CVPR 2023 Papers

The deployment of perception systems based on neural networks in safety critical applications requires assurance on their robustness. Deterministic guarantees on network robustness require formal verification. Standard approaches for verifying robustness analyse invariance to analytically defined transformations, but not the diverse and ubiquitous changes involving object pose, scene viewpoint, occlusions, etc. To this end, we present an efficient approach for verifying specifications definable using Latent Variable Models that capture such diverse changes. The approach involves adding an invertible encoding head to the network to be verified, enabling the verification of latent space sets with minimal reconstruction overhead. We report verification experiments for three classes of proposed latent space specifications, each capturing different types of realistic input variations. Differently from previous work in this area, the proposed approach is relatively independent of input dimensionality and scales to a broad class of deep networks and real-world datasets by mitigating the inefficiency and decoder expressivity dependence in the present state-of-the-art.

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is a computationally expensive task due to the per-frame prediction for videos of high frame rates. In recent work, compact models or adaptive network strategies have been proposed for efficient VSS. However, they did not consider a crucial factor that affects the computational cost from the input side: the input resolution. In this paper, we propose an altering resolution framework called AR-Seg for compressed videos to achieve efficient VSS. AR-Seg aims to reduce the computational cost by using low resolution for non-keyframes. To prevent the performance degradation caused by downsampling, we design a Cross Resolution Feature Fusion (CReFF) module, and supervise it with a novel Feature Similarity Training (FST) strategy. Specifically, CReFF first makes use of motion vectors stored in a compressed video to warp features from high-resolution keyframes to low-resolution non-keyframes for better spatial alignment, and then selectively aggregates the warped features with local attention mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed FST supervises the aggregated features with high-resolution features through an explicit similarity loss and an implicit constraint from the shared decoding layer. Extensive experiments on CamVid and Cityscapes show that AR-Seg achieves state-of-the-art performance and is compatible with different segmentation backbones. On CamVid, AR-Seg saves 67% computational cost (measured in GFLOPs) with the PSPNet18 backbone while maintaining high segmentation accuracy. Code: https://github.com/THU-LYJ-Lab/AR-Seg.

Any-scale image synthesis offers an efficient and scalable solution to synthesize photo-realistic images at any scale, even going beyond 2K resolution. However, existing GAN-based solutions depend excessively on convolutions and a hierarchical architecture, which introduce inconsistency and the "texture sticking" issue when scaling the output resolution. From another perspective, INR-based generators are scale-equivariant by design, but their huge memory footprint and slow inference hinder these networks from being adopted in large-scale or real-time systems. In this work, we propose Column-Row Entangled Pixel Synthesisthes (CREPS), a new generative model that is both efficient and scale-equivariant without using any spatial convolutions or coarse-to-fine design. To save memory footprint and make the system scalable, we employ a novel bi-line representation that decomposes layer-wise feature maps into separate "thick" column and row encodings. Experiments on standard datasets, including FFHQ, LSUN-Church, and MetFaces, confirm CREPS' ability to synthesize scale-consistent and alias-free images up to 4K resolution with proper training and inference speed.

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is widely studied in computer vision. Recently an adaptive rank estimate based RPCA has achieved top performance in low-level vision tasks without the prior rank, but both the rank estimate and RPCA optimization algorithm involve singular value decomposition, which requires extremely huge computational resource for large-scale matrices. To address these issues, an efficient RPCA (eRPCA) algorithm is proposed based on block Krylov iteration and CUR decomposition in this paper. Specifically, the Krylov iteration method is employed to approximate the eigenvalue decomposition in the rank estimation, which requires O(ndrq + n(rq)^2) for an (nxd) input matrix, in which q is a parameter with a small value, r is the target rank. Based on the estimated rank, CUR decomposition is adopted to replace SVD in updating low-rank matrix component, whose complexity reduces from O(rnd) to O(r^2n) per iteration. Experimental results verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed eRPCA over the state-of-the-art methods in various low-level vision applications.

