CVPR 2023 Papers

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a model trained on source data (e.g. synthetic) is adapted to target data (e.g. real-world) without access to target annotation. Most previous UDA methods struggle with classes that have a similar visual appearance on the target domain as no ground truth is available to learn the slight appearance differences. To address this problem, we propose a Masked Image Consistency (MIC) module to enhance UDA by learning spatial context relations of the target domain as additional clues for robust visual recognition. MIC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked target images, where random patches are withheld, and pseudo-labels that are generated based on the complete image by an exponential moving average teacher. To minimize the consistency loss, the network has to learn to infer the predictions of the masked regions from their context. Due to its simple and universal concept, MIC can be integrated into various UDA methods across different visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. MIC significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance across the different recognition tasks for synthetic-to-real, day-to-nighttime, and clear-to-adverse-weather UDA. For instance, MIC achieves an unprecedented UDA performance of 75.9 mIoU and 92.8% on GTA-to-Cityscapes and VisDA-2017, respectively, which corresponds to an improvement of +2.1 and +3.0 percent points over the previous state of the art. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/MIC.

In clinical scenarios, multi-specialist consultation could significantly benefit the diagnosis, especially for intricate cases. This inspires us to explore a "multi-expert joint diagnosis" mechanism to upgrade the existing "single expert" framework commonly seen in the current literature. To this end, we propose METransformer, a method to realize this idea with a transformer-based backbone. The key design of our method is the introduction of multiple learnable "expert" tokens into both the transformer encoder and decoder. In the encoder, each expert token interacts with both vision tokens and other expert tokens to learn to attend different image regions for image representation. These expert tokens are encouraged to capture complementary information by an orthogonal loss that minimizes their overlap. In the decoder, each attended expert token guides the cross-attention between input words and visual tokens, thus influencing the generated report. A metrics-based expert voting strategy is further developed to generate the final report. By the multi-experts concept, our model enjoys the merits of an ensemble-based approach but through a manner that is computationally more efficient and supports more sophisticated interactions among experts. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed model on two widely used benchmarks. Last but not least, the framework-level innovation makes our work ready to incorporate advances on existing "single-expert" models to further improve its performance.

Semi-supervised learning is a promising method for medical image segmentation under limited annotation. However, the model cognitive bias impairs the segmentation performance, especially for edge regions. Furthermore, current mainstream semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS) methods lack designs to handle model bias. The neural network has a strong learning ability, but the cognitive bias will gradually deepen during the training, and it is difficult to correct itself. We propose a novel mutual correction framework (MCF) to explore network bias correction and improve the performance of SSMIS. Inspired by the plain contrast idea, MCF introduces two different subnets to explore and utilize the discrepancies between subnets to correct cognitive bias of the model. More concretely, a contrastive difference review (CDR) module is proposed to find out inconsistent prediction regions and perform a review training. Additionally, a dynamic competitive pseudo-label generation (DCPLG) module is proposed to evaluate the performance of subnets in real-time, dynamically selecting more reliable pseudo-labels. Experimental results on two medical image databases with different modalities (CT and MRI) show that our method achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/WYC-321/MCF.

Generative modeling and representation learning are two key tasks in computer vision. However, these models are typically trained independently, which ignores the potential for each task to help the other, and leads to training and model maintenance overheads. In this work, we propose MAsked Generative Encoder (MAGE), the first framework to unify SOTA image generation and self-supervised representation learning. Our key insight is that using variable masking ratios in masked image modeling pre-training can allow generative training (very high masking ratio) and representation learning (lower masking ratio) under the same training framework. Inspired by previous generative models, MAGE uses semantic tokens learned by a vector-quantized GAN at inputs and outputs, combining this with masking. We can further improve the representation by adding a contrastive loss to the encoder output. We extensively evaluate the generation and representation learning capabilities of MAGE. On ImageNet-1K, a single MAGE ViT-L model obtains 9.10 FID in the task of class-unconditional image generation and 78.9% top-1 accuracy for linear probing, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both image generation and representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/LTH14/mage.

