Tao Hu, Liwei Wang, Xiaogang Xu, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia

Abstract: Recent single-view 3D reconstruction methods reconstruct object's shape and texture from a single image with only 2D image-level annotation. However, without explicit 3D attribute-level supervision, it is still difficult to achieve satisfying reconstruction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised Mesh Reconstruction (SMR) approach to enhance 3D mesh attribute learning process. Our approach is motivated by observations that (1) 3D attributes from interpolation and prediction should be consistent, and (2) feature representation of landmarks from all images should be consistent. By only requiring silhouette mask annotation, our SMR can be trained in an end-to-end manner and generalizes to reconstruct natural objects of birds, cows, motorbikes, etc. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves both 2D supervised and unsupervised 3D mesh reconstruction on multiple datasets. We also show that our model can be adapted to other image synthesis tasks, e.g., novel view generation, shape transfer, and texture transfer, with promising results. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-Research-Lab.

@InProceedings{Hu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Hu, Tao and Wang, Liwei and Xu, Xiaogang and Liu, Shu and Jia, Jiaya},
    title     = {Self-Supervised 3D Mesh Reconstruction From Single Images},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6002-6011}
}


Seunghwan Lee, Donghyeon Cho, Jiwon Kim, Tae Hyun Kim

Abstract: In this study, we propose a self-supervised video denoising method called ""restore-from-restored."" This method fine-tunes a pre-trained network by using a pseudo clean video during the test phase. The pseudo clean video is obtained by applying a noisy video to the baseline network. By adopting a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) as the baseline, we can improve video denoising performance without accurate optical flow estimation and registration steps, in contrast to many conventional video restoration methods, due to the translation equivariant property of the FCN. Specifically, the proposed method can take advantage of plentiful similar patches existing across multiple consecutive frames (i.e., patch-recurrence); these patches can boost the performance of the baseline network by a large margin. We analyze the restoration performance of the fine-tuned video denoising networks with the proposed self-supervision-based learning algorithm, and demonstrate that the FCN can utilize recurring patches without requiring accurate registration among adjacent frames. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to state-of-the-art denoisers and show that our fine-tuned networks achieve a considerable improvement in denoising performance.

@InProceedings{Lee_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lee, Seunghwan and Cho, Donghyeon and Kim, Jiwon and Kim, Tae Hyun},
    title     = {Restore From Restored: Video Restoration With Pseudo Clean Video},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3537-3546}
}


Abstract: Most works on person re-identification (ReID) take advantage of large backbone networks such as ResNet, which are designed for image classification instead of ReID, for feature extraction. However, these backbones may not be computationally efficient or the most suitable architectures for ReID. In this work, we aim to design a lightweight and suitable network for ReID. To this end, we propose a novel search space called Combined Depth Space (CDS), based on which we search for an efficient network architecture, which we call CDNet, via a differentiable architecture search algorithm. Through the use of the combined basic building blocks in CDS, CDNet tends to focus on combined pattern information that is typically found in images of pedestrians. We then propose a low-cost search strategy named the Top-k Sample Search strategy to make full use of the search space and avoid trapping in local optimal result. Furthermore, an effective Fine-grained Balance Neck (FBLNeck), which is removable at the inference time, is presented to balance the effects of triplet loss and softmax loss during the training process. Extensive experiments show that our CDNet ( 1.8 M parameters) has comparable performance with state-of-the-art lightweight networks.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Hanjun and Wu, Gaojie and Zheng, Wei-Shi},
    title     = {Combined Depth Space Based Architecture Search for Person Re-Identification},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6729-6738}
}


Qize Yang, Xihan Wei, Biao Wang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Lei Zhang

Abstract: The goal of semi-supervised object detection is to learn a detection model using only a few labeled data and large amounts of unlabeled data, thereby reducing the cost of data labeling. Although a few studies have proposed various self-training-based methods or consistency regularization-based methods, they ignore the discrepancies among the detection results in the same image that occur during different training iterations. Additionally, the predicted detection results vary among different detection models. In this paper, we propose an interactive form of self-training using mean teachers for semi-supervised object detection. Specifically, to alleviate the instability among the detection results in different iterations, we propose using nonmaximum suppression to fuse the detection results from different iterations. Simultaneously, we use multiple detection heads that predict pseudo labels for each other to provide complementary information. Furthermore, to avoid different detection heads collapsing to each other, we use a mean teacher model instead of the original detection model to predict the pseudo labels. Thus, the object detection model can be trained on both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

@InProceedings{Yang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yang, Qize and Wei, Xihan and Wang, Biao and Hua, Xian-Sheng and Zhang, Lei},
    title     = {Interactive Self-Training With Mean Teachers for Semi-Supervised Object Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5941-5950}
}


Xudong Lin, Gedas Bertasius, Jue Wang, Shih-Fu Chang, Devi Parikh, Lorenzo Torresani

Abstract: We present Vx2Text, a framework for text generation from multimodal inputs consisting of video plus text, speech, or audio. In order to leverage transformer networks, which have been shown to be effective at modeling language, each modality is first converted into a set of language embeddings by a learnable tokenizer. This allows our approach to perform multimodal fusion in the language space, thus eliminating the need for ad-hoc cross-modal fusion modules. To address the non-differentiability of tokenization on continuous inputs (e.g., video or audio), we utilize a relaxation scheme that enables end-to-end training. Furthermore, unlike prior encoder-only models, our network includes an autoregressive decoder to generate open-ended text from the multimodal embeddings fused by the language encoder. This renders our approach fully generative and makes it directly applicable to different "video+x to text" problems without the need to design specialized network heads for each task. The proposed framework is not only conceptually simple but also remarkably effective: experiments demonstrate that our approach based on a single architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art on three video-based text-generation tasks---captioning, question answering and audio-visual scene-aware dialog. Our code will be made publicly available.

@InProceedings{Lin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lin, Xudong and Bertasius, Gedas and Wang, Jue and Chang, Shih-Fu and Parikh, Devi and Torresani, Lorenzo},
    title     = {Vx2Text: End-to-End Learning of Video-Based Text Generation From Multimodal Inputs},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7005-7015}
}


Aysim Toker, Qunjie Zhou, Maxim Maximov, Laura Leal-Taixe

Abstract: The goal of cross-view image based geo-localization is to determine the location of a given street view image by matching it against a collection of geo-tagged satellite images. This task is notoriously challenging due to the drastic viewpoint and appearance differences between the two domains. We show that we can address this discrepancy explicitly by learning to synthesize realistic street views from satellite inputs. Following this observation, we propose a novel multi-task architecture in which image synthesis and retrieval are considered jointly. The rationale behind this is that we can bias our network to learn latent feature representations that are useful for retrieval if we utilize them to generate images across the two input domains. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first approach that creates realistic street views from satellite images and localizes the corresponding query street view simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. In our experiments, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on the CVUSA and CVACT benchmarks. Finally, we show compelling qualitative results for satellite-to-street view synthesis.

@InProceedings{Toker_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Toker, Aysim and Zhou, Qunjie and Maximov, Maxim and Leal-Taixe, Laura},
    title     = {Coming Down to Earth: Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis for Geo-Localization},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6488-6497}
}


Chen Gao, Jinyu Chen, Si Liu, Luting Wang, Qiong Zhang, Qi Wu

Abstract: The Remote Embodied Referring Expression (REVERIE) is a recently raised task that requires an agent to navigate to and localise a referred remote object according to a high-level language instruction. Different from related VLN tasks, the key to REVERIE is to conduct goal-oriented exploration instead of strict instruction-following, due to the lack of step-by-step navigation guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-modality Knowledge Reasoning (CKR) model to address the unique challenges of this task. The CKR, based on a transformer-architecture, learns to generate scene memory tokens and utilise these informative history clues for exploration. Particularly, a Room-and-Object Aware Attention (ROAA) mechanism is devised to explicitly perceive the room- and object-type information from both linguistic and visual observations. Moreover, through incorporating commonsense knowledge, we propose a Knowledge-enabled Entity Relationship Reasoning (KERR) module to learn the internal-external correlations among room- and object-entities for agent to make proper action at each viewpoint. Evaluation on REVERIE benchmark demonstrates the superiority of the CKR model, which significantly boosts SPL and REVERIE-success rate by 64.67% and 46.05%, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/alloldman/CKR.

