Abstract: This paper aims to reconstruct physically plausible hand motion from monocular color images. Existing frame-by-frame estimating approaches can not guarantee the physical plausibility (e.g. penetration, jittering) directly. In this paper, we embed physical constraints on the per-frame estimated motions in both spatial and temporal space. Our key idea is to adopt a self-supervised learning strategy to train a novel encoder-decoder, named TravelNet, whose training motion data is prepared by the physics engine using discrete pose states. TravelNet captures key pose states from hand motion sequences as compact motion descriptors, inspired by the concept of keyframes in animation. Finally, it manages to extract those key states out of perturbations without manual annotations, and reconstruct the motions preserving details and physical plausibility. In the experiments, we show that the outputs of the TravelNet contain both finger synergism and time consistency. Through the proposed framework, hand motions can be accurately reconstructed and flexibly re-edited, which is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.

@InProceedings{Zhao_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhao, Zimeng and Zhao, Xi and Wang, Yangang},
    title     = {TravelNet: Self-Supervised Physically Plausible Hand Motion Learning From Monocular Color Images},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11666-11676}
}


Abstract: We present a new versatile building block for deep point cloud processing architectures that is equally suited for diverse tasks. This building block combines the ideas of spatial transformers and multi-view convolutional networks with the efficiency of standard convolutional layers in two and three-dimensional dense grids. The new block operates via multiple parallel heads, whereas each head differentiably rasterizes feature representations of individual points into a low-dimensional space, and then uses dense convolution to propagate information across points. The results of the processing of individual heads are then combined together resulting in the update of point features. Using the new block, we build architectures for both discriminative (point cloud segmentation, point cloud classification) and generative (point cloud inpainting and image-based point cloud reconstruction) tasks. The resulting architectures achieve state-of-the-art performance for these tasks, demonstrating the versatility of the new block for point cloud processing.

@InProceedings{Mazur_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Mazur, Kirill and Lempitsky, Victor},
    title     = {Cloud Transformers: A Universal Approach to Point Cloud Processing Tasks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10715-10724}
}


Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Aneeshan Sain, Amandeep Kumar, Shuvozit Ghose, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Yi-Zhe Song

Abstract: Although text recognition has significantly evolved over the years, state-of the-art (SOTA) models still struggle in the wild scenarios due to complex backgrounds, varying fonts, uncontrolled illuminations, distortions and other artifacts. This is because such models solely depend on visual information for text recognition, thus lacking semantic reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we argue that semantic information offers a complementary role in addition to visual only. More specifically, we additionally utilize semantic information by proposing a multi-stage multi-scale attentional decoder that performs joint visual-semantic reasoning. Our novelty lies in the intuition that for text recognition, prediction should be refined in a stage-wise manner. Therefore our key contribution is in designing a stage-wise unrolling attentional decoder where non-differentiability, invoked by discretely predicted character labels, needs to be bypassed for end-to-end training. While the first stage predicts using visual features, subsequent stages refine on-top of it using joint visual-semantic information. Additionally, we introduce multi-scale 2D attention along with dense and residual connections between different stages to deal with varying scales of character sizes, for better performance and faster convergence during training. Experimental results show our approach to outperform existing SOTA methods by a considerable margin.

@InProceedings{Bhunia_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Bhunia, Ayan Kumar and Sain, Aneeshan and Kumar, Amandeep and Ghose, Shuvozit and Chowdhury, Pinaki Nath and Song, Yi-Zhe},
    title     = {Joint Visual Semantic Reasoning: Multi-Stage Decoder for Text Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {14940-14949}
}


Rishabh Dabral, Soshi Shimada, Arjun Jain, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik

Abstract: This paper proposes GraviCap, i.e., a new approach for joint markerless 3D human motion capture and object trajectory estimation from monocular RGB videos. We focus on scenes with objects partially observed during a free flight. In contrast to existing monocular methods, we can recover scale, object trajectories as well as human bone lengths in meters and the ground plane's orientation, thanks to the awareness of the gravity constraining object motions. Our objective function is parametrised by the object's initial velocity and position, gravity direction and focal length, and jointly optimised for one or several free flight episodes. The proposed human-object interaction constraints ensure geometric consistency of the 3D reconstructions and improved physical plausibility of human poses compared to the unconstrained case. We evaluate GraviCap on a new dataset with ground-truth annotations for persons and different objects undergoing free flights. In the experiments, our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D human motion capture on various metrics. We urge the reader to watch our supplementary video. Both the source code and the dataset are released; see http://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/GraviCap/.

@InProceedings{Dabral_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Dabral, Rishabh and Shimada, Soshi and Jain, Arjun and Theobalt, Christian and Golyanik, Vladislav},
    title     = {Gravity-Aware Monocular 3D Human-Object Reconstruction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {12365-12374}
}


Chen Zhao, Ali K. Thabet, Bernard Ghanem

Abstract: Temporal action localization (TAL) in videos is a challenging task, especially due to the large variation in action temporal scales. Short actions usually occupy a major proportion in the datasets, but tend to have the lowest performance. In this paper, we confront the challenge of short actions and propose a multi-level cross-scale solution dubbed as video self-stitching graph network (VSGN). We have two key components in VSGN: video self-stitching (VSS) and cross-scale graph pyramid network (xGPN). In VSS, we focus on a short period of a video and magnify it along the temporal dimension to obtain a larger scale. We stitch the original clip and its magnified counterpart in one input sequence to take advantage of the complementary properties of both scales. The xGPN component further exploits the cross-scale correlations by a pyramid of cross-scale graph networks, each containing a hybrid module to aggregate features from across scales as well as within the same scale. Our VSGN not only enhances the feature representations, but also generates more positive anchors for short actions and more short training samples. Experiments demonstrate that VSGN obviously improves the localization performance of short actions as well as achieving the state-of-the-art overall performance on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-v1.3.

@InProceedings{Zhao_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhao, Chen and Thabet, Ali K. and Ghanem, Bernard},
    title     = {Video Self-Stitching Graph Network for Temporal Action Localization},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13658-13667}
}


Haonan Yan, Jiaqi Chen, Xujie Zhang, Shengkai Zhang, Nianhong Jiao, Xiaodan Liang, Tianxiang Zheng

Abstract: Recovering dense human poses from images plays a critical role in establishing an image-to-surface correspondence between RGB images and the 3D surface of the human body, serving the foundation of rich real-world applications, such as virtual humans, monocular-to-3d reconstruction. However, the popular DensePose-COCO dataset relies on a sophisticated manual annotation system, leading to severe limitations in acquiring the denser and more accurate annotated pose resources. In this work, we introduce a new 3D human-body model with a series of decoupled parameters that could freely control the generation of the body. Furthermore, we build a data generation system based on this decoupling 3D model, and construct an ultra dense synthetic benchmark UltraPose, containing around 1.3 billion corresponding points. Compared to the existing manually annotated DensePose-COCO dataset, the synthetic UltraPose has ultra dense image-to-surface correspondences without annotation cost and error. Our proposed UltraPose provides the largest benchmark and data resources for lifting the model capability in predicting more accurate dense poses. To promote future researches in this field, we also propose a transformer-based method to model the dense correspondence between 2D and 3D worlds. The proposed model trained on synthetic UltraPose can be applied to real-world scenarios, indicating the effectiveness of our benchmark and model.

@InProceedings{Yan_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Yan, Haonan and Chen, Jiaqi and Zhang, Xujie and Zhang, Shengkai and Jiao, Nianhong and Liang, Xiaodan and Zheng, Tianxiang},
    title     = {UltraPose: Synthesizing Dense Pose With 1 Billion Points by Human-Body Decoupling 3D Model},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10891-10900}
}


David Brüggemann, Menelaos Kanakis, Anton Obukhov, Stamatios Georgoulis, Luc Van Gool

Abstract: The timeline of computer vision research is marked with advances in learning and utilizing efficient contextual representations. Most of them, however, are targeted at improving model performance on a single downstream task. We consider a multi-task environment for dense prediction tasks, represented by a common backbone and independent task-specific heads. Our goal is to find the most efficient way to refine each task prediction by capturing cross-task contexts dependent on tasks' relations. We explore various attention-based contexts, such as global and local, in the multi-task setting and analyze their behavior when applied to refine each task independently. Empirical findings confirm that different source-target task pairs benefit from different context types. To automate the selection process, we propose an Adaptive Task-Relational Context (ATRC) module, which samples the pool of all available contexts for each task pair using neural architecture search and outputs the optimal configuration for deployment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two important multi-task benchmarks, namely NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context. The proposed ATRC has a low computational toll and can be used as a drop-in refinement module for any supervised multi-task architecture.

