pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BEV-MAE: Bird's Eye View Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Pre-training in Autonomous Driving Scenarios
Authors: Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Shengxiang Qi, Nan Dong, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Point Cloud Pre-training, Self-Supervised Learning

Existing LiDAR-based 3D object detection methods for autonomous driving scenarios mainly adopt the training-from-scratch paradigm. Unfortunately, this paradigm heavily relies on large-scale labeled data, whose collection can be expensive and time-consuming. Self-supervised pre-training is an effective and desirable way to alleviate this dependence on extensive annotated data. In this work, we present BEV-MAE, an efficient masked autoencoder pre-training framework for LiDAR-based 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Specifically, we propose a bird's eye view (BEV) guided masking strategy to guide the 3D encoder learning feature representation in a BEV perspective and avoid complex decoder design during pre-training. Furthermore, we introduce a learnable point token to maintain a consistent receptive field size of the 3D encoder with fine-tuning for masked point cloud inputs. Based on the property of outdoor point clouds in autonomous driving scenarios, i.e., the point clouds of distant objects are more sparse, we propose point density prediction to enable the 3D encoder to learn location information, which is essential for object detection. Experimental results show that BEV-MAE surpasses prior state-of-the-art self-supervised methods and achieves a favorably pre-training efficiency. Furthermore, based on TransFusion-L, BEV-MAE achieves new state-of-the-art LiDAR-based 3D object detection results, with 73.6 NDS and 69.6 mAP on the nuScenes benchmark. The source code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/BEV-MAE
On Pre-Training for Visuo-Motor Control: Revisiting a Learning-from-Scratch Baseline
Authors: Nicklas Hansen, Zhecheng Yuan, Yanjie Ze, Tongzhou Mu, Aravind Rajeswaran, Hao Su, Huazhe Xu, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Data Augmentation

In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of pre-training for visuo-motor control tasks. We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch (LfS) baseline that incorporates data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet, and find that this baseline is surprisingly competitive with recent approaches (PVR, MVP, R3M) that leverage frozen visual representations trained on large-scale vision datasets -- across a variety of algorithms, task domains, and metrics in simulation and on a real robot. Our results demonstrate that these methods are hindered by a significant domain gap between the pre-training datasets and current benchmarks for visuo-motor control, which is alleviated by finetuning. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for future research in pre-training for control and hope that our simple yet strong baseline will aid in accurately benchmarking progress in this area.
ROIFormer: Semantic-Aware Region of Interest Transformer for Efficient Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Daitao Xing, Jinglin Shen, Chiuman Ho, Anthony Tzes
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

The exploration of mutual-benefit cross-domains has shown great potential toward accurate self-supervised depth estimation. In this work, we revisit feature fusion between depth and semantic information and propose an efficient local adaptive attention method for geometric aware representation enhancement. Instead of building global connections or deforming attention across the feature space without restraint, we bound the spatial interaction within a learnable region of interest. In particular, we leverage geometric cues from semantic information to learn local adaptive bounding boxes to guide unsupervised feature aggregation. The local areas preclude most irrelevant reference points from attention space, yielding more selective feature learning and faster convergence. We naturally extend the paradigm into a multi-head and hierarchic way to enable the information distillation in different semantic levels and improve the feature discriminative ability for fine-grained depth estimation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised monocular depth estimation task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach over former Transformer variants.
HDNet: A Hierarchically Decoupled Network for Crowd Counting
Authors: Chenliang Gu, Changan Wang, Bin-Bin Gao, Jun Liu, Tianliang Zhang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Density Estimation, regression

