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Jiwen Lu

Jiwen Lu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

39 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

BAMI: Training-Free Bias Mitigation in GUI Grounding

GUI grounding is a critical capability for enabling GUI agents to execute tasks such as clicking and dragging. However, in complex scenarios like the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, existing models often suffer from suboptimal performance. Utilizing the proposed \textbf{Masked Prediction Distribution (MPD)} attribution method, we identify that the primary sources of errors are twofold: high image resolution (leading to precision bias) and intricate interface elements (resulting in ambiguity bias). To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Bias-Aware Manipulation Inference (BAMI)}, which incorporates two key manipulations, coarse-to-fine focus and candidate selection, to effectively mitigate these biases. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that BAMI significantly enhances the accuracy of various GUI grounding models in a training-free setting. For instance, applying our method to the TianXi-Action-7B model boosts its accuracy on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark from 51.9\% to 57.8\%. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the robustness of the BAMI approach across diverse parameter configurations, highlighting its stability and effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/Neur-IO/BAMI.

preprint2023arXiv

AdaPoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Adaptive Geometry-Aware Transformers

In this paper, we present a new method that reformulates point cloud completion as a set-to-set translation problem and design a new model, called PoinTr, which adopts a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for point cloud completion. By representing the point cloud as a set of unordered groups of points with position embeddings, we convert the input data to a sequence of point proxies and employ the Transformers for generation. To facilitate Transformers to better leverage the inductive bias about 3D geometric structures of point clouds, we further devise a geometry-aware block that models the local geometric relationships explicitly. The migration of Transformers enables our model to better learn structural knowledge and preserve detailed information for point cloud completion. Taking a step towards more complicated and diverse situations, we further propose AdaPoinTr by developing an adaptive query generation mechanism and designing a novel denoising task during completing a point cloud. Coupling these two techniques enables us to train the model efficiently and effectively: we reduce training time (by 15x or more) and improve completion performance (over 20%). We also show our method can be extended to the scene-level point cloud completion scenario by designing a new geometry-enhanced semantic scene completion framework. Extensive experiments on the existing and newly-proposed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which attains 6.53 CD on PCN, 0.81 CD on ShapeNet-55 and 0.392 MMD on real-world KITTI, surpassing other work by a large margin and establishing new state-of-the-arts on various benchmarks. Most notably, AdaPoinTr can achieve such promising performance with higher throughputs and fewer FLOPs compared with the previous best methods in practice. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/yuxumin/PoinTr

preprint2022arXiv

A Roadmap for Big Model

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

preprint2022arXiv

A Simple Baseline for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection

3D object detection with surrounding cameras has been a promising direction for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present SimMOD, a Simple baseline for Multi-camera Object Detection, to solve the problem. To incorporate multi-view information as well as build upon previous efforts on monocular 3D object detection, the framework is built on sample-wise object proposals and designed to work in a two-stage manner. First, we extract multi-scale features and generate the perspective object proposals on each monocular image. Second, the multi-view proposals are aggregated and then iteratively refined with multi-view and multi-scale visual features in the DETR3D-style. The refined proposals are end-to-end decoded into the detection results. To further boost the performance, we incorporate the auxiliary branches alongside the proposal generation to enhance the feature learning. Also, we design the methods of target filtering and teacher forcing to promote the consistency of two-stage training. We conduct extensive experiments on the 3D object detection benchmark of nuScenes to demonstrate the effectiveness of SimMOD and achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Code will be available at https://github.com/zhangyp15/SimMOD.

preprint2022arXiv

Adaptive neighborhood Metric learning

In this paper, we reveal that metric learning would suffer from serious inseparable problem if without informative sample mining. Since the inseparable samples are often mixed with hard samples, current informative sample mining strategies used to deal with inseparable problem may bring up some side-effects, such as instability of objective function, etc. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel distance metric learning algorithm, named adaptive neighborhood metric learning (ANML). In ANML, we design two thresholds to adaptively identify the inseparable similar and dissimilar samples in the training procedure, thus inseparable sample removing and metric parameter learning are implemented in the same procedure. Due to the non-continuity of the proposed ANML, we develop an ingenious function, named \emph{log-exp mean function} to construct a continuous formulation to surrogate it, which can be efficiently solved by the gradient descent method. Similar to Triplet loss, ANML can be used to learn both the linear and deep embeddings. By analyzing the proposed method, we find it has some interesting properties. For example, when ANML is used to learn the linear embedding, current famous metric learning algorithms such as the large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) and neighbourhood components analysis (NCA) are the special cases of the proposed ANML by setting the parameters different values. When it is used to learn deep features, the state-of-the-art deep metric learning algorithms such as Triplet loss, Lifted structure loss, and Multi-similarity loss become the special cases of ANML. Furthermore, the \emph{log-exp mean function} proposed in our method gives a new perspective to review the deep metric learning methods such as Prox-NCA and N-pairs loss. At last, promising experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

