pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Point Discriminative Learning for Data-efficient 3D Point Cloud Analysis
Authors: Fayao Liu, Guosheng Lin, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Chaitanya K. Joshi, Jie Lin
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Classification, 3D Part Segmentation, 3D Point Cloud Classification, Natural Language Understanding, Point Cloud Classification, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Specificity

3D point cloud analysis has drawn a lot of research attention due to its wide applications. However, collecting massive labelled 3D point cloud data is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. This calls for data-efficient learning methods. In this work we propose PointDisc, a point discriminative learning method to leverage self-supervisions for data-efficient 3D point cloud classification and segmentation. PointDisc imposes a novel point discrimination loss on the middle and global level features produced by the backbone network. This point discrimination loss enforces learned features to be consistent with points belonging to the corresponding local shape region and inconsistent with randomly sampled noisy points. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D object classification, 3D semantic and part segmentation, showing the benefits of PointDisc for data-efficient learning. Detailed analysis demonstrate that PointDisc learns unsupervised features that well capture local and global geometry.
Human-In-The-Loop Document Layout Analysis
Authors: Xingjiao Wu, Tianlong Ma, Xin Li, Qin Chen, Liang He
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Layout Analysis, Semantic Segmentation

Document layout analysis (DLA) aims to divide a document image into different types of regions. DLA plays an important role in the document content understanding and information extraction systems. Exploring a method that can use less data for effective training contributes to the development of DLA. We consider a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) collaborative intelligence in the DLA. Our approach was inspired by the fact that the HITL push the model to learn from the unknown problems by adding a small amount of data based on knowledge. The HITL select key samples by using confidence. However, using confidence to find key samples is not suitable for DLA tasks. We propose the Key Samples Selection (KSS) method to find key samples in high-level tasks (semantic segmentation) more accurately through agent collaboration, effectively reducing costs. Once selected, these key samples are passed to human beings for active labeling, then the model will be updated with the labeled samples. Hence, we revisited the learning system from reinforcement learning and designed a sample-based agent update strategy, which effectively improves the agent's ability to accept new samples. It achieves significant improvement results in two benchmarks (DSSE-200 (from 77.1% to 86.3%) and CS-150 (from 88.0% to 95.6%)) by using 10% of labeled data.
Free Lunch for Co-Saliency Detection: Context Adjustment
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Prakhar Ganesh, Tan Wang, Junhao Liu, Le Zhang, Yao Chen
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Saliency Detection, Semantic Segmentation

We unveil a long-standing problem in the prevailing co-saliency detection systems: there is indeed inconsistency between training and testing. Constructing a high-quality co-saliency detection dataset involves time-consuming and labor-intensive pixel-level labeling, which has forced most recent works to rely instead on semantic segmentation or saliency detection datasets for training. However, the lack of proper co-saliency and the absence of multiple foreground objects in these datasets can lead to spurious variations and inherent biases learned by models. To tackle this, we introduce the idea of counterfactual training through context adjustment and propose a "cost-free" group-cut-paste (GCP) procedure to leverage off-the-shelf images and synthesize new samples. Following GCP, we collect a novel dataset called Context Adjustment Training (CAT). CAT consists of 33,500 images, which is four times larger than the current co-saliency detection datasets. All samples are automatically annotated with high-quality mask annotations, object categories, and edge maps. Extensive experiments on recent benchmarks are conducted, show that CAT can improve various state-of-the-art models by a large margin (5% ~ 25%). We hope that the scale, diversity, and quality of our dataset can benefit researchers in this area and beyond. Our dataset will be publicly accessible through our project page.
Online Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation
Authors: Zheng Li, Jingwen Ye, Mingli Song, Ying Huang, Zhigeng Pan
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Pose Estimation

Existing state-of-the-art human pose estimation methods require heavy computational resources for accurate predictions. One promising technique to obtain an accurate yet lightweight pose estimator is knowledge distillation, which distills the pose knowledge from a powerful teacher model to a less-parameterized student model. However, existing pose distillation works rely on a heavy pre-trained estimator to perform knowledge transfer and require a complex two-stage learning procedure. In this work, we investigate a novel Online Knowledge Distillation framework by distilling Human Pose structure knowledge in a one-stage manner to guarantee the distillation efficiency, termed OKDHP. Specifically, OKDHP trains a single multi-branch network and acquires the predicted heatmaps from each, which are then assembled by a Feature Aggregation Unit (FAU) as the target heatmaps to teach each branch in reverse. Instead of simply averaging the heatmaps, FAU which consists of multiple parallel transformations with different receptive fields, leverages the multi-scale information, thus obtains target heatmaps with higher-quality. Specifically, the pixel-wise Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is utilized to minimize the discrepancy between the target heatmaps and the predicted ones, which enables the student network to learn the implicit keypoint relationship. Besides, an unbalanced OKDHP scheme is introduced to customize the student networks with different compression rates. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by extensive experiments on two common benchmark datasets, MPII and COCO.
Question-controlled Text-aware Image Captioning
Authors: Anwen Hu, ShiZhe Chen, Qin Jin
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning, Question Answering