@InProceedings{Bruggemann_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Br\"uggemann, David and Kanakis, Menelaos and Obukhov, Anton and Georgoulis, Stamatios and Van Gool, Luc},
    title     = {Exploring Relational Context for Multi-Task Dense Prediction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15869-15878}
}


Xiong Zhang, Hongsheng Huang, Jianchao Tan, Hongmin Xu, Cheng Yang, Guozhu Peng, Lei Wang, Ji Liu

Abstract: Analyzing and understanding hand information from multimedia materials like images or videos is important for many real world applications and remains to be very active in research community. There are various works focusing on recovering hand information from single image, however, they usually solve a single task, for example, hand mask segmentation, 2D/3D hand pose estimation, or hand mesh reconstruction and perform not well in challenging scenarios. To further improve the performance of these tasks, we propose a novel Hand Image Understanding (HIU) framework (HIU-DMTL) to extract comprehensive information of the hand object from a single RGB image, by jointly considering the relationships between these tasks. To achieve this goal, a cascaded multi-task learning (MTL) backbone is designed to estimate the 2D heat maps, to learn the segmentation mask, and to generate the intermediate 3D information encoding, followed by a coarse-to-fine learning paradigm and a self-supervised learning strategy. Qualitative experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of recovering reasonable mesh representations even in challenging situations. Quantitatively, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on various widely-used datasets, in terms of diverse evaluation metrics.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhang, Xiong and Huang, Hongsheng and Tan, Jianchao and Xu, Hongmin and Yang, Cheng and Peng, Guozhu and Wang, Lei and Liu, Ji},
    title     = {Hand Image Understanding via Deep Multi-Task Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11281-11292}
}


Menghan Xia, Wenbo Hu, Xueting Liu, Tien-Tsin Wong

Abstract: Existing halftoning algorithms usually drop colors and fine details when dithering color images with binary dot patterns, which makes it extremely difficult to recover the original information. To dispense the recovery trouble in future, we propose a novel halftoning technique that converts a color image into binary halftone with full restorability to the original version. The key idea is to implicitly embed those previously dropped information into the halftone patterns. So, the halftone pattern not only serves to reproduce the image tone, maintain the blue-noise randomness, but also represents the color information and fine details. To this end, we exploit two collaborative convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn the dithering scheme, under a non-trivial self-supervision formulation. To tackle the flatness degradation issue of CNNs, we propose a novel noise incentive block (NIB) that can serve as a generic CNN plug-in for performance promotion. At last, we tailor a guiding-aware training scheme that secures the convergence direction as regulated. We evaluate the invertible halftones in multiple aspects, which evidences the effectiveness of our method.

@InProceedings{Xia_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Xia, Menghan and Hu, Wenbo and Liu, Xueting and Wong, Tien-Tsin},
    title     = {Deep Halftoning With Reversible Binary Pattern},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {14000-14009}
}


Rajshekhar Das, Yu-Xiong Wang, José M. F. Moura

Abstract: Few-shot classification aims at classifying categories of a novel task by learning from just a few (typically, 1 to 5) labeled examples. An effective approach to few-shot classification involves a prior model trained on a large-sample base domain, which is then finetuned over the novel few-shot task to yield generalizable representations. However, task-specific finetuning is prone to overfitting due to the lack of enough training examples. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new finetuning approach based on contrastive learning that reuses unlabelled examples from the base domain in the form of distractors. Unlike the nature of unlabelled data used in prior works, distractors belong to classes that do not overlap with the novel categories. We demonstrate for the first time that the inclusion of such distractors can significantly boost few-shot generalization. Our technical novelty includes a stochastic pairing of examples sharing the same category in the few-shot task and a weighting term that controls the relative influence of task-specific negatives and distractors. An important aspect of our finetuning objective is that it is agnostic to distractor labels and hence applicable to various base domain settings. More precisely, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our method shows accuracy gains of up to 12% in cross-domain and up to 5% in unsupervised prior-learning settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/quantacode/Contrastive-Finetuning.git

@InProceedings{Das_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Das, Rajshekhar and Wang, Yu-Xiong and Moura, Jos\'e M. F.},
    title     = {On the Importance of Distractors for Few-Shot Classification},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9030-9040}
}


Robustness via Cross-Domain Ensembles

Teresa Yeo, Oğuzhan Fatih Kar, Amir Zamir

Abstract: We present a method for making neural network predictions robust to shifts from the training data distribution. The proposed method is based on making predictions via a diverse set of cues (called `middle domains') and ensembling them into one strong prediction. The premise of the idea is that predictions made via different cues respond differently to a distribution shift, hence one should be able to merge them into one robust final prediction. We perform the merging in a straightforward but principled manner based on the uncertainty associated with each prediction. The evaluations are performed using multiple tasks and datasets (Taskonomy, Replica, ImageNet, CIFAR) under a wide range of adversarial and non-adversarial distribution shifts which demonstrate the proposed method is considerably more robust than its standard learning counterpart, conventional deep ensembles, and several other baselines.

@InProceedings{Yeo_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Yeo, Teresa and Kar, O\u{g}uzhan Fatih and Zamir, Amir},
    title     = {Robustness via Cross-Domain Ensembles},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {12189-12199}
}


Abstract: If an image tells a story, the image caption is the briefest narrator. Generally, a scene graph prefers to be an omniscient "generalist", while the image caption is more willing to be a "specialist", which outlines the gist. Lots of previous studies have found that a scene graph is not as practical as expected unless it can reduce the trivial contents and noises. In this respect, the image caption is a good tutor. To this end, we let the scene graph borrow the ability from the image caption so that it can be a specialist on the basis of remaining all-around, resulting in the so-called Topic Scene Graph. What an image caption pays attention to is distilled and passed to the scene graph for estimating the importance of partial objects, relationships, and events. Specifically, during the caption generation, the attention about individual objects in each time step is collected, pooled, and assembled to obtain the attention about relationships, which serves as weak supervision for regularizing the estimated importance scores of relationships. In addition, as this attention distillation process provides an opportunity for combining the generation of image caption and scene graph together, we further transform the scene graph into linguistic form with rich and free-form expressions by sharing a single generation model with image caption. Experiments show that attention distillation brings significant improvements in mining important relationships without strong supervision, and the topic scene graph shows great potential in subsequent applications.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Wang, Wenbin and Wang, Ruiping and Chen, Xilin},
    title     = {Topic Scene Graph Generation by Attention Distillation From Caption},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15900-15910}
}


Xiangyun Zhao, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Philip Andrew Mansfield, Boqing Gong, Bradley Green, Lior Shapira, Ying Wu

Abstract: Collecting labeled data for the task of semantic segmentation is expensive and time-consuming, as it requires dense pixel-level annotations. While recent Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based semantic segmentation approaches have achieved impressive results by using large amounts of labeled training data, their performance drops significantly as the amount of labeled data decreases. This happens because deep CNNs trained with the de facto cross-entropy loss can easily overfit to small amounts of labeled data. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective contrastive learning-based training strategy in which we first pretrain the network using a pixel-wise, label-based contrastive loss, and then fine-tune it using the cross-entropy loss. This approach increases intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, thereby resulting in a better pixel classifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training strategy using the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation datasets. Our results show that pretraining with the proposed contrastive loss results in large performance gains (more than 20% absolute improvement in some settings) when the amount of labeled data is limited. In many settings, the proposed contrastive pretraining strategy, which does not use any additional data, is able to match or outperform the widely-used ImageNet pretraining strategy that uses more than a million additional labeled images.

@InProceedings{Zhao_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhao, Xiangyun and Vemulapalli, Raviteja and Mansfield, Philip Andrew and Gong, Boqing and Green, Bradley and Shapira, Lior and Wu, Ying},
    title     = {Contrastive Learning for Label Efficient Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10623-10633}
}


Thanh-Dat Truong, Chi Nhan Duong, Ngan Le, Son Lam Phung, Chase Rainwater, Khoa Luu

Abstract: Semantic segmentation aims to predict pixel-level labels. It has become a popular task in various computer vision applications. While fully supervised segmentation methods have achieved high accuracy on large-scale vision datasets, they are unable to generalize on a new test environment or a new domain well. In this work, we first introduce a new Un- aligned Domain Score to measure the efficiency of a learned model on a new target domain in unsupervised manner. Then, we present the new Bijective Maximum Likelihood (BiMaL) loss that is a generalized form of the Adversarial Entropy Minimization without any assumption about pixel independence. We have evaluated the proposed BiMaL on two domains. The proposed BiMaL approach consistently outperforms the SOTA methods on empirical experiments on "SYNTHIA to Cityscapes", "GTA5 to Cityscapes", and "SYNTHIA to Vistas".