Recently, density map regression-based methods have dominated in crowd counting owing to their excellent fitting ability on density distribution. However, further improvement tends to saturate mainly because of the confusing background noise and the large density variation. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchically Decoupled Network (HDNet) to solve the above two problems within a unified framework. Specifically, a background classification sub-task is decomposed from the density map prediction task, which is then assigned to a Density Decoupling Module (DDM) to exploit its highly discriminative ability. For the remaining foreground prediction sub-task, it is further hierarchically decomposed to several density-specific sub-tasks by the DDM, which are then solved by the regression-based experts in a Foreground Density Estimation Module (FDEM). Although the proposed strategy effectively reduces the hypothesis space so as to relieve the optimization for those task-specific experts, the high correlation of these sub-tasks are ignored. Therefore, we introduce three types of interaction strategies to unify the whole framework, which are Feature Interaction, Gradient Interaction, and Scale Interaction. Integrated with the above spirits, HDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular counting benchmarks.
Tensor Factorization via Transformed Tensor-Tensor Product for Image Alignment
Authors: Sijia Xia, Duo Qiu, Xiongjun Zhang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the problem of a batch of linearly correlated image alignment, where the observed images are deformed by some unknown domain transformations, and corrupted by additive Gaussian noise and sparse noise simultaneously. By stacking these images as the frontal slices of a third-order tensor, we propose to utilize the tensor factorization method via transformed tensor-tensor product to explore the low-rankness of the underlying tensor, which is factorized into the product of two smaller tensors via transformed tensor-tensor product under any unitary transformation. The main advantage of transformed tensor-tensor product is that its computational complexity is lower compared with the existing literature based on transformed tensor nuclear norm. Moreover, the tensor $\ell_p$ $(0<p<1)$ norm is employed to characterize the sparsity of sparse noise and the tensor Frobenius norm is adopted to model additive Gaussian noise. A generalized Gauss-Newton algorithm is designed to solve the resulting model by linearizing the domain transformations and a proximal Gauss-Seidel algorithm is developed to solve the corresponding subproblem. Furthermore, the convergence of the proximal Gauss-Seidel algorithm is established, whose convergence rate is also analyzed based on the Kurdyka-$\L$ojasiewicz property. Extensive numerical experiments on real-world image datasets are carried out to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method as compared to several state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational time.
Feature Calibration Network for Occluded Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Tianliang Zhang, Qixiang Ye, Baochang Zhang, Jianzhuang Liu, Xiaopeng Zhang, Qi Tian
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection in the wild remains a challenging problem especially for scenes containing serious occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning method in the deep learning framework, referred to as Feature Calibration Network (FC-Net), to adaptively detect pedestrians under various occlusions. FC-Net is based on the observation that the visible parts of pedestrians are selective and decisive for detection, and is implemented as a self-paced feature learning framework with a self-activation (SA) module and a feature calibration (FC) module. In a new self-activated manner, FC-Net learns features which highlight the visible parts and suppress the occluded parts of pedestrians. The SA module estimates pedestrian activation maps by reusing classifier weights, without any additional parameter involved, therefore resulting in an extremely parsimony model to reinforce the semantics of features, while the FC module calibrates the convolutional features for adaptive pedestrian representation in both pixel-wise and region-based ways. Experiments on CityPersons and Caltech datasets demonstrate that FC-Net improves detection performance on occluded pedestrians up to 10% while maintaining excellent performance on non-occluded instances.
A Roadmap to Domain Knowledge Integration in Machine Learning
Authors: Himel Das Gupta, Victor S. Sheng
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00