For an image with multiple scene texts, different people may be interested in different text information. Current text-aware image captioning models are not able to generate distinctive captions according to various information needs. To explore how to generate personalized text-aware captions, we define a new challenging task, namely Question-controlled Text-aware Image Captioning (Qc-TextCap). With questions as control signals, this task requires models to understand questions, find related scene texts and describe them together with objects fluently in human language. Based on two existing text-aware captioning datasets, we automatically construct two datasets, ControlTextCaps and ControlVizWiz to support the task. We propose a novel Geometry and Question Aware Model (GQAM). GQAM first applies a Geometry-informed Visual Encoder to fuse region-level object features and region-level scene text features with considering spatial relationships. Then, we design a Question-guided Encoder to select the most relevant visual features for each question. Finally, GQAM generates a personalized text-aware caption with a Multimodal Decoder. Our model achieves better captioning performance and question answering ability than carefully designed baselines on both two datasets. With questions as control signals, our model generates more informative and diverse captions than the state-of-the-art text-aware captioning model. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/HAWLYQ/Qc-TextCap.
ICECAP: Information Concentrated Entity-aware Image Captioning
Authors: Anwen Hu, ShiZhe Chen, Qin Jin
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Image Captioning, Retrieval, Sentence

Most current image captioning systems focus on describing general image content, and lack background knowledge to deeply understand the image, such as exact named entities or concrete events. In this work, we focus on the entity-aware news image captioning task which aims to generate informative captions by leveraging the associated news articles to provide background knowledge about the target image. However, due to the length of news articles, previous works only employ news articles at the coarse article or sentence level, which are not fine-grained enough to refine relevant events and choose named entities accurately. To overcome these limitations, we propose an Information Concentrated Entity-aware news image CAPtioning (ICECAP) model, which progressively concentrates on relevant textual information within the corresponding news article from the sentence level to the word level. Our model first creates coarse concentration on relevant sentences using a cross-modality retrieval model and then generates captions by further concentrating on relevant words within the sentences. Extensive experiments on both BreakingNews and GoodNews datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms other state-of-the-arts. The code of ICECAP is publicly available at https://github.com/HAWLYQ/ICECAP.
Self-Supervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video by Alternative Training and Geometric Constraints from 3D to 2D
Authors: Jiaojiao Fang, Guizhong Liu
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning of depth and ego-motion from unlabeled monocular video has acquired promising results and drawn extensive attention. Most existing methods jointly train the depth and pose networks by photometric consistency of adjacent frames based on the principle of structure-from-motion (SFM). However, the coupling relationship of the depth and pose networks seriously influences the learning performance, and the re-projection relations is sensitive to scale ambiguity, especially for pose learning. In this paper, we aim to improve the depth-pose learning performance without the auxiliary tasks and address the above issues by alternative training each task and incorporating the epipolar geometric constraints into the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) based point clouds match process. Distinct from jointly training the depth and pose networks, our key idea is to better utilize the mutual dependency of these two tasks by alternatively training each network with respective losses while fixing the other. We also design a log-scale 3D structural consistency loss to put more emphasis on the smaller depth values during training. To makes the optimization easier, we further incorporate the epipolar geometry into the ICP based learning process for pose learning. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks datasets indicate the superiority of our algorithm over the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods.
Deep Anomaly Discovery From Unlabeled Videos via Normality Advantage and Self-Paced Refinement
Authors: Guang Yu, Siqi Wang, Zhiping Cai, Xinwang Liu, Chuanfu Xu, Chengkun Wu
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Video Anomaly Detection