Despite its importance for federated learning, continuous learning and many other applications, on-device training remains an open problem for EdgeAI. The problem stems from the large number of operations (e.g., floating point multiplications and additions) and memory consumption required during training by the back-propagation algorithm. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a new gradient filtering approach which enables on-device CNN model training. More precisely, our approach creates a special structure with fewer unique elements in the gradient map, thus significantly reducing the computational complexity and memory consumption of back propagation during training. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation with multiple CNN models (e.g., MobileNet, DeepLabV3, UPerNet) and devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano) demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach. For example, compared to SOTA, we achieve up to 19x speedup and 77.1% memory savings on ImageNet classification with only 0.1% accuracy loss. Finally, our method is easy to implement and deploy; over 20x speedup and 90% energy savings have been observed compared to highly optimized baselines in MKLDNN and CUDNN on NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Consequently, our approach opens up a new direction of research with a huge potential for on-device training.

Large-scale pre-training has brought unimodal fields such as computer vision and natural language processing to a new era. Following this trend, the size of multimodal learning models constantly increases, leading to an urgent need to reduce the massive computational cost of fine-tuning these models for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible multimodal fusion method, namely PMF, tailored for fusing unimodally pretrained transformers. Specifically, we first present a modular multimodal fusion framework that exhibits high flexibility and facilitates mutual interactions among different modalities. In addition, we disentangle vanilla prompts into three types in order to learn different optimizing objectives for multimodal learning. It is also worth noting that we propose to add prompt vectors only on the deep layers of the unimodal transformers, thus significantly reducing the training memory usage. Experiment results show that our proposed method achieves comparable performance to several other multimodal finetuning methods with less than 3% trainable parameters and up to 66% saving of training memory usage.

The ability to distinguish between different movie scenes is critical for understanding the storyline of a movie. However, accurately detecting movie scenes is often challenging as it requires the ability to reason over very long movie segments. This is in contrast to most existing video recognition models, which are typically designed for short-range video analysis. This work proposes a State-Space Transformer model that can efficiently capture dependencies in long movie videos for accurate movie scene detection. Our model, dubbed TranS4mer, is built using a novel S4A building block, which combines the strengths of structured state-space sequence (S4) and self-attention (A) layers. Given a sequence of frames divided into movie shots (uninterrupted periods where the camera position does not change), the S4A block first applies self-attention to capture short-range intra-shot dependencies. Afterward, the state-space operation in the S4A block is used to aggregate long-range inter-shot cues. The final TranS4mer model, which can be trained end-to-end, is obtained by stacking the S4A blocks one after the other multiple times. Our proposed TranS4mer outperforms all prior methods in three movie scene detection datasets, including MovieNet, BBC, and OVSD, while also being 2x faster and requiring 3x less GPU memory than standard Transformer models. We will release our code and models.

The goal of click-based interactive image segmentation is to extract target masks with the input of positive/negative clicks. Every time a new click is placed, existing methods run the whole segmentation network to obtain a corrected mask, which is inefficient since several clicks may be needed to reach satisfactory accuracy. To this end, we propose an efficient method to correct the mask with a lightweight mask correction network. The whole network remains a low computational cost from the second click, even if we have a large backbone. However, a simple correction network with limited capacity is not likely to achieve comparable performance with a classic segmentation network. Thus, we propose a click-guided self-attention module and a click-guided correlation module to effectively exploits the click information to boost performance. First, several templates are selected based on the semantic similarity with click features. Then the self-attention module propagates the template information to other pixels, while the correlation module directly uses the templates to obtain target outlines. With the efficient architecture and two click-guided modules, our method shows preferable performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/feiaxyt/EMC-Click.

Localization in a pre-built map is a basic technique for robot autonomous navigation. Existing mapping and localization methods commonly work well in small-scale environments. As a map grows larger, however, more memory is required and localization becomes inefficient. To solve these problems, map sparsification becomes a practical necessity to acquire a subset of the original map for localization. Previous map sparsification methods add a quadratic term in mixed-integer programming to enforce a uniform distribution of selected landmarks, which requires high memory capacity and heavy computation. In this paper, we formulate map sparsification in an efficient linear form and select uniformly distributed landmarks based on 2D discretized grids. Furthermore, to reduce the influence of different spatial distributions between the mapping and query sequences, which is not considered in previous methods, we also introduce a space constraint term based on 3D discretized grids. The exhaustive experiments in different datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods in both efficiency and localization performance. The relevant codes will be released at https://github.com/fishmarch/SLAM_Map_Compression.

