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Researcher profile

Wenjun Zeng

Wenjun Zeng contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Computer VisionMachine LearningArtificial Intelligenceeess.ASSoundHuman-Computer InteractionMultimediaRobotics

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Published work

40 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

An Efficient Streaming Video Understanding Framework with Agentic Control

Streaming video requires handling dynamic information density under strict latency budgets. Yet, existing methods typically employ static strategies, such as fixed memory compression or reliance on a single model, forcing a trade-off: fast models fail on complex queries, while always-on heavy models violate real-time constraints and overcomplicate simple queries. Rather than fixing these decisions upfront, we propose R3-Streaming (Remember, Respond, Reason), which formulates streaming video understanding as a cascaded control problem: for each query, the system compresses memory, judges response readiness, and routes computation sequentially, so that each downstream decision builds on progressively refined information states. To optimize this pipeline, we introduce an age-aware forgetting policy for memory compression, as aggressively compressing historical frames can yield substantial performance gains. For compute routing, we propose TB-GRPO, a target-balanced reinforcement learning objective that routes hard queries to a stronger model while preventing mode collapse. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that R3-Streaming achieves state-of-the-art results among streaming MLLMs, reaching 57.92 on OVO-Bench and 76.36 on StreamingBench, while reducing visual token usage by 95 to 96 percent.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

From Articulated Kinematics to Routed Visual Control for Action-Conditioned Surgical Video Generation

Action-conditioned surgical video generation is a critical yet highly challenging problem for robotic surgery. The core difficulty is that low-dimensional control vectors must precisely govern complex image-space evolution. In this work, we propose a kinematic-to-visual lifting paradigm that converts articulated kinematics into a unified set of five image-aligned control modalities. Building on this representation, we introduce a hierarchically routed visual control framework that selectively activates the most relevant control modalities and motion scales. Instead of uniformly applying all control signals, our model performs hierarchical routing to dynamically allocate conditioning capacity. We further design kinematic-prior-guided routing loss functions to ensure physically meaningful, temporally stable, and efficient expert utilization. To improve efficiency, we propose a budgeted training and inference scheme that leverages routing-induced sparsity. By selectively discarding low-significance control pathways during training and execution, our approach enables adaptive computation that is complementary to standard distillation. We additionally construct a new benchmark with curated articulated annotations, obtained through human-in-the-loop semantic labeling and differentiable pose tracking, providing realistic supervision for action-conditioned surgical video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves action faithfulness, visual fidelity, and cross-domain generalization over diverse baselines. Moreover, our efficient variant achieves substantial reductions in latency while maintaining strong control accuracy.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Generation Navigator: A State-Aware Agentic Framework for Image Generation

Despite rapid advances in text-to-image generation, faithfully realizing user intent remains challenging, often requiring manual multi-turn trial and error. To automate this process, existing systems rely on either simple prompt rewriting or closed-loop agents driven by hand-crafted rules, rather than learning to adapt actions to the evolving generation process. In this paper, we reformulate image generation as a state-conditioned action-making problem and propose Generation Navigator, a multi-turn T2I agent that learns to dynamically steer the generation trajectory and output the next action. However, training this agent via reinforcement learning introduces a critical credit assignment challenge: naively rewarding a trajectory based solely on a single state assigns equal credit to all actions in the rollout, ignores the quality dynamics across turns, and fails to distinguish actions that improve the trajectory from those that degrade it or waste turns without progress. We resolve this with PRE-GRPO (Peak-Retention-Efficiency Group Relative Policy Optimization), a trajectory-level reinforcement learning objective that explicitly rewards discovering a high-quality image (Peak), avoiding subsequent quality degradation across turns (Retention), and minimizing unnecessary turns (Efficiency). Experiments show substantial improvements across benchmarks, reaching a WISE score of 0.90 and 79.06% reasoning accuracy on T2I-ReasonBench.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

ReWorld: Multi-Dimensional Reward Modeling for Embodied World Models

Recently, video-based world models that learn to simulate the dynamics have gained increasing attention in robot learning. However, current approaches primarily emphasize visual generative quality while overlooking physical fidelity, dynamic consistency, and task logic, especially for contact-rich manipulation tasks, which limits their applicability to downstream tasks. To this end, we introduce ReWorld, a framework aimed to employ reinforcement learning to align the video-based embodied world models with physical realism, task completion capability, embodiment plausibility and visual quality. Specifically, we first construct a large-scale (~235K) video preference dataset and employ it to train a hierarchical reward model designed to capture multi-dimensional reward consistent with human preferences. We further propose a practical alignment algorithm that post-trains flow-based world models using this reward through a computationally efficient PPO-style algorithm. Comprehensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that ReWorld significantly improves the physical fidelity, logical coherence, embodiment and visual quality of generated rollouts, outperforming previous methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

S^2F-Net:A Robust Spatial-Spectral Fusion Framework for Cross-Model AIGC Detection

