CVPR 2023 Papers

The non-line-of-sight imaging technique aims to reconstruct targets from multiply reflected light. For most existing methods, dense points on the relay surface are raster scanned to obtain high-quality reconstructions, which requires a long acquisition time. In this work, we propose a signal-surface collaborative regularization (SSCR) framework that provides noise-robust reconstructions with a minimal number of measurements. Using Bayesian inference, we design joint regularizations of the estimated signal, the 3D voxel-based representation of the objects, and the 2D surface-based description of the targets. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that combines regularizations in mixed dimensions for hidden targets. Experiments on synthetic and experimental datasets illustrated the efficiency of the proposed method under both confocal and non-confocal settings. We report the reconstruction of the hidden targets with complex geometric structures with only 5 x 5 confocal measurements from public datasets, indicating an acceleration of the conventional measurement process by a factor of 10,000. Besides, the proposed method enjoys low time and memory complexity with sparse measurements. Our approach has great potential in real-time non-line-of-sight imaging applications such as rescue operations and autonomous driving.

Pre-trained vision-language models have inspired much research on few-shot learning. However, with only a few training images, there exist two crucial problems: (1) the visual feature distributions are easily distracted by class-irrelevant information in images, and (2) the alignment between the visual and language feature distributions is difficult. To deal with the distraction problem, we propose a Selective Attack module, which consists of trainable adapters that generate spatial attention maps of images to guide the attacks on class-irrelevant image areas. By messing up these areas, the critical features are captured and the visual distributions of image features are calibrated. To better align the visual and language feature distributions that describe the same object class, we propose a cross-modal distribution alignment module, in which we introduce a vision-language prototype for each class to align the distributions, and adopt the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) to optimize the prototypes. For efficient computation, the upper bound of EMD is derived. In addition, we propose an augmentation strategy to increase the diversity of the images and the text prompts, which can reduce overfitting to the few-shot training images. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior arts in few-shot learning.

Supervised keypoint localization methods rely on large manually labeled image datasets, where objects can deform, articulate, or occlude. However, creating such large keypoint labels is time-consuming and costly, and is often error-prone due to inconsistent labeling. Thus, we desire an approach that can learn keypoint localization with fewer yet consistently annotated images. To this end, we present a novel formulation that learns to localize semantically consistent keypoint definitions, even for occluded regions, for varying object categories. We use a few user-labeled 2D images as input examples, which are extended via self-supervision using a larger unlabeled dataset. Unlike unsupervised methods, the few-shot images act as semantic shape constraints for object localization. Furthermore, we introduce 3D geometry-aware constraints to uplift keypoints, achieving more accurate 2D localization. Our general-purpose formulation paves the way for semantically conditioned generative modeling and attains competitive or state-of-the-art accuracy on several datasets, including human faces, eyes, animals, cars, and never-before-seen mouth interior (teeth) localization tasks, not attempted by the previous few-shot methods. Project page: https://xingzhehe.github.io/FewShot3DKP/

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn novel classes based on only few training samples, which poses a more challenging task than the well-studied Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) due to data scarcity. While knowledge distillation, a prevailing technique in CIL, can alleviate the catastrophic forgetting of older classes by regularizing outputs between current and previous model, it fails to consider the overfitting risk of novel classes in FSCIL. To adapt the powerful distillation technique for FSCIL, we propose a novel distillation structure, by taking the unique challenge of overfitting into account. Concretely, we draw knowledge from two complementary teachers. One is the model trained on abundant data from base classes that carries rich general knowledge, which can be leveraged for easing the overfitting of current novel classes. The other is the updated model from last incremental session that contains the adapted knowledge of previous novel classes, which is used for alleviating their forgetting. To combine the guidances, an adaptive strategy conditioned on the class-wise semantic similarities is introduced. Besides, for better preserving base class knowledge when accommodating novel concepts, we adopt a two-branch network with an attention-based aggregation module to dynamically merge predictions from two complementary branches. Extensive experiments on 3 popular FSCIL datasets: mini-ImageNet, CIFAR100 and CUB200 validate the effectiveness of our method by surpassing existing works by a significant margin.

