pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Global Spectral Filter Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Yong liu, Ran Yu, Jiahao Wang, Xinyuan Zhao, Yitong Wang, Yansong Tang, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decoder, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

This paper studies semi-supervised video object segmentation through boosting intra-frame interaction. Recent memory network-based methods focus on exploiting inter-frame temporal reference while paying little attention to intra-frame spatial dependency. Specifically, these segmentation model tends to be susceptible to interference from unrelated nontarget objects in a certain frame. To this end, we propose Global Spectral Filter Memory network (GSFM), which improves intra-frame interaction through learning long-term spatial dependencies in the spectral domain. The key components of GSFM is 2D (inverse) discrete Fourier transform for spatial information mixing. Besides, we empirically find low frequency feature should be enhanced in encoder (backbone) while high frequency for decoder (segmentation head). We attribute this to semantic information extracting role for encoder and fine-grained details highlighting role for decoder. Thus, Low (High) Frequency Module is proposed to fit this circumstance. Extensive experiments on the popular DAVIS and YouTube-VOS benchmarks demonstrate that GSFM noticeably outperforms the baseline method and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Besides, extensive analysis shows that the proposed modules are reasonable and of great generalization ability. Our source code is available at https://github.com/workforai/GSFM.
The Equalization Losses: Gradient-Driven Training for Long-tailed Object Recognition
Authors: Jingru Tan, Bo Li, Xin Lu, Yongqiang Yao, Fengwei Yu, Tong He, Wanli Ouyang
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Long-tailed Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Semantic Segmentation

Long-tail distribution is widely spread in real-world applications. Due to the extremely small ratio of instances, tail categories often show inferior accuracy. In this paper, we find such performance bottleneck is mainly caused by the imbalanced gradients, which can be categorized into two parts: (1) positive part, deriving from the samples of the same category, and (2) negative part, contributed by other categories. Based on comprehensive experiments, it is also observed that the gradient ratio of accumulated positives to negatives is a good indicator to measure how balanced a category is trained. Inspired by this, we come up with a gradient-driven training mechanism to tackle the long-tail problem: re-balancing the positive/negative gradients dynamically according to current accumulative gradients, with a unified goal of achieving balance gradient ratios. Taking advantage of the simple and flexible gradient mechanism, we introduce a new family of gradient-driven loss functions, namely equalization losses. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide spectrum of visual tasks, including two-stage/single-stage long-tailed object detection (LVIS), long-tailed image classification (ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, iNaturalist), and long-tailed semantic segmentation (ADE20K). Our method consistently outperforms the baseline models, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed equalization losses. Codes will be released at https://github.com/ModelTC/United-Perception.
Hypergraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jhony H. Giraldo, Vincenzo Scarrica, Antonino Staiano, Francesco Camastra, Thierry Bouwmans
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Several deep learning methods have been proposed for semantic segmentation with outstanding results. However, these models require a lot of densely annotated images. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm that uses HyperGraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation (HyperGCN-WSS). Our algorithm constructs spatial and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) graphs from the images in the dataset to generate the hypergraphs. Then, we train a specialized HyperGraph Convolutional Network (HyperGCN) architecture using some weak signals. The outputs of the HyperGCN are denominated pseudo-labels, which are later used to train a DeepLab model for semantic segmentation. HyperGCN-WSS is evaluated on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset for semantic segmentation, using scribbles or clicks as weak signals. Our algorithm shows competitive performance against previous methods.
Unifying Diffusion Models' Latent Space, with Applications to CycleDiffusion and Guidance
Authors: Chen Henry Wu, Fernando de la Torre
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation

Diffusion models have achieved unprecedented performance in generative modeling. The commonly-adopted formulation of the latent code of diffusion models is a sequence of gradually denoised samples, as opposed to the simpler (e.g., Gaussian) latent space of GANs, VAEs, and normalizing flows. This paper provides an alternative, Gaussian formulation of the latent space of various diffusion models, as well as an invertible DPM-Encoder that maps images into the latent space. While our formulation is purely based on the definition of diffusion models, we demonstrate several intriguing consequences. (1) Empirically, we observe that a common latent space emerges from two diffusion models trained independently on related domains. In light of this finding, we propose CycleDiffusion, which uses DPM-Encoder for unpaired image-to-image translation. Furthermore, applying CycleDiffusion to text-to-image diffusion models, we show that large-scale text-to-image diffusion models can be used as zero-shot image-to-image editors. (2) One can guide pre-trained diffusion models and GANs by controlling the latent codes in a unified, plug-and-play formulation based on energy-based models. Using the CLIP model and a face recognition model as guidance, we demonstrate that diffusion models have better coverage of low-density sub-populations and individuals than GANs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/cycle-diffusion.
ViLPAct: A Benchmark for Compositional Generalization on Multimodal Human Activities
Authors: Terry Yue Zhuo, Yaqing Liao, Yuecheng Lei, Lizhen Qu, Gerard de Melo, Xiaojun Chang, Yazhou Ren, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00