The rapid development of generative models has imposed an urgent demand for detection schemes with strong generalization capabilities. However, existing detection methods generally suffer from overfitting to specific source models, leading to significant performance degradation when confronted with unseen generative architectures. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a cross-model detection framework called S 2 F-Net, whose core lies in exploring and leveraging the inherent spectral discrepancies between real and synthetic textures. Considering that upsampling operations leave unique and distinguishable frequency fingerprints in both texture-poor and texture-rich regions, we focus our research on the detection of frequency-domain artifacts, aiming to fundamentally improve the generalization performance of the model. Specifically, we introduce a learnable frequency attention module that adaptively weights and enhances discriminative frequency bands by synergizing spatial texture analysis and spectral dependencies.On the AIGCDetectBenchmark, which includes 17 categories of generative models, S 2 F-Net achieves a detection accuracy of 90.49%, significantly outperforming various existing baseline methods in cross-domain detection scenarios.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2025arXiv

Hierarchical Context Alignment with Disentangled Geometric and Temporal Modeling for Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Camera-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction (SOP) is crucial for understanding complex 3D scenes from limited 2D image observations. Existing SOP methods typically aggregate contextual features to assist the occupancy representation learning, alleviating issues like occlusion or ambiguity. However, these solutions often face misalignment issues wherein the corresponding features at the same position across different frames may have different semantic meanings during the aggregation process, which leads to unreliable contextual fusion results and an unstable representation learning process. To address this problem, we introduce a new Hierarchical context alignment paradigm for a more accurate SOP (Hi-SOP). Hi-SOP first disentangles the geometric and temporal context for separate alignment, which two branches are then composed to enhance the reliability of SOP. This parsing of the visual input into a local-global alignment hierarchy includes: (I) disentangled geometric and temporal separate alignment, within each leverages depth confidence and camera pose as prior for relevant feature matching respectively; (II) global alignment and composition of the transformed geometric and temporal volumes based on semantics consistency. Our method outperforms SOTAs for semantic scene completion on the SemanticKITTI & NuScenes-Occupancy datasets and LiDAR semantic segmentation on the NuScenes dataset. The project website is available at https://arlo0o.github.io/hisop.github.io/.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Nonparametric Contextual Bandit with Arm-level Eligibility Control for Customer Service Routing

Amazon Customer Service provides real-time support for millions of customer contacts every year. While bot-resolver helps automate some traffic, we still see high demand for human agents, also called subject matter experts (SMEs). Customers outreach with questions in different domains (return policy, device troubleshooting, etc.). Depending on their training, not all SMEs are eligible to handle all contacts. Routing contacts to eligible SMEs turns out to be a non-trivial problem because SMEs' domain eligibility is subject to training quality and can change over time. To optimally recommend SMEs while simultaneously learning the true eligibility status, we propose to formulate the routing problem with a nonparametric contextual bandit algorithm (K-Boot) plus an eligibility control (EC) algorithm. K-Boot models reward with a kernel smoother on similar past samples selected by $k$-NN, and Bootstrap Thompson Sampling for exploration. EC filters arms (SMEs) by the initially system-claimed eligibility and dynamically validates the reliability of this information. The proposed K-Boot is a general bandit algorithm, and EC is applicable to other bandits. Our simulation studies show that K-Boot performs on par with state-of-the-art Bandit models, and EC boosts K-Boot performance when stochastic eligibility signal exists.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Correlation-Aware Deep Tracking

Robustness and discrimination power are two fundamental requirements in visual object tracking. In most tracking paradigms, we find that the features extracted by the popular Siamese-like networks cannot fully discriminatively model the tracked targets and distractor objects, hindering them from simultaneously meeting these two requirements. While most methods focus on designing robust correlation operations, we propose a novel target-dependent feature network inspired by the self-/cross-attention scheme. In contrast to the Siamese-like feature extraction, our network deeply embeds cross-image feature correlation in multiple layers of the feature network. By extensively matching the features of the two images through multiple layers, it is able to suppress non-target features, resulting in instance-varying feature extraction. The output features of the search image can be directly used for predicting target locations without extra correlation step. Moreover, our model can be flexibly pre-trained on abundant unpaired images, leading to notably faster convergence than the existing methods. Extensive experiments show our method achieves the state-of-the-art results while running at real-time. Our feature networks also can be applied to existing tracking pipelines seamlessly to raise the tracking performance. Code will be available.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization

Machine learning systems generally assume that the training and testing distributions are the same. To this end, a key requirement is to develop models that can generalize to unseen distributions. Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increasing interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. Great progress has been made in the area of domain generalization for years. This paper presents the first review of recent advances in this area. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. We then thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. We categorize recent algorithms into three classes: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, and present several popular algorithms in detail for each category. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets, applications, and our open-sourced codebase for fair evaluation. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning Disentangled Representation by Exploiting Pretrained Generative Models: A Contrastive Learning View

