CVPR 2024 Papers

This paper introduces Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation (ULDA) a novel task setting that enables a single model to adapt to diverse target domains without explicit domain-ID knowledge. We identify the constraints in the existing language-driven zero-shot domain adaptation task particularly the requirement for domain IDs and domain-specific models which may restrict flexibility and scalability. To overcome these issues we propose a new framework for ULDA consisting of Hierarchical Context Alignment (HCA) Domain Consistent Representation Learning (DCRL) and Text-Driven Rectifier (TDR). These components work synergistically to align simulated features with target text across multiple visual levels retain semantic correlations between different regional representations and rectify biases between simulated and real target visual features respectively. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that this framework achieves competitive performance in both settings surpassing even the model that requires domain-ID showcasing its superiority and generalization ability. The proposed method is not only effective but also maintains practicality and efficiency as it does not introduce additional computational costs during inference. The code is available on the project website.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims at adapting a model pre-trained on the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing methods usually focus on improving TTA performance under covariate shifts while neglecting semantic shifts. In this paper we delve into a realistic open-set TTA setting where the target domain may contain samples from unknown classes. Many state-of-the-art closed-set TTA methods perform poorly when applied to open-set scenarios which can be attributed to the inaccurate estimation of data distribution and model confidence. To address these issues we propose a simple but effective framework called unified entropy optimization (UniEnt) which is capable of simultaneously adapting to covariate-shifted in-distribution (csID) data and detecting covariate-shifted out-of-distribution (csOOD) data. Specifically UniEnt first mines pseudo-csID and pseudo-csOOD samples from test data followed by entropy minimization on the pseudo-csID data and entropy maximization on the pseudo-csOOD data. Furthermore we introduce UniEnt+ to alleviate the noise caused by hard data partition leveraging sample-level confidence. Extensive experiments on CIFAR benchmarks and Tiny-ImageNet-C show the superiority of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/gaozhengqing/UniEnt.

Despite the recent advances in unified image segmentation (IS) developing a unified video segmentation (VS) model remains a challenge. This is mainly because generic category-specified VS tasks need to detect all objects and track them across consecutive frames while prompt-guided VS tasks require re-identifying the target with visual/text prompts throughout the entire video making it hard to handle the different tasks with the same architecture. We make an attempt to address these issues and present a novel unified VS architecture namely UniVS by using prompts as queries. UniVS averages the prompt features of the target from previous frames as its initial query to explicitly decode masks and introduces a target-wise prompt cross-attention layer in the mask decoder to integrate prompt features in the memory pool. By taking the predicted masks of entities from previous frames as their visual prompts UniVS converts different VS tasks into prompt-guided target segmentation eliminating the heuristic inter-frame matching process. Our framework not only unifies the different VS tasks but also naturally achieves universal training and testing ensuring robust performance across different scenarios. UniVS shows a commendable balance between performance and universality on 10 challenging VS benchmarks covering video instance semantic panoptic object and referring segmentation tasks. Code can be found at https://github.com/MinghanLi/UniVS.

Large-kernel convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have recently received extensive research attention but two unresolved and critical issues demand further investigation. 1) The architectures of existing large-kernel ConvNets largely follow the design principles of conventional ConvNets or transformers while the architectural design for large-kernel ConvNets remains under-addressed. 2) As transformers have dominated multiple modalities it remains to be investigated whether ConvNets also have a strong universal perception ability in domains beyond vision. In this paper we contribute from two aspects. 1) We propose four architectural guidelines for designing large-kernel ConvNets the core of which is to exploit the essential characteristics of large kernels that distinguish them from small kernels - they can see wide without going deep. Following such guidelines our proposed large-kernel ConvNet shows leading performance in image recognition (ImageNet accuracy of 88.0% ADE20K mIoU of 55.6% and COCO box AP of 56.4%) demonstrating better performance and higher speed than the recent powerful competitors. 2) We discover large kernels are the key to unlocking the exceptional performance of ConvNets in domains where they were originally not proficient. With certain modality-related preprocessing approaches the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on time-series forecasting and audio recognition tasks even without modality-specific customization to the architecture. All the code and models are publicly available on GitHub and Huggingface.

Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) i.e. fine-tuning a small portion of parameters is an effective strategy for adapting pre-trained models to downstream domains. To further reduce the memory demand recent PETL works focus on the more valuable memory-efficient characteristic. In this paper we argue that the scalability adaptability and generalizability of state-of-the-art methods are hindered by structural dependency and pertinency on specific pre-trained backbones. To this end we propose a new memory-efficient PETL strategy Universal Parallel Tuning (UniPT) to mitigate these weaknesses. Specifically we facilitate the transfer process via a lightweight and learnable parallel network which consists of: 1) A parallel interaction module that decouples the sequential connections and processes the intermediate activations detachedly from the pre-trained network. 2) A confidence aggregation module that learns optimal strategies adaptively for integrating cross-layer features. We evaluate UniPT with different backbones (e.g. T5 VSEinfinity CLIP4Clip Clip-ViL and MDETR) on various vision-and-language and pure NLP tasks. Extensive ablations on 18 datasets have validated that UniPT can not only dramatically reduce memory consumption and outperform the best competitor but also achieve competitive performance over other plain PETL methods with lower training memory overhead. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/UniPT.

In the context of autonomous driving the significance of effective feature learning is widely acknowledged. While conventional 3D self-supervised pre-training methods have shown widespread success most methods follow the ideas originally designed for 2D images. In this paper we present UniPAD a novel self-supervised learning paradigm applying 3D volumetric differentiable rendering. UniPAD implicitly encodes 3D space facilitating the reconstruction of continuous 3D shape structures and the intricate appearance characteristics of their 2D projections. The flexibility of our method enables seamless integration into both 2D and 3D frameworks enabling a more holistic comprehension of the scenes. We manifest the feasibility and effectiveness of UniPAD by conducting extensive experiments on various 3D perception tasks. Our method significantly improves lidar- camera- and lidar-camera-based baseline by 9.1 7.7 and 6.9 NDS respectively. Notably our pre-training pipeline achieves 73.2 NDS for 3D object detection and 79.4 mIoU for 3D semantic segmentation on the nuScenes validation set achieving state-of-the-art results in comparison with previous methods.

LiDAR semantic segmentation (LSS) is a critical task in autonomous driving and has achieved promising progress. However prior LSS methods are conventionally investigated and evaluated on datasets within the same domain in clear weather. The robustness of LSS models in unseen scenes and all weather conditions is crucial for ensuring safety and reliability in real applications. To this end we propose UniMix a universal method that enhances the adaptability and generalizability of LSS models. UniMix first leverages physically valid adverse weather simulation to construct a Bridge Domain which serves to bridge the domain gap between the clear weather scenes and the adverse weather scenes. Then a Universal Mixing operator is defined regarding spatial intensity and semantic distributions to create the intermediate domain with mixed samples from given domains. Integrating the proposed two techniques into a teacher-student framework UniMix efficiently mitigates the domain gap and enables LSS models to learn weather-robust and domain-invariant representations. We devote UniMix to two main setups: 1) unsupervised domain adaption adapting the model from the clear weather source domain to the adverse weather target domain; 2) domain generalization learning a model that generalizes well to unseen scenes in adverse weather. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UniMix across different tasks and datasets all achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released.

Human image editing includes tasks like changing a person's pose their clothing or editing the image according to a text prompt. However prior work often tackles these tasks separately overlooking the benefit of mutual reinforcement from learning them jointly. In this paper we propose UniHuman a unified model that addresses multiple facets of human image editing in real-world settings. To enhance the model's generation quality and generalization capacity we leverage guidance from human visual encoders and introduce a lightweight pose-warping module that can exploit different pose representations accommodating unseen textures and patterns. Furthermore to bridge the disparity between existing human editing benchmarks with real-world data we curated 400K high-quality human image-text pairs for training and collected 2K human images for out-of-domain testing both encompassing diverse clothing styles backgrounds and age groups. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets demonstrate that UniHuman outperforms task-specific models by a significant margin. In user studies UniHuman is preferred by the users in an average of 77% of cases. Our project is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/UniHuman.