We introduce ViLPAct, a novel vision-language benchmark for human activity planning. It is designed for a task where embodied AI agents can reason and forecast future actions of humans based on video clips about their initial activities and intents in text. The dataset consists of 2.9k videos from \charades extended with intents via crowdsourcing, a multi-choice question test set, and four strong baselines. One of the baselines implements a neurosymbolic approach based on a multi-modal knowledge base (MKB), while the other ones are deep generative models adapted from recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. According to our extensive experiments, the key challenges are compositional generalization and effective use of information from both modalities.
Evaluating Unsupervised Denoising Requires Unsupervised Metrics
Authors: Adria Marcos-Morales, Matan Leibovich, Sreyas Mohan, Joshua Lawrence Vincent, Piyush Haluai, Mai Tan, Peter Crozier, Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Unsupervised denoising is a crucial challenge in real-world imaging applications. Unsupervised deep-learning methods have demonstrated impressive performance on benchmarks based on synthetic noise. However, no metrics are available to evaluate these methods in an unsupervised fashion. This is highly problematic for the many practical applications where ground-truth clean images are not available. In this work, we propose two novel metrics: the unsupervised mean squared error (MSE) and the unsupervised peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), which are computed using only noisy data. We provide a theoretical analysis of these metrics, showing that they are asymptotically consistent estimators of the supervised MSE and PSNR. Controlled numerical experiments with synthetic noise confirm that they provide accurate approximations in practice. We validate our approach on real-world data from two imaging modalities: videos in raw format and transmission electron microscopy. Our results demonstrate that the proposed metrics enable unsupervised evaluation of denoising methods based exclusively on noisy data.
What does a deep neural network confidently perceive? The effective dimension of high certainty class manifolds and their low confidence boundaries
Authors: Stanislav Fort, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Surya Ganguli, Samuel S. Schoenholz
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00

Deep neural network classifiers partition input space into high confidence regions for each class. The geometry of these class manifolds (CMs) is widely studied and intimately related to model performance; for example, the margin depends on CM boundaries. We exploit the notions of Gaussian width and Gordon's escape theorem to tractably estimate the effective dimension of CMs and their boundaries through tomographic intersections with random affine subspaces of varying dimension. We show several connections between the dimension of CMs, generalization, and robustness. In particular we investigate how CM dimension depends on 1) the dataset, 2) architecture (including ResNet, WideResNet \& Vision Transformer), 3) initialization, 4) stage of training, 5) class, 6) network width, 7) ensemble size, 8) label randomization, 9) training set size, and 10) robustness to data corruption. Together a picture emerges that higher performing and more robust models have higher dimensional CMs. Moreover, we offer a new perspective on ensembling via intersections of CMs. Our code is at https://github.com/stanislavfort/slice-dice-optimize/
Learning Inter-Superpoint Affinity for Weakly Supervised 3D Instance Segmentation
Authors: Linghua Tang, Le Hui, Jin Xie
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Due to the few annotated labels of 3D point clouds, how to learn discriminative features of point clouds to segment object instances is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective 3D instance segmentation framework that can achieve good performance by annotating only one point for each instance. Specifically, to tackle extremely few labels for instance segmentation, we first oversegment the point cloud into superpoints in an unsupervised manner and extend the point-level annotations to the superpoint level. Then, based on the superpoint graph, we propose an inter-superpoint affinity mining module that considers the semantic and spatial relations to adaptively learn inter-superpoint affinity to generate high-quality pseudo labels via semantic-aware random walk. Finally, we propose a volume-aware instance refinement module to segment high-quality instances by applying volume constraints of objects in clustering on the superpoint graph. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet-v2 and S3DIS datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the weakly supervised point cloud instance segmentation task, and even outperforms some fully supervised methods.
Style-Guided Inference of Transformer for High-resolution Image Synthesis
Authors: Jonghwa Yim, Minjae Kim
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Transformer is eminently suitable for auto-regressive image synthesis which predicts discrete value from the past values recursively to make up full image. Especially, combined with vector quantised latent representation, the state-of-the-art auto-regressive transformer displays realistic high-resolution images. However, sampling the latent code from discrete probability distribution makes the output unpredictable. Therefore, it requires to generate lots of diverse samples to acquire desired outputs. To alleviate the process of generating lots of samples repetitively, in this article, we propose to take a desired output, a style image, as an additional condition without re-training the transformer. To this end, our method transfers the style to a probability constraint to re-balance the prior, thereby specifying the target distribution instead of the original prior. Thus, generated samples from the re-balanced prior have similar styles to reference style. In practice, we can choose either an image or a category of images as an additional condition. In our qualitative assessment, we show that styles of majority of outputs are similar to the input style.
Autonomous Asteroid Characterization Through Nanosatellite Swarming
Authors: Kaitlin Dennison, Nathan Stacey, Simone D'Amico
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Landmark Tracking, Navigate, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, State Estimation

