CVPR 2023 Papers

LiDAR-based 3D point cloud recognition has benefited various applications. Without specially considering the LiDAR point distribution, most current methods suffer from information disconnection and limited receptive field, especially for the sparse distant points. In this work, we study the varying-sparsity distribution of LiDAR points and present SphereFormer to directly aggregate information from dense close points to the sparse distant ones. We design radial window self-attention that partitions the space into multiple non-overlapping narrow and long windows. It overcomes the disconnection issue and enlarges the receptive field smoothly and dramatically, which significantly boosts the performance of sparse distant points. Moreover, to fit the narrow and long windows, we propose exponential splitting to yield fine-grained position encoding and dynamic feature selection to increase model representation ability. Notably, our method ranks 1st on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation benchmarks with 81.9% and 74.8% mIoU, respectively. Also, we achieve the 3rd place on nuScenes object detection benchmark with 72.8% NDS and 68.5% mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SphereFormer.git.

In recent years, neural distance functions trained via volumetric ray marching have been widely adopted for multi-view 3D reconstruction. These methods, however, apply the ray marching procedure for the entire scene volume, leading to reduced sampling efficiency and, as a result, lower reconstruction quality in the areas of high-frequency details. In this work, we address this problem via joint training of the implicit function and our new coarse sphere-based surface reconstruction. We use the coarse representation to efficiently exclude the empty volume of the scene from the volumetric ray marching procedure without additional forward passes of the neural surface network, which leads to an increased fidelity of the reconstructions compared to the base systems. We evaluate our approach by incorporating it into the training procedures of several implicit surface modeling methods and observe uniform improvements across both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our codebase can be accessed via the project page.

Denoising is a crucial step for hyperspectral image (HSI) applications. Though witnessing the great power of deep learning, existing HSI denoising methods suffer from limitations in capturing the non-local self-similarity. Transformers have shown potential in capturing long-range dependencies, but few attempts have been made with specifically designed Transformer to model the spatial and spectral correlation in HSIs. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a spectral enhanced rectangle Transformer, driving it to explore the non-local spatial similarity and global spectral low-rank property of HSIs. For the former, we exploit the rectangle self-attention horizontally and vertically to capture the non-local similarity in the spatial domain. For the latter, we design a spectral enhancement module that is capable of extracting global underlying low-rank property of spatial-spectral cubes to suppress noise, while enabling the interactions among non-overlapping spatial rectangles. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both synthetic noisy HSIs and real noisy HSIs, showing the effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of both objective metric and subjective visual quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MyuLi/SERT.

Recently deep learning techniques have significantly advanced image super-resolution (SR). Due to the black-box nature, quantifying reconstruction uncertainty is crucial when employing these deep SR networks. Previous approaches for SR uncertainty estimation mostly focus on capturing pixel-wise uncertainty in the spatial domain. SR uncertainty in the frequency domain which is highly related to image SR is seldom explored. In this paper, we propose to quantify spectral Bayesian uncertainty in image SR. To achieve this, a Dual-Domain Learning (DDL) framework is first proposed. Combined with Bayesian approaches, the DDL model is able to estimate spectral uncertainty accurately, enabling a reliability assessment for high frequencies reasoning from the frequency domain perspective. Extensive experiments under non-ideal premises are conducted and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed spectral uncertainty. Furthermore, we propose a novel Spectral Uncertainty based Decoupled Frequency (SUDF) training scheme for perceptual SR. Experimental results show the proposed SUDF can evidently boost perceptual quality of SR results without sacrificing much pixel accuracy.

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capability of text-conditioned image synthesis, and broader application horizons are emerging by personalizing those pretrained diffusion models toward generating some specialized target object or style. In this paper, we aim to learn an unseen style by simply fine-tuning a pre-trained diffusion model with a handful of images (e.g., less than 10), so that the fine-tuned model can generate high-quality images of arbitrary objects in this style. Such extremely lowshot fine-tuning is accomplished by a novel toolkit of finetuning techniques, including text-to-image customized data augmentations, a content loss to facilitate content-style disentanglement, and sparse updating that focuses on only a few time steps. Our framework, dubbed Specialist Diffusion, is plug-and-play to existing diffusion model backbones and other personalization techniques. We demonstrate it to outperform the latest few-shot personalization alternatives of diffusion models such as Textual Inversion and DreamBooth, in terms of learning highly sophisticated styles with ultra-sample-efficient tuning. We further show that Specialist Diffusion can be integrated on top of textual inversion to boost performance further, even on highly unusual styles. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Specialist-Diffusion