@InProceedings{Truong_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Truong, Thanh-Dat and Duong, Chi Nhan and Le, Ngan and Phung, Son Lam and Rainwater, Chase and Luu, Khoa},
    title     = {BiMaL: Bijective Maximum Likelihood Approach to Domain Adaptation in Semantic Scene Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8548-8557}
}


Abstract: In recent years, unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have been experiencing growth in various applications. With the expansion of USVs' application scenes from the typical marine areas to inland waters, new challenges arise for the object detection task, which is an essential part of the perception system of USVs. In our work, we focus on a relatively unexplored task for USVs in inland waters: small object detection on water surfaces, which is of vital importance for safe autonomous navigation and USVs' certain missions such as floating waste cleaning. Considering the limitations of vision-based object detection, we propose a novel vision-radar fusion based method for robust small object detection on water surfaces. By using a novel representation format of millimeter wave radar point clouds and applying a deep-level multi-scale fusion of RGB images and radar data, the proposed method can efficiently utilize the characteristics of radar data and improve the accuracy and robustness for small object detection on water surfaces. We test the method on the real-world floating bottle dataset that we collected and released. The result shows that, our method improves the average detection accuracy significantly compared to the vision-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Besides, the proposed method performs robustly when single sensor degrades.

@InProceedings{Cheng_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Cheng, Yuwei and Xu, Hu and Liu, Yimin},
    title     = {Robust Small Object Detection on the Water Surface Through Fusion of Camera and Millimeter Wave Radar},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15263-15272}
}


Shuaicheng Li, Qianggang Cao, Lingbo Liu, Kunlin Yang, Shinan Liu, Jun Hou, Shuai Yi

Abstract: Group activity recognition is a crucial yet challenging problem, whose core lies in fully exploring spatial-temporal interactions among individuals and generating reasonable group representations. However, previous methods either model spatial and temporal information separately, or directly aggregate individual features to form group features. To address these issues, we propose a novel group activity recognition network termed GroupFormer. It captures spatial-temporal contextual information jointly to augment the individual and group representations effectively with a clustered spatial-temporal transformer. Specifically, our GroupFormer has three appealing advantages: (1) A tailor-modified Transformer, Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer, is proposed to enhance the individual and group representation. (2) It models the spatial and temporal dependencies integrally and utilizes decoders to build the bridge between the spatial and temporal information. (3) A clustered attention mechanism is utilized to dynamically divide individuals into multiple clusters for better learning activity-aware semantic representations. Moreover, experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Volleyball dataset and Collective Activity dataset.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Li, Shuaicheng and Cao, Qianggang and Liu, Lingbo and Yang, Kunlin and Liu, Shinan and Hou, Jun and Yi, Shuai},
    title     = {GroupFormer: Group Activity Recognition With Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13668-13677}
}


Yahao Liu, Jinhong Deng, Xinchen Gao, Wen Li, Lixin Duan

Abstract: Existing cross-domain semantic segmentation methods usually focus on the overall segmentation results of whole objects but neglect the importance of object boundaries. In this work, we find that the segmentation performance can be considerably boosted if we treat object boundaries properly. For that, we propose a novel method called BAPA-Net, which is based on a convolutional neural network via Boundary Adaptation and Prototype Alignment, under the unsupervised domain adaptation setting. Specifically, we first construct additional images by pasting objects from source images to target images, and we develop a so-called boundary adaptation module to weigh each pixel based on its distance to the nearest boundary pixel of those pasted source objects. Moreover, we pro- pose another prototype alignment module to reduce the domain mismatch by minimizing distances between the class prototypes of the source and target domains, where boundaries are removed to avoid domain confusion during prototype calculation. By integrating the boundary adaptation and prototype alignment, we are able to train a discriminative and domain-invariant model for cross-domain semantic segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets of urban scenes (i.e., GTA5->Cityscapes and SYNTHIA->Cityscapes). And the promising results clearly show the effectiveness of our BAPA-Net method over existing state-of-the-art for cross-domain semantic segmentation. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/manmanjun/BAPA-Net.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Liu, Yahao and Deng, Jinhong and Gao, Xinchen and Li, Wen and Duan, Lixin},
    title     = {BAPA-Net: Boundary Adaptation and Prototype Alignment for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8801-8811}
}


Vida Adeli, Mahsa Ehsanpour, Ian Reid, Juan Carlos Niebles, Silvio Savarese, Ehsan Adeli, Hamid Rezatofighi

Abstract: Joint forecasting of human trajectory and pose dynamics is a fundamental building block of various applications ranging from robotics and autonomous driving to surveillance systems. Predicting body dynamics requires capturing subtle information embedded in the humans' interactions with each other and with the objects present in the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel TRajectory and POse Dynamics (nicknamed TRiPOD) method based on graph attentional networks to model the human-human and human-object interactions both in the input space and the output space (decoded future output). The model is supplemented by a message passing interface over the graphs to fuse these different levels of interactions efficiently. Furthermore, to incorporate a real-world challenge, we propound to learn an indicator representing whether an estimated body joint is visible/invisible at each frame, e.g. due to occlusion or being outside the sensor field of view. Finally, we introduce a new benchmark for this joint task based on two challenging datasets (PoseTrack and 3DPW) and propose evaluation metrics to measure the effectiveness of predictions in the global space, even when there are invisible cases of joints. Our evaluation shows that TRiPOD outperforms all prior work and state-of-the-art specifically designed for each of the trajectory and pose forecasting tasks.

@InProceedings{Adeli_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Adeli, Vida and Ehsanpour, Mahsa and Reid, Ian and Niebles, Juan Carlos and Savarese, Silvio and Adeli, Ehsan and Rezatofighi, Hamid},
    title     = {TRiPOD: Human Trajectory and Pose Dynamics Forecasting in the Wild},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13390-13400}
}


Abstract: Anomaly detection, the task of identifying unusual samples in data, often relies on a large set of training samples. In this work, we consider the setting of few-shot anomaly detection in images, where only a few images are given at training. We devise a hierarchical generative model that captures the multi-scale patch distribution of each training image. We further enhance the representation of our model by using image transformations and optimize scale-specific patch-discriminators to distinguish between real and fake patches of the image, as well as between different transformations applied to those patches. The anomaly score is obtained by aggregating the patch-based votes of the correct transformation across scales and image regions. We demonstrate the superiority of our method on both the one-shot and few-shot settings, on the datasets of Paris, CIFAR10, MNIST and FashionMNIST as well as in the setting of defect detection on MVTec. In all cases, our method outperforms the recent baseline methods.

@InProceedings{Sheynin_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Sheynin, Shelly and Benaim, Sagie and Wolf, Lior},
    title     = {A Hierarchical Transformation-Discriminating Generative Model for Few Shot Anomaly Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8495-8504}
}


Abstract: The choice of activation functions is crucial for modern deep neural networks. Popular hand-designed activation functions like Rectified Linear Unit(ReLU) and its variants show promising performance in various tasks and models. Swish, the automatically discovered activation function, outperforms ReLU on many challenging datasets. However, it has two main drawbacks. First, the tree-based search space is highly discrete and restricted, making it difficult to searching. Second, the sample-based searching method is inefficient, making it infeasible to find specialized activation functions for each dataset or neural architecture. To tackle these drawbacks, we propose a new activation function called Piecewise Linear Unit(PWLU), which incorporates a carefully designed formulation and learning method. It can learn specialized activation functions and achieves SOTA performance on large-scale datasets like ImageNet and COCO. For example, on ImageNet classification dataset, PWLU improves 0.9%/0.53%/1.0%/1.7%/1.0% top-1 accuracy over Swish for ResNet-18/ResNet-50/MobileNet-V2/MobileNet-V3/EfficientNet-B0. PWLU is also easy to implement and efficient at inference, which can be widely applied in real-world applications.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhou, Yucong and Zhu, Zezhou and Zhong, Zhao},
    title     = {Learning Specialized Activation Functions With the Piecewise Linear Unit},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {12095-12104}
}


Gabriele Berton, Carlo Masone, Valerio Paolicelli, Barbara Caputo

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel method for image matching based on dense local features and tailored for visual geolocalization. Dense local features matching is robust against changes in illumination and occlusions, but not against viewpoint shifts which are a fundamental aspect of geolocalization. Our method, called GeoWarp, directly embeds invariance to viewpoint shifts in the process of extracting dense features. This is achieved via a trainable module which learns from the data an invariance that is meaningful for the task of recognizing places. We also devise a new self-supervised loss and two new weakly supervised losses to train this module using only unlabeled data and weak labels. GeoWarp is implemented efficiently as a re-ranking method that can be easily embedded into pre-existing visual geolocalization pipelines. Experimental validation on standard geolocalization benchmarks demonstrates that GeoWarp boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art retrieval architectures. The code and trained models will be released upon acceptance of this paper.