Many machine learning algorithms have been developed in recent years to enhance the performance of a model in different aspects of artificial intelligence. But the problem persists due to inadequate data and resources. Integrating knowledge in a machine learning model can help to overcome these obstacles up to a certain degree. Incorporating knowledge is a complex task though because of various forms of knowledge representation. In this paper, we will give a brief overview of these different forms of knowledge integration and their performance in certain machine learning tasks.
HOTCOLD Block: Fooling Thermal Infrared Detectors with a Novel Wearable Design
Authors: Hui Wei, Zhixiang Wang, Xuemei Jia, Yinqiang Zheng, Hao Tang, Shin'ichi Satoh, Zheng Wang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Adversarial attacks on thermal infrared imaging expose the risk of related applications. Estimating the security of these systems is essential for safely deploying them in the real world. In many cases, realizing the attacks in the physical space requires elaborate special perturbations. These solutions are often \emph{impractical} and \emph{attention-grabbing}. To address the need for a physically practical and stealthy adversarial attack, we introduce \textsc{HotCold} Block, a novel physical attack for infrared detectors that hide persons utilizing the wearable Warming Paste and Cooling Paste. By attaching these readily available temperature-controlled materials to the body, \textsc{HotCold} Block evades human eyes efficiently. Moreover, unlike existing methods that build adversarial patches with complex texture and structure features, \textsc{HotCold} Block utilizes an SSP-oriented adversarial optimization algorithm that enables attacks with pure color blocks and explores the influence of size, shape, and position on attack performance. Extensive experimental results in both digital and physical environments demonstrate the performance of our proposed \textsc{HotCold} Block. \emph{Code is available: \textcolor{magenta}{https://github.com/weihui1308/HOTCOLDBlock}}.
Detection Selection Algorithm: A Likelihood based Optimization Method to Perform Post Processing for Object Detection
Authors: Angzhi Fan, Benjamin Ticknor, Yali Amit
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In object detection, post-processing methods like Non-maximum Suppression (NMS) are widely used. NMS can substantially reduce the number of false positive detections but may still keep some detections with low objectness scores. In order to find the exact number of objects and their labels in the image, we propose a post processing method called Detection Selection Algorithm (DSA) which is used after NMS or related methods. DSA greedily selects a subset of detected bounding boxes, together with full object reconstructions that give the interpretation of the whole image with highest likelihood, taking into account object occlusions. The algorithm consists of four components. First, we add an occlusion branch to Faster R-CNN to obtain occlusion relationships between objects. Second, we develop a single reconstruction algorithm which can reconstruct the whole appearance of an object given its visible part, based on the optimization of latent variables of a trained generative network which we call the decoder. Third, we propose a whole reconstruction algorithm which generates the joint reconstruction of all objects in a hypothesized interpretation, taking into account occlusion ordering. Finally we propose a greedy algorithm that incrementally adds or removes detections from a list to maximize the likelihood of the corresponding interpretation. DSA with NMS or Soft-NMS can achieve better results than NMS or Soft-NMS themselves, as is illustrated in our experiments on synthetic images with mutiple 3d objects.
CircleNet: Reciprocating Feature Adaptation for Robust Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Tianliang Zhang, Zhenjun Han, Huijuan Xu, Baochang Zhang, Qixiang Ye
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection in the wild remains a challenging problem especially when the scene contains significant occlusion and/or low resolution of the pedestrians to be detected. Existing methods are unable to adapt to these difficult cases while maintaining acceptable performance. In this paper we propose a novel feature learning model, referred to as CircleNet, to achieve feature adaptation by mimicking the process humans looking at low resolution and occluded objects: focusing on it again, at a finer scale, if the object can not be identified clearly for the first time. CircleNet is implemented as a set of feature pyramids and uses weight sharing path augmentation for better feature fusion. It targets at reciprocating feature adaptation and iterative object detection using multiple top-down and bottom-up pathways. To take full advantage of the feature adaptation capability in CircleNet, we design an instance decomposition training strategy to focus on detecting pedestrian instances of various resolutions and different occlusion levels in each cycle. Specifically, CircleNet implements feature ensemble with the idea of hard negative boosting in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on two pedestrian detection datasets, Caltech and CityPersons, show that CircleNet improves the performance of occluded and low-resolution pedestrians with significant margins while maintaining good performance on normal instances.
Evolutionary Multitasking with Solution Space Cutting for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Wu Yue, Peiran Gong, Maoguo Gong, Hangqi Ding, Zedong Tang, Yibo Liu, Wenping Ma, Qiguang Miao
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration, Transfer Learning

Point cloud registration (PCR) is a popular research topic in computer vision. Recently, the registration method in an evolutionary way has received continuous attention because of its robustness to the initial pose and flexibility in objective function design. However, most evolving registration methods cannot tackle the local optimum well and they have rarely investigated the success ratio, which implies the probability of not falling into local optima and is closely related to the practicality of the algorithm. Evolutionary multi-task optimization (EMTO) is a widely used paradigm, which can boost exploration capability through knowledge transfer among related tasks. Inspired by this concept, this study proposes a novel evolving registration algorithm via EMTO, where the multi-task configuration is based on the idea of solution space cutting. Concretely, one task searching in cut space assists another task with complex function landscape in escaping from local optima and enhancing successful registration ratio. To reduce unnecessary computational cost, a sparse-to-dense strategy is proposed. In addition, a novel fitness function robust to various overlap rates as well as a problem-specific metric of computational cost is introduced. Compared with 8 evolving approaches, 4 traditional approaches and 3 deep learning approaches on the object-scale and scene-scale registration datasets, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has superior performances in terms of precision and tackling local optima.
Masked autoencoders are effective solution to transformer data-hungry
Authors: Jiawei Mao, Honggu Zhou, Xuesong Yin, Yuanqi Chang. Binling Nie. Rui Xu
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Inductive Bias

Vision Transformers (ViTs) outperforms convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in several vision tasks with its global modeling capabilities. However, ViT lacks the inductive bias inherent to convolution making it require a large amount of data for training. This results in ViT not performing as well as CNNs on small datasets like medicine and science. We experimentally found that masked autoencoders (MAE) can make the transformer focus more on the image itself, thus alleviating the data-hungry issue of ViT to some extent. Yet the current MAE model is too complex resulting in over-fitting problems on small datasets. This leads to a gap between MAEs trained on small datasets and advanced CNNs models still. Therefore, we investigated how to reduce the decoder complexity in MAE and found a more suitable architectural configuration for it with small datasets. Besides, we additionally designed a location prediction task and a contrastive learning task to introduce localization and invariance characteristics for MAE. Our contrastive learning task not only enables the model to learn high-level visual information but also allows the training of MAE's class token. This is something that most MAE improvement efforts do not consider. Extensive experiments have shown that our method shows state-of-the-art performance on standard small datasets as well as medical datasets with few samples compared to the current popular masked image modeling (MIM) and vision transformers for small datasets.The code and models are available at https://github.com/Talented-Q/SDMAE.
Fighting Malicious Media Data: A Survey on Tampering Detection and Deepfake Detection
Authors: Junke Wang, Zhenxin Li, Chao Zhang, Jingjing Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Larry S. Davis, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