Attributable Visual Similarity Learning

This paper proposes an attributable visual similarity learning (AVSL) framework for a more accurate and explainable similarity measure between images. Most existing similarity learning methods exacerbate the unexplainability by mapping each sample to a single point in the embedding space with a distance metric (e.g., Mahalanobis distance, Euclidean distance). Motivated by the human semantic similarity cognition, we propose a generalized similarity learning paradigm to represent the similarity between two images with a graph and then infer the overall similarity accordingly. Furthermore, we establish a bottom-up similarity construction and top-down similarity inference framework to infer the similarity based on semantic hierarchy consistency. We first identify unreliable higher-level similarity nodes and then correct them using the most coherent adjacent lower-level similarity nodes, which simultaneously preserve traces for similarity attribution. Extensive experiments on the CUB-200-2011, Cars196, and Stanford Online Products datasets demonstrate significant improvements over existing deep similarity learning methods and verify the interpretability of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/zbr17/AVSL.

preprint2022arXiv

Back to Reality: Weakly-supervised 3D Object Detection with Shape-guided Label Enhancement

In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised approach for 3D object detection, which makes it possible to train a strong 3D detector with position-level annotations (i.e. annotations of object centers). In order to remedy the information loss from box annotations to centers, our method, namely Back to Reality (BR), makes use of synthetic 3D shapes to convert the weak labels into fully-annotated virtual scenes as stronger supervision, and in turn utilizes the perfect virtual labels to complement and refine the real labels. Specifically, we first assemble 3D shapes into physically reasonable virtual scenes according to the coarse scene layout extracted from position-level annotations. Then we go back to reality by applying a virtual-to-real domain adaptation method, which refine the weak labels and additionally supervise the training of detector with the virtual scenes. Furthermore, we propose a more challenging benckmark for indoor 3D object detection with more diversity in object sizes to better show the potential of BR. With less than 5% of the labeling labor, we achieve comparable detection performance with some popular fully-supervised approaches on the widely used ScanNet dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/wyf-ACCEPT/BackToReality

preprint2022arXiv

BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we present BEVerse, a unified framework for 3D perception and prediction based on multi-camera systems. Unlike existing studies focusing on the improvement of single-task approaches, BEVerse features in producing spatio-temporal Birds-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-camera videos and jointly reasoning about multiple tasks for vision-centric autonomous driving. Specifically, BEVerse first performs shared feature extraction and lifting to generate 4D BEV representations from multi-timestamp and multi-view images. After the ego-motion alignment, the spatio-temporal encoder is utilized for further feature extraction in BEV. Finally, multiple task decoders are attached for joint reasoning and prediction. Within the decoders, we propose the grid sampler to generate BEV features with different ranges and granularities for different tasks. Also, we design the method of iterative flow for memory-efficient future prediction. We show that the temporal information improves 3D object detection and semantic map construction, while the multi-task learning can implicitly benefit motion prediction. With extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, we show that the multi-task BEVerse outperforms existing single-task methods on 3D object detection, semantic map construction, and motion prediction. Compared with the sequential paradigm, BEVerse also favors in significantly improved efficiency. The code and trained models will be released at https://github.com/zhangyp15/BEVerse.

preprint2022arXiv

Bridge-Prompt: Towards Ordinal Action Understanding in Instructional Videos

Action recognition models have shown a promising capability to classify human actions in short video clips. In a real scenario, multiple correlated human actions commonly occur in particular orders, forming semantically meaningful human activities. Conventional action recognition approaches focus on analyzing single actions. However, they fail to fully reason about the contextual relations between adjacent actions, which provide potential temporal logic for understanding long videos. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based framework, Bridge-Prompt (Br-Prompt), to model the semantics across adjacent actions, so that it simultaneously exploits both out-of-context and contextual information from a series of ordinal actions in instructional videos. More specifically, we reformulate the individual action labels as integrated text prompts for supervision, which bridge the gap between individual action semantics. The generated text prompts are paired with corresponding video clips, and together co-train the text encoder and the video encoder via a contrastive approach. The learned vision encoder has a stronger capability for ordinal-action-related downstream tasks, e.g. action segmentation and human activity recognition. We evaluate the performances of our approach on several video datasets: Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), 50Salads, and the Breakfast dataset. Br-Prompt achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ttlmh/Bridge-Prompt