@InProceedings{Berton_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Berton, Gabriele and Masone, Carlo and Paolicelli, Valerio and Caputo, Barbara},
    title     = {Viewpoint Invariant Dense Matching for Visual Geolocalization},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {12169-12178}
}


Zihang Lai, Sifei Liu, Alexei A. Efros, Xiaolong Wang

Abstract: We present Video Autoencoder for learning disentangled representations of 3D structure and camera pose from videos in a self-supervised manner. Relying on temporal continuity in videos, our work assumes that the 3D scene structure in nearby video frames remains static. Given a sequence of video frames as input, the Video Autoencoder extracts a disentangled representation of the scene including: (i) a temporally-consistent deep voxel feature to represent the 3D structure and (ii) a 3D trajectory of camera poses for each frame. These two representations will then be re-entangled for rendering the input video frames. Video Autoencoder can be trained directly using a pixel reconstruction loss, without any ground truth 3D or camera pose annotations. The disentangled representation can be applied to a range of tasks, including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and video generation by motion following. We evaluate our method on several large-scale natural video datasets, and show generalization results on out-of-domain images.

@InProceedings{Lai_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Lai, Zihang and Liu, Sifei and Efros, Alexei A. and Wang, Xiaolong},
    title     = {Video Autoencoder: Self-Supervised Disentanglement of Static 3D Structure and Motion},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9730-9740}
}


Abstract: Applying feature dependent network weights have been proved to be effective in many fields. However, in practice, restricted by the enormous size of model parameters and memory footprints, scalable and versatile dynamic convolutions with per-pixel adapted filters are yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we address this challenge by decomposing filters, adapted to each spatial position, over dynamic filter atoms generated by a light-weight network from local features. Adaptive receptive fields can be supported by further representing each filter atom over sets of pre-fixed multi-scale bases. As plug-and-play replacements to convolutional layers, the introduced adaptive convolutions with per-pixel dynamic atoms enable explicit modeling of intra-image variance, while avoiding heavy computation, parameters, and memory cost. Our method preserves the appealing properties of conventional convolutions as being translation-equivariant and parametrically efficient. We present experiments to show that, the proposed method delivers comparable or even better performance across tasks, and are particularly effective on handling tasks with significant intra-image variance.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Wang, Ze and Miao, Zichen and Hu, Jun and Qiu, Qiang},
    title     = {Adaptive Convolutions With Per-Pixel Dynamic Filter Atom},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {12302-12311}
}


James Hong, Matthew Fisher, Michaël Gharbi, Kayvon Fatahalian

Abstract: Human pose is a useful feature for fine-grained sports action understanding. However, pose estimators are often unreliable when run on sports video due to domain shift and factors such as motion blur and occlusions. This leads to poor accuracy when downstream tasks, such as action recognition, depend on pose. End-to-end learning circumvents pose, but requires more labels to generalize. We introduce Video Pose Distillation (VPD), a weakly-supervised technique to learn features for new video domains, such as individual sports that challenge pose estimation. Under VPD, a student network learns to extract robust pose features from RGB frames in the sports video, such that, whenever pose is considered reliable, the features match the output of a pretrained teacher pose detector. Our strategy retains the best of both pose and end-to-end worlds, exploiting the rich visual patterns in raw video frames, while learning features that agree with the athletes' pose and motion in the target video domain to avoid over-fitting to patterns unrelated to athletes' motion. VPD features improve performance on few-shot, fine-grained action recognition, retrieval, and detection tasks in four real-world sports video datasets, without requiring additional ground-truth pose annotations.

@InProceedings{Hong_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Hong, James and Fisher, Matthew and Gharbi, Micha\"el and Fatahalian, Kayvon},
    title     = {Video Pose Distillation for Few-Shot, Fine-Grained Sports Action Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9254-9263}
}


Tianjiao Li, Qiuhong Ke, Hossein Rahmani, Rui En Ho, Henghui Ding, Jun Liu

Abstract: We address continual action recognition from skeleton sequence, which aims to learn a recognition model over time from a continuous stream of skeleton data. This task is very important in changing environment. Due to catastrophic forgetting problems of deep neural networks and large discrepancies between the previously learned and current new human actions from different categories, the neural networks may "forget" old actions, when learning new actions. This makes online continual action recognition a challenging task. We observe that although different human actions may vary to a large extent as a whole, their local body parts could share similar features. Therefore, we propose an Elastic Semantic Network (Else-Net) to learn new actions by decomposing human bodies into several semantic body parts. For each body part, the proposed Else-Net constructs a semantic pathway using several elastic cells learned with old actions, or explores new cells to store new knowledge.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Li, Tianjiao and Ke, Qiuhong and Rahmani, Hossein and Ho, Rui En and Ding, Henghui and Liu, Jun},
    title     = {Else-Net: Elastic Semantic Network for Continual Action Recognition From Skeleton Data},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13434-13443}
}


Fait Poms, Vishnu Sarukkai, Ravi Teja Mullapudi, Nimit S. Sohoni, William R. Mark, Deva Ramanan, Kayvon Fatahalian

Abstract: For machine learning models trained with limited labeled training data, validation stands to become the main bottleneck to reducing overall annotation costs. We propose a statistical validation algorithm that accurately estimates the F-score of binary classifiers for rare categories, where finding relevant examples to evaluate on is particularly challenging. Our key insight is that simultaneous calibration and importance sampling enables accurate estimates even in the low-sample regime (<300 samples). Critically, we also derive an accurate single-trial estimator of the variance of our method and demonstrate that this estimator is empirically accurate at low sample counts, enabling a practitioner to know how well they can trust a given low-sample estimate. When validating state-of-the-art semi-supervised models on ImageNet and iNaturalist2017, our method achieves the same estimates of model performance with up to 10x fewer labels than competing approaches. In particular, we can estimate model F1 scores with a variance of 0.005 using as few as 100 labels.

@InProceedings{Poms_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Poms, Fait and Sarukkai, Vishnu and Mullapudi, Ravi Teja and Sohoni, Nimit S. and Mark, William R. and Ramanan, Deva and Fatahalian, Kayvon},
    title     = {Low-Shot Validation: Active Importance Sampling for Estimating Classifier Performance on Rare Categories},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10705-10714}
}


Abstract: Conventional techniques to establish dense correspondences across visually or semantically similar images focused on designing a task-specific matching prior, which is difficult to model in general. To overcome this, recent learning-based methods have attempted to learn a good matching prior within a model itself on large training data. The performance improvement was apparent, but the need for sufficient training data and intensive learning hinders their applicability. Moreover, using the fixed model at test time does not account for the fact that a pair of images may require their own prior, thus providing limited performance and poor generalization to unseen images. In this paper, we show that an image pair-specific prior can be captured by solely optimizing the untrained matching networks on an input pair of images. Tailored for such test-time optimization for dense correspondence, we present a residual matching network and a confidence-aware contrastive loss to guarantee a meaningful convergence. Experiments demonstrate that our framework, dubbed Deep Matching Prior (DMP), is competitive, or even outperforms, against the latest learning-based methods on several benchmarks for geometric matching and semantic matching, even though it requires neither large training data nor intensive learning. With the networks pre-trained, DMP attains state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks.

@InProceedings{Hong_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Hong, Sunghwan and Kim, Seungryong},
    title     = {Deep Matching Prior: Test-Time Optimization for Dense Correspondence},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9907-9917}
}


Tao Wang, Ning Xu, Kean Chen, Weiyao Lin

Abstract: Video instance segmentation is a challenging task that extends image instance segmentation to the video domain. Existing methods either rely only on single-frame information for the detection and segmentation subproblems or handle tracking as a separate post-processing step, which limit their capability to fully leverage and share useful spatial-temporal information for all the subproblems. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-neural-network (GNN) based method to handle the aforementioned limitation. Specifically, graph nodes representing instance features are used for detection and segmentation while graph edges representing instance relations are used for tracking. Both inter and intra-frame information is effectively propagated and shared via graph updates and all the subproblems (i.e. detection, segmentation and tracking) are jointly optimized in an unified framework. The performance of our method shows great improvement on the YoutubeVIS validation dataset compared to existing methods and achieves 36.5% AP with a ResNet-50 backbone, operating at 22 FPS.

@InProceedings{Wang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Wang, Tao and Xu, Ning and Chen, Kean and Lin, Weiyao},
    title     = {End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation via Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10797-10806}
}


Heeseung Kwon, Manjin Kim, Suha Kwak, Minsu Cho

Abstract: Spatio-temporal convolution often fails to learn motion dynamics in videos and thus an effective motion representation is required for video understanding in the wild. In this paper, we propose a rich and robust motion representation based on spatio-temporal self-similarity (STSS). Given a sequence of frames, STSS represents each local region as similarities to its neighbors in space and time. By converting appearance features into relational values, it enables the learner to better recognize structural patterns in space and time. We leverage the whole volume of STSS and let our model learn to extract an effective motion representation from it. The proposed neural block, dubbed SELFY, can be easily inserted into neural architectures and trained end-to-end without additional supervision. With a sufficient volume of the neighborhood in space and time, it effectively captures long-term interaction and fast motion in the video, leading to robust action recognition. Our experimental analysis demonstrates its superiority over previous methods for motion modeling as well as its complementarity to spatio-temporal features from direct convolution. On the standard action recognition benchmarks, SomethingSomething-V1 & V2, Diving-48, and FineGym, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results.

