CVPR 2024 Papers

With the prevalence of the Pretraining-Finetuning paradigm in transfer learning the robustness of downstream tasks has become a critical concern. In this work we delve into adversarial robustness in transfer learning and reveal the critical role of initialization including both the pretrained model and the linear head. First we discover the necessity of an adversarially robust pretrained model. Specifically we reveal that with a standard pretrained model Parameter-Efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods either fail to be adversarially robust or continue to exhibit significantly degraded adversarial robustness on downstream tasks even with adversarial training during finetuning. Leveraging a robust pretrained model surprisingly we observe that a simple linear probing can outperform full finetuning and other PEFT methods with random initialization on certain datasets. We further identify that linear probing excels in preserving robustness from the robust pretraining. Based on this we propose Robust Linear Initialization (RoLI) for adversarial finetuning which initializes the linear head with the weights obtained by adversarial linear probing to maximally inherit the robustness from pretraining. Across five different image classification datasets we demonstrate the effectiveness of RoLI and achieve new state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/DongXzz/RoLI.

Recent strides in the development of diffusion models exemplified by advancements such as Stable Diffusion have underscored their remarkable prowess in generating visually compelling images. However the imperative of achieving a seamless alignment between the generated image and the provided prompt persists as a formidable challenge. This paper traces the root of these difficulties to invalid initial noise and proposes a solution in the form of Initial Noise Optimization (InitNO) a paradigm that refines this noise. Considering text prompts not all random noises are effective in synthesizing semantically-faithful images. We design the cross-attention response score and the self-attention conflict score to evaluate the initial noise bifurcating the initial latent space into valid and invalid sectors. A strategically crafted noise optimization pipeline is developed to guide the initial noise towards valid regions. Our method validated through rigorous experimentation shows a commendable proficiency in generating images in strict accordance with text prompts. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiefan-guo/initno.

Recently infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has been dominated by deep-learning-based methods. However these methods mainly focus on the design of complex model structures to extract discriminative features leaving the loss functions for IRSTD under-explored. For example the widely used Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice losses lack sensitivity to the scales and locations of targets limiting the detection performance of detectors. In this paper we focus on boosting detection performance with a more effective loss but a simpler model structure. Specifically we first propose a novel Scale and Location Sensitive (SLS) loss to handle the limitations of existing losses: 1) for scale sensitivity we compute a weight for the IoU loss based on target scales to help the detector distinguish targets with different scales: 2) for location sensitivity we introduce a penalty term based on the center points of targets to help the detector localize targets more precisely. Then we design a simple Multi-Scale Head to the plain U-Net (MSHNet). By applying SLS loss to each scale of the predictions our MSHNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. In addition the detection performance of existing detectors can be further improved when trained with our SLS loss demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of our SLS loss. The code is available at https://github.com/ying-fu/MSHNet.

Infrared physical adversarial examples are of great significance for studying the security of infrared AI systems that are widely used in our lives such as autonomous driving. Previous infrared physical attacks mainly focused on 2D infrared pedestrian detection which may not fully manifest its destructiveness to AI systems. In this work we propose a physical attack method against infrared detectors based on 3D modeling which is applied to a real car. The goal is to design a set of infrared adversarial stickers to make cars invisible to infrared detectors at various viewing angles distances and scenes. We build a 3D infrared car model with real infrared characteristics and propose an infrared adversarial pattern generation method based on 3D mesh shadow. We propose a 3D control points-based mesh smoothing algorithm and use a set of smoothness loss functions to enhance the smoothness of adversarial meshes and facilitate the sticker implementation. Besides We designed the aluminum stickers and conducted physical experiments on two real Mercedes-Benz A200L cars. Our adversarial stickers hid the cars from Faster RCNN an object detector at various viewing angles distances and scenes. The attack success rate (ASR) was 91.49% for real cars. In comparison the ASRs of random stickers and no sticker were only 6.21% and 0.66% respectively. In addition the ASRs of the designed stickers against six unseen object detectors such as YOLOv3 and Deformable DETR were between 73.35%-95.80% showing good transferability of the attack performance across detectors.