preprint2022arXiv

DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting

Recent progress has shown that large-scale pre-training using contrastive image-text pairs can be a promising alternative for high-quality visual representation learning from natural language supervision. Benefiting from a broader source of supervision, this new paradigm exhibits impressive transferability to downstream classification tasks and datasets. However, the problem of transferring the knowledge learned from image-text pairs to more complex dense prediction tasks has barely been visited. In this work, we present a new framework for dense prediction by implicitly and explicitly leveraging the pre-trained knowledge from CLIP. Specifically, we convert the original image-text matching problem in CLIP to a pixel-text matching problem and use the pixel-text score maps to guide the learning of dense prediction models. By further using the contextual information from the image to prompt the language model, we are able to facilitate our model to better exploit the pre-trained knowledge. Our method is model-agnostic, which can be applied to arbitrary dense prediction systems and various pre-trained visual backbones including both CLIP models and ImageNet pre-trained models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our methods on semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/DenseCLIP

preprint2022arXiv

FineDiving: A Fine-grained Dataset for Procedure-aware Action Quality Assessment

Most existing action quality assessment methods rely on the deep features of an entire video to predict the score, which is less reliable due to the non-transparent inference process and poor interpretability. We argue that understanding both high-level semantics and internal temporal structures of actions in competitive sports videos is the key to making predictions accurate and interpretable. Towards this goal, we construct a new fine-grained dataset, called FineDiving, developed on diverse diving events with detailed annotations on action procedures. We also propose a procedure-aware approach for action quality assessment, learned by a new Temporal Segmentation Attention module. Specifically, we propose to parse pairwise query and exemplar action instances into consecutive steps with diverse semantic and temporal correspondences. The procedure-aware cross-attention is proposed to learn embeddings between query and exemplar steps to discover their semantic, spatial, and temporal correspondences, and further serve for fine-grained contrastive regression to derive a reliable scoring mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods with better interpretability. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/xujinglin/FineDiving}.

preprint2022arXiv

HyperDet3D: Learning a Scene-conditioned 3D Object Detector

A bathtub in a library, a sink in an office, a bed in a laundry room -- the counter-intuition suggests that scene provides important prior knowledge for 3D object detection, which instructs to eliminate the ambiguous detection of similar objects. In this paper, we propose HyperDet3D to explore scene-conditioned prior knowledge for 3D object detection. Existing methods strive for better representation of local elements and their relations without scene-conditioned knowledge, which may cause ambiguity merely based on the understanding of individual points and object candidates. Instead, HyperDet3D simultaneously learns scene-agnostic embeddings and scene-specific knowledge through scene-conditioned hypernetworks. More specifically, our HyperDet3D not only explores the sharable abstracts from various 3D scenes, but also adapts the detector to the given scene at test time. We propose a discriminative Multi-head Scene-specific Attention (MSA) module to dynamically control the layer parameters of the detector conditioned on the fusion of scene-conditioned knowledge. Our HyperDet3D achieves state-of-the-art results on the 3D object detection benchmark of the ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets. Moreover, through cross-dataset evaluation, we show the acquired scene-conditioned prior knowledge still takes effect when facing 3D scenes with domain gap.

preprint2022arXiv

Label2Label: A Language Modeling Framework for Multi-Attribute Learning

Objects are usually associated with multiple attributes, and these attributes often exhibit high correlations. Modeling complex relationships between attributes poses a great challenge for multi-attribute learning. This paper proposes a simple yet generic framework named Label2Label to exploit the complex attribute correlations. Label2Label is the first attempt for multi-attribute prediction from the perspective of language modeling. Specifically, it treats each attribute label as a "word" describing the sample. As each sample is annotated with multiple attribute labels, these "words" will naturally form an unordered but meaningful "sentence", which depicts the semantic information of the corresponding sample. Inspired by the remarkable success of pre-training language models in NLP, Label2Label introduces an image-conditioned masked language model, which randomly masks some of the "word" tokens from the label "sentence" and aims to recover them based on the masked "sentence" and the context conveyed by image features. Our intuition is that the instance-wise attribute relations are well grasped if the neural net can infer the missing attributes based on the context and the remaining attribute hints. Label2Label is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. Without incorporating task-specific prior knowledge and highly specialized network designs, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on three different multi-attribute learning tasks, compared to highly customized domain-specific methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Li-Wanhua/Label2Label.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning from Temporal Spatial Cubism for Cross-Dataset Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Rapid progress and superior performance have been achieved for skeleton-based action recognition recently. In this article, we investigate this problem under a cross-dataset setting, which is a new, pragmatic, and challenging task in real-world scenarios. Following the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) paradigm, the action labels are only available on a source dataset, but unavailable on a target dataset in the training stage. Different from the conventional adversarial learning-based approaches for UDA, we utilize a self-supervision scheme to reduce the domain shift between two skeleton-based action datasets. Our inspiration is drawn from Cubism, an art genre from the early 20th century, which breaks and reassembles the objects to convey a greater context. By segmenting and permuting temporal segments or human body parts, we design two self-supervised learning classification tasks to explore the temporal and spatial dependency of a skeleton-based action and improve the generalization ability of the model. We conduct experiments on six datasets for skeleton-based action recognition, including three large-scale datasets (NTU RGB+D, PKU-MMD, and Kinetics) where new cross-dataset settings and benchmarks are established. Extensive results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. The source codes of our model and all the compared methods are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/st-cubism.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Series-Parallel Lookup Tables for Efficient Image Super-Resolution