@InProceedings{Gao_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Gao, Chen and Chen, Jinyu and Liu, Si and Wang, Luting and Zhang, Qiong and Wu, Qi},
    title     = {Room-and-Object Aware Knowledge Reasoning for Remote Embodied Referring Expression},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3064-3073}
}


Abstract: We present a novel, real-time, semantic segmentation network in which the encoder both encodes and generates the parameters (weights) of the decoder. Furthermore, to allow maximal adaptivity, the weights at each decoder block vary spatially. For this purpose, we design a new type of hypernetwork, composed of a nested U-Net for drawing higher level context features, a multi-headed weight generating module which generates the weights of each block in the decoder immediately before they are consumed, for efficient memory utilization, and a primary network that is composed of novel dynamic patch-wise convolutions. Despite the usage of less-conventional blocks, our architecture obtains real-time performance. In terms of the runtime vs. accuracy trade-off, we surpass state of the art (SotA) results on popular semantic segmentation benchmarks: PASCAL VOC 2012 (val. set) and real-time semantic segmentation on Cityscapes, and CamVid. The code is available: https://nirkin.com/hyperseg.

@InProceedings{Nirkin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Nirkin, Yuval and Wolf, Lior and Hassner, Tal},
    title     = {HyperSeg: Patch-Wise Hypernetwork for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4061-4070}
}


Partition-Guided GANs

Mohammadreza Armandpour, Ali Sadeghian, Chunyuan Li, Mingyuan Zhou

Abstract: Despite the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), their training suffers from several well-known problems, including mode collapse and difficulties learning a disconnected set of manifolds. In this paper, we break down the challenging task of learning complex high dimensional distributions, supporting diverse data samples, to simpler sub-tasks. Our solution relies on designing a partitioner that breaks the space into smaller regions, each having a simpler distribution, and training a different generator for each partition. This is done in an unsupervised manner without requiring any labels. We formulate two desired criteria for the space partitioner that aid the training of our mixture of generators: 1) to produce connected partitions and 2) provide a proxy of distance between partitions and data samples, along with a direction for reducing that distance. These criteria are developed to avoid producing samples from places with non-existent data density, and also facilitate training by providing additional direction to the generators. We develop theoretical constraints for a space partitioner to satisfy the above criteria. Guided by our theoretical analysis, we design an effective neural architecture for the space partitioner that empirically assures these conditions. Experimental results on various standard benchmarks show that the proposed unsupervised model outperforms several recent methods.

@InProceedings{Armandpour_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Armandpour, Mohammadreza and Sadeghian, Ali and Li, Chunyuan and Zhou, Mingyuan},
    title     = {Partition-Guided GANs},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5099-5109}
}


Cheol-Hui Min, Jinseok Bae, Junho Lee, Young Min Kim

Abstract: We present GATSBI, a generative model that can transform a sequence of raw observations into a structured latent representation that fully captures the spatio-temporal context of the agent's actions. In vision-based decision-making scenarios, an agent faces complex high-dimensional observations where multiple entities interact with each other. The agent requires a good scene representation of the visual observation that discerns essential components that consistently propagates along the time horizon. Our method, GATSBI, utilizes unsupervised scene representation learning to successfully separate an active agent, static background, and passive objects. GATSBI then models the interactions reflecting the causal relationships among decomposed entities and predicts physically plausible future states. Our model generalizes to a variety of environments where different types of robots and objects dynamically interact with each other. GATSBI achieves superior performance on scene decompo-sition and video prediction compared to its state-of-the-artcounterparts, and can be readily applied to sequential deci-sion making of an intelligent agent.

@InProceedings{Min_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Min, Cheol-Hui and Bae, Jinseok and Lee, Junho and Kim, Young Min},
    title     = {GATSBI: Generative Agent-Centric Spatio-Temporal Object Interaction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3074-3083}
}


Alex Yu, Vickie Ye, Matthew Tancik, Angjoo Kanazawa

Abstract: We propose pixelNeRF, a learning framework that predicts a continuous neural scene representation conditioned on one or few input images. The existing approach for constructing neural radiance fields (NeRFs) involves optimizing the representation to every scene independently, requiring many calibrated views and significant compute time. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing an architecture that conditions a NeRF on image inputs in a fully convolutional manner. This allows the network to be trained across multiple scenes to learn a scene prior, allowing it to perform novel view synthesis in a feed-forward manner from a sparse set of views (as few as one). Leveraging the volume rendering approach of NeRF, our model can be trained directly from images with no explicit 3D supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on ShapeNet benchmarks for single image novel view synthesis tasks under category specific and category agnostic settings. We further demonstrate the flexibility of pixelNeRF by demonstrating it on multi-object ShapeNet scenes as well as real scenes from the DTU dataset. In all cases, pixelNeRF outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines for novel view synthesis and single image 3D reconstruction.

@InProceedings{Yu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yu, Alex and Ye, Vickie and Tancik, Matthew and Kanazawa, Angjoo},
    title     = {pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields From One or Few Images},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4578-4587}
}


Anton Cherepkov, Andrey Voynov, Artem Babenko

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are currently an indispensable tool for visual editing, being a standard component of image-to-image translation and image restoration pipelines. Furthermore, GANs are especially useful for controllable generation since their latent spaces contain a wide range of interpretable directions, well suited for semantic editing operations. By gradually changing latent codes along these directions, one can produce impressive visual effects, unattainable without GANs. In this paper, we significantly expand the range of visual effects achievable with the state-of-the-art models, like StyleGAN2. In contrast to existing works, which mostly operate by latent codes, we  discover interpretable directions in the space of the generator parameters. By several simple methods, we explore this space and demonstrate that it also contains a plethora of interpretable directions, which are an excellent source of non-trivial semantic manipulations. The discovered manipulations cannot be achieved by transforming the latent codes and can be used to edit both synthetic and real images. We release our code and models and hope they will serve as a handy tool for further efforts on GAN-based image editing.

@InProceedings{Cherepkov_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Cherepkov, Anton and Voynov, Andrey and Babenko, Artem},
    title     = {Navigating the GAN Parameter Space for Semantic Image Editing},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3671-3680}
}


Shuang Li, Kaixiong Gong, Chi Harold Liu, Yulin Wang, Feng Qiao, Xinjing Cheng

Abstract: Real-world training data usually exhibits long-tailed distribution, where several majority classes have a significantly larger number of samples than the remaining minority classes. This imbalance degrades the performance of typical supervised learning algorithms designed for balanced training sets. In this paper, we address this issue by augmenting minority classes with a recently proposed implicit semantic data augmentation (ISDA) algorithm, which produces diversified augmented samples by translating deep features along many semantically meaningful directions. Importantly, given that ISDA estimates the class-conditional statistics to obtain semantic directions, we find it ineffective to do this on minority classes due to the insufficient training data. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn transformed semantic directions with meta-learning automatically. In specific, the augmentation strategy during training is dynamically optimized, aiming to minimize the loss on a small balanced validation set, which is approximated via a meta update step. Extensive empirical results on CIFAR-LT-10/100, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2017/2018 validate the effectiveness of our method.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Shuang and Gong, Kaixiong and Liu, Chi Harold and Wang, Yulin and Qiao, Feng and Cheng, Xinjing},
    title     = {MetaSAug: Meta Semantic Augmentation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5212-5221}
}


Youngkyu Hong, Seungju Han, Kwanghee Choi, Seokjun Seo, Beomsu Kim, Buru Chang

Abstract: The current evaluation protocol of long-tailed visual recognition trains the classification model on the long-tailed source label distribution and evaluates its performance on the uniform target label distribution. Such protocol has questionable practicality since the target may also be long-tailed. Therefore, we formulate long-tailed visual recognition as a label shift problem where the target and source label distributions are different. One of the significant hurdles in dealing with the label shift problem is the entanglement between the source label distribution and the model prediction. In this paper, we focus on disentangling the source label distribution from the model prediction. We first introduce a simple but overlooked baseline method that matches the target label distribution by post-processing the model prediction trained by the cross-entropy loss and the Softmax function. Although this method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, it can be further improved by directly disentangling the source label distribution from the model prediction in the training phase. Thus, we propose a novel method, LAbel distribution DisEntangling (LADE) loss based on the optimal bound of Donsker-Varadhan representation. LADE achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-100-LT, Places-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. Moreover, LADE outperforms existing methods on various shifted target label distributions, showing the general adaptability of our proposed method.