From the intuitive notion of disentanglement, the image variations corresponding to different factors should be distinct from each other, and the disentangled representation should reflect those variations with separate dimensions. To discover the factors and learn disentangled representation, previous methods typically leverage an extra regularization term when learning to generate realistic images. However, the term usually results in a trade-off between disentanglement and generation quality. For the generative models pretrained without any disentanglement term, the generated images show semantically meaningful variations when traversing along different directions in the latent space. Based on this observation, we argue that it is possible to mitigate the trade-off by $(i)$ leveraging the pretrained generative models with high generation quality, $(ii)$ focusing on discovering the traversal directions as factors for disentangled representation learning. To achieve this, we propose Disentaglement via Contrast (DisCo) as a framework to model the variations based on the target disentangled representations, and contrast the variations to jointly discover disentangled directions and learn disentangled representations. DisCo achieves the state-of-the-art disentangled representation learning and distinct direction discovering, given pretrained non-disentangled generative models including GAN, VAE, and Flow. Source code is at https://github.com/xrenaa/DisCo.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification with Coordinated Anti-forgetting and Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (ReID) has been extensively investigated to mitigate the adverse effects of domain gaps. Those works assume the target domain data can be accessible all at once. However, for the real-world streaming data, this hinders the timely adaptation to changing data statistics and sufficient exploitation of increasing samples. In this paper, to address more practical scenarios, we propose a new task, Lifelong Unsupervised Domain Adaptive (LUDA) person ReID. This is challenging because it requires the model to continuously adapt to unlabeled data in the target environments while alleviating catastrophic forgetting for such a fine-grained person retrieval task. We design an effective scheme for this task, dubbed CLUDA-ReID, where the anti-forgetting is harmoniously coordinated with the adaptation. Specifically, a meta-based Coordinated Data Replay strategy is proposed to replay old data and update the network with a coordinated optimization direction for both adaptation and memorization. Moreover, we propose Relational Consistency Learning for old knowledge distillation/inheritance in line with the objective of retrieval-based tasks. We set up two evaluation settings to simulate the practical application scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our CLUDA-ReID for both scenarios with stationary target streams and scenarios with dynamic target streams.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Markov Decision Process modeled with Bandits for Sequential Decision Making in Linear-flow

For marketing, we sometimes need to recommend content for multiple pages in sequence. Different from general sequential decision making process, the use cases have a simpler flow where customers per seeing recommended content on each page can only return feedback as moving forward in the process or dropping from it until a termination state. We refer to this type of problems as sequential decision making in linear--flow. We propose to formulate the problem as an MDP with Bandits where Bandits are employed to model the transition probability matrix. At recommendation time, we use Thompson sampling (TS) to sample the transition probabilities and allocate the best series of actions with analytical solution through exact dynamic programming. The way that we formulate the problem allows us to leverage TS's efficiency in balancing exploration and exploitation and Bandit's convenience in modeling actions' incompatibility. In the simulation study, we observe the proposed MDP with Bandits algorithm outperforms Q-learning with $ε$-greedy and decreasing $ε$, independent Bandits, and interaction Bandits. We also find the proposed algorithm's performance is the most robust to changes in the across-page interdependence strength.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

ReSTR: Convolution-free Referring Image Segmentation Using Transformers

Referring image segmentation is an advanced semantic segmentation task where target is not a predefined class but is described in natural language. Most of existing methods for this task rely heavily on convolutional neural networks, which however have trouble capturing long-range dependencies between entities in the language expression and are not flexible enough for modeling interactions between the two different modalities. To address these issues, we present the first convolution-free model for referring image segmentation using transformers, dubbed ReSTR. Since it extracts features of both modalities through transformer encoders, it can capture long-range dependencies between entities within each modality. Also, ReSTR fuses features of the two modalities by a self-attention encoder, which enables flexible and adaptive interactions between the two modalities in the fusion process. The fused features are fed to a segmentation module, which works adaptively according to the image and language expression in hand. ReSTR is evaluated and compared with previous work on all public benchmarks, where it outperforms all existing models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Retriever: Learning Content-Style Representation as a Token-Level Bipartite Graph

This paper addresses the unsupervised learning of content-style decomposed representation. We first give a definition of style and then model the content-style representation as a token-level bipartite graph. An unsupervised framework, named Retriever, is proposed to learn such representations. First, a cross-attention module is employed to retrieve permutation invariant (P.I.) information, defined as style, from the input data. Second, a vector quantization (VQ) module is used, together with man-induced constraints, to produce interpretable content tokens. Last, an innovative link attention module serves as the decoder to reconstruct data from the decomposed content and style, with the help of the linking keys. Being modal-agnostic, the proposed Retriever is evaluated in both speech and image domains. The state-of-the-art zero-shot voice conversion performance confirms the disentangling ability of our framework. Top performance is also achieved in the part discovery task for images, verifying the interpretability of our representation. In addition, the vivid part-based style transfer quality demonstrates the potential of Retriever to support various fascinating generative tasks. Project page at https://ydcustc.github.io/retriever-demo/.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Robust Multi-Object Tracking by Marginal Inference

Multi-object tracking in videos requires to solve a fundamental problem of one-to-one assignment between objects in adjacent frames. Most methods address the problem by first discarding impossible pairs whose feature distances are larger than a threshold, followed by linking objects using Hungarian algorithm to minimize the overall distance. However, we find that the distribution of the distances computed from Re-ID features may vary significantly for different videos. So there isn't a single optimal threshold which allows us to safely discard impossible pairs. To address the problem, we present an efficient approach to compute a marginal probability for each pair of objects in real time. The marginal probability can be regarded as a normalized distance which is significantly more stable than the original feature distance. As a result, we can use a single threshold for all videos. The approach is general and can be applied to the existing trackers to obtain about one point improvement in terms of IDF1 metric. It achieves competitive results on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks. In addition, the computed probability is more interpretable which facilitates subsequent post-processing operations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Skeleton-Based Mutually Assisted Interacted Object Localization and Human Action Recognition

