CVPR 2022 Papers

We study the problem of few-shot open-set recognition (FSOR), which learns a recognition system capable of both fast adaptation to new classes with limited labeled examples and rejection of unknown negative samples. Traditional large-scale open-set methods have been shown ineffective for FSOR problem due to data limitation. Current FSOR methods typically calibrate few-shot closed-set classifiers to be sensitive to negative samples so that they can be rejected via thresholding. However, threshold tuning is a challenging process as different FSOR tasks may require different rejection powers. In this paper, we instead propose task-adaptive negative class envision for FSOR to integrate threshold tuning into the learning process. Specifically, we augment the few-shot closed-set classifier with additional negative prototypes generated from few-shot examples. By incorporating few-shot class correlations in the negative generation process, we are able to learn dynamic rejection boundaries for FSOR tasks. Besides, we extend our method to generalized few-shot open-set recognition (GFSOR), which requires classification on both many-shot and few-shot classes as well as rejection of negative samples. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate our methods on both problems.

Recognizing discriminative details such as eyes and beaks is important for distinguishing fine-grained classes since they have similar overall appearances. In this regard, we introduce Task Discrepancy Maximization (TDM), a simple module for fine-grained few-shot classification. Our objective is to localize the class-wise discriminative regions by highlighting channels encoding distinct information of the class. Specifically, TDM learns task-specific channel weights based on two novel components: Support Attention Module (SAM) and Query Attention Module (QAM). SAM produces a support weight to represent channel-wise discriminative power for each class. Still, since the SAM is basically only based on the labeled support sets, it can be vulnerable to bias toward such support set. Therefore, we propose QAM which complements SAM by yielding a query weight that grants more weight to object-relevant channels for a given query image. By combining these two weights, a class-wise task-specific channel weight is defined. The weights are then applied to produce task-adaptive feature maps more focusing on the discriminative details. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of TDM and its complementary benefits with prior methods in fine-grained few-shot classification.

Reference-based super-resolution(RefSR) has achieved impressive progress on the recovery of high-frequency details thanks to an additional reference high-resolution(HR) image input. Although the superiority compared with Single-Image Super-Resolution(SISR), existing RefSR methods easily result in the reference-underuse issue and the reference-misuse as shown in Fig.1. In this work, we deeply investigate the cause of the two issues and further propose a novel framework to mitigate them. Our studies find that the issues are mostly due to the improper coupled framework design of current methods. Those methods conduct the super-resolution task of the input low-resolution(LR) image and the texture transfer task from the reference image together in one module, easily introducing the interference between LR and reference features. Inspired by this finding, we propose a novel framework, which decouples the two tasks of RefSR, eliminating the interference between the LR image and the reference image. The super-resolution task upsamples the LR image leveraging only the LR image itself. The texture transfer task extracts and transfers abundant textures from the reference image to the coarsely upsampled result of the super-resolution task. Extensive experiments demonstrate clear improvements in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations over state-of-the-art methods.

Adapting pre-trained models with broad capabilities has become standard practice for learning a wide range of downstream tasks. The typical approach of fine-tuning different models for each task is performant, but incurs a substantial memory cost. To efficiently learn multiple downstream tasks we introduce Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing (TAPS), a simple method for tuning a base model to a new task by adaptively modifying a small, task-specific subset of layers. This enables multi-task learning while minimizing the resources used and avoids catastrophic forgetting and competition between tasks. TAPS solves a joint optimization problem which determines both the layers that are shared with the base model and the value of the task-specific weights. Further, a sparsity penalty on the number of active layers promotes weight sharing with the base model. Compared to other methods, TAPS retains a high accuracy on the target tasks while still introducing only a small number of task-specific parameters. Moreover, TAPS is agnostic to the particular architecture used and requires only minor changes to the training scheme. We evaluate our method on a suite of fine-tuning tasks and architectures (ResNet, DenseNet, ViT) and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance while being simple to implement.