@InProceedings{Hong_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Hong, Youngkyu and Han, Seungju and Choi, Kwanghee and Seo, Seokjun and Kim, Beomsu and Chang, Buru},
    title     = {Disentangling Label Distribution for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6626-6636}
}


Dong Li, Zhaofan Qiu, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Houqiang Li, Tao Mei

Abstract: Human actions are typically of combinatorial structures or patterns, i.e., subjects, objects, plus spatio-temporal interactions in between. Discovering such structures is therefore a rewarding way to reason about the dynamics of interactions and recognize the actions. In this paper, we introduce a new design of sub-graphs to represent and encode the discriminative patterns of each action in the videos. Specifically, we present MUlti-scale Sub-graph LEarning (MUSLE) framework that novelly builds space-time graphs and clusters the graphs into compact sub-graphs on each scale with respect to the number of nodes. Technically, MUSLE produces 3D bounding boxes, i.e., tubelets, in each video clip, as graph nodes and takes dense connectivity as graph edges between tubelets. For each action category, we execute online clustering to decompose the graph into sub-graphs on each scale through learning Gaussian Mixture Layer and select the discriminative sub-graphs as action prototypes for recognition. Extensive experiments are conducted on both Something-Something V1 & V2 and Kinetics-400 datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art methods. More remarkably, our MUSLE achieves to-date the best reported accuracy of 65.0% on Something-Something V2 validation set.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Dong and Qiu, Zhaofan and Pan, Yingwei and Yao, Ting and Li, Houqiang and Mei, Tao},
    title     = {Representing Videos As Discriminative Sub-Graphs for Action Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3310-3319}
}


Linus Ericsson, Henry Gouk, Timothy M. Hospedales

Abstract: Self-supervised visual representation learning has seen huge progress recently, but no large scale evaluation has compared the many models now available. We evaluate the transfer performance of 13 top self-supervised models on 40 downstream tasks, including many-shot and few-shot recognition, object detection, and dense prediction. We compare their performance to a supervised baseline and show that on most tasks the best self-supervised models outperform supervision, confirming the recently observed trend in the literature. We find ImageNet Top-1 accuracy to be highly correlated with transfer to many-shot recognition, but increasingly less so for few-shot, object detection and dense prediction. No single self-supervised method dominates overall, suggesting that universal pre-training is still unsolved. Our analysis of features suggests that top self-supervised learners fail to preserve colour information as well as supervised alternatives, but tend to induce better classifier calibration, and less attentive overfitting than supervised learners.

@InProceedings{Ericsson_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Ericsson, Linus and Gouk, Henry and Hospedales, Timothy M.},
    title     = {How Well Do Self-Supervised Models Transfer?},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5414-5423}
}


Andreas Blattmann, Timo Milbich, Michael Dorkenwald, Bjorn Ommer

Abstract: What would be the effect of locally poking a static scene? We present an approach that learns naturally-looking global articulations caused by a local manipulation at a pixel level. Training requires only videos of moving objects but no information of the underlying manipulation of the physical scene. Our generative model learns to infer natural object dynamics as a response to user interaction and learns about the interrelations between different object body regions. Given a static image of an object and a local poking of a pixel, the approach then predicts how the object would deform over time. In contrast to existing work on video prediction, we do not synthesize arbitrary realistic videos but enable local interactive control of the deformation. Our model is not restricted to particular object categories and can transfer dynamics onto novel unseen object instances. Extensive experiments on diverse objects demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to common video prediction frameworks. Project page is available at https://bit.ly/3cxfA2L.

@InProceedings{Blattmann_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Blattmann, Andreas and Milbich, Timo and Dorkenwald, Michael and Ommer, Bjorn},
    title     = {Understanding Object Dynamics for Interactive Image-to-Video Synthesis},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5171-5181}
}


Eric R. Chan, Marco Monteiro, Petr Kellnhofer, Jiajun Wu, Gordon Wetzstein

Abstract: We have witnessed rapid progress on 3D-aware image synthesis, leveraging recent advances in generative visual models and neural rendering. Existing approaches however fall short in two ways: first, they may lack an underlying 3D representation or rely on view-inconsistent rendering, hence synthesizing images that are not multi-view consistent; second, they often depend upon representation network architectures that are not expressive enough, and their results thus lack in image quality. We propose a novel generative model, named Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks (p-GAN or pi-GAN), for high-quality 3D-aware image synthesis. p-GAN leverages neural representations with periodic activation functions and volumetric rendering to represent scenes as view-consistent radiance fields. The proposed approach obtains state-of-the-art results for 3D-aware image synthesis with multiple real and synthetic datasets.

@InProceedings{Chan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Chan, Eric R. and Monteiro, Marco and Kellnhofer, Petr and Wu, Jiajun and Wetzstein, Gordon},
    title     = {Pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5799-5809}
}


Fei Yang, Luis Herranz, Yongmei Cheng, Mikhail G. Mozerov

Abstract: Neural image compression leverages deep neural networks to outperform traditional image codecs in rate-distortion performance. However, the resulting models are also heavy, computationally demanding and generally optimized for a single rate, limiting their practical use. Focusing on practical image compression, we propose slimmable compressive autoencoders (SlimCAEs), where rate (R) and distortion (D) are jointly optimized for different capacities. Once trained, encoders and decoders can be executed at different capacities, leading to different rates and complexities. We show that a successful implementation of SlimCAEs requires suitable capacity-specific RD tradeoffs. Our experiments show that SlimCAEs are highly flexible models that provide excellent rate-distortion performance, variable rate, and dynamic adjustment of memory, computational cost and latency, thus addressing the main requirements of practical image compression.

@InProceedings{Yang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yang, Fei and Herranz, Luis and Cheng, Yongmei and Mozerov, Mikhail G.},
    title     = {Slimmable Compressive Autoencoders for Practical Neural Image Compression},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4998-5007}
}


Abstract: Pre-trained models play an important role in deep learning based text detectors. However, most methods ignore the gap between natural images and scene text images and directly apply ImageNet for pre-training. To address such a problem, some of them firstly pre-train the model using a large amount of synthetic data and then fine-tune it on target datasets, which is task-specific and has limited generalization capability. In this paper, we focus on providing general pre-trained models for text detectors. Considering the importance of exploring text contents for text detection, we propose STKM (Self-attention based Text Knowledge Mining), which consists of a CNN Encoder and a Self-attention Decoder, to learn general prior knowledge for text detection from SynthText. Given only image level text labels, Self-attention Decoder directly decodes features extracted from CNN Encoder to texts without requirement of detection, which guides the CNN backbone to explicitly learn discriminative semantic representations ignored by previous approaches. After that, the text knowledge learned by the backbone can be transferred to various text detectors to significantly improve their detection performance (e.g., 5.89% higher F-measure for EAST on ICDAR15 dataset) without bells and whistles. Pre-trained model is available at: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/STKM

@InProceedings{Wan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wan, Qi and Ji, Haoqin and Shen, Linlin},
    title     = {Self-Attention Based Text Knowledge Mining for Text Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5983-5992}
}


Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Kaiwen Guo, Pengpeng Liu, Qionghai Dai, Yebin Liu

Abstract: Human volumetric capture is a long-standing topic in computer vision and computer graphics. Although high-quality results can be achieved using sophisticated off-line systems, real-time human volumetric capture of complex scenarios, especially using light-weight setups, remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a human volumetric capture method that combines temporal volumetric fusion and deep implicit functions. To achieve high-quality and temporal-continuous reconstruction, we propose dynamic sliding fusion to fuse neighboring depth observations together with topology consistency. Moreover, for detailed and complete surface generation, we propose detail-preserving deep implicit functions for RGBD input which can not only preserve the geometric details on the depth inputs but also generate more plausible texturing results. Results and experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of view sparsity, generalization capacity, reconstruction quality, and run-time efficiency.

@InProceedings{Yu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yu, Tao and Zheng, Zerong and Guo, Kaiwen and Liu, Pengpeng and Dai, Qionghai and Liu, Yebin},
    title     = {Function4D: Real-Time Human Volumetric Capture From Very Sparse Consumer RGBD Sensors},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5746-5756}
}


Image De-Raining via Continual Learning

Man Zhou, Jie Xiao, Yifan Chang, Xueyang Fu, Aiping Liu, Jinshan Pan, Zheng-Jun Zha

Abstract: While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success on image de-raining task, most existing methods can only learn fixed mapping rules between paired rainy/clean images on a single dataset. This limits their applications in practical situations with multiple and incremental datasets where the mapping rules may change for different types of rain streaks. However, the catastrophic forgetting of traditional deep CNN model challenges the design of generalized framework for multiple and incremental datasets. A strategy of sharing the network structure but independently updating and storing the network parameters on each dataset has been developed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, this strategy is not applicable to compact systems as it dramatically increases the overall training time and parameter space. To alleviate such limitation, in this study, we propose a parameter importance guided weights modification approach, named PIGWM. Specifically, with new dataset (e.g. new rain dataset), the well-trained network weights are updated according to their importance evaluated on previous training dataset. With extensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that a single network with a single parameter set of our proposed method can process multiple rain datasets almost without performance degradation. The proposed model is capable of achieving superior performance on both inhomogeneous and incremental datasets, and is promising for highly compact systems to gradually learn myriad regularities of the different types of rain streaks. The results indicate that our proposed method has great potential for other computer vision tasks with dynamic learning environments.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhou, Man and Xiao, Jie and Chang, Yifan and Fu, Xueyang and Liu, Aiping and Pan, Jinshan and Zha, Zheng-Jun},
    title     = {Image De-Raining via Continual Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4907-4916}
}


Yanbei Chen, Yongqin Xian, A. Sophia Koepke, Ying Shan, Zeynep Akata

Abstract: Having access to multi-modal cues (e.g. vision and audio) empowers some cognitive tasks to be done faster compared to learning from a single modality. In this work, we propose to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous modalities, even though these data modalities may not be semantically correlated. Rather than directly aligning the representations of different modalities, we compose audio, image, and video representations across modalities to uncover the richer multi-modal knowledge. Our main idea is to learn a compositional embedding that closes the cross-modal semantic gap and captures the task-relevant semantics, which facilitates pulling together representations across modalities by compositional contrastive learning. We establish a new, comprehensive multi-modal distillation benchmark on three video datasets: UCF101, ActivityNet, and VGGSound. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms a variety of existing knowledge distillation methods in transferring audio-visual knowledge to improve video representation learning.