This paper first defines a class of estimation problem called simultaneous navigation and characterization (SNAC), which is a superset of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A SNAC framework is then developed for the Autonomous Nanosatellite Swarming (ANS) mission concept to autonomously navigate about and characterize an asteroid including the asteroid gravity field, rotational motion, and 3D shape. The ANS SNAC framework consists of three modules: 1) multi-agent optical landmark tracking and 3D point reconstruction using stereovision, 2) state estimation through a computationally efficient and robust unscented Kalman filter, and 3) reconstruction of an asteroid spherical harmonic shape model by leveraging a priori knowledge of the shape properties of celestial bodies. Despite significant interest in asteroids, there are several limitations to current asteroid rendezvous mission concepts. First, completed missions heavily rely on human oversight and Earth-based resources. Second, proposed solutions to increase autonomy make oversimplifying assumptions about state knowledge and information processing. Third, asteroid mission concepts often opt for high size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) avionics for environmental measurements. Finally, such missions often utilize a single spacecraft, neglecting the benefits of distributed space systems. In contrast, ANS is composed of multiple autonomous nanosatellites equipped with low SWaP-C avionics. The ANS SNAC framework is validated through a numerical simulation of three spacecraft orbiting asteroid 433 Eros. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture provides autonomous and accurate SNAC in a safe manner without an a priori shape model and using only low SWaP-C avionics.
ViFiCon: Vision and Wireless Association Via Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Nicholas Meegan, Hansi Liu, Bryan Cao, Abrar Alali, Kristin Dana, Marco Gruteser, Shubham Jain, Ashwin Ashok
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Region Proposal

We introduce ViFiCon, a self-supervised contrastive learning scheme which uses synchronized information across vision and wireless modalities to perform cross-modal association. Specifically, the system uses pedestrian data collected from RGB-D camera footage as well as WiFi Fine Time Measurements (FTM) from a user's smartphone device. We represent the temporal sequence by stacking multi-person depth data spatially within a banded image. Depth data from RGB-D (vision domain) is inherently linked with an observable pedestrian, but FTM data (wireless domain) is associated only to a smartphone on the network. To formulate the cross-modal association problem as self-supervised, the network learns a scene-wide synchronization of the two modalities as a pretext task, and then uses that learned representation for the downstream task of associating individual bounding boxes to specific smartphones, i.e. associating vision and wireless information. We use a pre-trained region proposal model on the camera footage and then feed the extrapolated bounding box information into a dual-branch convolutional neural network along with the FTM data. We show that compared to fully supervised SoTA models, ViFiCon achieves high performance vision-to-wireless association, finding which bounding box corresponds to which smartphone device, without hand-labeled association examples for training data.
Finding the global semantic representation in GAN through Frechet Mean
Authors: Jaewoong Choi, Geonho Hwang, Hyunsoo Cho, Myungjoo Kang
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

The ideally disentangled latent space in GAN involves the global representation of latent space with semantic attribute coordinates. In other words, considering that this disentangled latent space is a vector space, there exists the global semantic basis where each basis component describes one attribute of generated images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for finding this global semantic basis in the intermediate latent space in GANs. This semantic basis represents sample-independent meaningful perturbations that change the same semantic attribute of an image on the entire latent space. The proposed global basis, called Fr\'echet basis, is derived by introducing Fr\'echet mean to the local semantic perturbations in a latent space. Fr\'echet basis is discovered in two stages. First, the global semantic subspace is discovered by the Fr\'echet mean in the Grassmannian manifold of the local semantic subspaces. Second, Fr\'echet basis is found by optimizing a basis of the semantic subspace via the Fr\'echet mean in the Special Orthogonal Group. Experimental results demonstrate that Fr\'echet basis provides better semantic factorization and robustness compared to the previous methods. Moreover, we suggest the basis refinement scheme for the previous methods. The quantitative experiments show that the refined basis achieves better semantic factorization while constrained on the same semantic subspace given by the previous method.
Map-free Visual Relocalization: Metric Pose Relative to a Single Image
Authors: Eduardo Arnold, Jamie Wynn, Sara Vicente, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Áron Monszpart, Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Daniyar Turmukhambetov, Eric Brachmann
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction

Can we relocalize in a scene represented by a single reference image? Standard visual relocalization requires hundreds of images and scale calibration to build a scene-specific 3D map. In contrast, we propose Map-free Relocalization, i.e., using only one photo of a scene to enable instant, metric scaled relocalization. Existing datasets are not suitable to benchmark map-free relocalization, due to their focus on large scenes or their limited variability. Thus, we have constructed a new dataset of 655 small places of interest, such as sculptures, murals and fountains, collected worldwide. Each place comes with a reference image to serve as a relocalization anchor, and dozens of query images with known, metric camera poses. The dataset features changing conditions, stark viewpoint changes, high variability across places, and queries with low to no visual overlap with the reference image. We identify two viable families of existing methods to provide baseline results: relative pose regression, and feature matching combined with single-image depth prediction. While these methods show reasonable performance on some favorable scenes in our dataset, map-free relocalization proves to be a challenge that requires new, innovative solutions.
Aggregating Layers for Deepfake Detection
Authors: Amir Jevnisek, Shai Avidan
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Synthetic Image Detection

The increasing popularity of facial manipulation (Deepfakes) and synthetic face creation raises the need to develop robust forgery detection solutions. Crucially, most work in this domain assume that the Deepfakes in the test set come from the same Deepfake algorithms that were used for training the network. This is not how things work in practice. Instead, we consider the case where the network is trained on one Deepfake algorithm, and tested on Deepfakes generated by another algorithm. Typically, supervised techniques follow a pipeline of visual feature extraction from a deep backbone, followed by a binary classification head. Instead, our algorithm aggregates features extracted across all layers of one backbone network to detect a fake. We evaluate our approach on two domains of interest - Deepfake detection and Synthetic image detection, and find that we achieve SOTA results.
Large-to-small Image Resolution Asymmetry in Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Pavel Suma, Giorgos Tolias
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Metric Learning, Retrieval

Deep metric learning for vision is trained by optimizing a representation network to map (non-)matching image pairs to (non-)similar representations. During testing, which typically corresponds to image retrieval, both database and query examples are processed by the same network to obtain the representation used for similarity estimation and ranking. In this work, we explore an asymmetric setup by light-weight processing of the query at a small image resolution to enable fast representation extraction. The goal is to obtain a network for database examples that is trained to operate on large resolution images and benefits from fine-grained image details, and a second network for query examples that operates on small resolution images but preserves a representation space aligned with that of the database network. We achieve this with a distillation approach that transfers knowledge from a fixed teacher network to a student via a loss that operates per image and solely relies on coupled augmentations without the use of any labels. In contrast to prior work that explores such asymmetry from the point of view of different network architectures, this work uses the same architecture but modifies the image resolution. We conclude that resolution asymmetry is a better way to optimize the performance/efficiency trade-off than architecture asymmetry. Evaluation is performed on three standard deep metric learning benchmarks, namely CUB200, Cars196, and SOP. Code: https://github.com/pavelsuma/raml
FreGAN: Exploiting Frequency Components for Training GANs under Limited Data
Authors: Mengping Yang, Zhe Wang, Ziqiu Chi, Yanbing Zhang
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Training GANs under limited data often leads to discriminator overfitting and memorization issues, causing divergent training. Existing approaches mitigate the overfitting by employing data augmentations, model regularization, or attention mechanisms. However, they ignore the frequency bias of GANs and take poor consideration towards frequency information, especially high-frequency signals that contain rich details. To fully utilize the frequency information of limited data, this paper proposes FreGAN, which raises the model's frequency awareness and draws more attention to producing high-frequency signals, facilitating high-quality generation. In addition to exploiting both real and generated images' frequency information, we also involve the frequency signals of real images as a self-supervised constraint, which alleviates the GAN disequilibrium and encourages the generator to synthesize adequate rather than arbitrary frequency signals. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our FreGAN in ameliorating generation quality in the low-data regime (especially when training data is less than 100). Besides, FreGAN can be seamlessly applied to existing regularization and attention mechanism models to further boost the performance.