Flow-based methods have demonstrated promising results in addressing the ill-posed nature of super-resolution (SR) by learning the distribution of high-resolution (HR) images with the normalizing flow. However, these methods can only perform a predefined fixed-scale SR, limiting their potential in real-world applications. Meanwhile, arbitrary-scale SR has gained more attention and achieved great progress. Nonetheless, previous arbitrary-scale SR methods ignore the ill-posed problem and train the model with per-pixel L1 loss, leading to blurry SR outputs. In this work, we propose "Local Implicit Normalizing Flow" (LINF) as a unified solution to the above problems. LINF models the distribution of texture details under different scaling factors with normalizing flow. Thus, LINF can generate photo-realistic HR images with rich texture details in arbitrary scale factors. We evaluate LINF with extensive experiments and show that LINF achieves the state-of-the-art perceptual quality compared with prior arbitrary-scale SR methods.

Generating a talking face video from the input audio sequence is a practical yet challenging task. Most existing methods either fail to capture fine facial details or need to train a specific model for each identity. We argue that a codebook pre-learned on high-quality face images can serve as a useful prior that facilitates high-fidelity and generalizable talking head synthesis. Thanks to the strong capability of the codebook in representing face textures, we simplify the talking face generation task as finding proper lip-codes to characterize the variation of lips during a portrait talking. To this end, we propose LipFormer, a transformer-based framework, to model the audio-visual coherence and predict the lip-codes sequence based on the input audio features. We further introduce an adaptive face warping module, which helps warp the reference face to the target pose in the feature space, to alleviate the difficulty of lip-code prediction under different poses. By this means, LipFormer can make better use of the pre-learned priors in images and is robust to posture change. Extensive experiments show that LipFormer can produce more realistic talking face videos compared to previous methods and faithfully generalize to unseen identities.

Artificial light sources are often powered by an electric grid, and then their intensities rapidly oscillate in response to the grid's alternating current (AC). Interestingly, the flickers of scene radiance values due to AC illumination are useful for extracting rich information on a scene of interest. In this paper, we show that the flickers due to AC illumination is useful for intrinsic image decomposition (IID). Our proposed method conducts the light source separation (LSS) followed by the IID under AC illumination. In particular, we reveal the ambiguity in the blind LSS via matrix factorization and the ambiguity in the IID assuming the Lambert model, and then show why and how those ambiguities can be resolved. We experimentally confirmed that our method can recover the colors of the light sources, the diffuse reflectance values, and the diffuse and specular intensities (shadings) under each of the light sources, and that the IID under AC illumination is effective for application to auto white balancing.

Most existing vision-language pre-training (VLP) approaches adopt cross-modal masked language modeling (CMLM) to learn vision-language associations. However, we find that CMLM is insufficient for this purpose according to our observations: (1) Modality bias: a considerable amount of masked tokens in CMLM can be recovered with only the language information, ignoring the visual inputs. (2) Under-utilization of the unmasked tokens: CMLM primarily focuses on the masked token but it cannot simultaneously leverage other tokens to learn vision-language associations. To handle those limitations, we propose EPIC (lEveraging Per Image-Token Consistency for vision-language pre-training). In EPIC, for each image-sentence pair, we mask tokens that are salient to the image (i.e., Saliency-based Masking Strategy) and replace them with alternatives sampled from a language model (i.e., Inconsistent Token Generation Procedure), and then the model is required to determine for each token in the sentence whether it is consistent with the image (i.e., Image-Token Consistency Task). The proposed EPIC method is easily combined with pre-training methods. Extensive experiments show that the combination of the EPIC method and state-of-the-art pre-training approaches, including ViLT, ALBEF, METER, and X-VLM, leads to significant improvements on downstream tasks. Our coude is released at https://github.com/gyhdog99/epic