@InProceedings{Chen_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Chen, Yanbei and Xian, Yongqin and Koepke, A. Sophia and Shan, Ying and Akata, Zeynep},
    title     = {Distilling Audio-Visual Knowledge by Compositional Contrastive Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7016-7025}
}


Sheng Xu, Junhe Zhao, Jinhu Lu, Baochang Zhang, Shumin Han, David Doermann

Abstract: 1-bit detectors show great promise for resource-constrained embedded devices but often suffer from a significant performance gap compared with their real-valued counterparts. The primary reason lies in the layer-wise error during binarization. This paper presents a layer-wise search (LWS) strategy to generate 1-bit detectors that maintain a performance very close to the original real-valued model. The approach introduces angular and amplitude angular error loss functions to increase detector capacity. At each layer, it exploits a differentiable binarization search (DBS) to minimize the angular error in a student-teacher framework. It then fine-tunes the scale parameter of that layer to reduce the amplitude error. Extensive experiments show that LWS-Det outperforms state-of-the-art 1-bit detectors by a considerable margin on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. For example, the LWS-Det achieves 1-bit Faster-RCNN with ResNet-34 backbone within 2.0% mAP of its real-valued counterpart on the PASCAL VOC dataset.

@InProceedings{Xu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Xu, Sheng and Zhao, Junhe and Lu, Jinhu and Zhang, Baochang and Han, Shumin and Doermann, David},
    title     = {Layer-Wise Searching for 1-Bit Detectors},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5682-5691}
}


Abstract: The vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success. However, generalizing vision-based RL policy to unknown test environments still remains as a challenging problem. Unlike previous works that focus on training a universal RL policy that is invariant to discrepancies between test and training environment, we focus on developing an independent module to disperse interference factors irrelevant to the task, thereby providing ""clean"" observations for the RL policy. The proposed unsupervised visual attention and invariance method (VAI) contains three key components: 1) an unsupervised keypoint detection model which captures semantically meaningful keypoints in observations; 2) an unsupervised visual attention module which automatically generates the distraction-invariant attention mask for each observation; 3) a self-supervised adapter for visual distraction invariance which reconstructs distraction-invariant attention mask from observations with artificial disturbances generated by a series of foreground and background augmentations. All components are optimized in an unsupervised way, without manual annotation or access to environment internals, and only the adapter is used during inference time to provide distraction-free observations to RL policy. VAI empirically shows powerful generalization capabilities and significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method by 15% 49% in DeepMind Control suite benchmark and 61% 229% in our proposed robot manipulation benchmark, in term of cumulative rewards per episode.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wang, Xudong and Lian, Long and Yu, Stella X.},
    title     = {Unsupervised Visual Attention and Invariance for Reinforcement Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6677-6687}
}


Yihe Tang, Weifeng Chen, Yijun Luo, Yuting Zhang

Abstract: We propose a semi-supervised approach for contemporary object detectors following the teacher-student dual model framework. Our method is featured with 1) the exponential moving averaging strategy to update the teacher from the student online, 2) using plenty of region proposals and soft pseudo-labels as the student's training targets, and 3) a light-weighted detection-specific data ensemble for the teacher to generate more reliable pseudo labels. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art - STAC, which uses hard labels on sparsely selected hard pseudo samples, the teacher in our model exposes richer information to the student with soft-labels on many proposals. Our model achieves COCO-style AP of 53.04% on VOC07 val set, 8.4% better than STAC, when using VOC12 as unlabeled data. On MS-COCO, it outperforms prior work when only a small percentage of data is taken as labeled. It also reaches 53.8% AP on MS-COCO test-dev with 3.1% gain over the fully supervised ResNet-152 cascaded R-CNN, by tapping into unlabeled data of a similar size to the labeled data.

@InProceedings{Tang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Tang, Yihe and Chen, Weifeng and Luo, Yijun and Zhang, Yuting},
    title     = {Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3132-3141}
}


One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels

Yuhao Zhu, Qi Li, Jian Wang, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Zhenan Sun

Abstract: Face swapping has both positive applications such as entertainment, human-computer interaction, etc., and negative applications such as DeepFake threats to politics, economics, etc. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand the scheme of advanced methods for high-quality face swapping and generate enough and representative face swapping images to train DeepFake detection algorithms. This paper proposes the first Megapixel level method for one shot Face Swapping (or MegaFS for short). Firstly, MegaFS organizes face representation hierarchically by the proposed Hierarchical Representation Face Encoder (HieRFE) in an extended latent space to maintain more facial details, rather than compressed representation in previous face swapping methods. Secondly, a carefully designed Face Transfer Module (FTM) is proposed to transfer the identity from a source image to the target by a non-linear trajectory without explicit feature disentanglement. Finally, the swapped faces can be synthesized by StyleGAN2 with the benefits of its training stability and powerful generative capability. Each part of MegaFS can be trained separately so the requirement of our model for GPU memory can be satisfied for megapixel face swapping. In summary, complete face representation, stable training, and limited memory usage are the three novel contributions to the success of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MegaFS and the first megapixel level face swapping database is released for research on DeepFake detection and face image editing in the public domain.

@InProceedings{Zhu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhu, Yuhao and Li, Qi and Wang, Jian and Xu, Cheng-Zhong and Sun, Zhenan},
    title     = {One Shot Face Swapping on Megapixels},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4834-4844}
}


Mutian Xu, Runyu Ding, Hengshuang Zhao, Xiaojuan Qi

Abstract: We introduce Position Adaptive Convolution (PAConv), a generic convolution operation for 3D point cloud processing. The key of PAConv is to construct the convolution kernel by dynamically assembling basic weight matrices stored in Weight Bank, where the coefficients of these weight matrices are self-adaptively learned from point positions through ScoreNet. In this way, the kernel is built in a data-driven manner, endowing PAConv with more flexibility than 2D convolutions to better handle the irregular and unordered point cloud data. Besides, the complexity of the learning process is reduced by combining weight matrices instead of brutally predicting kernels from point positions. Furthermore, different from the existing point convolution operators whose network architectures are often heavily engineered, we integrate our PAConv into classical MLP-based point cloud pipelines without changing network configurations. Even built on simple networks, our method still approaches or even surpasses the state-of-the-art models, and significantly improves baseline performance on both classification and segmentation tasks, yet with decent efficiency. Thorough ablation studies and visualizations are provided to understand PAConv. Code is released on https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/PAConv.

@InProceedings{Xu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Xu, Mutian and Ding, Runyu and Zhao, Hengshuang and Qi, Xiaojuan},
    title     = {PAConv: Position Adaptive Convolution With Dynamic Kernel Assembling on Point Clouds},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3173-3182}
}


Abstract: We address the problem of weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using bounding box annotations. Although object bounding boxes are good indicators to segment corresponding objects, they do not specify object boundaries, making it hard to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation. We find that background regions are perceptually consistent in part within an image, and this can be leveraged to discriminate foreground and background regions inside object bounding boxes. To implement this idea, we propose a novel pooling method, dubbed background-aware pooling (BAP), that focuses more on aggregating foreground features inside the bounding boxes using attention maps. This allows to extract high-quality pseudo segmentation labels to train CNNs for semantic segmentation, but the labels still contain noise especially at object boundaries. To address this problem, we also introduce a noise-aware loss (NAL) that makes the networks less susceptible to incorrect labels. Experimental results demonstrate that learning with our pseudo labels already outperforms state-of-the-art weakly- and semi-supervised methods on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and the NAL further boosts the performance.