Garment manipulation (e.g. unfolding folding and hanging clothes) is essential for future robots to accomplish home-assistant tasks while highly challenging due to the diversity of garment configurations geometries and deformations. Although able to manipulate similar shaped garments in a certain task previous works mostly have to design different policies for different tasks could not generalize to garments with diverse geometries and often rely heavily on human-annotated data. In this paper we leverage the property that garments in a certain category have similar structures and then learn the topological dense (point-level) visual correspondence among garments in the category level with different deformations in the self-supervised manner. The topological correspondence can be easily adapted to the functional correspondence to guide the manipulation policies for various downstream tasks within only one or few-shot demonstrations. Experiments over garments in 3 different categories on 3 representative tasks in diverse scenarios using one or two arms taking one or more steps inputting flat or messy garments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: https://warshallrho.github.io/unigarmentmanip.

This paper introduces a novel unified representation of diffusion models for image generation and segmentation. Specifically we use a colormap to represent entity-level masks addressing the challenge of varying entity numbers while aligning the representation closely with the image RGB domain. Two novel modules including the location-aware color palette and progressive dichotomy module are proposed to support our mask representation. On the one hand a location-aware palette guarantees the colors' consistency to entities' locations. On the other hand the progressive dichotomy module can efficiently decode the synthesized colormap to high-quality entity-level masks in a depth-first binary search without knowing the cluster numbers. To tackle the issue of lacking large-scale segmentation training data we employ an inpainting pipeline and then improve the flexibility of diffusion models across various tasks including inpainting image synthesis referring segmentation and entity segmentation. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficiency of our approach demonstrating comparable segmentation mask quality to state-of-the-art and adaptability to multiple tasks.

We present UniBind a flexible and efficient approach that learns a unified representation space for seven diverse modalities-- images text audio point cloud thermal video and event data. Existing works eg. ImageBind treat the image as the central modality and build an image-centered representation space; however the space may be sub-optimal as it leads to an unbalanced representation space among all modalities. Moreover the category names are directly used to extract text embeddings for the downstream tasks making it hardly possible to represent the semantics of multi-modal data. The 'out-of-the-box' insight of our UniBind is to make the alignment center modality-agnostic and further learn a unified and balanced representation space empowered by the large language models (LLMs). UniBind is superior in its flexible application to all CLIP-style models and delivers remarkable performance boosts. To make this possible we 1) construct a knowledge base of text embeddings with the help of LLMs and multi-modal LLMs; 2) adaptively build LLM-augmented class-wise embedding center on top of the knowledge base and encoded visual embeddings; 3) align all the embeddings to the LLM-augmented embedding center via contrastive learning to achieve a unified and balanced representation space. UniBind shows strong zero-shot recognition performance gains over prior arts by an average of 6.36%. Finally we achieve new state-of-the-art performance eg. a 6.75% gain on ImageNet on the multi-modal fine-tuning setting while reducing 90% of the learnable parameters.

The training of contemporary deep learning models heavily relies on publicly available data posing a risk of unauthorized access to online data and raising concerns about data privacy. Current approaches to creating unlearnable data involve incorporating small specially designed noises but these methods strictly limit data usability overlooking its potential usage in authorized scenarios. In this paper we extend the concept of unlearnable data to conditional data learnability and introduce UnGeneralizable Examples (UGEs). UGEs exhibit learnability for authorized users while maintaining unlearnability for potential hackers. The protector defines the authorized network and optimizes UGEs to match the gradients of the original data and its ungeneralizable version ensuring learnability. To prevent unauthorized learning UGEs are trained by maximizing a designated distance loss in a common feature space. Additionally to further safeguard the authorized side from potential attacks we introduce additional undistillation optimization. Experimental results on multiple datasets and various networks demonstrate that the proposed UGEs framework preserves data usability while reducing training performance on hacker networks even under different types of attacks.