Lookup table (LUT) has shown its efficacy in low-level vision tasks due to the valuable characteristics of low computational cost and hardware independence. However, recent attempts to address the problem of single image super-resolution (SISR) with lookup tables are highly constrained by the small receptive field size. Besides, their frameworks of single-layer lookup tables limit the extension and generalization capacities of the model. In this paper, we propose a framework of series-parallel lookup tables (SPLUT) to alleviate the above issues and achieve efficient image super-resolution. On the one hand, we cascade multiple lookup tables to enlarge the receptive field of each extracted feature vector. On the other hand, we propose a parallel network which includes two branches of cascaded lookup tables which process different components of the input low-resolution images. By doing so, the two branches collaborate with each other and compensate for the precision loss of discretizing input pixels when establishing lookup tables. Compared to previous lookup table-based methods, our framework has stronger representation abilities with more flexible architectures. Furthermore, we no longer need interpolation methods which introduce redundant computations so that our method can achieve faster inference speed. Extensive experimental results on five popular benchmark datasets show that our method obtains superior SISR performance in a more efficient way. The code is available at https://github.com/zhjy2016/SPLUT.

preprint2022arXiv

LiDAR Distillation: Bridging the Beam-Induced Domain Gap for 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we propose the LiDAR Distillation to bridge the domain gap induced by different LiDAR beams for 3D object detection. In many real-world applications, the LiDAR points used by mass-produced robots and vehicles usually have fewer beams than that in large-scale public datasets. Moreover, as the LiDARs are upgraded to other product models with different beam amount, it becomes challenging to utilize the labeled data captured by previous versions' high-resolution sensors. Despite the recent progress on domain adaptive 3D detection, most methods struggle to eliminate the beam-induced domain gap. We find that it is essential to align the point cloud density of the source domain with that of the target domain during the training process. Inspired by this discovery, we propose a progressive framework to mitigate the beam-induced domain shift. In each iteration, we first generate low-beam pseudo LiDAR by downsampling the high-beam point clouds. Then the teacher-student framework is employed to distill rich information from the data with more beams. Extensive experiments on Waymo, nuScenes and KITTI datasets with three different LiDAR-based detectors demonstrate the effectiveness of our LiDAR Distillation. Notably, our approach does not increase any additional computation cost for inference.

preprint2022arXiv

MetaAge: Meta-Learning Personalized Age Estimators

Different people age in different ways. Learning a personalized age estimator for each person is a promising direction for age estimation given that it better models the personalization of aging processes. However, most existing personalized methods suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets due to the high-level requirements: identity labels and enough samples for each person to form a long-term aging pattern. In this paper, we aim to learn personalized age estimators without the above requirements and propose a meta-learning method named MetaAge for age estimation. Unlike most existing personalized methods that learn the parameters of a personalized estimator for each person in the training set, our method learns the mapping from identity information to age estimator parameters. Specifically, we introduce a personalized estimator meta-learner, which takes identity features as the input and outputs the parameters of customized estimators. In this way, our method learns the meta knowledge without the above requirements and seamlessly transfers the learned meta knowledge to the test set, which enables us to leverage the existing large-scale age datasets without any additional annotations. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets including MORPH II, ChaLearn LAP 2015 and ChaLearn LAP 2016 databases demonstrate that our MetaAge significantly boosts the performance of existing personalized methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2022arXiv

Personalized Trajectory Prediction via Distribution Discrimination

Trajectory prediction is confronted with the dilemma to capture the multi-modal nature of future dynamics with both diversity and accuracy. In this paper, we present a distribution discrimination (DisDis) method to predict personalized motion patterns by distinguishing the potential distributions. Motivated by that the motion pattern of each person is personalized due to his/her habit, our DisDis learns the latent distribution to represent different motion patterns and optimize it by the contrastive discrimination. This distribution discrimination encourages latent distributions to be more discriminative. Our method can be integrated with existing multi-modal stochastic predictive models as a plug-and-play module to learn the more discriminative latent distribution. To evaluate the latent distribution, we further propose a new metric, probability cumulative minimum distance (PCMD) curve, which cumulatively calculates the minimum distance on the sorted probabilities. Experimental results on the ETH and UCY datasets show the effectiveness of our method.