@InProceedings{Oh_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Oh, Youngmin and Kim, Beomjun and Ham, Bumsub},
    title     = {Background-Aware Pooling and Noise-Aware Loss for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6913-6922}
}


Vladimir Guzov, Aymen Mir, Torsten Sattler, Gerard Pons-Moll

Abstract: We introduce (HPS) Human POSEitioning System, a method to recover the full 3D pose of a human registered with a 3D scan of the surrounding environment using wearable sensors. Using IMUs attached at the body limbs and a head mounted camera looking outwards, HPS fuses camera based self-localization with IMU-based human body tracking. The former provides drift-free but noisy position and orientation estimates while the latter is accurate in the short-term but subject to drift over longer periods of time. We show that our optimization-based integration exploits the benefits of the two, resulting in pose accuracy free of drift. Furthermore, we integrate 3D scene constraints into our optimization, such as foot contact with the ground, resulting in physically plausible motion. HPS complements more common third-person-based 3D pose estimation methods. It allows capturing larger recording volumes and longer periods of motion, and could be used for VR/AR applications where humans interact with the scene without requiring direct line of sight with an external camera, or to train agents that navigate and interact with the environment based on first-person visual input, like real humans. With HPS, we recorded a dataset of humans interacting with large 3D scenes (300-1000 sq.m) consisting of 7 subjects and more than 3 hours of diverse motion. The dataset, code and video will be available on the project page: http://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/hps/.

@InProceedings{Guzov_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Guzov, Vladimir and Mir, Aymen and Sattler, Torsten and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
    title     = {Human POSEitioning System (HPS): 3D Human Pose Estimation and Self-Localization in Large Scenes From Body-Mounted Sensors},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4318-4329}
}


Ziyan Wang, Timur Bagautdinov, Stephen Lombardi, Tomas Simon, Jason Saragih, Jessica Hodgins, Michael Zollhofer

Abstract: Photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans is an important ability for telepresence systems, virtual shopping, synthetic data generation, and more. Recently, neural rendering methods, which combine techniques from computer graphics and machine learning, have created high-fidelity models of humans and objects. Some of these methods do not produce results with high-enough fidelity for driveable human models (Neural Volumes) whereas others have extremely long rendering times (NeRF). We propose a novel compositional 3D representation that combines the best of previous methods to produce both higher-resolution and faster results. Our representation bridges the gap between discrete and continuous volumetric representations by combining a coarse 3D-structure-aware grid of animation codes with a continuous learned scene function that maps every position and its corresponding local animation code to its view-dependent emitted radiance and local volume density. Differentiable volume rendering is employed to compute photo-realistic novel views of the human head and upper body as well as to train our novel representation end-to-end using only 2D supervision. In addition, we show that the learned dynamic radiance field can be used to synthesize novel unseen expressions based on a global animation code. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of dynamic human heads and the upper body. See our project page for more results.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wang, Ziyan and Bagautdinov, Timur and Lombardi, Stephen and Simon, Tomas and Saragih, Jason and Hodgins, Jessica and Zollhofer, Michael},
    title     = {Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5704-5713}
}


Hao Wang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Liang Li, Dong Liu, Jiebo Luo

Abstract: We address the problem of localizing a specific moment described by a natural language query. Existing works interact the query with either video frame or moment proposal, and neglect the inherent structure of moment construction for both cross-modal understanding and video content comprehension, which are the two crucial challenges for this task. In this paper, we disentangle the activity moment into boundary and content. Based on the explored moment structure, we propose a novel Structured Multi-level Interaction Network (SMIN) to tackle this problem through multi-levels of cross-modal interaction coupled with content-boundary-moment interaction. In particular, for cross-modal interaction, we interact the sentence-level query with the whole moment while interact the word-level query with content and boundary, as in a coarse-to-fine manner. For content-boundary-moment interaction, we capture the insightful relations between boundary, content, and the whole moment proposal. Through multi-level interactions, the model obtains robust cross-modal representation for accurate moment localization. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks (i.e., Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions, and TACoS) demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wang, Hao and Zha, Zheng-Jun and Li, Liang and Liu, Dong and Luo, Jiebo},
    title     = {Structured Multi-Level Interaction Network for Video Moment Localization via Language Query},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7026-7035}
}


Daejin Kim, Mohammad Azam Khan, Jaegul Choo

Abstract: Facial attribute editing aims to manipulate the image with the desired attribute while preserving the other details. Recently, generative adversarial networks along with the encoder-decoder architecture have been utilized for this task owing to their ability to create realistic images. However, the existing methods for the unpaired dataset cannot still preserve the attribute-irrelevant regions properly due to the absence of the ground truth image. This work proposes a novel, intuitive loss function called the CAM-consistency loss, which improves the consistency of an input image in image translation. While the existing cycle-consistency loss ensures that the image can be translated back, our approach makes the model further preserve the attribute-irrelevant regions even in a single translation to another domain by using the Grad-CAM output computed from the discriminator. Our CAM-consistency loss directly optimizes such a Grad-CAM output from the discriminator during training, in order to properly capture which local regions the generator should change while keeping the other regions unchanged. In this manner, our approach allows the generator and the discriminator to collaborate with each other to improve the image translation quality. In our experiments, we validate the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed CAM-consistency loss by applying it to several representative models for facial image editing, such as StarGAN, AttGAN, and STGAN.

@InProceedings{Kim_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Kim, Daejin and Khan, Mohammad Azam and Choo, Jaegul},
    title     = {Not Just Compete, but Collaborate: Local Image-to-Image Translation via Cooperative Mask Prediction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6509-6518}
}


Ramtin Hosseini, Xingyi Yang, Pengtao Xie

Abstract: In deep learning applications, the architectures of deep neural networks are crucial in achieving high accuracy. Many methods have been proposed to search for high-performance neural architectures automatically. However, these searched architectures are prone to adversarial attacks. A small perturbation of the input data can render the architecture to change prediction outcomes significantly. To address this problem, we propose methods to perform differentiable searches of robust neural architectures. In our methods, two differentiable metrics are defined to measure architectures' robustness, based on certified lower bound and Jacobian norm bound. Then we search for robust architectures by maximizing the robustness metrics. Different from previous approaches which aim to improve architectures' robustness in an implicit way: performing adversarial training and injecting random noise, our methods explicitly and directly maximize robustness metrics to harvest robust architectures. On CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and MNIST, we perform game-based evaluation and verification-based evaluation on the robustness of our methods. The experimental results show that our methods 1) are more robust to various norm-bound attacks than several robust NAS baselines; 2) are more accurate than baselines when there are no attacks; 3) have significantly higher certified lower bounds than baselines.

@InProceedings{Hosseini_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Hosseini, Ramtin and Yang, Xingyi and Xie, Pengtao},
    title     = {DSRNA: Differentiable Search of Robust Neural Architectures},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6196-6205}
}


Lingbo Liu, Jiaqi Chen, Hefeng Wu, Guanbin Li, Chenglong Li, Liang Lin

Abstract: Crowd counting is a fundamental yet challenging task, which desires rich information to generate pixel-wise crowd density maps. However, most previous methods only used the limited information of RGB images and cannot well discover potential pedestrians in unconstrained scenarios. In this work, we find that incorporating optical and thermal information can greatly help to recognize pedestrians. To promote future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale RGBT Crowd Counting (RGBT-CC) benchmark, which contains 2,030 pairs of RGB-thermal images with 138,389 annotated people. Furthermore, to facilitate the multimodal crowd counting, we propose a cross-modal collaborative representation learning framework, which consists of multiple modality-specific branches, a modality-shared branch, and an Information Aggregation-Distribution Module (IADM) to capture the complementary information of different modalities fully. Specifically, our IADM incorporates two collaborative information transfers to dynamically enhance the modality-shared and modality-specific representations with a dual information propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on the RGBT-CC benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for RGBT crowd counting. Moreover, the proposed approach is universal for multimodal crowd counting and is also capable to achieve superior performance on the ShanghaiTechRGBD dataset. Finally, our source code and benchmark have been released at http://lingboliu.com/RGBT_Crowd_Counting.html.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Lingbo and Chen, Jiaqi and Wu, Hefeng and Li, Guanbin and Li, Chenglong and Lin, Liang},
    title     = {Cross-Modal Collaborative Representation Learning and a Large-Scale RGBT Benchmark for Crowd Counting},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4823-4833}
}


Hexin Bai, Wensheng Cheng, Peng Chu, Juehuan Liu, Kai Zhang, Haibin Ling

Abstract: Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has witnessed remarkable advances in recent years. However, existing studies dominantly request prior knowledge of the tracking target (eg, pedestrians), and hence may not generalize well to unseen categories. In contrast, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT), which requires little prior information about the target, is largely under-explored. In this paper, we make contributions to boost the study of GMOT in three aspects. First, we construct the first publicly available dense GMOT dataset, dubbed GMOT-40, which contains 40 carefully annotated sequences evenly distributed among 10 object categories. In addition, two tracking protocols are adopted to evaluate different characteristics of tracking algorithms. Second, by noting the lack of devoted tracking algorithms, we have designed a series of baseline GMOT algorithms. Third, we perform thorough evaluations on GMOT-40, involving popular MOT algorithms (with necessary modifications) and the proposed baselines. The GMOT-40 benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/Spritea/GMOT40.