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has the potential to benefit many applications, particularly those where manually annotating data is cumbersome. One such situation is the semantic segmentation of point clouds. In this context, existing methods employ contrastive learning strategies and define positive pairs by performing various augmentation of point clusters in a single frame. As such, these methods do not exploit the temporal nature of LiDAR data. In this paper, we introduce an SSL strategy that leverages positive pairs in both the spatial and temporal domains. To this end, we design (i) a point-to-cluster learning strategy that aggregates spatial information to distinguish objects; and (ii) a cluster-to-cluster learning strategy based on unsupervised object tracking that exploits temporal correspondences. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach via extensive experiments performed by self-supervised training on two large-scale LiDAR datasets and transferring the resulting models to other point cloud segmentation benchmarks. Our results evidence that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud SSL methods.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of semantic segmentation transfers labeled source knowledge to an unlabeled target domain by relying on accessing both the source and target data. However, the access to source data is often restricted or infeasible in real-world scenarios. Under the source data restrictive circumstances, UDA is less practical. To address this, recent works have explored solutions under the Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) setup, which aims to adapt a source-trained model to the target domain without accessing source data. Still, existing SFDA approaches use only image-level information for adaptation, making them sub-optimal in video applications. This paper studies SFDA for Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS), where temporal information is leveraged to address video adaptation. Specifically, we propose Spatio-Temporal Pixel-Level (STPL) contrastive learning, a novel method that takes full advantage of spatio-temporal information to tackle the absence of source data better. STPL explicitly learns semantic correlations among pixels in the spatio-temporal space, providing strong self-supervision for adaptation to the unlabeled target domain. Extensive experiments show that STPL achieves state-of-the-art performance on VSS benchmarks compared to current UDA and SFDA approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/shaoyuanlo/STPL

Dual-pixel photography is monocular RGB-D photography with an ultra-high resolution, enabling many applications in computational photography. However, there are still several challenges to fully utilizing dual-pixel photography. Unlike the conventional stereo pair, the dual pixel exhibits a bidirectional disparity that includes positive and negative values, depending on the focus plane depth in an image. Furthermore, capturing a wide range of dual-pixel disparity requires a shallow depth of field, resulting in a severely blurred image, degrading depth estimation performance. Recently, several data-driven approaches have been proposed to mitigate these two challenges. However, due to the lack of the ground-truth dataset of the dual-pixel disparity, existing data-driven methods estimate either inverse depth or blurriness map. In this work, we propose a self-supervised learning method that learns bidirectional disparity by utilizing the nature of anisotropic blur kernels in dual-pixel photography. We observe that the dual-pixel left/right images have reflective-symmetric anisotropic kernels, so their sum is equivalent to that of a conventional image. We take a self-supervised training approach with the novel kernel-split symmetry loss accounting for the phenomenon. Our method does not rely on a training dataset of dual-pixel disparity that does not exist yet. Our method can estimate a complete disparity map with respect to the focus-plane depth from a dual-pixel image, outperforming the baseline dual-pixel methods.

Significant progress has been made in self-supervised image denoising (SSID) in the recent few years. However, most methods focus on dealing with spatially independent noise, and they have little practicality on real-world sRGB images with spatially correlated noise. Although pixel-shuffle downsampling has been suggested for breaking the noise correlation, it breaks the original information of images, which limits the denoising performance. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective to solve this problem, i.e., seeking for spatially adaptive supervision for real-world sRGB image denoising. Specifically, we take into account the respective characteristics of flat and textured regions in noisy images, and construct supervisions for them separately. For flat areas, the supervision can be safely derived from non-adjacent pixels, which are much far from the current pixel for excluding the influence of the noise-correlated ones. And we extend the blind-spot network to a blind-neighborhood network (BNN) for providing supervision on flat areas. For textured regions, the supervision has to be closely related to the content of adjacent pixels. And we present a locally aware network (LAN) to meet the requirement, while LAN itself is selectively supervised with the output of BNN. Combining these two supervisions, a denoising network (e.g., U-Net) can be well-trained. Extensive experiments show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art SSID methods on real-world sRGB photographs. The code is available at https://github.com/nagejacob/SpatiallyAdaptiveSSID.