Skeleton data carries valuable motion information and is widely explored in human action recognition. However, not only the motion information but also the interaction with the environment provides discriminative cues to recognize the action of persons. In this paper, we propose a joint learning framework for mutually assisted "interacted object localization" and "human action recognition" based on skeleton data. The two tasks are serialized together and collaborate to promote each other, where preliminary action type derived from skeleton alone helps improve interacted object localization, which in turn provides valuable cues for the final human action recognition. Besides, we explore the temporal consistency of interacted object as constraint to better localize the interacted object with the absence of ground-truth labels. Extensive experiments on the datasets of SYSU-3D, NTU60 RGB+D, Northwestern-UCLA and UAV-Human show that our method achieves the best or competitive performance with the state-of-the-art methods for human action recognition. Visualization results show that our method can also provide reasonable interacted object localization results.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Sparse MLP for Image Recognition: Is Self-Attention Really Necessary?

Transformers have sprung up in the field of computer vision. In this work, we explore whether the core self-attention module in Transformer is the key to achieving excellent performance in image recognition. To this end, we build an attention-free network called sMLPNet based on the existing MLP-based vision models. Specifically, we replace the MLP module in the token-mixing step with a novel sparse MLP (sMLP) module. For 2D image tokens, sMLP applies 1D MLP along the axial directions and the parameters are shared among rows or columns. By sparse connection and weight sharing, sMLP module significantly reduces the number of model parameters and computational complexity, avoiding the common over-fitting problem that plagues the performance of MLP-like models. When only trained on the ImageNet-1K dataset, the proposed sMLPNet achieves 81.9% top-1 accuracy with only 24M parameters, which is much better than most CNNs and vision Transformers under the same model size constraint. When scaling up to 66M parameters, sMLPNet achieves 83.4% top-1 accuracy, which is on par with the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer. The success of sMLPNet suggests that the self-attention mechanism is not necessarily a silver bullet in computer vision. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/SPACH

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Style Normalization and Restitution for Domain Generalization and Adaptation

For many practical computer vision applications, the learned models usually have high performance on the datasets used for training but suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in new environments, where there are usually style differences between the training images and the testing images. An effective domain generalizable model is expected to be able to learn feature representations that are both generalizable and discriminative. In this paper, we design a novel Style Normalization and Restitution module (SNR) to simultaneously ensure both high generalization and discrimination capability of the networks. In the SNR module, particularly, we filter out the style variations (e.g, illumination, color contrast) by performing Instance Normalization (IN) to obtain style normalized features, where the discrepancy among different samples and domains is reduced. However, such a process is task-ignorant and inevitably removes some task-relevant discriminative information, which could hurt the performance. To remedy this, we propose to distill task-relevant discriminative features from the residual (i.e, the difference between the original feature and the style normalized feature) and add them back to the network to ensure high discrimination. Moreover, for better disentanglement, we enforce a dual causality loss constraint in the restitution step to encourage the better separation of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We validate the effectiveness of our SNR on different computer vision tasks, including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Experiments demonstrate that our SNR module is capable of improving the performance of networks for domain generalization (DG) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on many tasks. Code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/SNR.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Towards Building A Group-based Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement Framework

Disentangled representation learning is one of the major goals of deep learning, and is a key step for achieving explainable and generalizable models. A well-defined theoretical guarantee still lacks for the VAE-based unsupervised methods, which are a set of popular methods to achieve unsupervised disentanglement. The Group Theory based definition of representation disentanglement mathematically connects the data transformations to the representations using the formalism of group. In this paper, built on the group-based definition and inspired by the n-th dihedral group, we first propose a theoretical framework towards achieving unsupervised representation disentanglement. We then propose a model, based on existing VAE-based methods, to tackle the unsupervised learning problem of the framework. In the theoretical framework, we prove three sufficient conditions on model, group structure, and data respectively in an effort to achieve, in an unsupervised way, disentangled representation per group-based definition. With the first two of the conditions satisfied and a necessary condition derived for the third one, we offer additional constraints, from the perspective of the group-based definition, for the existing VAE-based models. Experimentally, we train 1800 models covering the most prominent VAE-based methods on five datasets to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical framework. Compared to the original VAE-based methods, these Groupified VAEs consistently achieve better mean performance with smaller variances.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Understanding Mobile GUI: from Pixel-Words to Screen-Sentences

The ubiquity of mobile phones makes mobile GUI understanding an important task. Most previous works in this domain require human-created metadata of screens (e.g. View Hierarchy) during inference, which unfortunately is often not available or reliable enough for GUI understanding. Inspired by the impressive success of Transformers in NLP tasks, targeting for purely vision-based GUI understanding, we extend the concepts of Words/Sentence to Pixel-Words/Screen-Sentence, and propose a mobile GUI understanding architecture: Pixel-Words to Screen-Sentence (PW2SS). In analogy to the individual Words, we define the Pixel-Words as atomic visual components (text and graphic components), which are visually consistent and semantically clear across screenshots of a large variety of design styles. The Pixel-Words extracted from a screenshot are aggregated into Screen-Sentence with a Screen Transformer proposed to model their relations. Since the Pixel-Words are defined as atomic visual components, the ambiguity between their visual appearance and semantics is dramatically reduced. We are able to make use of metadata available in training data to auto-generate high-quality annotations for Pixel-Words. A dataset, RICO-PW, of screenshots with Pixel-Words annotations is built based on the public RICO dataset, which will be released to help to address the lack of high-quality training data in this area. We train a detector to extract Pixel-Words from screenshots on this dataset and achieve metadata-free GUI understanding during inference. We conduct experiments and show that Pixel-Words can be well extracted on RICO-PW and well generalized to a new dataset, P2S-UI, collected by ourselves. The effectiveness of PW2SS is further verified in the GUI understanding tasks including relation prediction, clickability prediction, screen retrieval, and app type classification.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