@InProceedings{Bai_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Bai, Hexin and Cheng, Wensheng and Chu, Peng and Liu, Juehuan and Zhang, Kai and Ling, Haibin},
    title     = {GMOT-40: A Benchmark for Generic Multiple Object Tracking},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6719-6728}
}


Abstract: Face recognition is known to exhibit bias -- subjects in a certain demographic group can be better recognized than other groups. This work aims to learn a fair face representation, where faces of every group could be more equally represented. Our proposed group adaptive classifier mitigates bias by using adaptive convolution kernels and attention mechanisms on faces based on their demographic attributes. The adaptive module comprises kernel masks and channel-wise attention maps for each demographic group so as to activate different facial regions for identification, leading to more discriminative features pertinent to their demographics. Our introduced automated adaptation strategy determines whether to apply adaptation to a certain layer by iteratively computing the dissimilarity among demographic-adaptive parameters. A new de-biasing loss function is proposed to mitigate the gap of average intra-class distance between demographic groups. Experiments on face benchmarks (RFW, LFW, IJB-A, and IJB-C) show that our work is able to mitigate face recognition bias across demographic groups while maintaining the competitive accuracy.

@InProceedings{Gong_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Gong, Sixue and Liu, Xiaoming and Jain, Anil K.},
    title     = {Mitigating Face Recognition Bias via Group Adaptive Classifier},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3414-3424}
}


Abstract: Temporal action detection on unconstrained videos has seen significant research progress in recent years. Deep learning has achieved enormous success in this direction. However, collecting large-scale temporal detection datasets to ensuring promising performance in the real-world is a laborious, impractical and time consuming process. Accordingly, we present a novel improved temporal action localization model that is better able to take advantage of limited labeled data available. Specifically, we design two auxiliary tasks by reconstructing the available label information and then facilitate the learning of the temporal action detection model. Each task generates their supervision signal by recycling the original annotations, and are jointly trained with the temporal action detection model in a multi-task learning fashion. Note that the proposed approach can be pluggable to any region proposal based temporal action detection models. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, namely THUMOS'14, Charades and ActivityNet. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Zhihui and Yao, Lina},
    title     = {Three Birds with One Stone: Multi-Task Temporal Action Detection via Recycling Temporal Annotations},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4751-4760}
}


Abstract: Both non-local (NL) operation and sparse representation are crucial for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). In this paper, we investigate their combinations and propose a novel Non-Local Sparse Attention (NLSA) with dynamic sparse attention pattern. NLSA is designed to retain long-range modeling capability from NL operation while enjoying robustness and high-efficiency of sparse representation. Specifically, NLSA rectifies NL attention with spherical locality sensitive hashing (LSH) that partitions the input space into hash buckets of related features. For every query signal, NLSA assigns a bucket to it and only computes attention within the bucket. The resulting sparse attention prevents the model from attending to locations that are noisy and less-informative, while reducing the computational cost from quadratic to asymptotic linear with respect to the spatial size. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of NLSA. With a few non-local sparse attention modules, our architecture, called non-local sparse network (NLSN), reaches state-of-the-art performance for SISR quantitatively and qualitatively.

@InProceedings{Mei_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Mei, Yiqun and Fan, Yuchen and Zhou, Yuqian},
    title     = {Image Super-Resolution With Non-Local Sparse Attention},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3517-3526}
}


Shunsuke Saito, Jinlong Yang, Qianli Ma, Michael J. Black

Abstract: We present SCANimate, an end-to-end trainable framework that takes raw 3D scans of a clothed human and turns them into an animatable avatar. These avatars are driven by pose parameters and have realistic clothing that moves and deforms naturally. SCANimate does not rely on a customized mesh template or surface mesh registration. We observe that fitting a parametric 3D body model, like SMPL, to a clothed human scan is tractable while surface registration of the body topology to the scan is often not, because clothing can deviate significantly from the body shape. We also observe that articulated transformations are invertible, resulting in geometric cycle-consistency in the posed and unposed shapes. These observations lead us to a weakly supervised learning method that aligns scans into a canonical pose by disentangling articulated deformations without template-based surface registration. Furthermore, to complete missing regions in the aligned scans while modeling pose-dependent deformations, we introduce a locally pose-aware implicit function that learns to complete and model geometry with learned pose correctives. In contrast to commonly used global pose embeddings, our local pose conditioning significantly reduces long-range spurious correlations and improves generalization to unseen poses, especially when training data is limited. Our method can be applied to pose-aware appearance modeling to generate a fully textured avatar. We demonstrate our approach on various clothing types with different amounts of training data, outperforming existing solutions and other variants in terms of fidelity and generality in every setting. The code is available at https://scanimate.is.tue.mpg.de

@InProceedings{Saito_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Saito, Shunsuke and Yang, Jinlong and Ma, Qianli and Black, Michael J.},
    title     = {SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {2886-2897}
}


Abstract: Current video retrieval efforts all found their evaluation on an instance-based assumption, that only a single caption is relevant to a query video and vice versa. We demonstrate that this assumption results in performance comparisons often not indicative of models' retrieval capabilities. We propose a move to semantic similarity video retrieval, where (i) multiple videos/captions can be deemed equally relevant, and their relative ranking does not affect a method's reported performance and (ii) retrieved videos/captions are ranked by their similarity to a query. We propose several proxies to estimate semantic similarities in large-scale retrieval datasets, without additional annotations. Our analysis is performed on three commonly used video retrieval datasets (MSR-VTT, YouCook2 and EPIC-KITCHENS).

@InProceedings{Wray_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wray, Michael and Doughty, Hazel and Damen, Dima},
    title     = {On Semantic Similarity in Video Retrieval},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3650-3660}
}


Abstract: We study a worst-case scenario in generalization: Out-of-domain generalization from a single source. The goal is to learn a robust model from a single source and expect it to generalize over many unknown distributions. This challenging problem has been seldom investigated while existing solutions suffer from various limitations. In this paper, we propose a new solution. The key idea is to augment the source capacity in both input and label spaces, while the augmentation is guided by uncertainty assessment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to (1) access the generalization uncertainty from a single source and (2) leverage it to guide both input and label augmentation for robust generalization. The model training and deployment are effectively organized in a Bayesian meta-learning framework. We conduct extensive comparisons and ablation study to validate our approach. The results prove our superior performance in a wide scope of tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, text classification, and speech recognition.

@InProceedings{Qiao_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Qiao, Fengchun and Peng, Xi},
    title     = {Uncertainty-Guided Model Generalization to Unseen Domains},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6790-6800}
}


Chang Liu, Han Yu, Boyang Li, Zhiqi Shen, Zhanning Gao, Peiran Ren, Xuansong Xie, Lizhen Cui, Chunyan Miao

Abstract: The existence of noisy labels in real-world data negatively impacts the performance of deep learning models. Although much research effort has been devoted to improving robustness to noisy labels in classification tasks, the problem of noisy labels in deep metric learning (DML) remains open. In this paper, we propose a noise-resistant training technique for DML, which we name Probabilistic Ranking-based Instance Selection with Memory (PRISM). PRISM identifies noisy data in a minibatch using average similarity against image features extracted by several previous versions of the neural network. These features are stored in and retrieved from a memory bank. To alleviate the high computational cost brought by the memory bank, we introduce an acceleration method that replaces individual data points with the class centers. In extensive comparisons with 12 existing approaches under both synthetic and real-world label noise, PRISM demonstrates superior performance of up to 6.06% in Precision@1.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Chang and Yu, Han and Li, Boyang and Shen, Zhiqi and Gao, Zhanning and Ren, Peiran and Xie, Xuansong and Cui, Lizhen and Miao, Chunyan},
    title     = {Noise-Resistant Deep Metric Learning With Ranking-Based Instance Selection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6811-6820}
}


Zhengqi Li, Simon Niklaus, Noah Snavely, Oliver Wang

Abstract: We present a method to perform novel view and time synthesis of dynamic scenes, requiring only a monocular video with known camera poses as input. To do this, we introduce Neural Scene Flow Fields, a new representation that models the dynamic scene as a time-variant continuous function of appearance, geometry, and 3D scene motion. Our representation is optimized through a neural network to fit the observed input views. We show that our representation can be used for complex dynamic scenes, including thin structures, view-dependent effects, and natural degrees of motion. We conduct a number of experiments that demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms recent monocular view synthesis methods, and show qualitative results of space-time view synthesis on a variety of real-world videos.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Zhengqi and Niklaus, Simon and Snavely, Noah and Wang, Oliver},
    title     = {Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6498-6508}
}


Xin Yuan, Zhe Lin, Jason Kuen, Jianming Zhang, Yilin Wang, Michael Maire, Ajinkya Kale, Baldo Faieta

Abstract: We develop an approach to learning visual representations that embraces multimodal data, driven by a combination of intra- and inter-modal similarity preservation objectives. Unlike existing visual pre-training methods, which solve a proxy prediction task in a single domain, our method exploits intrinsic data properties within each modality and semantic information from cross-modal correlation simultaneously, hence improving the quality of learned visual representations. By including multimodal training in a unified framework with different types of contrastive losses, our method can learn more powerful and generic visual features. We first train our model on COCO and evaluate the learned visual representations on various downstream tasks including image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. For example, the visual representations pre-trained on COCO by our method achieve state-of-the-art top-1 validation accuracy of 55.3% on ImageNet classification, under the common transfer protocol. We also evaluate our method on the large-scale Stock images dataset and show its effectiveness on multi-label image tagging, and cross-modal retrieval tasks.