Online media data, in the forms of images and videos, are becoming mainstream communication channels. However, recent advances in deep learning, particularly deep generative models, open the doors for producing perceptually convincing images and videos at a low cost, which not only poses a serious threat to the trustworthiness of digital information but also has severe societal implications. This motivates a growing interest of research in media tampering detection, i.e., using deep learning techniques to examine whether media data have been maliciously manipulated. Depending on the content of the targeted images, media forgery could be divided into image tampering and Deepfake techniques. The former typically moves or erases the visual elements in ordinary images, while the latter manipulates the expressions and even the identity of human faces. Accordingly, the means of defense include image tampering detection and Deepfake detection, which share a wide variety of properties. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the current media tampering detection approaches, and discuss the challenges and trends in this field for future research.
Cross-Modal Learning with 3D Deformable Attention for Action Recognition
Authors: Sangwon Kim, Dasom Ahn, Byoung Chul Ko
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Action Recognition

An important challenge in vision-based action recognition is the embedding of spatiotemporal features with two or more heterogeneous modalities into a single feature. In this study, we propose a new 3D deformable transformer for action recognition with adaptive spatiotemporal receptive fields and a cross-modal learning scheme. The 3D deformable transformer consists of three attention modules: 3D deformability, local joint stride, and temporal stride attention. The two cross-modal tokens are input into the 3D deformable attention module to create a cross-attention token with a reflected spatiotemporal correlation. Local joint stride attention is applied to spatially combine attention and pose tokens. Temporal stride attention temporally reduces the number of input tokens in the attention module and supports temporal expression learning without the simultaneous use of all tokens. The deformable transformer iterates L-times and combines the last cross-modal token for classification. The proposed 3D deformable transformer was tested on the NTU60, NTU120, FineGYM, and PennAction datasets, and showed results better than or similar to pre-trained state-of-the-art methods even without a pre-training process. In addition, by visualizing important joints and correlations during action recognition through spatial joint and temporal stride attention, the possibility of achieving an explainable potential for action recognition is presented.
DISCO: Adversarial Defense with Local Implicit Functions
Authors: Chih-Hui Ho, Nuno Vasconcelos
Date: 2022-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, image-classification, Image Classification

The problem of adversarial defenses for image classification, where the goal is to robustify a classifier against adversarial examples, is considered. Inspired by the hypothesis that these examples lie beyond the natural image manifold, a novel aDversarIal defenSe with local impliCit functiOns (DISCO) is proposed to remove adversarial perturbations by localized manifold projections. DISCO consumes an adversarial image and a query pixel location and outputs a clean RGB value at the location. It is implemented with an encoder and a local implicit module, where the former produces per-pixel deep features and the latter uses the features in the neighborhood of query pixel for predicting the clean RGB value. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both DISCO and its cascade version outperform prior defenses, regardless of whether the defense is known to the attacker. DISCO is also shown to be data and parameter efficient and to mount defenses that transfers across datasets, classifiers and attacks.
Accelerating Self-Supervised Learning via Efficient Training Strategies
Authors: Mustafa Taha Koçyiğit, Timothy M. Hospedales, Hakan Bilen
Date: 2022-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Recently the focus of the computer vision community has shifted from expensive supervised learning towards self-supervised learning of visual representations. While the performance gap between supervised and self-supervised has been narrowing, the time for training self-supervised deep networks remains an order of magnitude larger than its supervised counterparts, which hinders progress, imposes carbon cost, and limits societal benefits to institutions with substantial resources. Motivated by these issues, this paper investigates reducing the training time of recent self-supervised methods by various model-agnostic strategies that have not been used for this problem. In particular, we study three strategies: an extendable cyclic learning rate schedule, a matching progressive augmentation magnitude and image resolutions schedule, and a hard positive mining strategy based on augmentation difficulty. We show that all three methods combined lead up to 2.7 times speed-up in the training time of several self-supervised methods while retaining comparable performance to the standard self-supervised learning setting.