@InProceedings{Kwon_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Kwon, Heeseung and Kim, Manjin and Kwak, Suha and Cho, Minsu},
    title     = {Learning Self-Similarity in Space and Time As Generalized Motion for Video Action Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13065-13075}
}


Cheng Gu, Erik Learned-Miller, Daniel Sheldon, Guillermo Gallego, Pia Bideau

Abstract: Event cameras, inspired by biological vision systems, provide a natural and data efficient representation of visual information. Visual information is acquired in the form of events that are triggered by local brightness changes. However, because most brightness changes are triggered by relative motion of the camera and the scene, the events recorded at a single sensor location seldom correspond to the same world point. To extract meaningful information from event cameras, it is helpful to register events that were triggered by the same underlying world point. In this work we propose a new model of event data that captures its natural spatio-temporal structure. We start by developing a model for aligned event data. That is, we develop a model for the data as though it has been perfectly registered already. In particular, we model the aligned data as a spatio-temporal Poisson point process. Based on this model, we develop a maximum likelihood approach to registering events that are not yet aligned. That is, we find transformations of the observed events that make them as likely as possible under our model. In particular we extract the camera rotation that leads to the best event alignment. We show new state of the art accuracy for rotational velocity estimation on the DAVIS 240C dataset [??]. In addition, our method is also faster and has lower computational complexity than several competing methods.

@InProceedings{Gu_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Gu, Cheng and Learned-Miller, Erik and Sheldon, Daniel and Gallego, Guillermo and Bideau, Pia},
    title     = {The Spatio-Temporal Poisson Point Process: A Simple Model for the Alignment of Event Camera Data},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13495-13504}
}


Yu Zeng, Zhe Lin, Huchuan Lu, Vishal M. Patel

Abstract: Recent deep generative inpainting methods use attention layers to allow the generator to explicitly borrow feature patches from the known region to complete a missing region. Due to the lack of supervision signals for the correspondence between missing regions and known regions, it may fail to find proper reference features, which often leads to artifacts in the results. Also, it computes pair-wise similarity across the entire feature map during inference bringing a significant computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose to teach such patch-borrowing behavior to an attention-free generator by joint training of an auxiliary contextual reconstruction task, which encourages the generated output to be plausible even when reconstructed by surrounding regions. The auxiliary branch can be seen as a learnable loss function, i.e. named as contextual reconstruction (CR) loss, where query-reference feature similarity and reference-based reconstructor are jointly optimized with the inpainting generator. The auxiliary branch (i.e. CR loss) is required only during training, and only the inpainting generator is required during the inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed inpainting model compares favourably against the state-of-the-art in terms of quantitative and visual performance. Code is available at https://github.com/zengxianyu/crfill.

@InProceedings{Zeng_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zeng, Yu and Lin, Zhe and Lu, Huchuan and Patel, Vishal M.},
    title     = {CR-Fill: Generative Image Inpainting With Auxiliary Contextual Reconstruction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {14164-14173}
}


Alexander Cui, Sergio Casas, Abbas Sadat, Renjie Liao, Raquel Urtasun

Abstract: In this paper, we present LookOut, a novel autonomy system that perceives the environment, predicts a diverse set of futures of how the scene might unroll and estimates the trajectory of the SDV by optimizing a set of contingency plans over these future realizations. In particular, we learn a diverse joint distribution over multi-agent future trajectories in a traffic scene that covers a wide range of future modes with high sample efficiency while leveraging the expressive power of generative models. Unlike previous work in diverse motion forecasting, our diversity objective explicitly rewards sampling future scenarios that require distinct reactions from the self-driving vehicle for improved safety. Our contingency planner then finds comfortable and non-conservative trajectories that ensure safe reactions to a wide range of future scenarios. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our model demonstrates significantly more diverse and sample-efficient motion forecasting in a large-scale self-driving dataset as well as safer and less conservative motion plans in long-term closed-loop simulations when compared to current state-of-the-art models.

@InProceedings{Cui_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Cui, Alexander and Casas, Sergio and Sadat, Abbas and Liao, Renjie and Urtasun, Raquel},
    title     = {LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {16107-16116}
}


Qinqin Zhou, Xiawu Zheng, Liujuan Cao, Bineng Zhong, Teng Xi, Gang Zhang, Errui Ding, Mingliang Xu, Rongrong Ji

Abstract: Based on the relaxed search space, differential architecture search (DARTS) is efficient in searching for a high-performance architecture. However, the unbalanced competition among operations that have different trainable parameters causes the model collapse. Besides, the inconsistent structures in the search and retraining stages causes cross-stage evaluation to be unstable. In this paper, we call these issues as an operation gap and a structure gap in DARTS. To shrink these gaps, we propose to induce equalized and consistent optimization in differentiable architecture search (EC-DARTS). EC-DARTS decouples different operations based on their categories to optimize the operation weights so that the operation gap between them is shrinked. Besides, we introduce an induced structural transition to bridge the structure gap between the model structures in the search and retraining stages. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10 and ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, on CIFAR10, we achieve a test error of 2.39%, while only 0.3 GPU days on NVIDIA TITAN V. On ImageNet, our method achieves a top-1 error of 23.6% under the mobile setting.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zhou, Qinqin and Zheng, Xiawu and Cao, Liujuan and Zhong, Bineng and Xi, Teng and Zhang, Gang and Ding, Errui and Xu, Mingliang and Ji, Rongrong},
    title     = {EC-DARTS: Inducing Equalized and Consistent Optimization Into DARTS},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11986-11995}
}


Jooyoung Choi, Sungwon Kim, Yonghyun Jeong, Youngjune Gwon, Sungroh Yoon

Abstract: Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) have shown remarkable performance in unconditional image generation. However, due to the stochasticity of the generative process in DDPM, it is challenging to generate images with the desired semantics. In this work, we propose Iterative Latent Variable Refinement (ILVR), a method to guide the generative process in DDPM to generate high-quality images based on a given reference image. Here, the refinement of the generative process in DDPM enables a single DDPM to sample images from various sets directed by the reference image. The proposed ILVR method generates high-quality images while controlling the generation. The controllability of our method allows adaptation of a single DDPM without any additional learning in various image generation tasks, such as generation from various downsampling factors, multi-domain image translation, paint-to-image, and editing with scribbles.

@InProceedings{Choi_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Choi, Jooyoung and Kim, Sungwon and Jeong, Yonghyun and Gwon, Youngjune and Yoon, Sungroh},
    title     = {ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {14367-14376}
}


Aditya Ganeshan, Alexis Vallet, Yasunori Kudo, Shin-ichi Maeda, Tommi Kerola, Rares Ambrus, Dennis Park, Adrien Gaidon

Abstract: Deep learning models for semantic segmentation rely on expensive, large-scale, manually annotated datasets. Labelling is a tedious process that can take hours per image. Automatically annotating video sequences by propagating sparsely labeled frames through time is a more scalable alternative. In this work, we propose a novel label propagation method, termed Warp-Refine Propagation, that combines semantic cues with geometric cues to efficiently auto-label videos. Our method learns to refine geometrically-warped labels and infuse them with learned semantic priors in a semi-supervised setting by leveraging cycle consistency across time. We quantitatively show that our method improves label-propagation by a noteworthy margin of 13.1 mIoU on the ApolloScape dataset. Furthermore, by training with the auto-labelled frames, we achieve competitive results on three semantic-segmentation benchmarks, improving the state-of-the-art by a large margin of 1.8 and 3.61 mIoU on NYU-V2 and KITTI, while matching the current best results on Cityscapes.

