ECCV 2020 Papers

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have dominated as the best performers in machine learning, but can be challenged by adversarial attacks. In this paper, we defend against adversarial attacks using neural architecture search (NAS) which is based on a comprehensive search of denoising blocks, weight-free operations, Gabor filters and convolutions. The resulting anti-bandit NAS (ABanditNAS) incorporates a new operation evaluation measure and search process based on the lower and upper confidence bounds (LCB and UCB). Unlike the conventional bandit algorithm using UCB for evaluation only, we use UCB to abandon arms for search efficiency and LCB for a fair competition between arms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ABanditNAS is about twice as fast as the state-of-the-art NAS method, while achieving an $8.73\%$ improvement over prior arts on CIFAR-10 under PGD-$7$."

In this work, we present a simple and general search space shrinking method, called Angle-Based search space Shrinking (ABS), for Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Our approach progressively simplifies the original search space by dropping unpromising candidates, thus can reduce difficulties for existing NAS methods to find superior architectures. In particular, we propose an angle-based metric to guide the shrinking process. We provide comprehensive evidences showing that, in weight-sharing supernet, the proposed metric is more stable and accurate than accuracy-based and magnitude-based metrics to predict the capability of child models. We also show that the angle-based metric can converge fast while training supernet, enabling us to get promising shrunk search spaces efficiently. ABS can easily apply to most of NAS approaches (e.g. SPOS, FairNAS, ProxylessNAS, DARTS and PDARTS). Comprehensive experiments show that ABS can dramatically enhance existing NAS approaches by providing a promising shrunk search space."

Trauma PXR are essential for instantaneous pelvic bone fracture detection. However, small, pathologically critical fractures can be missed, even by experienced clinicians, under the very limited diagnosis times allowed in urgent care. As a result, fracture CAD has very high demands to save time and assist physicians to detect (otherwise) missed fractures more accurately and reliably. In this work, we present a new approach to fracture detection that uses a Siamese network to take advantage of the anatomical symmetry of pelvic structures to improve fracture detection. We show that symmetric alignment at the network feature level makes Siamese learning more spatially accurate and also reduces the influence of imaging artifacts. Metric learning on Siamese deep features further improves CAD differentiation power with the anatomical symmetry cue. We evaluate our method on 2,359 PXR patients, reporting an area under the ROC curve value of 0.9771, the highest among state-of-the-art fracture detection methods. "

Detecting objects in 3D LiDAR data is a core technology for autonomous driving and other robotics applications. Although LiDAR data is acquired over time, most of the 3D object detection algorithms propose object bounding boxes independently for each frame and neglect the useful information available in the temporal domain. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a sparse LSTM-based multi-frame 3d object detection algorithm. We use a U-Net style 3D sparse convolution network to extract features for each frame's LiDAR point-cloud. These features are fed to the LSTM module together with the hidden and memory features from last frame to predict the 3d objects in the current frame as well as hidden and memory features that are passed to the next frame. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset show that our algorithm outperforms the traditional frame by frame approach by 7.5% mAP@0.7 and other multi-frame approaches by 1.2% while using less memory and computation per frame. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use an LSTM for 3D object detection in sparse point clouds."

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for optimal solutions to submodular higher-order multi-label MRF-MAP energy functions which can handle practical computer vision problems with up to 16 labels and cliques of size 100. The algorithm uses a transformation which transforms a multi-label problem to a 2-label problem on a much larger clique. Earlier algorithms based on this transformation could not handle problems larger than 16 labels on cliques of size 4. The proposed algorithm optimizes the resultant 2-label problem using the submodular polyhedron based Min Norm Point algorithm. The task is challenging because the state space of the transformed problem has a very large number of invalid states. For polyhedral based algorithms the presence of invalid states poses a challenge as apart from numerical instability, the transformation also increases the dimension of the polyhedral space making the straightforward use of known algorithms impractical. The approach reported in this paper allows us to bypass the large costs associated with invalid configurations, resulting in a stable, practical, optimal and efficient inference algorithm that, in our experiments, gives high-quality outputs on problems like pixel-wise object segmentation and stereo matching."