VirtualPose: Learning Generalizable 3D Human Pose Models from Virtual Data

While monocular 3D pose estimation seems to have achieved very accurate results on the public datasets, their generalization ability is largely overlooked. In this work, we perform a systematic evaluation of the existing methods and find that they get notably larger errors when tested on different cameras, human poses and appearance. To address the problem, we introduce VirtualPose, a two-stage learning framework to exploit the hidden "free lunch" specific to this task, i.e. generating infinite number of poses and cameras for training models at no cost. To that end, the first stage transforms images to abstract geometry representations (AGR), and then the second maps them to 3D poses. It addresses the generalization issue from two aspects: (1) the first stage can be trained on diverse 2D datasets to reduce the risk of over-fitting to limited appearance; (2) the second stage can be trained on diverse AGR synthesized from a large number of virtual cameras and poses. It outperforms the SOTA methods without using any paired images and 3D poses from the benchmarks, which paves the way for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/wkom/VirtualPose.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

When Shift Operation Meets Vision Transformer: An Extremely Simple Alternative to Attention Mechanism

Attention mechanism has been widely believed as the key to success of vision transformers (ViTs), since it provides a flexible and powerful way to model spatial relationships. However, is the attention mechanism truly an indispensable part of ViT? Can it be replaced by some other alternatives? To demystify the role of attention mechanism, we simplify it into an extremely simple case: ZERO FLOP and ZERO parameter. Concretely, we revisit the shift operation. It does not contain any parameter or arithmetic calculation. The only operation is to exchange a small portion of the channels between neighboring features. Based on this simple operation, we construct a new backbone network, namely ShiftViT, where the attention layers in ViT are substituted by shift operations. Surprisingly, ShiftViT works quite well in several mainstream tasks, e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation. The performance is on par with or even better than the strong baseline Swin Transformer. These results suggest that the attention mechanism might not be the vital factor that makes ViT successful. It can be even replaced by a zero-parameter operation. We should pay more attentions to the remaining parts of ViT in the future work. Code is available at github.com/microsoft/SPACH.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

General-Purpose Speech Representation Learning through a Self-Supervised Multi-Granularity Framework

This paper presents a self-supervised learning framework, named MGF, for general-purpose speech representation learning. In the design of MGF, speech hierarchy is taken into consideration. Specifically, we propose to use generative learning approaches to capture fine-grained information at small time scales and use discriminative learning approaches to distill coarse-grained or semantic information at large time scales. For phoneme-scale learning, we borrow idea from the masked language model but tailor it for the continuous speech signal by replacing classification loss with a contrastive loss. We corroborate our design by evaluating MGF representation on various downstream tasks, including phoneme classification, speaker classification, speech recognition, and emotion classification. Experiments verify that training at different time scales needs different training targets and loss functions, which in general complement each other and lead to a better performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

VAE^2: Preventing Posterior Collapse of Variational Video Predictions in the Wild

Predicting future frames of video sequences is challenging due to the complex and stochastic nature of the problem. Video prediction methods based on variational auto-encoders (VAEs) have been a great success, but they require the training data to contain multiple possible futures for an observed video sequence. This is hard to be fulfilled when videos are captured in the wild where any given observation only has a determinate future. As a result, training a vanilla VAE model with these videos inevitably causes posterior collapse. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel VAE structure, dabbed VAE-in-VAE or VAE$^2$. The key idea is to explicitly introduce stochasticity into the VAE. We treat part of the observed video sequence as a random transition state that bridges its past and future, and maximize the likelihood of a Markov Chain over the video sequence under all possible transition states. A tractable lower bound is proposed for this intractable objective function and an end-to-end optimization algorithm is designed accordingly. VAE$^2$ can mitigate the posterior collapse problem to a large extent, as it breaks the direct dependence between future and observation and does not directly regress the determinate future provided by the training data. We carry out experiments on a large-scale dataset called Cityscapes, which contains videos collected from a number of urban cities. Results show that VAE$^2$ is capable of predicting diverse futures and is more resistant to posterior collapse than the other state-of-the-art VAE-based approaches. We believe that VAE$^2$ is also applicable to other stochastic sequence prediction problems where training data are lack of stochasticity.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Beyond Intra-modality: A Survey of Heterogeneous Person Re-identification