preprint2022arXiv

Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling

We present Point-BERT, a new paradigm for learning Transformers to generalize the concept of BERT to 3D point cloud. Inspired by BERT, we devise a Masked Point Modeling (MPM) task to pre-train point cloud Transformers. Specifically, we first divide a point cloud into several local point patches, and a point cloud Tokenizer with a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) is designed to generate discrete point tokens containing meaningful local information. Then, we randomly mask out some patches of input point clouds and feed them into the backbone Transformers. The pre-training objective is to recover the original point tokens at the masked locations under the supervision of point tokens obtained by the Tokenizer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed BERT-style pre-training strategy significantly improves the performance of standard point cloud Transformers. Equipped with our pre-training strategy, we show that a pure Transformer architecture attains 93.8% accuracy on ModelNet40 and 83.1% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing carefully designed point cloud models with much fewer hand-made designs. We also demonstrate that the representations learned by Point-BERT transfer well to new tasks and domains, where our models largely advance the state-of-the-art of few-shot point cloud classification task. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lulutang0608/Point-BERT

preprint2022arXiv

SemAffiNet: Semantic-Affine Transformation for Point Cloud Segmentation

Conventional point cloud semantic segmentation methods usually employ an encoder-decoder architecture, where mid-level features are locally aggregated to extract geometric information. However, the over-reliance on these class-agnostic local geometric representations may raise confusion between local parts from different categories that are similar in appearance or spatially adjacent. To address this issue, we argue that mid-level features can be further enhanced with semantic information, and propose semantic-affine transformation that transforms features of mid-level points belonging to different categories with class-specific affine parameters. Based on this technique, we propose SemAffiNet for point cloud semantic segmentation, which utilizes the attention mechanism in the Transformer module to implicitly and explicitly capture global structural knowledge within local parts for overall comprehension of each category. We conduct extensive experiments on the ScanNetV2 and NYUv2 datasets, and evaluate semantic-affine transformation on various 3D point cloud and 2D image segmentation baselines, where both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority and generalization ability of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/SemAffiNet.

preprint2022arXiv

Shap-CAM: Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks based on Shapley Value

Explaining deep convolutional neural networks has been recently drawing increasing attention since it helps to understand the networks' internal operations and why they make certain decisions. Saliency maps, which emphasize salient regions largely connected to the network's decision-making, are one of the most common ways for visualizing and analyzing deep networks in the computer vision community. However, saliency maps generated by existing methods cannot represent authentic information in images due to the unproven proposals about the weights of activation maps which lack solid theoretical foundation and fail to consider the relations between each pixel. In this paper, we develop a novel post-hoc visual explanation method called Shap-CAM based on class activation mapping. Unlike previous gradient-based approaches, Shap-CAM gets rid of the dependence on gradients by obtaining the importance of each pixel through Shapley value. We demonstrate that Shap-CAM achieves better visual performance and fairness for interpreting the decision making process. Our approach outperforms previous methods on both recognition and localization tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Shapley-NAS: Discovering Operation Contribution for Neural Architecture Search

In this paper, we propose a Shapley value based method to evaluate operation contribution (Shapley-NAS) for neural architecture search. Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) acquires the optimal architectures by optimizing the architecture parameters with gradient descent, which significantly reduces the search cost. However, the magnitude of architecture parameters updated by gradient descent fails to reveal the actual operation importance to the task performance and therefore harms the effectiveness of obtained architectures. By contrast, we propose to evaluate the direct influence of operations on validation accuracy. To deal with the complex relationships between supernet components, we leverage Shapley value to quantify their marginal contributions by considering all possible combinations. Specifically, we iteratively optimize the supernet weights and update the architecture parameters by evaluating operation contributions via Shapley value, so that the optimal architectures are derived by selecting the operations that contribute significantly to the tasks. Since the exact computation of Shapley value is NP-hard, the Monte-Carlo sampling based algorithm with early truncation is employed for efficient approximation, and the momentum update mechanism is adopted to alleviate fluctuation of the sampling process. Extensive experiments on various datasets and various search spaces show that our Shapley-NAS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin with light search cost. The code is available at https://github.com/Euphoria16/Shapley-NAS.git

preprint2022arXiv

Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusion

Human behavior has the nature of indeterminacy, which requires the pedestrian trajectory prediction system to model the multi-modality of future motion states. Unlike existing stochastic trajectory prediction methods which usually use a latent variable to represent multi-modality, we explicitly simulate the process of human motion variation from indeterminate to determinate. In this paper, we present a new framework to formulate the trajectory prediction task as a reverse process of motion indeterminacy diffusion (MID), in which we progressively discard indeterminacy from all the walkable areas until reaching the desired trajectory. This process is learned with a parameterized Markov chain conditioned by the observed trajectories. We can adjust the length of the chain to control the degree of indeterminacy and balance the diversity and determinacy of the predictions. Specifically, we encode the history behavior information and the social interactions as a state embedding and devise a Transformer-based diffusion model to capture the temporal dependencies of trajectories. Extensive experiments on the human trajectory prediction benchmarks including the Stanford Drone and ETH/UCY datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/gutianpei/MID.

preprint2022arXiv

WebFace260M: A Benchmark for Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