@InProceedings{Ganeshan_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Ganeshan, Aditya and Vallet, Alexis and Kudo, Yasunori and Maeda, Shin-ichi and Kerola, Tommi and Ambrus, Rares and Park, Dennis and Gaidon, Adrien},
    title     = {Warp-Refine Propagation: Semi-Supervised Auto-Labeling via Cycle-Consistency},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15499-15509}
}


Abstract: In this paper, we look at the problem of few-shot image classification that aims to learn a classifier for previously unseen classes and domains from few labeled samples. Recent methods use various adaptation strategies for aligning their visual representations to new domains or select the relevant ones from multiple domain-specific feature extractors. In this work, we present URL, which learns a single set of universal visual representations by distilling knowledge of multiple domain-specific networks after co-aligning their features with the help of adapters and centered kernel alignment. We show that the universal representations can be further refined for previously unseen domains by an efficient adaptation step in a similar spirit to distance learning methods. We rigorously evaluate our model in the recent Meta-Dataset benchmark and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms the previous methods while being more efficient.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Li, Wei-Hong and Liu, Xialei and Bilen, Hakan},
    title     = {Universal Representation Learning From Multiple Domains for Few-Shot Classification},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9526-9535}
}


Kai Huang, Jie Geng, Wen Jiang, Xinyang Deng, Zhe Xu

Abstract: Semi-supervised few-shot learning is developed to train a classifier that can adapt to new tasks with limited labeled data and a fixed quantity of unlabeled data. Most semi-supervised few-shot learning methods select pseudo-labeled data of unlabeled set by task-specific confidence estimation. This work presents a task-unified confidence estimation approach for semi-supervised few-shot learning, named pseudo-loss confidence metric (PLCM). It measures the data credibility by the loss distribution of pseudo-labels, which is synthetical considered multi-tasks. Specifically, pseudo-labeled data of different tasks are mapped to a unified metric space by mean of the pseudo-loss model, making it possible to learn the prior pseudo-loss distribution. Then, confidence of pseudo-labeled data is estimated according to the distribution component confidence of its pseudo-loss. Thus highly reliable pseudo-labeled data are selected to strengthen the classifier. Moreover, to overcome the pseudo-loss distribution shift and improve the effectiveness of classifier, we advance the multi-step training strategy coordinated with the class balance measures of class-apart selection and class weight. Experimental results on four popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively select pseudo-labeled data and achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

@InProceedings{Huang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Huang, Kai and Geng, Jie and Jiang, Wen and Deng, Xinyang and Xu, Zhe},
    title     = {Pseudo-Loss Confidence Metric for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8671-8680}
}


Alexandros Stergiou, Ronald Poppe, Grigorios Kalliatakis

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) use pooling to decrease the size of activation maps. This process is crucial to increase the receptive fields and to reduce computational requirements of subsequent convolutions. An important feature of the pooling operation is the minimization of information loss, with respect to the initial activation maps, without a significant impact on the computation and memory overhead. To meet these requirements, we propose SoftPool: a fast and efficient method for exponentially weighted activation downsampling. Through experiments across a range of architectures and pooling methods, we demonstrate that SoftPool can retain more information in the reduced activation maps. This refined downsampling leads to improvements in a CNN's classification accuracy. Experiments with pooling layer substitutions on ImageNet1K show an increase in accuracy over both original architectures and other pooling methods. We also test SoftPool on video datasets for action recognition. Again, through the direct replacement of pooling layers, we observe consistent performance improvements while computational loads and memory requirements remain limited.

@InProceedings{Stergiou_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Stergiou, Alexandros and Poppe, Ronald and Kalliatakis, Grigorios},
    title     = {Refining Activation Downsampling With SoftPool},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10357-10366}
}


Garvita Tiwari, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Tony Tung, Gerard Pons-Moll

Abstract: We present Neural Generalized Implicit Functions(Neural-GIF), to animate people in clothing as a function of the body pose. Given a sequence of scans of a subject in various poses, we learn to animate the character for new poses. Existing methods have relied on template-based representations of the human body(or clothing). However such models usually have fixed and limited resolutions, and require difficult data pre-processing steps, and cannot be used for complex clothing. We draw inspiration from template-based methods, which factorize motion into articulation and non-rigid deformation, but generalize this concept for implicit shape learning to obtain a more flexible model. We learn to map every point in the space to a canonical space, where a learned deformation field is applied to model non-rigid effects, before evaluating the signed distance field. Our formulation allows the learning of complex and non-rigid deformations of clothing and soft tissue, without computing a template registration as it is common with current approaches. Neural-GIF can be trained on raw 3D scans and reconstructs detailed complex surface geometry and deformations. Moreover, the model can generalize to new poses. We evaluate our method on a variety of characters from different public datasets in diverse clothing styles and show significant improvement over baseline methods, quantitatively and qualitatively. We also extend our model to multiple shape setting. To stimulate further research, we will make the model, code, and data publicly available.

@InProceedings{Tiwari_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Tiwari, Garvita and Sarafianos, Nikolaos and Tung, Tony and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
    title     = {Neural-GIF: Neural Generalized Implicit Functions for Animating People in Clothing},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11708-11718}
}


Abstract: Typical domain adaptation techniques aim to transfer label information from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain in the same label space. However, it is often hard to get even the unlabeled target domain data of a task of interest. In such a case, we can capture the domain shift between the source domain and target domain from an unseen task and transfer it to the task of interest, which is known as zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA). Existing state-of-the-art methods for ZSDA attempted to generate target domain data. However, training such generative models causes significant computational overhead and is hardly optimized. In this paper, we propose a novel ZSDA method that learns a task-agnostic domain shift by collaborative training of domain-invariant semantic features and task-invariant domain features via adversarial learning. Meanwhile, the spatial attention map is learned from disentangled feature representations to selectively emphasize the domain-specific salient parts of the domain-invariant features. Experimental results show that our ZSDA method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

@InProceedings{Jhoo_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Jhoo, Won Young and Heo, Jae-Pil},
    title     = {Collaborative Learning With Disentangled Features for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8896-8905}
}


Ruben Villegas, Duygu Ceylan, Aaron Hertzmann, Jimei Yang, Jun Saito

Abstract: This paper introduces a motion retargeting method that preserves self-contacts and prevents inter-penetration. Self-contacts, such as when hands touch each other or the torso or the head, are important attributes of human body language and dynamics, yet existing methods do not model or preserve these contacts. Likewise, self-penetrations, such as a hand passing into the torso, are a typical artifact of motion estimation methods. The input to our method is a human motion sequence and a target skeleton and character geometry. The method identifies self-contacts and ground contacts in the input motion, and optimizes the motion to apply to the output skeleton, while preserving these contacts and reducing self-penetrations. We introduce a novel geometry-conditioned recurrent network with an encoder-space optimization strategy that achieves efficient retargeting while satisfying contact constraints. In experiments, our results quantitatively outperform previous methods and in the user study our retargeted motions are rated as higher-quality than those produced by recent works. We also show our method generalizes to motion estimated from human videos where we improve over previous works that produce noticeable interpenetration.

@InProceedings{Villegas_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Villegas, Ruben and Ceylan, Duygu and Hertzmann, Aaron and Yang, Jimei and Saito, Jun},
    title     = {Contact-Aware Retargeting of Skinned Motion},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9720-9729}
}


Chaoda Zheng, Xu Yan, Jiantao Gao, Weibing Zhao, Wei Zhang, Zhen Li, Shuguang Cui

Abstract: Current 3D single object tracking approaches track the target based on a feature comparison between the target template and the search area. However, due to the common occlusion in LiDAR scans, it is non-trivial to conduct accurate feature comparisons on severe sparse and incomplete shapes. In this work, we exploit the ground truth bounding box given in the first frame as a strong cue to enhance the feature description of the target object, enabling a more accurate feature comparison in a simple yet effective way. In particular, we first propose the BoxCloud, an informative and robust representation, to depict an object using the point-to-box relation. We further design an efficient box-aware feature fusion module, which leverages the aforementioned BoxCloud for reliable feature matching and embedding. Integrating the proposed general components into an existing model P2B, we construct a superior box-aware tracker (BAT). Experiments confirm that our proposed BAT outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin on both KITTI and NuScenes benchmarks, achieving a 12.8% improvement in terms of precision while running  20% faster.

@InProceedings{Zheng_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Zheng, Chaoda and Yan, Xu and Gao, Jiantao and Zhao, Weibing and Zhang, Wei and Li, Zhen and Cui, Shuguang},
    title     = {Box-Aware Feature Enhancement for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13199-13208}
}


Field-Guide-Inspired Zero-Shot Learning

Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala

Abstract: Modern recognition systems require large amounts of supervision to achieve accuracy. Adapting to new domains requires significant data from experts, which is onerous and can become too expensive. Zero-shot learning requires an annotated set of attributes for a novel category. Annotating the full set of attributes for a novel category proves to be a tedious and expensive task in deployment. This is especially the case when the recognition domain is an expert domain. We introduce a new field-guide-inspired approach to zero-shot annotation where the learner model interactively asks for the most useful attributes that define a class. We evaluate our method on classification benchmarks with attribute annotations like CUB, SUN, and AWA2 and show that our model achieves the performance of a model with full annotations at the cost of a significantly fewer number of annotations. Since the time of experts is precious, decreasing annotation cost can be very valuable for real-world deployment.