We introduce Infinigen Indoors a Blender-based procedural generator of photorealistic indoor scenes. It builds upon the existing Infinigen system which focuses on natural scenes but expands its coverage to indoor scenes by introducing a diverse library of procedural indoor assets including furniture architecture elements appliances and other day-to-day objects. It also introduces a constraint-based arrangement system which consists of a domain-specific language for expressing diverse constraints on scene composition and a solver that generates scene compositions that maximally satisfy the constraints. We provide an export tool that allows the generated 3D objects and scenes to be directly used for training embodied agents in real-time simulators such as Omniverse and Unreal. Infinigen Indoors is open-sourced under the BSD license. Please visit infinigen.org for code and videos.

Due to high expense of human labor one major challenge for semantic segmentation in real-world scenarios is the lack of sufficient pixel-level labels which is more serious when processing video data. To exploit unlabeled data for model training semi-supervised learning methods attempt to construct pseudo labels or various auxiliary constraints as supervision signals. However most of them just process video data as a set of independent images in a per-frame manner. The rich temporal relationships are ignored which can serve as valuable clues for representation learning. Besides this per-frame recognition paradigm is quite different from that of humans. Actually benefited from the internal temporal relevance of video data human would wisely use the distinguished semantic concepts in historical frames to aid the recognition of the current frame. Motivated by this observation we propose a novel temporally-dependent classifier (TDC) to mimic the human-like recognition procedure. Comparing to the conventional classifier TDC can guide the model to learn a group of temporally-consistent semantic concepts across frames which essentially provides an implicit and effective constraint. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid and the results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method to previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/jfzhuang/TDC.

Continual learning requires the model to learn multiple tasks sequentially. In continual learning the model should possess the ability to maintain its performance on old tasks (stability) and the ability to adapt to new tasks continuously (plasticity). Recently parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) which involves freezing a pre-trained model and injecting a small number of learnable parameters to adapt to downstream tasks has gained increasing popularity in continual learning. Although existing continual learning methods based on PEFT have demonstrated superior performance compared to those not based on PEFT most of them do not consider how to eliminate the interference of the new task on the old tasks which inhibits the model from making a good trade-off between stability and plasticity. In this work we propose a new PEFT method called interference-free low-rank adaptation (InfLoRA) for continual learning. InfLoRA injects a small number of parameters to reparameterize the pre-trained weights and shows that fine-tuning these injected parameters is equivalent to fine-tuning the pre-trained weights within a subspace. Furthermore InfLoRA designs this subspace to eliminate the interference of the new task on the old tasks making a good trade-off between stability and plasticity. Experimental results show that InfLoRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art continual learning methods on multiple datasets.

We present a novel semantic segmentation approach for incremental nuclei segmentation from histopathological images which is a very challenging task as we have to incrementally optimize existing models to make them perform well in both old and new classes without using training samples of old classes. Yet it is an indispensable component of computer-aided diagnosis systems. The proposed approach has two key techniques. First we propose a new future-class awareness mechanism by separating some potential regions for future classes from background based on their similarities to both old and new classes in the representation space. With this mechanism we can not only reserve more parameter space for future updates but also enhance the representation capability of learned features. We further propose an innovative compatibility-inspired distillation scheme to make our model take full advantage of the knowledge learned by the old model. We conducted extensive experiments on two famous histopathological datasets and the results demonstrate the proposed approach achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/why19991/InSeg.

Existing object recognition models have been shown to lack robustness in diverse geographical scenarios due to domain shifts in design and context. Class representations need to be adapted to more accurately reflect an object concept under these shifts. In the absence of training data from target geographies we hypothesize that geographically diverse descriptive knowledge of categories can enhance robustness. For this purpose we explore the feasibility of probing a large language model for geography-based object knowledge and we examine the effects of integrating knowledge into zero-shot and learnable soft prompting with CLIP. Within this exploration we propose geography knowledge regularization to ensure that soft prompts trained on a source set of geographies generalize to an unseen target set. Accuracy gains over prompting baselines on DollarStreet while training only on Europe data are up to +2.8/1.2/1.6 on target data from Africa/Asia/Americas and +4.6 overall on the hardest classes. Competitive performance is shown vs. few-shot target training and analysis is provided to direct future study of geographical robustness.