Face benchmarks empower the research community to train and evaluate high-performance face recognition systems. In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale recognition benchmark, containing uncurated 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name lists and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical deployments, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a new test set with rich attributes are constructed. Besides, we gather a large-scale masked face sub-set for biometrics assessment under COVID-19. For a comprehensive evaluation of face matchers, three recognition tasks are performed under standard, masked and unbiased settings, respectively. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Enabled by WebFace42M, we reduce 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set and rank 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with the public training sets. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established under the FRUITS-100/500/1000 milliseconds protocols. The proposed benchmark shows enormous potential on standard, masked and unbiased face recognition scenarios. Our WebFace260M website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

preprint2021arXiv

Latent Fingerprint Registration via Matching Densely Sampled Points

Latent fingerprint matching is a very important but unsolved problem. As a key step of fingerprint matching, fingerprint registration has a great impact on the recognition performance. Existing latent fingerprint registration approaches are mainly based on establishing correspondences between minutiae, and hence will certainly fail when there are no sufficient number of extracted minutiae due to small fingerprint area or poor image quality. Minutiae extraction has become the bottleneck of latent fingerprint registration. In this paper, we propose a non-minutia latent fingerprint registration method which estimates the spatial transformation between a pair of fingerprints through a dense fingerprint patch alignment and matching procedure. Given a pair of fingerprints to match, we bypass the minutiae extraction step and take uniformly sampled points as key points. Then the proposed patch alignment and matching algorithm compares all pairs of sampling points and produces their similarities along with alignment parameters. Finally, a set of consistent correspondences are found by spectral clustering. Extensive experiments on NIST27 database and MOLF database show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art registration performance, especially under challenging conditions.

preprint2021arXiv

Rank-Consistency Deep Hashing for Scalable Multi-Label Image Search

As hashing becomes an increasingly appealing technique for large-scale image retrieval, multi-label hashing is also attracting more attention for the ability to exploit multi-level semantic contents. In this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method for scalable multi-label image search. Unlike existing approaches with conventional objectives such as contrast and triplet losses, we employ a rank list, rather than pairs or triplets, to provide sufficient global supervision information for all the samples. Specifically, a new rank-consistency objective is applied to align the similarity orders from two spaces, the original space and the hamming space. A powerful loss function is designed to penalize the samples whose semantic similarity and hamming distance are mismatched in two spaces. Besides, a multi-label softmax cross-entropy loss is presented to enhance the discriminative power with a concise formulation of the derivative function. In order to manipulate the neighborhood structure of the samples with different labels, we design a multi-label clustering loss to cluster the hashing vectors of the samples with the same labels by reducing the distances between the samples and their multiple corresponding class centers. The state-of-the-art experimental results achieved on three public multi-label datasets, MIRFLICKR-25K, IAPRTC12 and NUS-WIDE, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

preprint2021arXiv

SOSD-Net: Joint Semantic Object Segmentation and Depth Estimation from Monocular images

Depth estimation and semantic segmentation play essential roles in scene understanding. The state-of-the-art methods employ multi-task learning to simultaneously learn models for these two tasks at the pixel-wise level. They usually focus on sharing the common features or stitching feature maps from the corresponding branches. However, these methods lack in-depth consideration on the correlation of the geometric cues and the scene parsing. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of semantic objectness to exploit the geometric relationship of these two tasks through an analysis of the imaging process, then propose a Semantic Object Segmentation and Depth Estimation Network (SOSD-Net) based on the objectness assumption. To the best of our knowledge, SOSD-Net is the first network that exploits the geometry constraint for simultaneous monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation. In addition, considering the mutual implicit relationship between these two tasks, we exploit the iterative idea from the expectation-maximization algorithm to train the proposed network more effectively. Extensive experimental results on the Cityscapes and NYU v2 dataset are presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.

preprint2021arXiv

WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale face benchmark containing noisy 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name list and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical scenarios, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a test set are constructed to comprehensively evaluate face matchers. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Empowered by WebFace42M, we reduce relative 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set, and ranks the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with public training set. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established on our rich-attribute test set under FRUITS-100ms/500ms/1000ms protocol, including MobileNet, EfficientNet, AttentionNet, ResNet, SENet, ResNeXt and RegNet families. Benchmark website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

preprint2020arXiv

BiDet: An Efficient Binarized Object Detector

In this paper, we propose a binarized neural network learning method called BiDet for efficient object detection. Conventional network binarization methods directly quantize the weights and activations in one-stage or two-stage detectors with constrained representational capacity, so that the information redundancy in the networks causes numerous false positives and degrades the performance significantly. On the contrary, our BiDet fully utilizes the representational capacity of the binary neural networks for object detection by redundancy removal, through which the detection precision is enhanced with alleviated false positives. Specifically, we generalize the information bottleneck (IB) principle to object detection, where the amount of information in the high-level feature maps is constrained and the mutual information between the feature maps and object detection is maximized. Meanwhile, we learn sparse object priors so that the posteriors are concentrated on informative detection prediction with false positive elimination. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art binary neural networks by a sizable margin.