In low-level video analyses, effective representations are important to derive the correspondences between video frames. These representations have been learned in a self-supervised fashion from unlabeled images/videos, using carefully designed pretext tasks in some recent studies. However, the previous work concentrates on either spatial-discriminative features or temporal-repetitive features, with little attention to the synergy between spatial and temporal cues. To address this issue, we propose a novel spatial-then-temporal self-supervised learning method. Specifically, we firstly extract spatial features from unlabeled images via contrastive learning, and secondly enhance the features by exploiting the temporal cues in unlabeled videos via reconstructive learning. In the second step, we design a global correlation distillation loss to ensure the learning not to forget the spatial cues, and we design a local correlation distillation loss to combat the temporal discontinuity that harms the reconstruction. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods, as established by the experimental results on a series of correspondence-based video analysis tasks. Also, we performed ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of the two-step design as well as the distillation losses.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performance on various tasks. Despite its widespread adoption, the decision procedure of the network still lacks transparency and interpretability, making it difficult to enhance the performance further. Hence, there has been considerable interest in providing explanation and interpretability for CNNs over the last few years. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) investigates the relationship between input images or videos and output predictions. Recent studies have achieved outstanding success in explaining 2D image classification ConvNets. On the other hand, due to the high computation cost and complexity of video data, the explanation of 3D video recognition ConvNets is relatively less studied. And none of them are able to produce a high-level explanation. In this paper, we propose a STCE (Spatial-temporal Concept-based Explanation) framework for interpreting 3D ConvNets. In our approach: (1) videos are represented with high-level supervoxels, similar supervoxels are clustered as a concept, which is straightforward for human to understand; and (2) the interpreting framework calculates a score for each concept, which reflects its significance in the ConvNet decision procedure. Experiments on diverse 3D ConvNets demonstrate that our method can identify global concepts with different importance levels, allowing us to investigate the impact of the concepts on a target task, such as action recognition, in-depth. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yingji425/STCE.

Face super-resolution (FSR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) face images from the low-resolution (LR) ones. With the advent of deep learning, the FSR technique has achieved significant breakthroughs. However, existing FSR methods either have a fixed receptive field or fail to maintain facial structure, limiting the FSR performance. To circumvent this problem, Fourier transform is introduced, which can capture global facial structure information and achieve image-size receptive field. Relying on the Fourier transform, we devise a spatial-frequency mutual network (SFMNet) for FSR, which is the first FSR method to explore the correlations between spatial and frequency domains as far as we know. To be specific, our SFMNet is a two-branch network equipped with a spatial branch and a frequency branch. Benefiting from the property of Fourier transform, the frequency branch can achieve image-size receptive field and capture global dependency while the spatial branch can extract local dependency. Considering that these dependencies are complementary and both favorable for FSR, we further develop a frequency-spatial interaction block (FSIB) which mutually amalgamates the complementary spatial and frequency information to enhance the capability of the model. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art FSR methods in recovering face images. The implementation and model will be released at https://github.com/wcy-cs/SFMNet.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown competitive advantages in terms of performance compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different attention patterns by limiting a fixed number of spatially nearby tokens to accelerate the ViT's multi-head self-attention (MHSA) operations. However, such structured attention patterns limit the token-to-token connections to their spatial relevance, which disregards learned semantic connections from a full attention mask. In this work, we propose an approach to learn instance-dependent attention patterns, by devising a lightweight connectivity predictor module that estimates the connectivity score of each pair of tokens. Intuitively, two tokens have high connectivity scores if the features are considered relevant either spatially or semantically. As each token only attends to a small number of other tokens, the binarized connectivity masks are often very sparse by nature and therefore provide the opportunity to reduce network FLOPs via sparse computations. Equipped with the learned unstructured attention pattern, sparse attention ViT (Sparsifiner) produces a superior Pareto frontier between FLOPs and top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared to token sparsity. Our method reduces 48% 69% FLOPs of MHSA while the accuracy drop is within 0.4%. We also show that combining attention and token sparsity reduces ViT FLOPs by over 60%.

Sparsely annotated semantic segmentation (SASS) aims to learn a segmentation model by images with sparse labels (i.e., points or scribbles). Existing methods mainly focus on introducing low-level affinity or generating pseudo labels to strengthen supervision, while largely ignoring the inherent relation between labeled and unlabeled pixels. In this paper, we observe that pixels that are close to each other in the feature space are more likely to share the same class. Inspired by this, we propose a novel SASS framework, which is equipped with an Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model (AGMM). Our AGMM can effectively endow reliable supervision for unlabeled pixels based on the distributions of labeled and unlabeled pixels. Specifically, we first build Gaussian mixtures using labeled pixels and their relatively similar unlabeled pixels, where the labeled pixels act as centroids, for modeling the feature distribution of each class. Then, we leverage the reliable information from labeled pixels and adaptively generated GMM predictions to supervise the training of unlabeled pixels, achieving online, dynamic, and robust self-supervision. In addition, by capturing category-wise Gaussian mixtures, AGMM encourages the model to learn discriminative class decision boundaries in an end-to-end contrastive learning manner. Experimental results conducted on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our AGMM can establish new state-of-the-art SASS performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Luffy03/AGMM-SASS.