Real-world data often exhibits long tail distributions with heavy class imbalance, where the majority classes can dominate the training process and alter the decision boundaries of the minority classes. Recently, researchers have investigated the potential of supervised contrastive learning for long-tailed recognition, and demonstrated that it provides a strong performance gain. In this paper, we show that while supervised contrastive learning can help improve performance, past baselines suffer from poor uniformity brought in by imbalanced data distribution. This poor uniformity manifests in samples from the minority class having poor separability in the feature space. To address this problem, we propose targeted supervised contrastive learning (TSC), which improves the uniformity of the feature distribution on the hypersphere. TSC first generates a set of targets uniformly distributed on a hypersphere. It then makes the features of different classes converge to these distinct and uniformly distributed targets during training. This forces all classes, including minority classes, to maintain a uniform distribution in the feature space, improves class boundaries, and provides better generalization even in the presence of long-tail data. Experiments on multiple datasets show that TSC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-tailed recognition tasks.

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) is a promising way to alleviate performance drop of detectors in new scenes. Albeit great effort made in single source domain adaptation, a more generalized task with multiple source domains remains not being well explored, due to knowledge degradation during their combination. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, namely target-relevant knowledge preservation (TRKP), to unsupervised multi-source DAOD. Specifically, TRKP adopts the teacher-student framework, where the multi-head teacher network is built to extract knowledge from labeled source domains and guide the student network to learn detectors in unlabeled target domain. The teacher network is further equipped with an adversarial multi-source disentanglement (AMSD) module to preserve source domain-specific knowledge and simultaneously perform cross-domain alignment. Besides, a holistic target-relevant mining (HTRM) scheme is developed to re-weight the source images according to the source-target relevance. By this means, the teacher network is enforced to capture target-relevant knowledge, thus benefiting decreasing domain shift when mentoring object detection in the target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on various widely used benchmarks with new state-of-the-art scores reported, highlighting the effectiveness.

This study addresses the issue of fusing infrared and visible images that appear differently for object detection. Aiming at generating an image of high visual quality, previous approaches discover commons underlying the two modalities and fuse upon the common space either by iterative optimization or deep networks. These approaches neglect that modality differences implying the complementary information are extremely important for both fusion and subsequent detection task. This paper proposes a bilevel optimization formulation for the joint problem of fusion and detection, and then unrolls to a target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning (TarDAL) network for fusion and a commonly used detection network. The fusion network with one generator and dual discriminators seeks commons while learning from differences, which preserves structural information of targets from the infrared and textural details from the visible. Furthermore, we build a synchronized imaging system with calibrated infrared and optical sensors, and collect currently the most comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of scenarios. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that our method outputs not only visually appealing fusion but also higher detection mAP than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Tables organize valuable content in a concise and compact representation. This content is extremely valuable for systems such as search engines, Knowledge Graph's, etc, since they enhance their predictive capabilities. Unfortunately, tables come in a large variety of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, they can have complex column/row-header configurations, multiline rows, different variety of separation lines, missing entries, etc. As such, the correct identification of the table-structure from an image is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present a new table-structure identification model. The latter improves the latest end-to-end deep learning model (i.e. encoder-dual-decoder from PubTabNet) in two significant ways. First, we introduce a new object detection decoder for table-cells. In this way, we can obtain the content of the table-cells from programmatic PDF's directly from the PDF source and avoid the training of the custom OCR decoders. This architectural change leads to more accurate table-content extraction and allows us to tackle non-english tables. Second, we replace the LSTM decoders with transformer based decoders. This upgrade improves significantly the previous state-of-the-art tree-editing-distance-score (TEDS) from 91% to 98.5% on simple tables and from 88.7% to 95% on complex tables.

We explore the way to alleviate the label-hungry problem in a semi-supervised setting for 3D instance segmentation. To leverage the unlabeled data to boost model performance, we present a novel Two-Way Inter-label Self-Training framework named TWIST. It exploits inherent correlations between semantic understanding and instance information of a scene. Specifically, we consider two kinds of pseudo labels for semantic- and instance-level supervision. Our key design is to provide object-level information for denoising pseudo labels and make use of their correlation for two-way mutual enhancement, thereby iteratively promoting the pseudo-label qualities. TWIST attains leading performance on both ScanNet and S3DIS, compared to recent 3D pre-training approaches, and can cooperate with them to further enhance performance, e.g., +4.4% AP50 on 1%-label ScanNet data-efficient benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/TWIST.