preprint2020arXiv

Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis: The COIN Dataset and Performance Evaluation

Thanks to the substantial and explosively inscreased instructional videos on the Internet, novices are able to acquire knowledge for completing various tasks. Over the past decade, growing efforts have been devoted to investigating the problem on instructional video analysis. However, the most existing datasets in this area have limitations in diversity and scale, which makes them far from many real-world applications where more diverse activities occur. To address this, we present a large-scale dataset named as "COIN" for COmprehensive INstructional video analysis. Organized with a hierarchical structure, the COIN dataset contains 11,827 videos of 180 tasks in 12 domains (e.g., vehicles, gadgets, etc.) related to our daily life. With a new developed toolbox, all the videos are annotated efficiently with a series of step labels and the corresponding temporal boundaries. In order to provide a benchmark for instructional video analysis, we evaluate plenty of approaches on the COIN dataset under five different settings. Furthermore, we exploit two important characteristics (i.e., task-consistency and ordering-dependency) for localizing important steps in instructional videos. Accordingly, we propose two simple yet effective methods, which can be easily plugged into conventional proposal-based action detection models. We believe the introduction of the COIN dataset will promote the future in-depth research on instructional video analysis for the community. Our dataset, annotation toolbox and source code are available at http://coin-dataset.github.io.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Face Super-Resolution with Iterative Collaboration between Attentive Recovery and Landmark Estimation

Recent works based on deep learning and facial priors have succeeded in super-resolving severely degraded facial images. However, the prior knowledge is not fully exploited in existing methods, since facial priors such as landmark and component maps are always estimated by low-resolution or coarsely super-resolved images, which may be inaccurate and thus affect the recovery performance. In this paper, we propose a deep face super-resolution (FSR) method with iterative collaboration between two recurrent networks which focus on facial image recovery and landmark estimation respectively. In each recurrent step, the recovery branch utilizes the prior knowledge of landmarks to yield higher-quality images which facilitate more accurate landmark estimation in turn. Therefore, the iterative information interaction between two processes boosts the performance of each other progressively. Moreover, a new attentive fusion module is designed to strengthen the guidance of landmark maps, where facial components are generated individually and aggregated attentively for better restoration. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FSR methods in recovering high-quality face images.

preprint2020arXiv

DotFAN: A Domain-transferred Face Augmentation Network for Pose and Illumination Invariant Face Recognition

The performance of a convolutional neural network (CNN) based face recognition model largely relies on the richness of labelled training data. Collecting a training set with large variations of a face identity under different poses and illumination changes, however, is very expensive, making the diversity of within-class face images a critical issue in practice. In this paper, we propose a 3D model-assisted domain-transferred face augmentation network (DotFAN) that can generate a series of variants of an input face based on the knowledge distilled from existing rich face datasets collected from other domains. DotFAN is structurally a conditional CycleGAN but has two additional subnetworks, namely face expert network (FEM) and face shape regressor (FSR), for latent code control. While FSR aims to extract face attributes, FEM is designed to capture a face identity. With their aid, DotFAN can learn a disentangled face representation and effectively generate face images of various facial attributes while preserving the identity of augmented faces. Experiments show that DotFAN is beneficial for augmenting small face datasets to improve their within-class diversity so that a better face recognition model can be learned from the augmented dataset.

preprint2020arXiv

Global-Local Bidirectional Reasoning for Unsupervised Representation Learning of 3D Point Clouds

Local and global patterns of an object are closely related. Although each part of an object is incomplete, the underlying attributes about the object are shared among all parts, which makes reasoning the whole object from a single part possible. We hypothesize that a powerful representation of a 3D object should model the attributes that are shared between parts and the whole object, and distinguishable from other objects. Based on this hypothesis, we propose to learn point cloud representation by bidirectional reasoning between the local structures at different abstraction hierarchies and the global shape without human supervision. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the unsupervisedly learned representation is even better than supervised representation in discriminative power, generalization ability, and robustness. We show that unsupervisedly trained point cloud models can outperform their supervised counterparts on downstream classification tasks. Most notably, by simply increasing the channel width of an SSG PointNet++, our unsupervised model surpasses the state-of-the-art supervised methods on both synthetic and real-world 3D object classification datasets. We expect our observations to offer a new perspective on learning better representation from data structures instead of human annotations for point cloud understanding.