An efficient and effective person re-identification (ReID) system relieves the users from painful and boring video watching and accelerates the process of video analysis. Recently, with the explosive demands of practical applications, a lot of research efforts have been dedicated to heterogeneous person re-identification (Hetero-ReID). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art Hetero-ReID methods that address the challenge of inter-modality discrepancies. According to the application scenario, we classify the methods into four categories -- low-resolution, infrared, sketch, and text. We begin with an introduction of ReID, and make a comparison between Homogeneous ReID (Homo-ReID) and Hetero-ReID tasks. Then, we describe and compare existing datasets for performing evaluations, and survey the models that have been widely employed in Hetero-ReID. We also summarize and compare the representative approaches from two perspectives, i.e., the application scenario and the learning pipeline. We conclude by a discussion of some future research directions. Follow-up updates are avaible at: https://github.com/lightChaserX/Awesome-Hetero-reID

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Feature Alignment and Restoration for Domain Generalization and Adaptation

For domain generalization (DG) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), cross domain feature alignment has been widely explored to pull the feature distributions of different domains in order to learn domain-invariant representations. However, the feature alignment is in general task-ignorant and could result in degradation of the discrimination power of the feature representation and thus hinders the high performance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework termed Feature Alignment and Restoration (FAR) to simultaneously ensure high generalization and discrimination power of the networks for effective DG and UDA. Specifically, we perform feature alignment (FA) across domains by aligning the moments of the distributions of attentively selected features to reduce their discrepancy. To ensure high discrimination, we propose a Feature Restoration (FR) operation to distill task-relevant features from the residual information and use them to compensate for the aligned features. For better disentanglement, we enforce a dual ranking entropy loss constraint in the FR step to encourage the separation of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. Extensive experiments on multiple classification benchmarks demonstrate the high performance and strong generalization of our FAR framework for both domain generalization and unsupervised domain adaptation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Fusing Wearable IMUs with Multi-View Images for Human Pose Estimation: A Geometric Approach

We propose to estimate 3D human pose from multi-view images and a few IMUs attached at person's limbs. It operates by firstly detecting 2D poses from the two signals, and then lifting them to the 3D space. We present a geometric approach to reinforce the visual features of each pair of joints based on the IMUs. This notably improves 2D pose estimation accuracy especially when one joint is occluded. We call this approach Orientation Regularized Network (ORN). Then we lift the multi-view 2D poses to the 3D space by an Orientation Regularized Pictorial Structure Model (ORPSM) which jointly minimizes the projection error between the 3D and 2D poses, along with the discrepancy between the 3D pose and IMU orientations. The simple two-step approach reduces the error of the state-of-the-art by a large margin on a public dataset. Our code will be released at https://github.com/CHUNYUWANG/imu-human-pose-pytorch.

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preprint2020arXiv

Global Distance-distributions Separation for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Supervised person re-identification (ReID) often has poor scalability and usability in real-world deployments due to domain gaps and the lack of annotations for the target domain data. Unsupervised person ReID through domain adaptation is attractive yet challenging. Existing unsupervised ReID approaches often fail in correctly identifying the positive samples and negative samples through the distance-based matching/ranking. The two distributions of distances for positive sample pairs (Pos-distr) and negative sample pairs (Neg-distr) are often not well separated, having large overlap. To address this problem, we introduce a global distance-distributions separation (GDS) constraint over the two distributions to encourage the clear separation of positive and negative samples from a global view. We model the two global distance distributions as Gaussian distributions and push apart the two distributions while encouraging their sharpness in the unsupervised training process. Particularly, to model the distributions from a global view and facilitate the timely updating of the distributions and the GDS related losses, we leverage a momentum update mechanism for building and maintaining the distribution parameters (mean and variance) and calculate the loss on the fly during the training. Distribution-based hard mining is proposed to further promote the separation of the two distributions. We validate the effectiveness of the GDS constraint in unsupervised ReID networks. Extensive experiments on multiple ReID benchmark datasets show our method leads to significant improvement over the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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preprint2020arXiv

Multi-Granularity Reference-Aided Attentive Feature Aggregation for Video-based Person Re-identification

Video-based person re-identification (reID) aims at matching the same person across video clips. It is a challenging task due to the existence of redundancy among frames, newly revealed appearance, occlusion, and motion blurs. In this paper, we propose an attentive feature aggregation module, namely Multi-Granularity Reference-aided Attentive Feature Aggregation (MG-RAFA), to delicately aggregate spatio-temporal features into a discriminative video-level feature representation. In order to determine the contribution/importance of a spatial-temporal feature node, we propose to learn the attention from a global view with convolutional operations. Specifically, we stack its relations, i.e., pairwise correlations with respect to a representative set of reference feature nodes (S-RFNs) that represents global video information, together with the feature itself to infer the attention. Moreover, to exploit the semantics of different levels, we propose to learn multi-granularity attentions based on the relations captured at different granularities. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our attentive feature aggregation module MG-RAFA. Our framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.

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preprint2020arXiv

Online Speaker Diarization with Relation Network

In this paper, we propose an online speaker diarization system based on Relation Network, named RenoSD. Unlike conventional diariztion systems which consist of several independently-optimized modules, RenoSD implements voice-activity-detection (VAD), embedding extraction, and speaker identity association using a single deep neural network. The most striking feature of RenoSD is that it adopts a meta-learning strategy for speaker identity association. In particular, the relation network learns to learn a deep distance metric in a data-driven way and it can determine through a simple forward pass whether two given segments belong to the same speaker. As such, RenoSD can be performed in an online manner with low latency. Experimental results on AMI and CALLHOME datasets show that the proposed RenoSD system achieves consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art x-vector baseline. Compared with an existing online diarization system named UIS-RNN, RenoSD achieves a better performance using much fewer training data and at a lower time complexity.