As convolution has empowered many smart applications, dynamic convolution further equips it with the ability to adapt to diverse inputs. However, the static and dynamic convolutions are either layout-agnostic or computation-heavy, making it inappropriate for layout-specific applications, e.g., face recognition and medical image segmentation. We observe that these applications naturally exhibit the characteristics of large intra-image (spatial) variance and small cross-image variance. This observation motivates our efficient translation variant convolution (TVConv) for layout-aware visual processing. Technically, TVConv is composed of affinity maps and a weight-generating block. While affinity maps depict pixel-paired relationships gracefully, the weight-generating block can be explicitly overparameterized for better training while maintaining efficient inference. Although conceptually simple, TVConv significantly improves the efficiency of the convolution and can be readily plugged into various network architectures. Extensive experiments on face recognition show that TVConv reduces the computational cost by up to 3.1x and improves the corresponding throughput by 2.3x while maintaining a high accuracy compared to the depthwise convolution. Moreover, for the same computation cost, we boost the mean accuracy by up to 4.21%. We also conduct experiments on the optic disc/cup segmentation task and obtain better generalization performance, which helps mitigate the critical data scarcity issue. Code is available at https://github.com/JierunChen/TVConv.

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) construct invertible mappings between an arbitrary complex distribution and an isotropic Gaussian distribution using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (neural ODEs). It has not been tractable on large datasets due to the incremental complexity of the neural ODE training. Optimal Transport theory has been applied to regularize the dynamics of the ODE to speed up training in recent works. In this paper, a temporal optimization is proposed by optimizing the evolutionary time for forward propagation of the neural ODE training. In this appoach, we optimize the network weights of the CNF alternately with evolutionary time by coordinate descent. Further with temporal regularization, stability of the evolution is ensured. This approach can be used in conjunction with the original regularization approach. We have experimentally demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly accelerate training without sacrifying performance over baseline models.

Temporal contexts among consecutive frames are far from being fully utilized in existing visual trackers. In this work, we present TCTrack, a comprehensive framework to fully exploit temporal contexts for aerial tracking. The temporal contexts are incorporated at two levels: the extraction of features and the refinement of similarity maps. Specifically, for feature extraction, an online temporally adaptive convolution is proposed to enhance the spatial features using temporal information, which is achieved by dynamically calibrating the convolution weights according to the previous frames. For similarity map refinement, we propose an adaptive temporal transformer, which first effectively encodes temporal knowledge in a memory-efficient way, before the temporal knowledge is decoded for accurate adjustment of the similarity map. TCTrack is effective and efficient: evaluation on four aerial tracking benchmarks shows its impressive performance; real-world UAV tests show its high speed of over 27 FPS on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier.

Accelerated by telemedicine, advances in Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) are beginning to offer a viable path toward non-contact physiological measurement. Unfortunately, the datasets for rPPG are limited as they require videos of the human face paired with ground-truth, synchronized heart rate data from a medical-grade health monitor. Also troubling is that the datasets are not inclusive of diverse populations, i.e., current real rPPG facial video datasets are imbalanced in terms of races or skin tones, leading to accuracy disparities on different demographic groups. This paper proposes a scalable biophysical learning based method to generate physio-realistic synthetic rPPG videos given any reference image and target rPPG signal and shows that it could further improve the state-of-the-art physiological measurement and reduce the bias among different groups. We also collect the largest rPPG dataset of its kind (UCLA-rPPG) with a diverse presence of subject skin tones, in the hope that this could serve as a benchmark dataset for different skin tones in this area and ensure that advances of the technique can benefit all people for healthcare equity. The dataset is available at https://visual.ee.ucla.edu/rppg_avatars.htm/.