Attackers can deceive neural networks by adding human imperceptive perturbations to their input data; this reveals the vulnerability and weak robustness of current deep-learning networks. Many attack techniques have been proposed to evaluate the model's robustness. Gradient-based attacks suffer from severely overestimating the robustness. This paper identifies that the relative error in calculated gradients caused by floating-point errors, including floating-point underflow and rounding errors, is a fundamental reason why gradient-based attacks fail to accurately assess the model's robustness. Although it is hard to eliminate the relative error in the gradients, we can control its effect on the gradient-based attacks. Correspondingly, we propose an efficient loss function by minimizing the detrimental impact of the floating-point errors on the attacks. Experimental results show that it is more efficient and reliable than other loss functions when examined across a wide range of defence mechanisms.

Learning an accurate entropy model is a fundamental way to remove the redundancy in point cloud compression. Recently, the octree-based auto-regressive entropy model which adopts the self-attention mechanism to explore dependencies in a large-scale context is proved to be promising. However, heavy global attention computations and auto-regressive contexts are inefficient for practical applications. To improve the efficiency of the attention model, we propose a hierarchical attention structure that has a linear complexity to the context scale and maintains the global receptive field. Furthermore, we present a grouped context structure to address the serial decoding issue caused by the auto-regression while preserving the compression performance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed entropy model achieves superior rate-distortion performance and significant decoding latency reduction compared with the state-of-the-art large-scale auto-regressive entropy model.

Since training a deep neural network (DNN) is costly, the well-trained deep models can be regarded as valuable intellectual property (IP) assets. The IP protection associated with deep models has been receiving increasing attentions in recent years. Passport-based method, which replaces normalization layers with passport layers, has been one of the few protection solutions that are claimed to be secure against advanced attacks. In this work, we tackle the issue of evaluating the security of passport-based IP protection methods. We propose a novel and effective ambiguity attack against passport-based method, capable of successfully forging multiple valid passports with a small training dataset. This is accomplished by inserting a specially designed accessory block ahead of the passport parameters. Using less than 10% of training data, with the forged passport, the model exhibits almost indistinguishable performance difference (less than 2%) compared with that of the authorized passport. In addition, it is shown that our attack strategy can be readily generalized to attack other IP protection methods based on watermark embedding. Directions for potential remedy solutions are also given.

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) achieve highly photo-realistic novel-view synthesis, but it's a challenging problem to edit the scenes modeled by NeRF-based methods, especially for dynamic scenes. We propose editable neural radiance fields that enable end-users to easily edit dynamic scenes and even support topological changes. Input with an image sequence from a single camera, our network is trained fully automatically and models topologically varying dynamics using our picked-out surface key points. Then end-users can edit the scene by easily dragging the key points to desired new positions. To achieve this, we propose a scene analysis method to detect and initialize key points by considering the dynamics in the scene, and a weighted key points strategy to model topologically varying dynamics by joint key points and weights optimization. Our method supports intuitive multi-dimensional (up to 3D) editing and can generate novel scenes that are unseen in the input sequence. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high-quality editing on various dynamic scenes and outperforms the state-of-the-art. Our code and captured data are available at https://chengwei-zheng.github.io/EditableNeRF/.

Recent work has shown that deep vision models tend to be overly dependent on low-level or "texture" features, leading to poor generalization. Various data augmentation strategies have been proposed to overcome this so-called texture bias in DNNs. We propose a simple, lightweight adversarial augmentation technique that explicitly incentivizes the network to learn holistic shapes for accurate prediction in an object classification setting. Our augmentations superpose edgemaps from one image onto another image with shuffled patches, using a randomly determined mixing proportion, with the image label of the edgemap image. To classify these augmented images, the model needs to not only detect and focus on edges but distinguish between relevant and spurious edges. We show that our augmentations significantly improve classification accuracy and robustness measures on a range of datasets and neural architectures. As an example, for ViT-S, We obtain absolute gains on classification accuracy gains up to 6%. We also obtain gains of up to 28% and 8.5% on natural adversarial and out-of-distribution datasets like ImageNet-A (for ViTB) and ImageNet-R (for ViT-S), respectively. Analysis using a range of probe datasets shows substantially increased shape sensitivity in our trained models, explaining the observed improvement in robustness and classification accuracy.