@InProceedings{Yuan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yuan, Xin and Lin, Zhe and Kuen, Jason and Zhang, Jianming and Wang, Yilin and Maire, Michael and Kale, Ajinkya and Faieta, Baldo},
    title     = {Multimodal Contrastive Training for Visual Representation Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6995-7004}
}


Hamad Ahmed, Ronnie B. Wilbur, Hari M. Bharadwaj, Jeffrey Mark Siskind

Abstract: New results suggest strong limits to the feasibility of object classification from human brain activity evoked by image stimuli, as measured through EEG. Considerable prior work suffers from a confound between the stimulus class and the time since the start of the experiment. A prior attempt to avoid this confound using randomized trials was unable to achieve results above chance in a statistically significant fashion when the data sets were of the same size as the original experiments. Here, we attempt object classification from EEG using an array of methods that are representative of the state-of-the-art, with a far larger (20x) dataset of randomized EEG trials, 1,000 stimulus presentations of each of forty classes, all from a single subject. To our knowledge, this is the largest such EEG data-collection effort from a single subject and is at the bounds of feasibility. We obtain classification accuracy that is marginally above chance and above chance in a statistically significant fashion, and further assess how accuracy depends on the classifier used, the amount of training data used, and the number of classes. Reaching the limits of data collection with only marginally above-chance performance suggests that the prevailing literature substantially exaggerates the feasibility of object classification from EEG.

@InProceedings{Ahmed_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Ahmed, Hamad and Wilbur, Ronnie B. and Bharadwaj, Hari M. and Siskind, Jeffrey Mark},
    title     = {Object Classification From Randomized EEG Trials},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3845-3854}
}


Shangzhe Wu, Ameesh Makadia, Jiajun Wu, Noah Snavely, Richard Tucker, Angjoo Kanazawa

Abstract: Recent works have shown exciting results in unsupervised image de-rendering--learning to decompose 3D shape, appearance, and lighting from single-image collections without explicit supervision. However, many of these assume simplistic material and lighting models. We propose a method, termed RADAR, that can recover environment illumination and surface materials from real single-image collections, relying neither on explicit 3D supervision, nor on multi-view or multi-light images. Specifically, we focus on rotationally symmetric artefacts that exhibit challenging surface properties including specular reflections, such as vases. We introduce a novel self-supervised albedo discriminator, which allows the model to recover plausible albedo without requiring any ground-truth during training. In conjunction with a shape reconstruction module exploiting rotational symmetry, we present an end-to-end learning framework that is able to de-render the world's revolutionary artefacts. We conduct experiments on a real vase dataset and demonstrate compelling decomposition results, allowing for applications including free-viewpoint rendering and relighting. More results and code at: https://sorderender.github.io/.

@InProceedings{Wu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wu, Shangzhe and Makadia, Ameesh and Wu, Jiajun and Snavely, Noah and Tucker, Richard and Kanazawa, Angjoo},
    title     = {De-Rendering the World's Revolutionary Artefacts},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6338-6347}
}


Shangrong Yang, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Chunjie Zhang, Yao Zhao

Abstract: Distortion rectification is often required for fisheye images. The generation-based method is one mainstream solution due to its label-free property, but its naive skip-connection and overburdened decoder will cause blur and incomplete correction. First, the skip-connection directly transfers the image features, which may introduce distortion and cause incomplete correction. Second, the decoder is overburdened during simultaneously reconstructing the content and structure of the image, resulting in vague performance. To solve these two problems, in this paper, we focus on the interpretable correction mechanism of the distortion rectification network and propose a feature-level correction scheme. We embed a correction layer in skip-connection and leverage the appearance flows in different layers to pre-correct the image features. Consequently, the decoder can easily reconstruct a plausible result with the remaining distortion-less information. In addition, we propose a parallel complementary structure. It effectively reduces the burden of the decoder by separating content reconstruction and structure correction. Subjective and objective experiment results on different datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

@InProceedings{Yang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yang, Shangrong and Lin, Chunyu and Liao, Kang and Zhang, Chunjie and Zhao, Yao},
    title     = {Progressively Complementary Network for Fisheye Image Rectification Using Appearance Flow},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6348-6357}
}


Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Ajaykumar Unagar, Mans Larsson, Hugo Germain, Carl Toft, Viktor Larsson, Marc Pollefeys, Vincent Lepetit, Lars Hammarstrand, Fredrik Kahl, Torsten Sattler

Abstract: Camera pose estimation in known scenes is a 3D geometry task recently tackled by multiple learning algorithms. Many regress precise geometric quantities, like poses or 3D points, from an input image. This either fails to generalize to new viewpoints or ties the model parameters to a specific scene. In this paper, we go Back to the Feature: we argue that deep networks should focus on learning robust and invariant visual features, while the geometric estimation should be left to principled algorithms. We introduce PixLoc, a scene-agnostic neural network that estimates an accurate 6-DoF pose from an image and a 3D model. Our approach is based on the direct alignment of multiscale deep features, casting camera localization as metric learning. PixLoc learns strong data priors by end-to-end training from pixels to pose and exhibits exceptional generalization to new scenes by separating model parameters and scene geometry. The system can localize in large environments given coarse pose priors but also improve the accuracy of sparse feature matching by jointly refining keypoints and poses with little overhead. The code will be publicly available at github.com/cvg/pixloc.

@InProceedings{Sarlin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Sarlin, Paul-Edouard and Unagar, Ajaykumar and Larsson, Mans and Germain, Hugo and Toft, Carl and Larsson, Viktor and Pollefeys, Marc and Lepetit, Vincent and Hammarstrand, Lars and Kahl, Fredrik and Sattler, Torsten},
    title     = {Back to the Feature: Learning Robust Camera Localization From Pixels To Pose},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3247-3257}
}


Jiapeng Tang, Dan Xu, Kui Jia, Lei Zhang

Abstract: This paper focuses on the task of 4D shape reconstruction from a sequence of point clouds. Despite the recent success achieved by extending deep implicit representations into 4D space, it is still a great challenge in two respects, i.e. how to design a flexible framework for learning robust spatio-temporal shape representations from 4D point clouds, and develop an efficient mechanism for capturing shape dynamics. In this work, we present a novel pipeline to learn a temporal evolution of the 3D human shape through spatially continuous transformation functions among cross-frame occupancy fields. The key idea is to parallelly establish the dense correspondence between predicted occupancy fields at different time steps via explicitly learning continuous displacement vector fields from robust spatio-temporal shape representations. Extensive comparisons against previous state-of-the-arts show the superior accuracy of our approach for 4D human reconstruction in the problems of 4D shape auto-encoding and completion, and a much faster network inference with about 8 times speedup demonstrates the significant efficiency of our approach.

@InProceedings{Tang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Tang, Jiapeng and Xu, Dan and Jia, Kui and Zhang, Lei},
    title     = {Learning Parallel Dense Correspondence From Spatio-Temporal Descriptors for Efficient and Robust 4D Reconstruction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {6022-6031}
}


Aditya Prakash, Kashyap Chitta, Andreas Geiger

Abstract: How should representations from complementary sensors be integrated for autonomous driving? Geometry-based sensor fusion has shown great promise for perception tasks such as object detection and motion forecasting. However, for the actual driving task, the global context of the 3D scene is key, e.g. a change in traffic light state can affect the behavior of a vehicle geometrically distant from that traffic light. Geometry alone may therefore be insufficient for effectively fusing representations in end-to-end driving models. In this work, we demonstrate that imitation learning policies based on existing sensor fusion methods under-perform in the presence of a high density of dynamic agents and complex scenarios, which require global contextual reasoning, such as handling traffic oncoming from multiple directions at uncontrolled intersections. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a novel Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer, to integrate image and LiDAR representations using attention. We experimentally validate the efficacy of our approach in urban settings involving complex scenarios using the CARLA urban driving simulator. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art driving performance while reducing collisions by 76% compared to geometry-based fusion.