While classic video anomaly detection (VAD) requires labeled normal videos for training, emerging unsupervised VAD (UVAD) aims to discover anomalies directly from fully unlabeled videos. However, existing UVAD methods still rely on shallow models to perform detection or initialization, and they are evidently inferior to classic VAD methods. This paper proposes a full deep neural network (DNN) based solution that can realize highly effective UVAD. First, we, for the first time, point out that deep reconstruction can be surprisingly effective for UVAD, which inspires us to unveil a property named "normality advantage", i.e., normal events will enjoy lower reconstruction loss when DNN learns to reconstruct unlabeled videos. With this property, we propose Localization based Reconstruction (LBR) as a strong UVAD baseline and a solid foundation of our solution. Second, we propose a novel self-paced refinement (SPR) scheme, which is synthesized into LBR to conduct UVAD. Unlike ordinary self-paced learning that injects more samples in an easy-to-hard manner, the proposed SPR scheme gradually drops samples so that suspicious anomalies can be removed from the learning process. In this way, SPR consolidates normality advantage and enables better UVAD in a more proactive way. Finally, we further design a variant solution that explicitly takes the motion cues into account. The solution evidently enhances the UVAD performance, and it sometimes even surpasses the best classic VAD methods. Experiments show that our solution not only significantly outperforms existing UVAD methods by a wide margin (5% to 9% AUROC), but also enables UVAD to catch up with the mainstream performance of classic VAD.
Cross-modality Discrepant Interaction Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Chen Zhang, Runmin Cong, Qinwei Lin, Lin Ma, Feng Li, Yao Zhao, Sam Kwong
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

The popularity and promotion of depth maps have brought new vigor and vitality into salient object detection (SOD), and a mass of RGB-D SOD algorithms have been proposed, mainly concentrating on how to better integrate cross-modality features from RGB image and depth map. For the cross-modality interaction in feature encoder, existing methods either indiscriminately treat RGB and depth modalities, or only habitually utilize depth cues as auxiliary information of the RGB branch. Different from them, we reconsider the status of two modalities and propose a novel Cross-modality Discrepant Interaction Network (CDINet) for RGB-D SOD, which differentially models the dependence of two modalities according to the feature representations of different layers. To this end, two components are designed to implement the effective cross-modality interaction: 1) the RGB-induced Detail Enhancement (RDE) module leverages RGB modality to enhance the details of the depth features in low-level encoder stage. 2) the Depth-induced Semantic Enhancement (DSE) module transfers the object positioning and internal consistency of depth features to the RGB branch in high-level encoder stage. Furthermore, we also design a Dense Decoding Reconstruction (DDR) structure, which constructs a semantic block by combining multi-level encoder features to upgrade the skip connection in the feature decoding. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our network outperforms $15$ state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code is publicly available at: https://rmcong.github.io/proj_CDINet.html.
Skeleton Cloud Colorization for Unsupervised 3D Action Representation Learning
Authors: Siyuan Yang, Jun Liu, Shijian Lu, Meng Hwa Er, Alex C. Kot
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Action Recognition, Action Recognition, Colorization, Representation Learning, Temporal Action Localization

Skeleton-based human action recognition has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on supervised learning which requiring a large number of annotated action sequences that are often expensive to collect. We investigate unsupervised representation learning for skeleton action recognition, and design a novel skeleton cloud colorization technique that is capable of learning skeleton representations from unlabeled skeleton sequence data. Specifically, we represent a skeleton action sequence as a 3D skeleton cloud and colorize each point in the cloud according to its temporal and spatial orders in the original (unannotated) skeleton sequence. Leveraging the colorized skeleton point cloud, we design an auto-encoder framework that can learn spatial-temporal features from the artificial color labels of skeleton joints effectively. We evaluate our skeleton cloud colorization approach with action classifiers trained under different configurations, including unsupervised, semi-supervised and fully-supervised settings. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D and NW-UCLA datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing unsupervised and semi-supervised 3D action recognition methods by large margins, and it achieves competitive performance in supervised 3D action recognition as well.
Learning Compatible Embeddings
Authors: Qiang Meng, Chixiang Zhang, Xiaoqiang Xu, Feng Zhou
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Retrieval

Achieving backward compatibility when rolling out new models can highly reduce costs or even bypass feature re-encoding of existing gallery images for in-production visual retrieval systems. Previous related works usually leverage losses used in knowledge distillation which can cause performance degradations or not guarantee compatibility. To address these issues, we propose a general framework called Learning Compatible Embeddings (LCE) which is applicable for both cross model compatibility and compatible training in direct/forward/backward manners. Our compatibility is achieved by aligning class centers between models directly or via a transformation, and restricting more compact intra-class distributions for the new model. Experiments are conducted in extensive scenarios such as changes of training dataset, loss functions, network architectures as well as feature dimensions, and demonstrate that LCE efficiently enables model compatibility with marginal sacrifices of accuracies. The code will be available at https://github.com/IrvingMeng/LCE.
Automatic cerebral hemisphere segmentation in rat MRI with lesions via attention-based convolutional neural networks
Authors: Juan Miguel Valverde, Artem Shatillo, Riccardo de Feo, Jussi Tohka
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Skull Stripping