Weight pruning has been widely acknowledged as a straightforward and effective method to eliminate redundancy in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), thereby achieving acceleration on various platforms. However, most of the pruning techniques are essentially trade-offs between model accuracy and regularity which lead to impaired inference accuracy and limited on-device acceleration performance. To solve the problem, we introduce a new sparsity dimension, namely pattern-based sparsity that comprises pattern and connectivity sparsity, and becoming both highly accurate and hardware friendly. With carefully designed patterns, the proposed pruning unprecedentedly and consistently achieves accuracy enhancement and better feature extraction ability on different DNN structures and datasets, and our pattern-aware pruning framework also achieves pattern library extraction, pattern selection, pattern and connectivity pruning and weight training simultaneously. Our approach on the new pattern-based sparsity naturally fits into compiler optimization for highly efficient DNN execution on mobile platforms. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that mobile devices achieve real-time inference for the large-scale DNN models thanks to the unique spatial property of pattern-based sparsity and the help of the code generation capability of compilers."

Few-shot learning aims to train efficient predictive models with a few examples. The lack of training data leads to poor models that perform high-variance or low-confidence predictions. In this paper, we propose to meta-learn the ensemble of epoch-wise empirical Bayes models (E3BM) to achieve robust predictions. ""Epoch-wise"" means that each training epoch has a Bayes model whose parameters are specifically learned and deployed. ""Empirical"" means that the hyperparameters, e.g., used for learning and ensembling the epoch-wise models, are generated by hyperprior learners conditional on task-specific data. We introduce four kinds of hyperprior learners by considering inductive vs. transductive, and epoch-dependent vs. epoch-independent, in the paradigm of meta-learning. We conduct extensive experiments for five-class few-shot learning tasks on three challenging benchmarks: miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and FC100, and achieve top performance using the epoch-dependent transductive hyperprior learner, which captures the richest information. Our ablation study shows that both ""epoch-wise ensemble"" and ""empirical"" encourage high efficiency and robustness in the model performance."

Nowadays rich description on detail images help users know more about the commodities. With the help of OCR technology, the description text can be detected and recognized as auxiliary information to remove the comprehending barriers among the visual impaired users. However, for lack of proper logical structure among these OCR text blocks, it is challenging to comprehend the detail images accurately. To tackle the above problems, we propose a novel end-to-end OCR text reorganizing model. Specifically, we create a Graph Neural Network with an attention map to encode the text blocks with visual layout features, with which an attention based sequence decoder inspired by the Pointer Network and a Sinkhorn global optimization will reorder the OCR text into a proper sequence. Experimental results illustrate that our model outperforms the other baselines, and the real experiment of the blind users' experience shows that our model improves their comprehension."

As machine learning models and dataset escalate in scales rapidly, the huge memory footprint impedes efficient training. Reversible operators can reduce memory consumption by discarding intermediate feature maps in forward computations and recover them via their inverse functions in the backward propagation. They save memory at the cost of computation overhead. However, current implementations of reversible layers mainly focus on saving memory usage with computation overhead neglected. In this work, we formulate the decision problem for reversible operators with training time as the objective function and memory usage as the constraint. By solving this problem, we can maximize the training throughput for reversible neural architectures. Our proposed framework fully automates this decision process, empowering researchers to develop and train reversible neural networks more efficiently."

The progressive clustering method and its variants, which iteratively generate pseudo labels for unlabeled data and perform feature learning, have shown great process in unsupervised person re-identification (re-id). However, they have an intrinsic problem of modeling the in-camera variability of images successfully, that is, pedestrian features extracted from the same camera tend to be clustered into the same class. This often results in a non-convergent model in the real world application of clustering based re-id models, leading to degenerated performance. In the present study, we propose an attention-driven two-stage clustering (ADTC) method to solve this problem. Specifically, our method consists of two strategies. Firstly, we use an unsupervised attention kernel to shift the learned features from the image background to the pedestrian foreground, which results in more informative clusters. Secondly, to aid the learning of the attention driven clustering model, we separate the clustering process into two stages. We first use kmeans to generate the centroids of clusters (stage 1) and then apply the k-reciprocal Jaccard distance (KRJD) metric to re-assign data points to each cluster (stage 2). By iteratively learning with the two strategies, the attentive regions are gradually shifted from the background to the foreground and the features become more discriminative. Using two benchmark datasets Market1501 and DukeMTMC, we demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches for person re-id."