@InProceedings{Mall_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Mall, Utkarsh and Hariharan, Bharath and Bala, Kavita},
    title     = {Field-Guide-Inspired Zero-Shot Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9546-9555}
}


Daniela Massiceti, Luisa Zintgraf, John Bronskill, Lida Theodorou, Matthew Tobias Harris, Edward Cutrell, Cecily Morrison, Katja Hofmann, Simone Stumpf

Abstract: Object recognition has made great advances in the last decade, but predominately still relies on many high-quality training examples per object category. In contrast, learning new objects from only a few examples could enable many impactful applications from robotics to user personalization. Most few-shot learning research, however, has been driven by benchmark datasets that lack the high variation that these applications will face when deployed in the real-world. To close this gap, we present the ORBIT dataset and benchmark, grounded in the real-world application of teachable object recognizers for people who are blind/low-vision. The dataset contains 3,822 videos of 486 objects recorded by people who are blind/low-vision on their mobile phones. The benchmark reflects a realistic, highly challenging recognition problem, providing a rich playground to drive research in robustness to few-shot, high-variation conditions. We set the benchmark's first state-of-the-art and show there is massive scope for further innovation, holding the potential to impact a broad range of real-world vision applications including tools for the blind/low-vision community. We release the dataset at https://doi.org/10.25383/city.14294597 and benchmark code at https://github.com/microsoft/ORBIT-Dataset.

@InProceedings{Massiceti_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Massiceti, Daniela and Zintgraf, Luisa and Bronskill, John and Theodorou, Lida and Harris, Matthew Tobias and Cutrell, Edward and Morrison, Cecily and Hofmann, Katja and Stumpf, Simone},
    title     = {ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10818-10828}
}


Tianyi Chen, Yi Liu, Yunfei Zhang, Si Wu, Yong Xu, Feng Liangbing, Hau San Wong

Abstract: Previous state-of-the-art deep generative models improve fine-grained image generation quality by designing hierarchical model structures and synthesizing images across multiple stages. The learning process is typically performed without any supervision in object categories. To address this issue, while at the same time to alleviate the level of complexity of both model design and training, we propose a Single-Stage Controllable GAN (SSC-GAN) for conditional fine-grained image synthesis in a semi-supervised setting. Considering the fact that fine-grained object categories may have subtle distinctions and shared attributes, we take into account three factors of variation for generative modeling: class-independent content, cross-class attributes and class semantics, and associate them with different variables. To ensure disentanglement among the variables, we maximize mutual information between the class-independent variable and synthesized images, map real images to the latent space of a generator to perform consistency regularization of cross-class attributes, and incorporate class semantic-based regularization into a discriminator's feature space. We show that the proposed approach delivers a single-stage controllable generator and high-fidelity synthesized images of fine-grained categories. The proposed approach establishes state-of-the-art semi-supervised image synthesis results across multiple fine-grained datasets.

@InProceedings{Chen_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Chen, Tianyi and Liu, Yi and Zhang, Yunfei and Wu, Si and Xu, Yong and Liangbing, Feng and Wong, Hau San},
    title     = {Semi-Supervised Single-Stage Controllable GANs for Conditional Fine-Grained Image Generation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9264-9273}
}


Jiawei Ma, Hanchen Xie, Guangxing Han, Shih-Fu Chang, Aram Galstyan, Wael Abd-Almageed

Abstract: Few-shot Learning has been studied to mimic human visual capabilities and learn effective models without the need of exhaustive human annotation. Even though the idea of meta-learning for adaptation has dominated the few-shot learning methods, how to train a feature extractor is still a challenge. In this paper, we focus on the design of training strategy to obtain an elemental representation such that the prototype of each novel class can be estimated from a few labeled samples. We propose a two-stage training scheme, Partner-Assisted Learning (PAL), which first trains a partner encoder to model pair-wise similarities and extract features serving as soft-anchors, and then trains a main encoder by aligning its outputs with soft-anchors while attempting to maximize classification performance. Two alignment constraints from logit-level and feature-level are designed individually. For each few-shot task, we perform prototype classification. Our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art method on four benchmarks. Detailed ablation studies of PAL are provided to justify the selection of each component involved in training.

@InProceedings{Ma_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Ma, Jiawei and Xie, Hanchen and Han, Guangxing and Chang, Shih-Fu and Galstyan, Aram and Abd-Almageed, Wael},
    title     = {Partner-Assisted Learning for Few-Shot Image Classification},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10573-10582}
}


Pan Du, Suyun Zhao, Hui Chen, Shuwen Chai, Hong Chen, Cuiping Li

Abstract: Active learning (AL) is successful based on the assumption that labeled and unlabeled data are obtained from the same class distribution. However, its performance deteriorates under class distribution mismatch, wherein the unlabeled data contain many samples out of the class distribution of labeled data. To effectively handle the problems under class distribution mismatch, we propose a contrastive coding based AL framework named CCAL. Unlike the existing AL methods that focus on selecting the most informative samples for annotating, CCAL extracts both semantic and distinctive features by contrastive learning and combines them in a query strategy to choose the most informative unlabeled samples with matched categories. Theoretically, we prove that the AL error of CCAL has a tight upper bound. Experimentally, we evaluate its performance on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and an artificial cross-dataset that consists of five datasets; consequently, CCAL achieves state-of-the-art performance by a large margin with remarkably lower annotation cost. To the best of our knowledge, CCAL is the first work related to AL for class distribution mismatch.

@InProceedings{Du_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Du, Pan and Zhao, Suyun and Chen, Hui and Chai, Shuwen and Chen, Hong and Li, Cuiping},
    title     = {Contrastive Coding for Active Learning Under Class Distribution Mismatch},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8927-8936}
}


Yuecong Xu, Jianfei Yang, Haozhi Cao, Zhenghua Chen, Qi Li, Kezhi Mao

Abstract: Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) is a practical and general domain adaptation scenario, which relaxes the fully shared label space assumption such that the source label space subsumes the target one. The key challenge of PDA is the issue of negative transfer caused by source-only classes. For videos, such negative transfer could be triggered by both spatial and temporal features, which leads to a more challenging Partial Video Domain Adaptation (PVDA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Partial Adversarial Temporal Attentive Network (PATAN) to address the PVDA problem by utilizing both spatial and temporal features for filtering source-only classes. Besides, PATAN constructs effective overall temporal features by attending to local temporal features that contribute more toward the class filtration process. We further introduce new benchmarks to facilitate research on PVDA problems, covering a wide range of PVDA scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed PATAN across the multiple PVDA benchmarks.

@InProceedings{Xu_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Xu, Yuecong and Yang, Jianfei and Cao, Haozhi and Chen, Zhenghua and Li, Qi and Mao, Kezhi},
    title     = {Partial Video Domain Adaptation With Partial Adversarial Temporal Attentive Network},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9332-9341}
}


Learning Compatible Embeddings

Qiang Meng, Chixiang Zhang, Xiaoqiang Xu, Feng Zhou

Abstract: Achieving backward compatibility when rolling out new models can highly reduce costs or even bypass feature re-encoding of existing gallery images for in-production visual retrieval systems. Previous related works usually leverage losses used in knowledge distillation which can cause performance degradations or not guarantee compatibility. To address these issues, we propose a general framework called Learning Compatible Embeddings (LCE) which is applicable for both cross model compatibility and compatible training in direct/forward/backward manners. Our compatibility is achieved by aligning class centers between models directly or via a transformation, and restricting more compact intra-class distributions for the new model. Experiments are conducted in extensive scenarios such as changes of training dataset, loss functions, network architectures as well as feature dimensions, and demonstrate that LCE efficiently enables model compatibility with marginal sacrifices of accuracies.

@InProceedings{Meng_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Meng, Qiang and Zhang, Chixiang and Xu, Xiaoqiang and Zhou, Feng},
    title     = {Learning Compatible Embeddings},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9939-9948}
}


Oscar Mañas, Alexandre Lacoste, Xavier Giró-i-Nieto, David Vazquez, Pau Rodríguez

Abstract: Remote sensing and automatic earth monitoring are key to solve global-scale challenges such as disaster prevention, land use monitoring, or tackling climate change. Although there exist vast amounts of remote sensing data, most of it remains unlabeled and thus inaccessible for supervised learning algorithms. Transfer learning approaches can reduce the data requirements of deep learning algorithms. However, most of these methods are pre-trained on ImageNet and their generalization to remote sensing imagery is not guaranteed due to the domain gap. In this work, we propose Seasonal Contrast (SeCo), an effective pipeline to leverage unlabeled data for in-domain pre-training of remote sensing representations. The SeCo pipeline is composed of two parts. First, a principled procedure to gather large-scale, unlabeled and uncurated remote sensing datasets containing images from multiple Earth locations at different timestamps. Second, a self-supervised algorithm that takes advantage of time and position invariance to learn transferable representations for remote sensing applications. We empirically show that models trained with SeCo achieve better performance than their ImageNet pre-trained counterparts and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods on multiple downstream tasks. The datasets and models in SeCo will be made public to facilitate transfer learning and enable rapid progress in remote sensing applications.