Transformers-based methods have achieved significant performance in image deraining as they can model the non-local information which is vital for high-quality image reconstruction. In this paper, we find that most existing Transformers usually use all similarities of the tokens from the query-key pairs for the feature aggregation. However, if the tokens from the query are different from those of the key, the self-attention values estimated from these tokens also involve in feature aggregation, which accordingly interferes with the clear image restoration. To overcome this problem, we propose an effective DeRaining network, Sparse Transformer (DRSformer) that can adaptively keep the most useful self-attention values for feature aggregation so that the aggregated features better facilitate high-quality image reconstruction. Specifically, we develop a learnable top-k selection operator to adaptively retain the most crucial attention scores from the keys for each query for better feature aggregation. Simultaneously, as the naive feed-forward network in Transformers does not model the multi-scale information that is important for latent clear image restoration, we develop an effective mixed-scale feed-forward network to generate better features for image deraining. To learn an enriched set of hybrid features, which combines local context from CNN operators, we equip our model with mixture of experts feature compensator to present a cooperation refinement deraining scheme. Extensive experimental results on the commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/DRSformer.

Low-light Image Enhancement (LIE) aims at improving contrast and restoring details for images captured in low-light conditions. Most of the previous LIE algorithms adjust illumination using a single input image with several handcrafted priors. Those solutions, however, often fail in revealing image details due to the limited information in a single image and the poor adaptability of handcrafted priors. To this end, we propose PairLIE, an unsupervised approach that learns adaptive priors from low-light image pairs. First, the network is expected to generate the same clean images as the two inputs share the same image content. To achieve this, we impose the network with the Retinex theory and make the two reflectance components consistent. Second, to assist the Retinex decomposition, we propose to remove inappropriate features in the raw image with a simple self-supervised mechanism. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that the proposed PairLIE achieves comparable performance against the state-of-the-art approaches with a simpler network and fewer handcrafted priors. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhenqifu/PairLIE.

Image restoration under multiple adverse weather conditions aims to remove weather-related artifacts by using the single set of network parameters. In this paper, we find that distorted images under different weather conditions contain general characteristics as well as their specific characteristics. Inspired by this observation, we design an efficient unified framework with a two-stage training strategy to explore the weather-general and weather-specific features. The first training stage aims to learn the weather-general features by taking the images under various weather conditions as the inputs and outputting the coarsely restored results. The second training stage aims to learn to adaptively expand the specific parameters for each weather type in the deep model, where requisite positions for expansion of weather-specific parameters are learned automatically. Hence, we can obtain an efficient and unified model for image restoration under multiple adverse weather conditions. Moreover, we build the first real-world benchmark dataset with multiple weather conditions to better deal with real-world weather scenarios. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior performance on all the synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets.

We introduce a method that can learn to predict scene-level implicit functions for 3D reconstruction from posed RGBD data. At test time, our system maps a previously unseen RGB image to a 3D reconstruction of a scene via implicit functions. While implicit functions for 3D reconstruction have often been tied to meshes, we show that we can train one using only a set of posed RGBD images. This setting may help 3D reconstruction unlock the sea of accelerometer+RGBD data that is coming with new phones. Our system, D2-DRDF, can match and sometimes outperform current methods that use mesh supervision and shows better robustness to sparse data.

We tackle open-world semantic segmentation, which aims at learning to segment arbitrary visual concepts in images, by using only image-text pairs without dense annotations. Existing open-world segmentation methods have shown impressive advances by employing contrastive learning (CL) to learn diverse visual concepts and transferring the learned image-level understanding to the segmentation task. However, these CL-based methods suffer from a train-test discrepancy, since it only considers image-text alignment during training, whereas segmentation requires region-text alignment during testing. In this paper, we proposed a novel Text-grounded Contrastive Learning (TCL) framework that enables a model to directly learn region-text alignment. Our method generates a segmentation mask for a given text, extracts text-grounded image embedding from the masked region, and aligns it with text embedding via TCL. By learning region-text alignment directly, our framework encourages a model to directly improve the quality of generated segmentation masks. In addition, for a rigorous and fair comparison, we present a unified evaluation protocol with widely used 8 semantic segmentation datasets. TCL achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot segmentation performances with large margins in all datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/tcl.

