CVPR 2023 Papers

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to form class-agnostic models segmenting unseen classes with only a handful of annotations. Previous methods limited to the semantic feature and prototype representation suffer from coarse segmentation granularity and train-set overfitting. In this work, we design Hierarchically Decoupled Matching Network (HDMNet) mining pixel-level support correlation based on the transformer architecture. The self-attention modules are used to assist in establishing hierarchical dense features, as a means to accomplish the cascade matching between query and support features. Moreover, we propose a matching module to reduce train-set overfitting and introduce correlation distillation leveraging semantic correspondence from coarse resolution to boost fine-grained segmentation. Our method performs decently in experiments. We achieve 50.0% mIoU on COCO-5i dataset one-shot setting and 56.0% on five-shot segmentation, respectively. The code is available on the project website.

Typical video compression systems consist of two main modules: motion coding and residual coding. This general architecture is adopted by classical coding schemes (such as international standards H.265 and H.266) and deep learning-based coding schemes. We propose a novel B-frame coding architecture based on two-layer Conditional Augmented Normalization Flows (CANF). It has the striking feature of not transmitting any motion information. Our proposed idea of video compression without motion coding offers a new direction for learned video coding. Our base layer is a low-resolution image compressor that replaces the full-resolution motion compressor. The low-resolution coded image is merged with the warped high-resolution images to generate a high-quality image as a conditioning signal for the enhancement-layer image coding in full resolution. One advantage of this architecture is significantly reduced computational complexity due to eliminating the motion information compressor. In addition, we adopt a skip-mode coding technique to reduce the transmitted latent samples. The rate-distortion performance of our scheme is slightly lower than that of the state-of-the-art learned B-frame coding scheme, B-CANF, but outperforms other learned B-frame coding schemes. However, compared to B-CANF, our scheme saves 45% of multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) for encoding and 27% of MACs for decoding. The code is available at https://nycu-clab.github.io.

Video-language embeddings are a promising avenue for injecting semantics into visual representations, but existing methods capture only short-term associations between seconds-long video clips and their accompanying text. We propose HierVL, a novel hierarchical video-language embedding that simultaneously accounts for both long-term and short-term associations. As training data, we take videos accompanied by timestamped text descriptions of human actions, together with a high-level text summary of the activity throughout the long video (as are available in Ego4D). We introduce a hierarchical contrastive training objective that encourages text-visual alignment at both the clip level and video level. While the clip-level constraints use the step-by-step descriptions to capture what is happening in that instant, the video-level constraints use the summary text to capture why it is happening, i.e., the broader context for the activity and the intent of the actor. Our hierarchical scheme yields a clip representation that outperforms its single-level counterpart, as well as a long-term video representation that achieves SotA results on tasks requiring long-term video modeling. HierVL successfully transfers to multiple challenging downstream tasks (in EPIC-KITCHENS-100, Charades-Ego, HowTo100M) in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.

This work proposes a novel approach to 4D radar-based scene flow estimation via cross-modal learning. Our approach is motivated by the co-located sensing redundancy in modern autonomous vehicles. Such redundancy implicitly provides various forms of supervision cues to the radar scene flow estimation. Specifically, we introduce a multi-task model architecture for the identified cross-modal learning problem and propose loss functions to opportunistically engage scene flow estimation using multiple cross-modal constraints for effective model training. Extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method and demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-modal supervised learning to infer more accurate 4D radar scene flow. We also show its usefulness to two subtasks - motion segmentation and ego-motion estimation. Our source code will be available on https://github.com/Toytiny/CMFlow.

We propose Hi4D, a method and dataset for the auto analysis of physically close human-human interaction under prolonged contact. Robustly disentangling several in-contact subjects is a challenging task due to occlusions and complex shapes. Hence, existing multi-view systems typically fuse 3D surfaces of close subjects into a single, connected mesh. To address this issue we leverage i) individually fitted neural implicit avatars; ii) an alternating optimization scheme that refines pose and surface through periods of close proximity; and iii) thus segment the fused raw scans into individual instances. From these instances we compile Hi4D dataset of 4D textured scans of 20 subject pairs, 100 sequences, and a total of more than 11K frames. Hi4D contains rich interaction-centric annotations in 2D and 3D alongside accurately registered parametric body models. We define varied human pose and shape estimation tasks on this dataset and provide results from state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks.