Inspired by the long-range modeling ability of ViTs large-kernel convolutions are widely studied and adopted recently to enlarge the receptive field and improve model performance like the remarkable work ConvNeXt which employs 7x7 depthwise convolution. Although such depthwise operator only consumes a few FLOPs it largely harms the model efficiency on powerful computing devices due to the high memory access costs. For example ConvNeXt-T has similar FLOPs with ResNet-50 but only achieves 60% throughputs when trained on A100 GPUs with full precision. Although reducing the kernel size of ConvNeXt can improve speed it results in significant performance degradation which poses a challenging problem: How to speed up large-kernel-based CNN models while preserving their performance. To tackle this issue inspired by Inceptions we propose to decompose large-kernel depthwise convolution into four parallel branches along channel dimension i.e. small square kernel two orthogonal band kernels and an identity mapping. With this new Inception depthwise convolution we build a series of networks namely IncepitonNeXt which not only enjoy high throughputs but also maintain competitive performance. For instance InceptionNeXt-T achieves 1.6x higher training throughputs than ConvNeX-T as well as attains 0.2% top-1 accuracy improvement on ImageNet-1K. We anticipate InceptionNeXt can serve as an economical baseline for future architecture design to reduce carbon footprint.

We propose InNeRF360 an automatic system that accurately removes text-specified objects from 360-degree Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). The challenge is to effectively remove objects while inpainting perceptually consistent content for the missing regions which is particularly demanding for existing NeRF models due to their implicit volumetric representation. Moreover unbounded scenes are more prone to floater artifacts in the inpainted region than frontal-facing scenes as the change of object appearance and background across views is more sensitive to inaccurate segmentations and inconsistent inpainting. With a trained NeRF and a text description our method efficiently removes specified objects and inpaints visually consistent content without artifacts. We apply depth-space warping to enforce consistency across multiview text-encoded segmentations and then refine the inpainted NeRF model using perceptual priors and 3D diffusion-based geometric priors to ensure visual plausibility. Through extensive experiments in segmentation and inpainting on 360-degree and frontal-facing NeRFs we show that InNeRF360 is effective and enhances NeRF's editability. Project page: https://ivrl.github.io/InNeRF360.

Dual-camera compressive hyperspectral imaging (DCCHI) offers the capability to reconstruct 3D hyperspectral image (HSI) by fusing compressive and panchromatic (PAN) image which has shown great potential for snapshot hyperspectral imaging in practice. In this paper we introduce a novel DCCHI reconstruction network intra-inter similarity exploiting Transformer (In2SET). Our key insight is to make full use of the PAN image to assist the reconstruction. To this end we propose to use the intra-similarity within the PAN image as a proxy for approximating the intra-similarity in the original HSI thereby offering an enhanced content prior for more accurate HSI reconstruction. Furthermore we propose to use the inter-similarity to align the features between HSI and PAN images thereby maintaining semantic consistency between the two modalities during the reconstruction process. By integrating In2SET into a PAN-guided deep unrolling (PGDU) framework our method substantially enhances the spatial-spectral fidelity and detail of the reconstructed images providing a more comprehensive and accurate depiction of the scene. Experiments conducted on both real and simulated datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction quality and computational complexity. The code is available at https://github.com/2JONAS/In2SET.

To alleviate the utility degradation of deep learning image classification with differential privacy (DP) employing extra public data or pre-trained models has been widely explored. Recently the use of in-distribution public data has been investigated where tiny subsets of datasets are released publicly. In this paper we investigate a framework that leverages recent diffusion models to amplify the information of public data. Subsequently we identify data diversity and generalization gap between public and private data as critical factors addressing the limited public data. While assuming 4% of training data as public our method achieves 85.48% on CIFAR-10 with a privacy budget of ?=2 without employing extra public data for training.