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preprint2020arXiv

Relation-Aware Global Attention for Person Re-identification

For person re-identification (re-id), attention mechanisms have become attractive as they aim at strengthening discriminative features and suppressing irrelevant ones, which matches well the key of re-id, i.e., discriminative feature learning. Previous approaches typically learn attention using local convolutions, ignoring the mining of knowledge from global structure patterns. Intuitively, the affinities among spatial positions/nodes in the feature map provide clustering-like information and are helpful for inferring semantics and thus attention, especially for person images where the feasible human poses are constrained. In this work, we propose an effective Relation-Aware Global Attention (RGA) module which captures the global structural information for better attention learning. Specifically, for each feature position, in order to compactly grasp the structural information of global scope and local appearance information, we propose to stack the relations, i.e., its pairwise correlations/affinities with all the feature positions (e.g., in raster scan order), and the feature itself together to learn the attention with a shallow convolutional model. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our RGA can significantly enhance the feature representation power and help achieve the state-of-the-art performance on several popular benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Relation-Aware-Global-Attention-Networks.

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preprint2020arXiv

Semantics-Aligned Representation Learning for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (reID) aims to match person images to retrieve the ones with the same identity. This is a challenging task, as the images to be matched are generally semantically misaligned due to the diversity of human poses and capture viewpoints, incompleteness of the visible bodies (due to occlusion), etc. In this paper, we propose a framework that drives the reID network to learn semantics-aligned feature representation through delicate supervision designs. Specifically, we build a Semantics Aligning Network (SAN) which consists of a base network as encoder (SA-Enc) for re-ID, and a decoder (SA-Dec) for reconstructing/regressing the densely semantics aligned full texture image. We jointly train the SAN under the supervisions of person re-identification and aligned texture generation. Moreover, at the decoder, besides the reconstruction loss, we add Triplet ReID constraints over the feature maps as the perceptual losses. The decoder is discarded in the inference and thus our scheme is computationally efficient. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. We achieve the state-of-the-art performances on the benchmark datasets CUHK03, Market1501, MSMT17, and the partial person reID dataset Partial REID. Code for our proposed method is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/Semantics-Aligned-Representation-Learning-for-Person-Re-identification.

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preprint2020arXiv

Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition

Skeleton-based human action recognition has attracted great interest thanks to the easy accessibility of the human skeleton data. Recently, there is a trend of using very deep feedforward neural networks to model the 3D coordinates of joints without considering the computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective semantics-guided neural network (SGN) for skeleton-based action recognition. We explicitly introduce the high level semantics of joints (joint type and frame index) into the network to enhance the feature representation capability. In addition, we exploit the relationship of joints hierarchically through two modules, i.e., a joint-level module for modeling the correlations of joints in the same frame and a framelevel module for modeling the dependencies of frames by taking the joints in the same frame as a whole. A strong baseline is proposed to facilitate the study of this field. With an order of magnitude smaller model size than most previous works, SGN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the NTU60, NTU120, and SYSU datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SGN.

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preprint2020arXiv

Spatiotemporal Fusion in 3D CNNs: A Probabilistic View

Despite the success in still image recognition, deep neural networks for spatiotemporal signal tasks (such as human action recognition in videos) still suffers from low efficacy and inefficiency over the past years. Recently, human experts have put more efforts into analyzing the importance of different components in 3D convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs) to design more powerful spatiotemporal learning backbones. Among many others, spatiotemporal fusion is one of the essentials. It controls how spatial and temporal signals are extracted at each layer during inference. Previous attempts usually start by ad-hoc designs that empirically combine certain convolutions and then draw conclusions based on the performance obtained by training the corresponding networks. These methods only support network-level analysis on limited number of fusion strategies. In this paper, we propose to convert the spatiotemporal fusion strategies into a probability space, which allows us to perform network-level evaluations of various fusion strategies without having to train them separately. Besides, we can also obtain fine-grained numerical information such as layer-level preference on spatiotemporal fusion within the probability space. Our approach greatly boosts the efficiency of analyzing spatiotemporal fusion. Based on the probability space, we further generate new fusion strategies which achieve the state-of-the-art performance on four well-known action recognition datasets.

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preprint2020arXiv

Style Normalization and Restitution for Generalizable Person Re-identification

Existing fully-supervised person re-identification (ReID) methods usually suffer from poor generalization capability caused by domain gaps. The key to solving this problem lies in filtering out identity-irrelevant interference and learning domain-invariant person representations. In this paper, we aim to design a generalizable person ReID framework which trains a model on source domains yet is able to generalize/perform well on target domains. To achieve this goal, we propose a simple yet effective Style Normalization and Restitution (SNR) module. Specifically, we filter out style variations (e.g., illumination, color contrast) by Instance Normalization (IN). However, such a process inevitably removes discriminative information. We propose to distill identity-relevant feature from the removed information and restitute it to the network to ensure high discrimination. For better disentanglement, we enforce a dual causal loss constraint in SNR to encourage the separation of identity-relevant features and identity-irrelevant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong generalization capability of our framework. Our models empowered by the SNR modules significantly outperform the state-of-the-art domain generalization approaches on multiple widely-used person ReID benchmarks, and also show superiority on unsupervised domain adaptation.