Few-shot image generation (FSIG) learns to generate diverse and high-fidelity images from a target domain using a few (e.g., 10) reference samples. Existing FSIG methods select, preserve and transfer prior knowledge from a source generator (pretrained on a related domain) to learn the target generator. In this work, we investigate an underexplored issue in FSIG, dubbed as incompatible knowledge transfer, which would significantly degrade the realisticness of synthetic samples. Empirical observations show that the issue stems from the least significant filters from the source generator. To this end, we propose knowledge truncation to mitigate this issue in FSIG, which is a complementary operation to knowledge preservation and is implemented by a lightweight pruning-based method. Extensive experiments show that knowledge truncation is simple and effective, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, including challenging setups where the source and target domains are more distant. Project Page: https://yunqing-me.github.io/RICK.

We address the task of weakly-supervised few-shot image classification and segmentation, by leveraging a Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained with self-supervision. Our proposed method takes token representations from the self-supervised ViT and leverages their correlations, via self-attention, to produce classification and segmentation predictions through separate task heads. Our model is able to effectively learn to perform classification and segmentation in the absence of pixel-level labels during training, using only image-level labels. To do this it uses attention maps, created from tokens generated by the self-supervised ViT backbone, as pixel-level pseudo-labels. We also explore a practical setup with "mixed" supervision, where a small number of training images contains ground-truth pixel-level labels and the remaining images have only image-level labels. For this mixed setup, we propose to improve the pseudo-labels using a pseudo-label enhancer that was trained using the available ground-truth pixel-level labels. Experiments on Pascal-5i and COCO-20i demonstrate significant performance gains in a variety of supervision settings, and in particular when little-to-no pixel-level labels are available.

Generalized few-shot object detection aims to achieve precise detection on both base classes with abundant annotations and novel classes with limited training data. Existing approaches enhance few-shot generalization with the sacrifice of base-class performance, or maintain high precision in base-class detection with limited improvement in novel-class adaptation. In this paper, we point out the reason is insufficient Discriminative feature learning for all of the classes. As such, we propose a new training framework, DiGeo, to learn Geometry-aware features of inter-class separation and intra-class compactness. To guide the separation of feature clusters, we derive an offline simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) classifier whose weights serve as class centers and are maximally and equally separated. To tighten the cluster for each class, we include adaptive class-specific margins into the classification loss and encourage the features close to the class centers. Experimental studies on two few-shot benchmark datasets (PASCAL VOC, MSCOCO) and one long-tail dataset (LVIS) demonstrate that, with a single model, our method can effectively improve generalization on novel classes without hurting the detection of base classes.

Content and style disentanglement is an effective way to achieve few-shot font generation. It allows to transfer the style of the font image in a source domain to the style defined with a few reference images in a target domain. However, the content feature extracted using a representative font might not be optimal. In light of this, we propose a content fusion module (CFM) to project the content feature into a linear space defined by the content features of basis fonts, which can take the variation of content features caused by different fonts into consideration. Our method also allows to optimize the style representation vector of reference images through a lightweight iterative style-vector refinement (ISR) strategy. Moreover, we treat the 1D projection of a character image as a probability distribution and leverage the distance between two distributions as the reconstruction loss (namely projected character loss, PCL). Compared to L2 or L1 reconstruction loss, the distribution distance pays more attention to the global shape of characters. We have evaluated our method on a dataset of 300 fonts with 6.5k characters each. Experimental results verify that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art few-shot font generation methods by a large margin. The source code can be found at https://github.com/wangchi95/CF-Font.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) has been rapidly developed in recent years, potentially eliminating the requirement for significant data acquisition. Few-shot fine-tuning has been demonstrated to be practically efficient and helpful, especially for out-of-distribution datum. In this work, we first observe that the few-shot fine-tuned methods are learned with the imbalanced class marginal distribution. This observation further motivates us to propose the Transductive Fine-tuning with Margin-based uncertainty weighting and Probability regularization (TF-MP), which learns a more balanced class marginal distribution. We first conduct sample weighting on the testing data with margin-based uncertainty scores and further regularize each test sample's categorical probability. TF-MP achieves state-of-the-art performance on in- / out-of-distribution evaluations of Meta-Dataset and surpasses previous transductive methods by a large margin.