The Event-based Synthetic Aperture Imaging (E-SAI) has recently been proposed to see through extremely dense occlusions. However, the performance of E-SAI is not consistent under sparse occlusions due to the dramatic decrease of signal events. This paper addresses this problem by leveraging the merits of both events and frames, leading to a fusion-based SAI (EF-SAI) that performs consistently under the different densities of occlusions. In particular, we first extract the feature from events and frames via multi-modal feature encoders and then apply a multi-stage fusion network for cross-modal enhancement and density-aware feature selection. Finally, a CNN decoder is employed to generate occlusion-free visual images from selected features. Extensive experiments show that our method effectively tackles varying densities of occlusions and achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art SAI methods. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/smjsc/EF-SAI

Handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) is a challenging task that has many potential applications. Recent methods for HMER have achieved outstanding performance with an encoder-decoder architecture. However, these methods adhere to the paradigm that the prediction is made "from one character to another", which inevitably yields prediction errors due to the complicated structures of mathematical expressions or crabbed handwritings. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient method for HMER, which is the first to incorporate syntax information into an encoder-decoder network. Specifically, we present a set of grammar rules for converting the LaTeX markup sequence of each expression into a parsing tree; then, we model the markup sequence prediction as a tree traverse process with a deep neural network. In this way, the proposed method can effectively describe the syntax context of expressions, alleviating the structure prediction errors of HMER. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better recognition performance than prior arts. To further validate the effectiveness of our method, we create a large-scale dataset consisting of 100k handwritten mathematical expression images acquired from ten thousand writers. The source code, new dataset, and pre-trained models of this work will be publicly available.

Visual exploration is a task that seeks to visit all the navigable areas of an environment as quickly as possible. The existing methods employ deep reinforcement learning (RL) as the standard tool for the task. However, they tend to be vulnerable to statistical shifts between the training and test data, resulting in poor generalization over novel environments that are out-of-distribution (OOD) from the training data. In this paper, we attempt to improve the generalization ability by utilizing the inductive biases available for the task. Employing the active neural SLAM (ANS) that learns exploration policies with the advantage actor-critic (A2C) method as the base framework, we first point out that the mappings represented by the actor and the critic should satisfy specific symmetries. We then propose a network design for the actor and the critic to inherently attain these symmetries. Specifically, we use G-convolution instead of the standard convolution and insert the semi-global polar pooling (SGPP) layer, which we newly design in this study, in the last section of the critic network. Experimental results show that our method increases area coverage by 8.1 square meters when trained on the Gibson dataset and tested on the Matterport3D dataset, establishing the new state-of-the-art.

We propose a keypoint-based object-level SLAM framework that can provide globally consistent 6DoF pose estimates for symmetric and asymmetric objects alike. To the best of our knowledge, our system is among the first to utilize the camera pose information from SLAM to provide prior knowledge for tracking keypoints on symmetric objects - ensuring that new measurements are consistent with the current 3D scene. Moreover, our semantic keypoint network is trained to predict the Gaussian covariance for the keypoints that captures the true error of the prediction, and thus is not only useful as a weight for the residuals in the system's optimization problems, but also as a means to detect harmful statistical outliers without choosing a manual threshold. Experiments show that our method provides competitive performance to the state of the art in 6DoF object pose estimation, and at a real-time speed. Our code, pre-trained models, and keypoint labels are available https://github.com/rpng/suo_slam.

We study the challenging incremental few-shot object detection (iFSD) setting. Recently, hypernetwork-based approaches have been studied in the context of continuous and finetune-free iFSD with limited success. We take a closer look at important design choices of such methods, leading to several key improvements and resulting in a more accurate and flexible framework, which we call Sylph. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of decoupling object classification from localization by leveraging a base detector that is pretrained for class-agnostic localization on large-scale dataset. Contrary to what previous results have suggested, we show that with a carefully designed class-conditional hypernetwork, finetune-free iFSD can be highly effective, especially when a large number of base categories with abundant data are available for meta-training, almost approaching alternatives that undergo test-time-training. This result is even more significant considering its many practical advantages: (1) incrementally learning new classes in sequence without additional training, (2) detecting both novel and seen classes in a single pass, and (3) no forgetting of previously seen classes. We benchmark our model on both COCO and LVIS, reporting as high as 17% AP on the long-tail rare classes on LVIS, indicating the promise of hypernetwork-based iFSD.