Automatically estimating 3D skeleton, shape, camera viewpoints, and part articulation from sparse in-the-wild image ensembles is a severely under-constrained and challenging problem. Most prior methods rely on large-scale image datasets, dense temporal correspondence, or human annotations like camera pose, 2D keypoints, and shape templates. We propose Hi-LASSIE, which performs 3D articulated reconstruction from only 20-30 online images in the wild without any user-defined shape or skeleton templates. We follow the recent work of LASSIE that tackles a similar problem setting and make two significant advances. First, instead of relying on a manually annotated 3D skeleton, we automatically estimate a class-specific skeleton from the selected reference image. Second, we improve the shape reconstructions with novel instance-specific optimization strategies that allow reconstructions to faithful fit on each instance while preserving the class-specific priors learned across all images. Experiments on in-the-wild image ensembles show that Hi-LASSIE obtains higher fidelity state-of-the-art 3D reconstructions despite requiring minimum user input. Project page: chhankyao.github.io/hi-lassie/

Modeling and re-rendering dynamic 3D scenes is a challenging task in 3D vision. Prior approaches build on NeRF and rely on implicit representations. This is slow since it requires many MLP evaluations, constraining real-world applications. We show that dynamic 3D scenes can be explicitly represented by six planes of learned features, leading to an elegant solution we call HexPlane. A HexPlane computes features for points in spacetime by fusing vectors extracted from each plane, which is highly efficient. Pairing a HexPlane with a tiny MLP to regress output colors and training via volume rendering gives impressive results for novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes, matching the image quality of prior work but reducing training time by more than 100x. Extensive ablations confirm our HexPlane design and show that it is robust to different feature fusion mechanisms, coordinate systems, and decoding mechanisms. HexPlane is a simple and effective solution for representing 4D volumes, and we hope they can broadly contribute to modeling spacetime for dynamic 3D scenes.

We propose a novel framework and a solution to tackle the continual learning (CL) problem with changing network architectures. Most CL methods focus on adapting a single architecture to a new task/class by modifying its weights. However, with rapid progress in architecture design, the problem of adapting existing solutions to novel architectures becomes relevant. To address this limitation, we propose Heterogeneous Continual Learning (HCL), where a wide range of evolving network architectures emerge continually together with novel data/tasks. As a solution, we build on top of the distillation family of techniques and modify it to a new setting where a weaker model takes the role of a teacher; meanwhile, a new stronger architecture acts as a student. Furthermore, we consider a setup of limited access to previous data and propose Quick Deep Inversion (QDI) to recover prior task visual features to support knowledge transfer. QDI significantly reduces computational costs compared to previous solutions and improves overall performance. In summary, we propose a new setup for CL with a modified knowledge distillation paradigm and design a quick data inversion method to enhance distillation. Our evaluation of various benchmarks shows a significant improvement on accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art methods over various networks architectures.

Recovery of an underlying scene geometry from multi-view images stands as a long-time challenge in computer vision research. The recent promise leverages neural implicit surface learning and differentiable volume rendering, and achieves both the recovery of scene geometry and synthesis of novel views, where deep priors of neural models are used as an inductive smoothness bias. While promising for object-level surfaces, these methods suffer when coping with complex scene surfaces. In the meanwhile, traditional multi-view stereo can recover the geometry of scenes with rich textures, by globally optimizing the local, pixel-wise correspondences across multiple views. We are thus motivated to make use of the complementary benefits from the two strategies, and propose a method termed Helix-shaped neural implicit Surface learning or HelixSurf; HelixSurf uses the intermediate prediction from one strategy as the guidance to regularize the learning of the other one, and conducts such intertwined regularization iteratively during the learning process. We also propose an efficient scheme for differentiable volume rendering in HelixSurf. Experiments on surface reconstruction of indoor scenes show that our method compares favorably with existing methods and is orders of magnitude faster, even when some of existing methods are assisted with auxiliary training data. The source code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/HelixSurf.

Triangle mesh segmentation is an important task in 3D shape analysis, especially in applications such as digital humans and AR/VR. Transformer model is inherently permutation-invariant to input, which makes it a suitable candidate model for 3D mesh processing. However, two main challenges involved in adapting Transformer from natural languages to 3D mesh are yet to be solved, such as i) extracting the multi-scale information of mesh data in an adaptive manner; ii) capturing geometric structures of mesh data as the discriminative characteristics of the shape. Current point based Transformer models fail to tackle such challenges and thus provide inferior performance for discretized surface segmentation. In this work, heat diffusion based method is exploited to tackle these problems. A novel Transformer model called MeshFormer is proposed, which i) integrates Heat Diffusion method into Multi-head Self-Attention operation (HDMSA) to adaptively capture the features from local neighborhood to global contexts; ii) applies a novel Heat Kernel Signature based Structure Encoding (HKSSE) to embed the intrinsic geometric structures of mesh instances into Transformer for structure-aware processing. Extensive experiments on triangle mesh segmentation validate the effectiveness of the proposed MeshFormer model and show significant improvements over current state-of-the-art methods.