@InProceedings{Manas_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Ma\~nas, Oscar and Lacoste, Alexandre and Gir\'o-i-Nieto, Xavier and Vazquez, David and Rodr{\'\i}guez, Pau},
    title     = {Seasonal Contrast: Unsupervised Pre-Training From Uncurated Remote Sensing Data},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9414-9423}
}


Abstract: Recent works have advanced the performance of self-supervised representation learning by a large margin. The core among these methods is intra-image invariance learning. Two different transformations of one image instance are considered as a positive sample pair, where various tasks are designed to learn invariant representations by comparing the pair. Analogically, for video data, representations of frames from the same video are trained to be closer than frames from other videos, i.e. intra-video invariance. However, cross-video relation has barely been explored for visual representation learning. Unlike intra-video invariance, ground-truth labels of cross-video relation is usually unavailable without human labors. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning method which explores the cross-video relation by using cycle-consistency for general image representation learning. This allows to collect positive sample pairs across different video instances, which we hypothesize will lead to higher-level semantics. We validate our method by transferring our image representation to multiple downstream tasks including visual object tracking, image classification, and action recognition. We show significant improvement over state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods. Project page is available at https://happywu.github.io/cycle_contrast_video.

@InProceedings{Wu_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Wu, Haiping and Wang, Xiaolong},
    title     = {Contrastive Learning of Image Representations With Cross-Video Cycle-Consistency},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10149-10159}
}


Farzaneh Rezaeianaran, Rakshith Shetty, Rahaf Aljundi, Daniel Olmeda Reino, Shanshan Zhang, Bernt Schiele

Abstract: In order to robustly deploy object detectors across a wide range of scenarios, they should be adaptable to shifts in the input distribution without the need to constantly annotate new data. This has motivated research in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) algorithms for detection. UDA methods learn to adapt from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, by inducing alignment between detector features from source and target domains. Yet, there is no consensus on what features to align and how to do the alignment. In our work, we propose a framework that generalizes the different components commonly used by UDA methods laying the ground for an in-depth analysis of the UDA design space. Specifically, we propose a novel UDA algorithm, ViSGA, a direct implementation of our framework, that leverages the best design choices and introduces a simple but effective method to aggregate features at the instance-level based on the visual similarity before inducing group alignment via adversarial training. We show that both similarity-based grouping and adversarial training allows our model to focus on coarsely aligning feature groups, without being forced to match all instances across loosely aligned domains. Finally, we examine the applicability of ViSGA to the setting where labeled data are gathered from different sources. Experiments show that not only our method outperforms previous single-source approaches on Sim2Real and Adverse Weather, but also generalizes well to the multi-source setting.

@InProceedings{Rezaeianaran_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Rezaeianaran, Farzaneh and Shetty, Rakshith and Aljundi, Rahaf and Reino, Daniel Olmeda and Zhang, Shanshan and Schiele, Bernt},
    title     = {Seeking Similarities Over Differences: Similarity-Based Domain Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9204-9213}
}


Xuan Gong, Abhishek Sharma, Srikrishna Karanam, Ziyan Wu, Terrence Chen, David Doermann, Arun Innanje

Abstract: We consider the problem of Federated Learning (FL) where numerous decentralized computational nodes collaborate with each other to train a centralized machine learning model without explicitly sharing their local data samples. Such decentralized training naturally leads to issues of imbalanced or differing data distributions among the local models and challenges in fusing them into a central model. Existing FL methods deal with these issues by either sharing local parameters or fusing models via online distillation. However, such a design leads to multiple rounds of inter-node communication resulting in substantial bandwidth consumption, while also increasing the risk of data leakage and consequent privacy issues. To address these problems, we propose a new distillation-based FL framework that can preserve privacy by design, while also consuming substantially less network communication resources when compared to the current state-of-the-art. Our framework engages in inter-node communication using only publicly available and approved datasets, thereby giving explicit privacy control to the user. To distill knowledge among the various local models, our framework involves a novel ensemble distillation algorithm that uses both final prediction as well as model attention. This algorithm explicitly considers the diversity among various local nodes while also seeking consensus among them. This results in a comprehensive technique to distill knowledge from various decentralized nodes. We demonstrate the various aspects and the associated benefits of our FL framework through extensive experiments that produce state-of-the-art results on both classification and segmentation tasks on natural and medical images.

@InProceedings{Gong_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Gong, Xuan and Sharma, Abhishek and Karanam, Srikrishna and Wu, Ziyan and Chen, Terrence and Doermann, David and Innanje, Arun},
    title     = {Ensemble Attention Distillation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15076-15086}
}


Dim P. Papadopoulos, Ethan Weber, Antonio Torralba

Abstract: Manually annotating object segmentation masks is very time-consuming. While interactive segmentation methods offer a more efficient alternative, they become unaffordable at a large scale because the cost grows linearly with the number of annotated masks. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient annotation scheme for building large datasets with object segmentation masks. At a large scale, images contain many object instances with similar appearance. We exploit these similarities by using hierarchical clustering on mask predictions made by a segmentation model. We propose a scheme that efficiently searches through the hierarchy of clusters and selects which clusters to annotate. Humans manually verify only a few masks per cluster, and the labels are propagated to the whole cluster. Through a large-scale experiment to populate 1M unlabeled images with object segmentation masks for 80 object classes, we show that (1) we obtain 1M object segmentation masks with an total annotation time of only 290 hours; (2) we reduce annotation time by 76x compared to manual annotation; (3) the segmentation quality of our masks is on par with those from manually annotated datasets. Code, data, and models are available online.

@InProceedings{Papadopoulos_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Papadopoulos, Dim P. and Weber, Ethan and Torralba, Antonio},
    title     = {Scaling Up Instance Annotation via Label Propagation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {15364-15373}
}


Kyoungkook Kang, Seongtae Kim, Sunghyun Cho

Abstract: For successful semantic editing of real images, it is critical for a GAN inversion method to find an in-domain latent code that aligns with the domain of a pre-trained GAN model. Unfortunately, such in-domain latent codes can be found only for in-range images that align with the training images of a GAN model. In this paper, we propose BDInvert, a novel GAN inversion approach to semantic editing of out-of-range images that are geometrically unaligned with the training images of a GAN model. To find a latent code that is semantically editable, BDInvert inverts an input out-of-range image into an alternative latent space than the original latent space. We also propose a regularized inversion method to find a solution that supports semantic editing in the alternative space. Our experiments show that BDInvert effectively supports semantic editing of out-of-range images with geometric transformations.

@InProceedings{Kang_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Kang, Kyoungkook and Kim, Seongtae and Cho, Sunghyun},
    title     = {GAN Inversion for Out-of-Range Images With Geometric Transformations},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {13941-13949}
}


Stephan J. Garbin, Marek Kowalski, Matthew Johnson, Jamie Shotton, Julien Valentin

Abstract: Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showed how neural networks can be used to encode complex 3D environments that can be rendered photorealistically from novel viewpoints. Rendering these images is very computationally demanding and recent improvements are still a long way from enabling interactive rates, even on high-end hardware. Motivated by scenarios on mobile and mixed reality devices, we propose FastNeRF, the first NeRF-based system capable of rendering high fidelity photorealistic images at 200Hz on a high-end consumer GPU. The core of our method is a graphics-inspired factorization that allows for (i) compactly caching a deep radiance map at each position in space, (ii) efficiently querying that map using ray directions to estimate the pixel values in the rendered image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF algorithm and at least an order of magnitude faster than existing work on accelerating NeRF, while maintaining visual quality and extensibility.

@InProceedings{Garbin_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Garbin, Stephan J. and Kowalski, Marek and Johnson, Matthew and Shotton, Jamie and Valentin, Julien},
    title     = {FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {14346-14355}
}


Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo, Ruihong Qiu, Sen Wang, Zi Huang, Jingjing Li, Zheng Zhang

Abstract: Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) aims to classify samples under the assumption that some classes are not observable during training. To bridge the gap between the seen and unseen classes, most GZSL methods attempt to associate the visual features of seen classes with attributes or to generate unseen samples directly. Nevertheless, the visual features used in prior approaches do not necessarily encode semantically related information that the shared attributes refer to, which greatly degrades the model generalization to unseen classes. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel semantics disentangling framework for the generalized zero-shot learning task (SDGZSL), where the visual features depicted unseen classes are firstly estimated by a conditional VAE and then factorized into semantic-consistent and semantic-unrelated latent vectors. In particular, a total correlation penalty is applied to guarantee the independence between the two factorized representations, and the semantic consistency of which is measured by the derived relation network. Extensive experiments conducted on four GZSL benchmark datasets have evidenced that the semantic-consistent features disentangled by the proposed SDGZSL are more generalizable in tasks of canonical and generalized zero-shot learning.

@InProceedings{Chen_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Chen, Zhi and Luo, Yadan and Qiu, Ruihong and Wang, Sen and Huang, Zi and Li, Jingjing and Zhang, Zheng},
    title     = {Semantics Disentangling for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8712-8720}
}