Generating faithful visualizations of human faces requires capturing both coarse and fine-level details of the face geometry and appearance. Existing methods are either data-driven, requiring an extensive corpus of data not publicly accessible to the research community, or fail to capture fine details because they rely on geometric face models that cannot represent fine-grained details in texture with a mesh discretization and linear deformation designed to model only a coarse face geometry. We introduce a method that bridges this gap by drawing inspiration from traditional computer graphics techniques. Unseen expressions are modeled by blending appearance from a sparse set of extreme poses. This blending is performed by measuring local volumetric changes in those expressions and locally reproducing their appearance whenever a similar expression is performed at test time. We show that our method generalizes to unseen expressions, adding fine-grained effects on top of smooth volumetric deformations of a face, and demonstrate how it generalizes beyond faces.

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn the generalizability from seen to unseen data with only a few samples. Most previous few-shot learning focus on learning generalizability within particular domains. However, the more practical scenarios may also require generalizability across domains. In this paper, we study the problem of Few-shot domain generalization (FSDG), which is a more challenging variant of few-shot classification. FSDG requires additional generalization with larger gap from seen domains to unseen domains. We address FSDG problem by meta-learning two levels of meta-knowledge, where the lower-level meta-knowledge are domain-specific embedding spaces as subspaces of a base space for intra-domain generalization, and the upper-level meta-knowledge is the base space and a prior subspace over domain-specific spaces for inter-domain generalization. We formulate the two levels of meta-knowledge learning problem with bi-level optimization, and further develop an optimization algorithm without Hessian information to solve it. We demonstrate our method is significantly superior to the previous works by evaluating it on the widely used benchmark Meta-Dataset.

It is well-known that zero-shot learning (ZSL) can suffer severely from the problem of domain shift, where the true and learned data distributions for the unseen classes do not match. Although transductive ZSL (TZSL) attempts to improve this by allowing the use of unlabelled examples from the unseen classes, there is still a high level of distribution shift. We propose a novel TZSL model (named as Bi-VAEGAN), which largely improves the shift by a strengthened distribution alignment between the visual and auxiliary spaces. The key proposal of the model design includes (1) a bi-directional distribution alignment, (2) a simple but effective L_2-norm based feature normalization approach, and (3) a more sophisticated unseen class prior estimation approach. In benchmark evaluation using four datasets, Bi-VAEGAN achieves the new state of the arts under both the standard and generalized TZSL settings. Code could be found at https://github.com/Zhicaiwww/Bi-VAEGAN.

In this work, we study few-shot domain adaptive object detection (FSDAOD), where only a few target labeled images are available for training in addition to sufficient source labeled images. Critically, in FSDAOD, the data-scarcity in the target domain leads to an extreme data imbalance between the source and target domains, which potentially causes over-adaptation in traditional feature alignment. To address the data imbalance problem, we propose an asymmetric adaptation paradigm, namely AsyFOD, which leverages the source and target instances from different perspectives. Specifically, by using target distribution estimation, the AsyFOD first identifies the target-similar source instances, which serves for augmenting the limited target instances. Then, we conduct asynchronous alignment between target-dissimilar source instances and augmented target instances, which is simple yet effective for alleviating the over-adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AsyFOD outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on four FSDAOD benchmarks with various environmental variances, e.g., 3.1% mAP improvement on Cityscapes-to-FoggyCityscapes and 2.9% mAP increase on Sim10k-to-Cityscapes. The code is available at https://github.com/Hlings/AsyFOD.