Self-training approaches recently achieved promising results in cross-domain object detection, where people iteratively generate pseudo labels for unlabeled target domain samples with a model, and select high-confidence samples to refine the model. In this work, we reveal that the consistency of classification and localization predictions are crucial to measure the quality of pseudo labels, and propose a new Harmonious Teacher approach to improve the self-training for cross-domain object detection. In particular, we first propose to enhance the quality of pseudo labels by regularizing the consistency of the classification and localization scores when training the detection model. The consistency losses are defined for both labeled source samples and the unlabeled target samples. Then, we further remold the traditional sample selection method by a sample reweighing strategy based on the consistency of classification and localization scores to improve the ranking of predictions. This allows us to fully exploit all instance predictions from the target domain without abandoning valuable hard examples. Without bells and whistles, our method shows superior performance in various cross-domain scenarios compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, which validates the effectiveness of our Harmonious Teacher. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/kinredon/Harmonious-Teacher.

Joint hand and object pose estimation from a single image is extremely challenging as serious occlusion often occurs when the hand and object interact. Existing approaches typically first extract coarse hand and object features from a single backbone, then further enhance them with reference to each other via interaction modules. However, these works usually ignore that the hand and object are competitive in feature learning, since the backbone takes both of them as foreground and they are usually mutually occluded. In this paper, we propose a novel Harmonious Feature Learning Network (HFL-Net). HFL-Net introduces a new framework that combines the advantages of single- and double-stream backbones: it shares the parameters of the low- and high-level convolutional layers of a common ResNet-50 model for the hand and object, leaving the middle-level layers unshared. This strategy enables the hand and the object to be extracted as the sole targets by the middle-level layers, avoiding their competition in feature learning. The shared high-level layers also force their features to be harmonious, thereby facilitating their mutual feature enhancement. In particular, we propose to enhance the feature of the hand via concatenation with the feature in the same location from the object stream. A subsequent self-attention layer is adopted to deeply fuse the concatenated feature. Experimental results show that our proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the popular HO3D and Dex-YCB databases. Notably, the performance of our model on hand pose estimation even surpasses that of existing works that only perform the single-hand pose estimation task. Code is available at https://github.com/lzfff12/HFL-Net.

Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) is promising for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks when the data for training full-precision models are inaccessible. In ZSQ, network quantization is performed using synthetic samples, thus, the performance of quantized models depends heavily on the quality of synthetic samples. Nonetheless, we find that the synthetic samples constructed in existing ZSQ methods can be easily fitted by models. Accordingly, quantized models obtained by these methods suffer from significant performance degradation on hard samples. To address this issue, we propose HArd sample Synthesizing and Training (HAST). Specifically, HAST pays more attention to hard samples when synthesizing samples and makes synthetic samples hard to fit when training quantized models. HAST aligns features extracted by full-precision and quantized models to ensure the similarity between features extracted by these two models. Extensive experiments show that HAST significantly outperforms existing ZSQ methods, achieving performance comparable to models that are quantized with real data.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has attracted much research attention due to its promising potential for learning scalable visual representations. In typical approaches, models usually focus on predicting specific contents of masked patches, and their performances are highly related to pre-defined mask strategies. Intuitively, this procedure can be considered as training a student (the model) on solving given problems (predict masked patches). However, we argue that the model should not only focus on solving given problems, but also stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce a more challenging problem by itself. To this end, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), a brand-new framework for MIM pre-training. We observe that the reconstruction loss can naturally be the metric of the difficulty of the pre-training task. Therefore, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, predicting patch-wise losses first and deciding where to mask next. It adopts a relative relationship learning strategy to prevent overfitting to exact reconstruction loss values. Experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of HPM in constructing masked images. Furthermore, we empirically find that solely introducing the loss prediction objective leads to powerful representations, verifying the efficacy of the ability to be aware of where is hard to reconstruct.