Small on-device models have been successfully trained with user-level differential privacy (DP) for next word prediction and image classification tasks in the past. However, existing methods can fail when directly applied to learn embedding models using supervised training data with a large class space. To achieve user-level DP for large image-to-embedding feature extractors, we propose DP-FedEmb, a variant of federated learning algorithms with per-user sensitivity control and noise addition, to train from user-partitioned data centralized in datacenter. DP-FedEmb combines virtual clients, partial aggregation, private local fine-tuning, and public pretraining to achieve strong privacy utility trade-offs. We apply DP-FedEmb to train image embedding models for faces, landmarks and natural species, and demonstrate its superior utility under same privacy budget on benchmark datasets DigiFace, GLD and iNaturalist. We further illustrate it is possible to achieve strong user-level DP guarantees of epsilon < 2 while controlling the utility drop within 5%, when millions of users can participate in training.

The hardware image signal processing (ISP) pipeline is the intermediate layer between the imaging sensor and the downstream application, processing the sensor signal into an RGB image. The ISP is less programmable and consists of a series of processing modules. Each processing module handles a subtask and contains a set of tunable hyperparameters. A large number of hyperparameters form a complex mapping with the ISP output. The industry typically relies on manual and time-consuming hyperparameter tuning by image experts, biased towards human perception. Recently, several automatic ISP hyperparameter optimization methods using downstream evaluation metrics come into sight. However, existing methods for ISP tuning treat the high-dimensional parameter space as a global space for optimization and prediction all at once without inducing the structure knowledge of ISP. To this end, we propose a sequential ISP hyperparameter prediction framework that utilizes the sequential relationship within ISP modules and the similarity among parameters to guide the model sequence process. We validate the proposed method on object detection, image segmentation, and image quality tasks.

Image resampling is a basic technique that is widely employed in daily applications. Existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have made impressive progress in resampling performance. Yet these methods are still not the perfect substitute for interpolation, due to the issues of efficiency and continuous resampling. In this work, we propose a novel method of Learning Resampling Function (termed LeRF), which takes advantage of both the structural priors learned by DNNs and the locally continuous assumption of interpolation methods. Specifically, LeRF assigns spatially-varying steerable resampling functions to input image pixels and learns to predict the hyper-parameters that determine the orientations of these resampling functions with a neural network. To achieve highly efficient inference, we adopt look-up tables (LUTs) to accelerate the inference of the learned neural network. Furthermore, we design a directional ensemble strategy and edge-sensitive indexing patterns to better capture local structures. Extensive experiments show that our method runs as fast as interpolation, generalizes well to arbitrary transformations, and outperforms interpolation significantly, e.g., up to 3dB PSNR gain over bicubic for x2 upsampling on Manga109.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) investigates how to improve illumination and produce normal-light images. The majority of existing methods improve low-light images via a global and uniform manner, without taking into account the semantic information of different regions. Without semantic priors, a network may easily deviate from a region's original color. To address this issue, we propose a novel semantic-aware knowledge-guided framework (SKF) that can assist a low-light enhancement model in learning rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a semantic segmentation model. We concentrate on incorporating semantic knowledge from three key aspects: a semantic-aware embedding module that wisely integrates semantic priors in feature representation space, a semantic-guided color histogram loss that preserves color consistency of various instances, and a semantic-guided adversarial loss that produces more natural textures by semantic priors. Our SKF is appealing in acting as a general framework in LLIE task. Extensive experiments show that models equipped with the SKF significantly outperform the baselines on multiple datasets and our SKF generalizes to different models and scenes well. The code is available at Semantic-Aware-Low-Light-Image-Enhancement.

Image-text matching, a bridge connecting image and language, is an important task, which generally learns a holistic cross-modal embedding to achieve a high-quality semantic alignment between the two modalities. However, previous studies only focus on capturing fragment-level relation within a sample from a particular modality, e.g., salient regions in an image or text words in a sentence, where they usually pay less attention to capturing instance-level interactions among samples and modalities, e.g., multiple images and texts. In this paper, we argue that sample relations could help learn subtle differences for hard negative instances, and thus transfer shared knowledge for infrequent samples should be promising in obtaining better holistic embeddings. Therefore, we propose a novel hierarchical relation modeling framework (HREM), which explicitly capture both fragment- and instance-level relations to learn discriminative and robust cross-modal embeddings. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO show our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art ones by 4%-10% in terms of rSum.