preprint2020arXiv

Graph-based Kinship Reasoning Network

In this paper, we propose a graph-based kinship reasoning (GKR) network for kinship verification, which aims to effectively perform relational reasoning on the extracted features of an image pair. Unlike most existing methods which mainly focus on how to learn discriminative features, our method considers how to compare and fuse the extracted feature pair to reason about the kin relations. The proposed GKR constructs a star graph called kinship relational graph where each peripheral node represents the information comparison in one feature dimension and the central node is used as a bridge for information communication among peripheral nodes. Then the GKR performs relational reasoning on this graph with recursive message passing. Extensive experimental results on the KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II datasets show that the proposed GKR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Graph-Based Social Relation Reasoning

Human beings are fundamentally sociable -- that we generally organize our social lives in terms of relations with other people. Understanding social relations from an image has great potential for intelligent systems such as social chatbots and personal assistants. In this paper, we propose a simpler, faster, and more accurate method named graph relational reasoning network (GR2N) for social relation recognition. Different from existing methods which process all social relations on an image independently, our method considers the paradigm of jointly inferring the relations by constructing a social relation graph. Furthermore, the proposed GR2N constructs several virtual relation graphs to explicitly grasp the strong logical constraints among different types of social relations. Experimental results illustrate that our method generates a reasonable and consistent social relation graph and improves the performance in both accuracy and efficiency.

preprint2020arXiv

MetaDistiller: Network Self-Boosting via Meta-Learned Top-Down Distillation

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been one of the most popu-lar methods to learn a compact model. However, it still suffers from highdemand in time and computational resources caused by sequential train-ing pipeline. Furthermore, the soft targets from deeper models do notoften serve as good cues for the shallower models due to the gap of com-patibility. In this work, we consider these two problems at the same time.Specifically, we propose that better soft targets with higher compatibil-ity can be generated by using a label generator to fuse the feature mapsfrom deeper stages in a top-down manner, and we can employ the meta-learning technique to optimize this label generator. Utilizing the softtargets learned from the intermediate feature maps of the model, we canachieve better self-boosting of the network in comparison with the state-of-the-art. The experiments are conducted on two standard classificationbenchmarks, namely CIFAR-100 and ILSVRC2012. We test various net-work architectures to show the generalizability of our MetaDistiller. Theexperiments results on two datasets strongly demonstrate the effective-ness of our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Reinforced Axial Refinement Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection aims to extract the 3D position and properties of objects from a 2D input image. This is an ill-posed problem with a major difficulty lying in the information loss by depth-agnostic cameras. Conventional approaches sample 3D bounding boxes from the space and infer the relationship between the target object and each of them, however, the probability of effective samples is relatively small in the 3D space. To improve the efficiency of sampling, we propose to start with an initial prediction and refine it gradually towards the ground truth, with only one 3d parameter changed in each step. This requires designing a policy which gets a reward after several steps, and thus we adopt reinforcement learning to optimize it. The proposed framework, Reinforced Axial Refinement Network (RAR-Net), serves as a post-processing stage which can be freely integrated into existing monocular 3D detection methods, and improve the performance on the KITTI dataset with small extra computational costs.

preprint2020arXiv

Structure-Preserving Super Resolution with Gradient Guidance

Structures matter in single image super resolution (SISR). Recent studies benefiting from generative adversarial network (GAN) have promoted the development of SISR by recovering photo-realistic images. However, there are always undesired structural distortions in the recovered images. In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving super resolution method to alleviate the above issue while maintaining the merits of GAN-based methods to generate perceptual-pleasant details. Specifically, we exploit gradient maps of images to guide the recovery in two aspects. On the one hand, we restore high-resolution gradient maps by a gradient branch to provide additional structure priors for the SR process. On the other hand, we propose a gradient loss which imposes a second-order restriction on the super-resolved images. Along with the previous image-space loss functions, the gradient-space objectives help generative networks concentrate more on geometric structures. Moreover, our method is model-agnostic, which can be potentially used for off-the-shelf SR networks. Experimental results show that we achieve the best PI and LPIPS performance and meanwhile comparable PSNR and SSIM compared with state-of-the-art perceptual-driven SR methods. Visual results demonstrate our superiority in restoring structures while generating natural SR images.

preprint2020arXiv

Uncertainty-aware Score Distribution Learning for Action Quality Assessment

Assessing action quality from videos has attracted growing attention in recent years. Most existing approaches usually tackle this problem based on regression algorithms, which ignore the intrinsic ambiguity in the score labels caused by multiple judges or their subjective appraisals. To address this issue, we propose an uncertainty-aware score distribution learning (USDL) approach for action quality assessment (AQA). Specifically, we regard an action as an instance associated with a score distribution, which describes the probability of different evaluated scores. Moreover, under the circumstance where fine-grained score labels are available (e.g., difficulty degree of an action or multiple scores from different judges), we further devise a multi-path uncertainty-aware score distributions learning (MUSDL) method to explore the disentangled components of a score. We conduct experiments on three AQA datasets containing various Olympic actions and surgical activities, where our approaches set new state-of-the-arts under the Spearman's Rank Correlation.