We present MedicDeepLabv3+, a convolutional neural network that is the first completely automatic method to segment cerebral hemispheres in magnetic resonance (MR) volumes of rats with lesions. MedicDeepLabv3+ improves the state-of-the-art DeepLabv3+ with an advanced decoder, incorporating spatial attention layers and additional skip connections that, as we show in our experiments, lead to more precise segmentations. MedicDeepLabv3+ requires no MR image preprocessing, such as bias-field correction or registration to a template, produces segmentations in less than a second, and its GPU memory requirements can be adjusted based on the available resources. We optimized MedicDeepLabv3+ and six other state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (DeepLabv3+, UNet, HighRes3DNet, V-Net, VoxResNet, Demon) on a heterogeneous training set comprised by MR volumes from 11 cohorts acquired at different lesion stages. Then, we evaluated the trained models and two approaches specifically designed for rodent MRI skull stripping (RATS and RBET) on a large dataset of 655 MR rat brain volumes. In our experiments, MedicDeepLabv3+ outperformed the other methods, yielding an average Dice coefficient of 0.952 and 0.944 in the brain and contralateral hemisphere regions. Additionally, we show that despite limiting the GPU memory and the training data, our MedicDeepLabv3+ also provided satisfactory segmentations. In conclusion, our method, publicly available at https://github.com/jmlipman/MedicDeepLabv3Plus, yielded excellent results in multiple scenarios, demonstrating its capability to reduce human workload in rat neuroimaging studies.
PDE-GCN: Novel Architectures for Graph Neural Networks Motivated by Partial Differential Equations
Authors: Moshe Eliasof, Eldad Haber, Eran Treister
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Graph neural networks are increasingly becoming the go-to approach in various fields such as computer vision, computational biology and chemistry, where data are naturally explained by graphs. However, unlike traditional convolutional neural networks, deep graph networks do not necessarily yield better performance than shallow graph networks. This behavior usually stems from the over-smoothing phenomenon. In this work, we propose a family of architectures to control this behavior by design. Our networks are motivated by numerical methods for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on manifolds, and as such, their behavior can be explained by similar analysis. Moreover, as we demonstrate using an extensive set of experiments, our PDE-motivated networks can generalize and be effective for various types of problems from different fields. Our architectures obtain better or on par with the current state-of-the-art results for problems that are typically approached using different architectures.
An Operator-Splitting Method for the Gaussian Curvature Regularization Model with Applications to Surface Smoothing and Imaging
Authors: Hao liu, Xue-Cheng Tai, Roland Glowinski
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Gaussian curvature is an important geometric property of surfaces, which has been used broadly in mathematical modeling. Due to the full nonlinearity of the Gaussian curvature, efficient numerical methods for models based on it are uncommon in literature. In this article, we propose an operator-splitting method for a general Gaussian curvature model. In our method, we decouple the full nonlinearity of Gaussian curvature from differential operators by introducing two matrix- and vector-valued functions. The optimization problem is then converted into the search for the steady state solution of a time dependent PDE system. The above PDE system is well-suited to time discretization by operator splitting, the sub-problems encountered at each fractional step having either a closed form solution or being solvable by efficient algorithms. The proposed method is not sensitive to the choice of parameters, its efficiency and performances being demonstrated via systematic experiments on surface smoothing and image denoising.
Internal Video Inpainting by Implicit Long-range Propagation
Authors: Hao Ouyang, Tengfei Wang, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2021-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 4k, Object, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Inpainting

We propose a novel framework for video inpainting by adopting an internal learning strategy. Unlike previous methods that use optical flow for cross-frame context propagation to inpaint unknown regions, we show that this can be achieved implicitly by fitting a convolutional neural network to known regions. Moreover, to handle challenging sequences with ambiguous backgrounds or long-term occlusion, we design two regularization terms to preserve high-frequency details and long-term temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on the DAVIS dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art inpainting quality quantitatively and qualitatively. We further extend the proposed method to another challenging task: learning to remove an object from a video giving a single object mask in only one frame in a 4K video.