3D-aware GANs offer new capabilities for view synthesis while preserving the editing functionalities of their 2D counterparts. GAN inversion is a crucial step that seeks the latent code to reconstruct input images or videos subsequently enabling diverse editing tasks through manipulation of this latent code. However a model pre-trained on a particular dataset (e.g. FFHQ) often has difficulty reconstructing images with out-of-distribution (OOD) objects such as faces with heavy make-up or occluding objects. We address this issue by explicitly modeling OOD objects from the input in 3D-aware GANs. Our core idea is to represent the image using two individual neural radiance fields: one for the in-distribution content and the other for the out-of-distribution object. The final reconstruction is achieved by optimizing the composition of these two radiance fields with carefully designed regularization. We demonstrate that our explicit decomposition alleviates the inherent trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and editability. We evaluate reconstruction accuracy and editability of our method on challenging real face images and videos and showcase favorable results against other baselines.

We introduce in-context matting a novel task setting of image matting. Given a reference image of a certain foreground and guided priors such as points scribbles and masks in-context matting enables automatic alpha estimation on a batch of target images of the same foreground category without additional auxiliary input. This setting marries good performance in auxiliary input-based matting and ease of use in automatic matting which finds a good trade-off between customization and automation. To overcome the key challenge of accurate foreground matching we introduce IconMatting an in-context matting model built upon a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. Conditioned on inter- and intra-similarity matching IconMatting can make full use of reference context to generate accurate target alpha mattes. To benchmark the task we also introduce a novel testing dataset ICM-57 covering 57 groups of real-world images. Quantitative and qualitative results on the ICM-57 testing set show that IconMatting rivals the accuracy of trimap-based matting while retaining the automation level akin to automatic matting. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/in-context-matting.

Neural field is an emerging paradigm in data representation that trains a neural network to approximate the given signal. A key obstacle that prevents its widespread adoption is the encoding speed---generating neural fields requires an overfitting of a neural network which can take a significant number of SGD steps to reach the desired fidelity level. In this paper we delve into the impacts of data transformations on the speed of neural field training specifically focusing on how permuting pixel locations affect the convergence speed of SGD. Counterintuitively we find that randomly permuting the pixel locations can considerably accelerate the training. To explain this phenomenon we examine the neural field training through the lens of PSNR curves loss landscapes and error patterns. Our analyses suggest that the random pixel permutations remove the easy-to-fit patterns which facilitate easy optimization in the early stage but hinder capturing fine details of the signal.

The success of large language models has inspired the computer vision community to explore image segmentation foundation model that is able to zero/few-shot generalize through prompt engineering. Segment-Anything (SAM) among others is the state-of-the-art image segmentation foundation model demonstrating strong zero/few-shot generalization. Despite the success recent studies reveal the weakness of SAM under strong distribution shift. In particular SAM performs awkwardly on corrupted natural images camouflaged images medical images etc. Motivated by the observations we aim to develop a self-training based strategy to adapt SAM to target distribution. Given the unique challenges of large source dataset high computation cost and incorrect pseudo label we propose a weakly supervised self-training architecture with anchor regularization and low-rank finetuning to improve the robustness and computation efficiency of adaptation. We validate the effectiveness on 5 types of downstream segmentation tasks including natural clean/corrupted images medical images camouflaged images and robotic images. Our proposed method is task-agnostic in nature and outperforms pre-trained SAM and state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on almost all downstream tasks with the same testing prompt inputs.

Visual scenes are naturally organized in a hierarchy where a coarse semantic is recursively comprised of several fine details. Exploring such a visual hierarchy is crucial to recognize the complex relations of visual elements leading to a comprehensive scene understanding. In this paper we propose a Visual Hierarchy Mapper (Hi-Mapper) a novel approach for enhancing the structured understanding of the pre-trained Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Hi-Mapper investigates the hierarchical organization of the visual scene by 1) pre-defining a hierarchy tree through the encapsulation of probability densities; and 2) learning the hierarchical relations in hyperbolic space with a novel hierarchical contrastive loss. The pre-defined hierarchy tree recursively interacts with the visual features of the pre-trained DNNs through hierarchy decomposition and encoding procedures thereby effectively identifying the visual hierarchy and enhancing the recognition of an entire scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-Mapper significantly enhances the representation capability of DNNs leading to an improved performance on various tasks including image classification and dense prediction tasks.