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preprint2020arXiv

Target-Tailored Source-Transformation for Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation aims to provide a semantic and structural description of an image, denoting the objects (with nodes) and their relationships (with edges). The best performing works to date are based on exploiting the context surrounding objects or relations,e.g., by passing information among objects. In these approaches, to transform the representation of source objects is a critical process for extracting information for the use by target objects. In this work, we argue that a source object should give what tar-get object needs and give different objects different information rather than contributing common information to all targets. To achieve this goal, we propose a Target-TailoredSource-Transformation (TTST) method to efficiently propagate information among object proposals and relations. Particularly, for a source object proposal which will contribute information to other target objects, we transform the source object feature to the target object feature domain by simultaneously taking both the source and target into account. We further explore more powerful representations by integrating language prior with the visual context in the transformation for the scene graph generation. By doing so the target object is able to extract target-specific information from the source object and source relation accordingly to refine its representation. Our framework is validated on the Visual Genome bench-mark and demonstrated its state-of-the-art performance for the scene graph generation. The experimental results show that the performance of object detection and visual relation-ship detection are promoted mutually by our method.

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preprint2020arXiv

Tracking by Instance Detection: A Meta-Learning Approach

We consider the tracking problem as a special type of object detection problem, which we call instance detection. With proper initialization, a detector can be quickly converted into a tracker by learning the new instance from a single image. We find that model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) offers a strategy to initialize the detector that satisfies our needs. We propose a principled three-step approach to build a high-performance tracker. First, pick any modern object detector trained with gradient descent. Second, conduct offline training (or initialization) with MAML. Third, perform domain adaptation using the initial frame. We follow this procedure to build two trackers, named Retina-MAML and FCOS-MAML, based on two modern detectors RetinaNet and FCOS. Evaluations on four benchmarks show that both trackers are competitive against state-of-the-art trackers. On OTB-100, Retina-MAML achieves the highest ever AUC of 0.712. On TrackingNet, FCOS-MAML ranks the first on the leader board with an AUC of 0.757 and the normalized precision of 0.822. Both trackers run in real-time at 40 FPS.

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preprint2020arXiv

Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Shot Knowledge Distillation for Image-Based Object Re-Identification

Object re-identification (re-id) aims to identify a specific object across times or camera views, with the person re-id and vehicle re-id as the most widely studied applications. Re-id is challenging because of the variations in viewpoints, (human) poses, and occlusions. Multi-shots of the same object can cover diverse viewpoints/poses and thus provide more comprehensive information. In this paper, we propose exploiting the multi-shots of the same identity to guide the feature learning of each individual image. Specifically, we design an Uncertainty-aware Multi-shot Teacher-Student (UMTS) Network. It consists of a teacher network (T-net) that learns the comprehensive features from multiple images of the same object, and a student network (S-net) that takes a single image as input. In particular, we take into account the data dependent heteroscedastic uncertainty for effectively transferring the knowledge from the T-net to S-net. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make use of multi-shots of an object in a teacher-student learning manner for effectively boosting the single image based re-id. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on the popular vehicle re-id and person re-id datasets. In inference, the S-net alone significantly outperforms the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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preprint2020arXiv

VoxelPose: Towards Multi-Camera 3D Human Pose Estimation in Wild Environment

We present an approach to estimate 3D poses of multiple people from multiple camera views. In contrast to the previous efforts which require to establish cross-view correspondence based on noisy and incomplete 2D pose estimations, we present an end-to-end solution which directly operates in the $3$D space, therefore avoids making incorrect decisions in the 2D space. To achieve this goal, the features in all camera views are warped and aggregated in a common 3D space, and fed into Cuboid Proposal Network (CPN) to coarsely localize all people. Then we propose Pose Regression Network (PRN) to estimate a detailed 3D pose for each proposal. The approach is robust to occlusion which occurs frequently in practice. Without bells and whistles, it outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the public datasets. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/multiperson-pose-estimation-pytorch.

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preprint2019arXiv

EleAtt-RNN: Adding Attentiveness to Neurons in Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are capable of modeling temporal dependencies of complex sequential data. In general, current available structures of RNNs tend to concentrate on controlling the contributions of current and previous information. However, the exploration of different importance levels of different elements within an input vector is always ignored. We propose a simple yet effective Element-wise-Attention Gate (EleAttG), which can be easily added to an RNN block (e.g. all RNN neurons in an RNN layer), to empower the RNN neurons to have attentiveness capability. For an RNN block, an EleAttG is used for adaptively modulating the input by assigning different levels of importance, i.e., attention, to each element/dimension of the input. We refer to an RNN block equipped with an EleAttG as an EleAtt-RNN block. Instead of modulating the input as a whole, the EleAttG modulates the input at fine granularity, i.e., element-wise, and the modulation is content adaptive. The proposed EleAttG, as an additional fundamental unit, is general and can be applied to any RNN structures, e.g., standard RNN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), or Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EleAtt-RNN by applying it to different tasks including the action recognition, from both skeleton-based data and RGB videos, gesture recognition, and sequential MNIST classification. Experiments show that adding attentiveness through EleAttGs to RNN blocks significantly improves the power of RNNs.

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