Computer vision applications predict on digital images acquired by a camera from physical scenes through light. However conventional robustness benchmarks rely on perturbations in digitized images diverging from distribution shifts occurring in the image acquisition process. To bridge this gap we introduce a new distribution shift dataset ImageNet-ES comprising variations in environmental and camera sensor factors by directly capturing 202k images with a real camera in a controllable testbed. With the new dataset we evaluate out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and model robustness. We find that existing OOD detection methods do not cope with the covariate shifts in ImageNet-ES implying that the definition and detection of OOD should be revisited to embrace real-world distribution shifts. We also observe that the model becomes more robust in both ImageNet-C and -ES by learning environment and sensor variations in addition to existing digital augmentations. Lastly our results suggest that effective shift mitigation via camera sensor control can significantly improve performance without increasing model size. With these findings our benchmark may aid future research on robustness OOD and camera sensor control for computer vision. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Edw2n/ImageNet-ES.

Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) is an emerging and challenging research area that addresses the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) without source data. Though numerous successful methods have been proposed for SFDA a theoretical understanding of why these methods work well is still absent. In this paper we shed light on the theoretical perspective of existing SFDA methods. Specifically we find that SFDA loss functions comprising discriminability and diversity losses work in the same way as the training objective in the theory of self-training based on the expansion assumption which shows the existence of the target error bound. This finding brings two novel insights that enable us to build an improved SFDA method comprising 1) Model Training with Auto-Adjusting Diversity Constraint and 2) Augmentation Training with Teacher-Student Framework yielding a better recognition performance. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the validity of the theoretical analysis and our method.

We present a highly scalable self-training framework for incrementally adapting vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving policies in a semi-supervised manner i.e. over a continual stream of incoming video data. To facilitate large-scale model training (e.g. open web or unlabeled data) we do not assume access to ground-truth labels and instead estimate pseudo-label policy targets for each video. Our framework comprises three key components: knowledge distillation a sample purification module and an exploration and knowledge retention mechanism. First given sequential image frames we pseudo-label the data and estimate uncertainty using an ensemble of inverse dynamics models. The uncertainty is used to select the most informative samples to add to an experience replay buffer. We specifically select high-uncertainty pseudo-labels to facilitate the exploration and learning of new and diverse driving skills. However in contrast to prior work in continual learning that assumes ground-truth labeled samples the uncertain pseudo-labels can introduce significant noise. Thus we also pair the exploration with a label refinement module which makes use of consistency constraints to re-label the noisy exploratory samples and effectively learn from diverse data. Trained as a complete never-ending learning system we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on training from domain-changing data as well as millions of images from the open web.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can effectively address domain gap issues in real-world image Super-Resolution (SR) by accessing both the source and target data. Considering privacy policies or transmission restrictions of source data in practical scenarios we propose a SOurce-free Domain Adaptation framework for image SR (SODA-SR) to address this issue i.e. adapt a source-trained model to a target domain with only unlabeled target data. SODA-SR leverages the source-trained model to generate refined pseudo-labels for teacher-student learning. To better utilize pseudo-labels we propose a novel wavelet-based augmentation method named Wavelet Augmentation Transformer (WAT) which can be flexibly incorporated with existing networks to implicitly produce useful augmented data. WAT learns low-frequency information of varying levels across diverse samples which is aggregated efficiently via deformable attention. Furthermore an uncertainty-aware self-training mechanism is proposed to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels with inaccurate predictions being rectified by uncertainty estimation. To acquire better SR results and avoid overfitting pseudo-labels several regularization losses are proposed to constrain target LR and SR images in the frequency domain. Experiments show that without accessing source data SODA-SR outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods in both synthetic->real and real->real adaptation settings and is not constrained by specific network architectures.

In ill-posed inverse problems it is commonly desirable to obtain insight into the full spectrum of plausible solutions rather than extracting only a single reconstruction. Information about the plausible solutions and their likelihoods is encoded in the posterior distribution. However for high-dimensional data this distribution is challenging to visualize. In this work we introduce a new approach for estimating and visualizing posteriors by employing energy-based models (EBMs) over low-dimensional subspaces. Specifically we train a conditional EBM that receives an input measurement and a set of directions that span some low-dimensional subspace of solutions and outputs the probability density function of the posterior within that space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across a diverse range of datasets and image restoration problems showcasing its strength in uncertainty quantification and visualization. As we show our method outperforms a baseline that projects samples from a diffusion-based posterior sampler while being orders of magnitude faster. Furthermore it is more accurate than a baseline that assumes a Gaussian posterior.