Over the last few years, with the advent of virtual and augmented reality, an enormous amount of research has been focused on modeling, tracking and reconstructing human hands. Given their power to express human behavior, hands have been a very important, but challenging component of the human body. Currently, most of the state-of-the-art reconstruction and pose estimation methods rely on the low polygon MANO model. Apart from its low polygon count, MANO model was trained with only 31 adult subjects, which not only limits its expressive power but also imposes unnecessary shape reconstruction constraints on pose estimation methods. Moreover, hand appearance remains almost unexplored and neglected from the majority of hand reconstruction methods. In this work, we propose "Handy", a large-scale model of the human hand, modeling both shape and appearance composed of over 1200 subjects which we make publicly available for the benefit of the research community. In contrast to current models, our proposed hand model was trained on a dataset with large diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity, which tackles the limitations of MANO and accurately reconstructs out-of-distribution samples. In order to create a high quality texture model, we trained a powerful GAN, which preserves high frequency details and is able to generate high resolution hand textures. To showcase the capabilities of the proposed model, we built a synthetic dataset of textured hands and trained a hand pose estimation network to reconstruct both the shape and appearance from single images. As it is demonstrated in an extensive series of quantitative as well as qualitative experiments, our model proves to be robust against the state-of-the-art and realistically captures the 3D hand shape and pose along with a high frequency detailed texture even in adverse "in-the-wild" conditions.

Generating synthetic images of handwritten text in a writer-specific style is a challenging task, especially in the case of unseen styles and new words, and even more when these latter contain characters that are rarely encountered during training. While emulating a writer's style has been recently addressed by generative models, the generalization towards rare characters has been disregarded. In this work, we devise a Transformer-based model for Few-Shot styled handwritten text generation and focus on obtaining a robust and informative representation of both the text and the style. In particular, we propose a novel representation of the textual content as a sequence of dense vectors obtained from images of symbols written as standard GNU Unifont glyphs, which can be considered their visual archetypes. This strategy is more suitable for generating characters that, despite having been seen rarely during training, possibly share visual details with the frequently observed ones. As for the style, we obtain a robust representation of unseen writers' calligraphy by exploiting specific pre-training on a large synthetic dataset. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in generating words in unseen styles and with rare characters more faithfully than existing approaches relying on independent one-hot encodings of the characters.

Recent work leverages the expressive power of genera- tive adversarial networks (GANs) to generate labeled syn- thetic datasets. These dataset generation methods often require new annotations of synthetic images, which forces practitioners to seek out annotators, curate a set of synthetic images, and ensure the quality of generated labels. We in- troduce the HandsOff framework, a technique capable of producing an unlimited number of synthetic images and cor- responding labels after being trained on less than 50 pre- existing labeled images. Our framework avoids the practi- cal drawbacks of prior work by unifying the field of GAN in- version with dataset generation. We generate datasets with rich pixel-wise labels in multiple challenging domains such as faces, cars, full-body human poses, and urban driving scenes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation, keypoint detection, and depth es- timation compared to prior dataset generation approaches and transfer learning baselines. We additionally showcase its ability to address broad challenges in model develop- ment which stem from fixed, hand-annotated datasets, such as the long-tail problem in semantic segmentation. Project page: austinxu87.github.io/handsoff.

We propose a novel framework to reconstruct accurate appearance and geometry with neural radiance fields (NeRF) for interacting hands, enabling the rendering of photo-realistic images and videos for gesture animation from arbitrary views. Given multi-view images of a single hand or interacting hands, an off-the-shelf skeleton estimator is first employed to parameterize the hand poses. Then we design a pose-driven deformation field to establish correspondence from those different poses to a shared canonical space, where a pose-disentangled NeRF for one hand is optimized. Such unified modeling efficiently complements the geometry and texture cues in rarely-observed areas for both hands. Meanwhile, we further leverage the pose priors to generate pseudo depth maps as guidance for occlusion-aware density learning. Moreover, a neural feature distillation method is proposed to achieve cross-domain alignment for color optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the merits of our proposed HandNeRF and report a series of state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on the large-scale InterHand2.6M dataset.

We present HandAvatar, a novel representation for hand animation and rendering, which can generate smoothly compositional geometry and self-occlusion-aware texture. Specifically, we first develop a MANO-HD model as a high-resolution mesh topology to fit personalized hand shapes. Sequentially, we decompose hand geometry into per-bone rigid parts, and then re-compose paired geometry encodings to derive an across-part consistent occupancy field. As for texture modeling, we propose a self-occlusion-aware shading field (SelF). In SelF, drivable anchors are paved on the MANO-HD surface to record albedo information under a wide variety of hand poses. Moreover, directed soft occupancy is designed to describe the ray-to-surface relation, which is leveraged to generate an illumination field for the disentanglement of pose-independent albedo and pose-dependent illumination. Trained from monocular video data, our HandAvatar can perform free-pose hand animation and rendering while at the same time achieving superior appearance fidelity. We also demonstrate that HandAvatar provides a route for hand appearance editing.