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach that improves continual test-time adaptation (TTA) in a memory-efficient manner. TTA may primarily be conducted on edge devices with limited memory, so reducing memory is crucial but has been overlooked in previous TTA studies. In addition, long-term adaptation often leads to catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation, which hinders applying TTA in real-world deployments. Our approach consists of two components to address these issues. First, we present lightweight meta networks that can adapt the frozen original networks to the target domain. This novel architecture minimizes memory consumption by decreasing the size of intermediate activations required for backpropagation. Second, our novel self-distilled regularization controls the output of the meta networks not to deviate significantly from the output of the frozen original networks, thereby preserving well-trained knowledge from the source domain. Without additional memory, this regularization prevents error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting, resulting in stable performance even in long-term test-time adaptation. We demonstrate that our simple yet effective strategy outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Notably, our proposed method with ResNet-50 and WideResNet-40 takes 86% and 80% less memory than the recent state-of-the-art method, CoTTA.

Experience precedes understanding. Humans constantly explore and learn about their environment out of curiosity, gather information, and update their models of the world. On the other hand, machines are either trained to learn passively from static and fixed datasets, or taught to complete specific goal-conditioned tasks. To encourage the development of exploratory interactive agents, we present the EXCALIBUR benchmark. EXCALIBUR allows agents to explore their environment for long durations and then query their understanding of the physical world via inquiries like: "is the small heavy red bowl made from glass?" or "is there a silver spoon heavier than the egg?". This design encourages agents to perform free-form home exploration without myopia induced by goal conditioning. Once the agents have answered a series of questions, they can renter the scene to refine their knowledge, update their beliefs, and improve their performance on the questions. Our experiments demonstrate the challenges posed by this dataset for the present-day state-of-the-art embodied systems and the headroom afforded to develop new innovative methods. Finally, we present a virtual reality interface that enables humans to seamlessly interact within the simulated world and use it to gather human performance measures. EXCALIBUR affords unique challenges in comparison to present-day benchmarks and represents the next frontier for embodied AI research.

We develop a novel framework for single-scene video anomaly localization that allows for human-understandable reasons for the decisions the system makes. We first learn general representations of objects and their motions (using deep networks) and then use these representations to build a high-level, location-dependent model of any particular scene. This model can be used to detect anomalies in new videos of the same scene. Importantly, our approach is explainable -- our high-level appearance and motion features can provide human-understandable reasons for why any part of a video is classified as normal or anomalous. We conduct experiments on standard video anomaly detection datasets (Street Scene, CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech and UCSD Ped1, Ped2) and show significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art. All of our code and extra datasets will be made publicly available.

Machine unlearning can fortify the privacy and security of machine learning applications. Unfortunately, the exact unlearning approaches are inefficient, and the approximate unlearning approaches are unsuitable for complicated CNNs. Moreover, the approximate approaches have serious security flaws because even unlearning completely different data points can produce the same contribution estimation as unlearning the target data points. To address the above problems, we try to define machine unlearning from the knowledge perspective, and we propose a knowledge-level machine unlearning method, namely ERM-KTP. Specifically, we propose an entanglement-reduced mask (ERM) structure to reduce the knowledge entanglement among classes during the training phase. When receiving the unlearning requests, we transfer the knowledge of the non-target data points from the original model to the unlearned model and meanwhile prohibit the knowledge of the target data points via our proposed knowledge transfer and prohibition (KTP) method. Finally, we will get the unlearned model as the result and delete the original model to accomplish the unlearning process. Especially, our proposed ERM-KTP is an interpretable unlearning method because the ERM structure and the crafted masks in KTP can explicitly explain the operation and the effect of unlearning data points. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, high fidelity, and scalability of the ERM-KTP unlearning method.