factors such as the increased level of safety requirements in automotive, computational power in embedded systems, and desire to get closer to autonomous driving. It is a cross disciplinary area encompassing specialised fields like computer vision, machine learning, robotic navigation, embedded systems, automotive electronics and safety critical software. In this paper, we survey the list of vision based advanced driver assistance systems with a consistent terminology and propose a taxonomy. We also propose an abstract model in an attempt to formalize a top-down view of application development to scale towards autonomous driving system.
FedDPGAN: Federated Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Networks Framework for the Detection of COVID-19 Pneumonia
Authors: Longling Zhang, Bochen Shen, Ahmed Barnawi, Shan Xi, Neeraj Kumar, Yi Wu
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Generative Adversarial Network

Existing deep learning technologies generally learn the features of chest X-ray data generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia. However, the above methods have a critical challenge: data privacy. GAN will leak the semantic information of the training data which can be used to reconstruct the training samples by attackers, thereby this method will leak the privacy of the patient. Furthermore, for this reason that is the limitation of the training data sample, different hospitals jointly train the model through data sharing, which will also cause the privacy leakage. To solve this problem, we adopt the Federated Learning (FL) frame-work which is a new technique being used to protect the data privacy. Under the FL framework and Differentially Private thinking, we propose a FederatedDifferentially Private Generative Adversarial Network (FedDPGAN) to detectCOVID-19 pneumonia for sustainable smart cities. Specifically, we use DP-GAN to privately generate diverse patient data in which differential privacy technology is introduced to make sure the privacy protection of the semantic information of training dataset. Furthermore, we leverage FL to allow hospitals to collaboratively train COVID-19 models without sharing the original data. Under Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) and non-IID settings, The evaluation of the proposed model is on three types of chest X-ray (CXR) images dataset (COVID-19, normal, and normal pneumonia). A large number of the truthful reports make the verification of our model can effectively diagnose COVID-19 without compromising privacy.
Learning from Event Cameras with Sparse Spiking Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Loïc Cordone, Benoît Miramond, Sonia Ferrante
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are now the de facto solution for computer vision problems thanks to their impressive results and ease of learning. These networks are composed of layers of connected units called artificial neurons, loosely modeling the neurons in a biological brain. However, their implementation on conventional hardware (CPU/GPU) results in high power consumption, making their integration on embedded systems difficult. In a car for example, embedded algorithms have very high constraints in term of energy, latency and accuracy. To design more efficient computer vision algorithms, we propose to follow an end-to-end biologically inspired approach using event cameras and spiking neural networks (SNNs). Event cameras output asynchronous and sparse events, providing an incredibly efficient data source, but processing these events with synchronous and dense algorithms such as CNNs does not yield any significant benefits. To address this limitation, we use spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are more biologically realistic neural networks where units communicate using discrete spikes. Due to the nature of their operations, they are hardware friendly and energy-efficient, but training them still remains a challenge. Our method enables the training of sparse spiking convolutional neural networks directly on event data, using the popular deep learning framework PyTorch. The performances in terms of accuracy, sparsity and training time on the popular DVS128 Gesture Dataset make it possible to use this bio-inspired approach for the future embedding of real-time applications on low-power neuromorphic hardware.
Mutual Contrastive Learning for Visual Representation Learning
Authors: Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Linhang Cai, Yongjun Xu
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Network Embedding, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Image Classification, Transfer Learning

We present a collaborative learning method called Mutual Contrastive Learning (MCL) for general visual representation learning. The core idea of MCL is to perform mutual interaction and transfer of contrastive distributions among a cohort of networks. A crucial component of MCL is Interactive Contrastive Learning (ICL). Compared with vanilla contrastive learning, ICL can aggregate cross-network embedding information and maximize the lower bound to the mutual information between two networks. This enables each network to learn extra contrastive knowledge from others, leading to better feature representations for visual recognition tasks. We emphasize that the resulting MCL is conceptually simple yet empirically powerful. It is a generic framework that can be applied to both supervised and self-supervised representation learning. Experimental results on image classification and transfer learning to object detection show that MCL can lead to consistent performance gains, demonstrating that MCL can guide the network to generate better feature representations. Code is available at https://github.com/winycg/MCL.
Synthetic 3D Data Generation Pipeline for Geometric Deep Learning in Architecture
Authors: Stanislava Fedorova, Alberto Tono, Meher Shashwat Nigam, Jiayao Zhang, Amirhossein Ahmadnia, Cecilia Bolognesi, Dominik L. Michels
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Synthetic Data Generation

With the growing interest in deep learning algorithms and computational design in the architectural field, the need for large, accessible and diverse architectural datasets increases. We decided to tackle this problem by constructing a field-specific synthetic data generation pipeline that generates an arbitrary amount of 3D data along with the associated 2D and 3D annotations. The variety of annotations, the flexibility to customize the generated building and dataset parameters make this framework suitable for multiple deep learning tasks, including geometric deep learning that requires direct 3D supervision. Creating our building data generation pipeline we leveraged architectural knowledge from experts in order to construct a framework that would be modular, extendable and would provide a sufficient amount of class-balanced data samples. Moreover, we purposefully involve the researcher in the dataset customization allowing the introduction of additional building components, material textures, building classes, number and type of annotations as well as the number of views per 3D model sample. In this way, the framework would satisfy different research requirements and would be adaptable to a large variety of tasks. All code and data are made publicly available.
Computer vision in automated parking systems: Design, implementation and challenges
Authors: Markus Heimberger, Jonathan Horgan, Ciaran Hughes, John McDonald, Senthil Yogamani
Date: 2021-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Pedestrian Detection

Automated driving is an active area of research in both industry and academia. Automated Parking, which is automated driving in a restricted scenario of parking with low speed manoeuvring, is a key enabling product for fully autonomous driving systems. It is also an important milestone from the perspective of a higher end system built from the previous generation driver assistance systems comprising of collision warning, pedestrian detection, etc. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of an automated parking system from the perspective of computer vision algorithms. Designing a low-cost system with functional safety is challenging and leads to a large gap between the prototype and the end product, in order to handle all the corner cases. We demonstrate how camera systems are crucial for addressing a range of automated parking use cases and also, to add robustness to systems based on active distance measuring sensors, such as ultrasonics and radar. The key vision modules which realize the parking use cases are 3D reconstruction, parking slot marking recognition, freespace and vehicle/pedestrian detection. We detail the important parking use cases and demonstrate how to combine the vision modules to form a robust parking system. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first detailed discussion of a systemic view of a commercial automated parking system.