Recently, few-shot action recognition receives increasing attention and achieves remarkable progress. However, previous methods mainly rely on limited unimodal data (e.g., RGB frames) while the multimodal information remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Active Multimodal Few-shot Action Recognition (AMFAR) framework, which can actively find the reliable modality for each sample based on task-dependent context information to improve few-shot reasoning procedure. In meta-training, we design an Active Sample Selection (ASS) module to organize query samples with large differences in the reliability of modalities into different groups based on modality-specific posterior distributions. In addition, we design an Active Mutual Distillation (AMD) module to capture discriminative task-specific knowledge from the reliable modality to improve the representation learning of unreliable modality by bidirectional knowledge distillation. In meta-test, we adopt Adaptive Multimodal Inference (AMI) module to adaptively fuse the modality-specific posterior distributions with a larger weight on the reliable modality. Extensive experimental results on four public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over existing unimodal and multimodal methods.

This paper introduces a generalized few-shot segmentation framework with a straightforward training process and an easy-to-optimize inference phase. In particular, we propose a simple yet effective model based on the well-known InfoMax principle, where the Mutual Information (MI) between the learned feature representations and their corresponding predictions is maximized. In addition, the terms derived from our MI-based formulation are coupled with a knowledge distillation term to retain the knowledge on base classes. With a simple training process, our inference model can be applied on top of any segmentation network trained on base classes. The proposed inference yields substantial improvements on the popular few-shot segmentation benchmarks, PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i. Particularly, for novel classes, the improvement gains range from 7% to 26% (PASCAL-5^i) and from 3% to 12% (COCO-20^i) in the 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a more challenging setting, where performance gaps are further exacerbated. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sinahmr/DIaM.

We propose an approach to estimate the number of samples required for a model to reach a target performance. We find that the power law, the de facto principle to estimate model performance, leads to large error when using a small dataset (e.g., 5 samples per class) for extrapolation. This is because the log-performance error against the log-dataset size follows a nonlinear progression in the few-shot regime followed by a linear progression in the high-shot regime. We introduce a novel piecewise power law (PPL) that handles the two data regimes differently. To estimate the parameters of the PPL, we introduce a random forest regressor trained via meta learning that generalizes across classification/detection tasks, ResNet/ViT based architectures, and random/pre-trained initializations. The PPL improves the performance estimation on average by 37% across 16 classification datasets and 33% across 10 detection datasets, compared to the power law. We further extend the PPL to provide a confidence bound and use it to limit the prediction horizon that reduces over-estimation of data by 76% on classification and 91% on detection datasets.

Recent studies usually approach multi-label zero-shot learning (MLZSL) with visual-semantic mapping on spatial-class correlation, which can be computationally costly, and worse still, fails to capture fine-grained class-specific semantics. We observe that different channels may usually have different sensitivities on classes, which can correspond to specific semantics. Such an intrinsic channel-class correlation suggests a potential alternative for the more accurate and class-harmonious feature representations. In this paper, our interest is to fully explore the power of channel-class correlation as the unique base for MLZSL. Specifically, we propose a light yet efficient Multi-Label Multi-Layer Perceptron-based Encoder, dubbed (ML)^2P-Encoder, to extract and preserve channel-wise semantics. We reorganize the generated feature maps into several groups, of which each of them can be trained independently with (ML)^2P-Encoder. On top of that, a global group-wise attention module is further designed to build the multi-label specific class relationships among different classes, which eventually fulfills a novel Channel-Class Correlation MLZSL framework (C^3-MLZSL). Extensive experiments on large-scale MLZSL benchmarks including NUS-WIDE and Open-Images-V4 demonstrate the superiority of our model against other representative state-of-the-art models.