@InProceedings{Prakash_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Prakash, Aditya and Chitta, Kashyap and Geiger, Andreas},
    title     = {Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7077-7087}
}


Yutong Zheng, Yu-Kai Huang, Ran Tao, Zhiqiang Shen, Marios Savvides

Abstract: We propose a method to disentangle linear-encoded facial semantics from StyleGAN without external supervision. The method derives from linear regression and sparse representation learning concepts to make the disentangled latent representations easily interpreted as well. We start by coupling StyleGAN with a stabilized 3D deformable facial reconstruction method to decompose single-view GAN generations into multiple semantics. Latent representations are then extracted to capture interpretable facial semantics. In this work, we make it possible to get rid of labels for disentangling meaningful facial semantics. Also, we demonstrate that the guided extrapolation along the disentangled representations can help with data augmentation, which sheds light on handling unbalanced data. Finally, we provide an analysis of our learned localized facial representations and illustrate that the semantic information is encoded, which surprisingly complies with human intuition. The overall unsupervised design brings more flexibility to representation learning in the wild.

@InProceedings{Zheng_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zheng, Yutong and Huang, Yu-Kai and Tao, Ran and Shen, Zhiqiang and Savvides, Marios},
    title     = {Unsupervised Disentanglement of Linear-Encoded Facial Semantics},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3917-3926}
}


Li Hu, Peng Zhang, Bang Zhang, Pan Pan, Yinghui Xu, Rong Jin

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation(VOS). Multiple works have shown that memory-based approaches can be effective for video object segmentation. They are mostly based on pixel-level matching, both spatially and temporally. The main shortcoming of memory-based approaches is that they do not take into account the sequential order among frames and do not exploit object-level knowledge from the target. To address this limitation, we propose to learn position and target consistency framework for memory-based video object segmentation, termed as LCM. It applies the memory mechanism to retrieve pixels globally, and meanwhile learns position consistency for more reliable segmentation. The learned location response promotes a better discrimination between target and distractors. Besides, LCM introduces an object-level relationship from the target to maintain target consistency, making LCM more robust to error drifting. Experiments show that our LCM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both DAVIS and Youtube-VOS benchmark. And we rank the 1st in the DAVIS 2020 challenge semi-supervised VOS task.

@InProceedings{Hu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Hu, Li and Zhang, Peng and Zhang, Bang and Pan, Pan and Xu, Yinghui and Jin, Rong},
    title     = {Learning Position and Target Consistency for Memory-Based Video Object Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {4144-4154}
}


Visual Room Rearrangement

Luca Weihs, Matt Deitke, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Roozbeh Mottaghi

Abstract: There has been a significant recent progress in the field of Embodied AI with researchers developing models and algorithms enabling embodied agents to navigate and interact within completely unseen environments. In this paper, we propose a new dataset and baseline models for the task of Rearrangement. We particularly focus on the task of Room Rearrangement: an agent begins by exploring a room and recording objects' initial configurations. We then remove the agent and change the poses and states (e.g., open/closed) of some objects in the room. The agent must restore the initial configurations of all objects in the room. Our dataset, named RoomR, includes 6,000 distinct rearrangement settings involving 72 different object types in 120 scenes. Our experiments show that solving this challenging interactive task that involves navigation and object interaction is beyond the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art techniques for embodied tasks and we are still very far from achieving perfect performance on these types of tasks.

@InProceedings{Weihs_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Weihs, Luca and Deitke, Matt and Kembhavi, Aniruddha and Mottaghi, Roozbeh},
    title     = {Visual Room Rearrangement},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5922-5931}
}


Polygonal Point Set Tracking

Gunhee Nam, Miran Heo, Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee, Seon Joo Kim

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based polygonal point set tracking method. Compared to existing video object segmentation (VOS) methods that propagate pixel-wise object mask information, we propagate a polygonal point set over frames. Specifically, the set is defined as a subset of points in the target contour, and our goal is to track corresponding points on the target contour. Those outputs enable us to apply various visual effects such as motion tracking, part deformation, and texture mapping. To this end, we propose a new method to track the corresponding points between frames by the global-local alignment with delicately designed losses and regularization terms. We also introduce a novel learning strategy using synthetic and VOS datasets that makes it possible to tackle the problem without developing the point correspondence dataset. Since the existing datasets are not suitable to validate our method, we build a new polygonal point set tracking dataset and demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the baselines and existing contour-based VOS methods. In addition, we present visual-effects applications of our method on part distortion and text mapping.

@InProceedings{Nam_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Nam, Gunhee and Heo, Miran and Oh, Seoung Wug and Lee, Joon-Young and Kim, Seon Joo},
    title     = {Polygonal Point Set Tracking},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5569-5578}
}


Wolfgang Stammer, Patrick Schramowski, Kristian Kersting

Abstract: Most explanation methods in deep learning map importance estimates for a model's prediction back to the original input space. These "visual" explanations are often insufficient, as the model's actual concept remains elusive. Moreover, without insights into the model's semantic concept, it is difficult --if not impossible-- to intervene on the model's behavior via its explanations, called Explanatory Interactive Learning. Consequently, we propose to intervene on a Neuro-Symbolic scene representation, which allows one to revise the model on the semantic level, e.g. "never focus on the color to make your decision". We compiled a novel con-founded visual scene data set, the CLEVR-Hans data set,capturing complex compositions of different objects. The results of our experiments on CLEVR-Hans demonstrate that our semantic explanations, i.e. compositional explanations at a per-object level, can identify confounders that are not identifiable using "visual" explanations only. More importantly, feedback on this semantic level makes it possible to revise the model from focusing on these factors.

@InProceedings{Stammer_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Stammer, Wolfgang and Schramowski, Patrick and Kersting, Kristian},
    title     = {Right for the Right Concept: Revising Neuro-Symbolic Concepts by Interacting With Their Explanations},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3619-3629}
}


Ramana Sundararaman, Cedric De Almeida Braga, Eric Marchand, Julien Pettre

Abstract: Tracking humans in crowded video sequences is an important constituent of visual scene understanding. Increasing crowd density challenges visibility of humans, limiting the scalability of existing pedestrian trackers to higher crowd densities. For that reason, we propose to revitalize head tracking with Crowd of Heads Dataset (CroHD), consisting of 9 sequences of 11,463 frames with over 2,276,838 heads and 5,230 tracks annotated in diverse scenes. For evaluation, we proposed a new metric, IDEucl, to measure an algorithm's efficacy in preserving a unique identity for the longest stretch in image coordinate space, thus building a correspondence between pedestrian crowd motion and the performance of a tracking algorithm. Moreover, we also propose a new head detector, HeadHunter, which is designed for small head detection in crowded scenes. We extend HeadHunter with a Particle Filter and a color histogram based re-identification module for head tracking. To establish this as a strong baseline, we compare our tracker with existing state-of-the-art pedestrian trackers on CroHD and demonstrate superiority, especially in identity preserving tracking metrics. With a light-weight head detector and a tracker which is efficient at identity preservation, we believe our contributions will serve useful in advancement of pedestrian tracking in dense crowds. We make our dataset, code and models publicly available at https://project.inria.fr/crowdscience/project/dense-crowd-head-tracking/.

@InProceedings{Sundararaman_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Sundararaman, Ramana and De Almeida Braga, Cedric and Marchand, Eric and Pettre, Julien},
    title     = {Tracking Pedestrian Heads in Dense Crowd},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {3865-3875}
}


Bin Yan, Xinyu Zhang, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu, Xiaoyun Yang

Abstract: Visual object tracking aims to precisely estimate the bounding box for the given target, which is a challenging problem due to factors such as deformation and occlusion. Many recent trackers adopt the multiple-stage tracking strategy to improve the quality of bounding box estimation. These methods first coarsely locate the target and then refine the initial prediction in the following stages. However, existing approaches still suffer from limited precision, and the coupling of different stages severely restricts the method's transferability. This work proposes a novel, flexible, and accurate refinement module called Alpha-Refine (AR), which can significantly improve the base trackers' box estimation quality. By exploring a series of design options, we conclude that the key to successful refinement is extracting and maintaining detailed spatial information as much as possible. Following this principle, Alpha-Refine adopts a pixel-wise correlation, a corner prediction head, and an auxiliary mask head as the core components. Comprehensive experiments on TrackingNet, LaSOT, GOT-10K, and VOT2020 benchmarks with multiple base trackers show that our approach significantly improves the base trackers' performance with little extra latency. The proposed Alpha-Refine method leads to a series of strengthened trackers, among which the ARSiamRPN (AR strengthened SiamRPNpp) and the ARDiMP50 (ARstrengthened DiMP50) achieve good efficiency-precision trade-off, while the ARDiMPsuper (AR strengthened DiMP-super) achieves very competitive performance at a real-time speed. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/MasterBin-IIAU/AlphaRefine.

@InProceedings{Yan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yan, Bin and Zhang, Xinyu and Wang, Dong and Lu, Huchuan and Yang, Xiaoyun},
    title     = {Alpha-Refine: Boosting Tracking Performance by Precise Bounding Box Estimation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {5289-5298}
}