High-resolution images enable neural networks to learn richer visual representations. However, this improved performance comes at the cost of growing computational complexity, hindering their usage in latency-sensitive applications. As not all pixels are equal, skipping computations for less-important regions offers a simple and effective measure to reduce the computation. This, however, is hard to be translated into actual speedup for CNNs since it breaks the regularity of the dense convolution workload. In this paper, we introduce SparseViT that revisits activation sparsity for recent window-based vision transformers (ViTs). As window attentions are naturally batched over blocks, actual speedup with window activation pruning becomes possible: i.e., 50% latency reduction with 60% sparsity. Different layers should be assigned with different pruning ratios due to their diverse sensitivities and computational costs. We introduce sparsity-aware adaptation and apply the evolutionary search to efficiently find the optimal layerwise sparsity configuration within the vast search space. SparseViT achieves speedups of 1.5x, 1.4x, and 1.3x compared to its dense counterpart in monocular 3D object detection, 2D instance segmentation, and 2D semantic segmentation, respectively, with negligible to no loss of accuracy.

Camera pose estimation is a key step in standard 3D reconstruction pipelines that operates on a dense set of images of a single object or scene. However, methods for pose estimation often fail when there are only a few images available because they rely on the ability to robustly identify and match visual features between pairs of images. While these methods can work robustly with dense camera views, capturing a large set of images can be time consuming or impractical. Here, we propose Sparse-View Camera Pose Regression and Refinement (SparsePose) for recovering accurate camera poses given a sparse set of wide-baseline images (fewer than 10). The method learns to regress initial camera poses and then iteratively refine them after training on a large-scale dataset of objects (Co3D: Common Objects in 3D). SparsePose significantly outperforms conventional and learning-based baselines in recovering accurate camera rotations and translations. We also demonstrate our pipeline for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction using only 5-9 images of an object.

We propose SparseFusion, a sparse view 3D reconstruction approach that unifies recent advances in neural rendering and probabilistic image generation. Existing approaches typically build on neural rendering with re-projected features but fail to generate unseen regions or handle uncertainty under large viewpoint changes. Alternate methods treat this as a (probabilistic) 2D synthesis task, and while they can generate plausible 2D images, they do not infer a consistent underlying 3D. However, we find that this trade-off between 3D consistency and probabilistic image generation does not need to exist. In fact, we show that geometric consistency and generative inference can be complementary in a mode seeking behavior. By distilling a 3D consistent scene representation from a view-conditioned latent diffusion model, we are able to recover a plausible 3D representation whose renderings are both accurate and realistic. We evaluate our approach across 51 categories in the CO3D dataset and show that it outperforms existing methods, in both distortion and perception metrics, for sparse view novel view synthesis.

Processing giga-pixel whole slide histopathology images (WSI) is a computationally expensive task. Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the conventional approach to process WSIs, in which these images are split into smaller patches for further processing. However, MIL-based techniques ignore explicit information about the individual cells within a patch. In this paper, by defining the novel concept of shared-context processing, we designed a multi-modal Graph Transformer that uses the cellular graph within the tissue to provide a single representation for a patient while taking advantage of the hierarchical structure of the tissue, enabling a dynamic focus between cell-level and tissue-level information. We benchmarked the performance of our model against multiple state-of-the-art methods in survival prediction and showed that ours can significantly outperform all of them including hierarchical vision Transformer (ViT). More importantly, we show that our model is strongly robust to missing information to an extent that it can achieve the same performance with as low as 20% of the data. Finally, in two different cancer datasets, we demonstrated that our model was able to stratify the patients into low-risk and high-risk groups while other state-of-the-art methods failed to achieve this goal. We also publish a large dataset of immunohistochemistry (IHC) images containing 1,600 tissue microarray (TMA) cores from 188 patients along with their survival information, making it one of the largest publicly available datasets in this context.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models are able to generate convincing results of unprecedented quality. However, it is nearly impossible to control the shapes of different regions/objects or their layout in a fine-grained fashion. Previous attempts to provide such controls were hindered by their reliance on a fixed set of labels. To this end, we present SpaText --- a new method for text-to-image generation using open-vocabulary scene control. In addition to a global text prompt that describes the entire scene, the user provides a segmentation map where each region of interest is annotated by a free-form natural language description. Due to lack of large-scale datasets that have a detailed textual description for each region in the image, we choose to leverage the current large-scale text-to-image datasets and base our approach on a novel CLIP-based spatio-textual representation, and show its effectiveness on two state-of-the-art diffusion models: pixel-based and latent-based. In addition, we show how to extend the classifier-free guidance method in diffusion models to the multi-conditional case and present an alternative accelerated inference algorithm. Finally, we offer several automatic evaluation metrics and use them, in addition to FID scores and a user study, to evaluate our method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on image generation with free-form textual scene control.