Action assessment is a task of assessing the performance of an action. It is widely applicable to many real-world scenarios such as medical treatment and sporting events. However, existing methods for action assessment are mostly limited to individual actions, especially lacking modeling of the asymmetric relations among agents (e.g., between persons and objects); and this limitation undermines their ability to assess actions containing asymmetrically interactive motion patterns, since there always exists subordination between agents in many interactive actions. In this work, we model the asymmetric interactions among agents for action assessment. In particular, we propose an asymmetric interaction module (AIM), to explicitly model asymmetric interactions between intelligent agents within an action, where we group these agents into a primary one (e.g., human) and secondary ones (e.g., objects). We perform experiments on JIGSAWS dataset containing surgical actions, and additionally collect a new dataset, TASD-2, for interactive sporting actions. The experimental results on two interactive action datasets show the effectiveness of our model, and our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The extended experiment on AQA-7 dataset also demonstrates the generalization capability of our framework to conventional action assessment."

This paper studies the problem of sparse residual regression, i.e., learning a linear model using a norm that favors solutions in which the residuals are sparsely distributed. This is a common problem in a wide range of computer vision applications where a linear system has a lot more equations than unknowns and we wish to find the maximum feasible set of equations by discarding unreliable ones. We show that one of the most popular solution methods, iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS), can be significantly accelerated by the use of matrix sketching. We analyze the convergence behavior of the proposed method and show its efficiency on a range of computer vision applications."

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to detect and recognise how people interact with the objects that surround them. This is challenging as different interaction categories are often distinguished only by very subtle visual differences in the scene. In this paper we introduce two methods to amplify key cues in the image, and also a method to combine these and other cues when considering the interaction between a human and an object. First, we introduce an encoding mechanism for representing the fine-grained spatial layout of the human and object (a subtle cue) and also semantic context (a cue, represented by text embeddings of surrounding objects). Second, we use plausible future movements of humans and objects as a cue to constrain the space of possible interactions. Third, we use a gate and memory architecture as a fusion module to combine the cues. We demonstrate that these three improvements lead to a performance which exceeds prior HOI methods across standard benchmarks by a considerable margin."

Recent advances in high refresh rate displays as well as the increased interest in high rate of slow motion and frame up-conversion fuel the demand for efficient and cost-effective multi-frame video interpolation solutions. To that regard, inserting multiple frames between consecutive video frames are of paramount importance for the consumer electronics industry. State-of-the-art methods are iterative solutions interpolating one frame at the time. They introduce temporal inconsistencies and clearly noticeable visual artifacts.

We present a method for projecting an input image into the space of a class-conditional generative neural network. We propose a method that optimizes for transformation to counteract the model biases in generative neural networks. Specifically, we demonstrate that one can solve for image translation, scale, and global color transformation, during the projection optimization to address the object-center bias and color bias of a Generative Adversarial Network. This projection process poses a difficult optimization problem, and purely gradient-based optimizations fail to find good solutions. We describe a hybrid optimization strategy that finds good projections by estimating transformations and class parameters. We show the effectiveness of our method on real images and further demonstrate how the corresponding projections lead to better editability of these images."

In this paper, we focus on the task of extracting visual correspondences across videos. Given a query video clip from an action class, we aim to align it with training videos in space and time. Obtaining training data for such a fine-grained alignment task is challenging and often ambiguous. Hence, we propose a novel alignment procedure that learns such correspondence in space and time via cross video cycle-consistency. During training, given a pair of videos, we compute cycles that connect patches in a given frame in the first video by matching through frames in the second video. Cycles that connect overlapping patches together are encouraged to score higher than cycles that connect non-overlapping patches. Our experiments on the Penn Action and Pouring datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully learn to correspond semantically similar patches across videos, and learns representations that are sensitive to object and action states."

While attention has been an increasingly popular component in deep neural networks to both interpret and boost performance of models, little work has examined how attention progresses to accomplish a task and whether it is reasonable. In this work, we propose an Attention with Reasoning capability (AiR) framework that uses attention to understand and improve the process leading to task outcomes. We first define an evaluation metric based on a sequence of atomic reasoning operations, enabling quantitative measurement of attention that considers the reasoning process. We then collect human eye-tracking and answer correctness data, and analyze various machine and human attentions on their reasoning capability and how they impact task performance. Furthermore, we propose a supervision method to jointly and progressively optimize attention, reasoning, and task performance so that models learn to look at regions of interests by following a reasoning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in analyzing and modeling attention with better reasoning capability and task performance. The code and data are available at https://github.com/szzexpoi/AiR"

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Practically, adversarial training is by far the most effective approach for enhancing the robustness of neural networks against adversarial examples. The current adversarial training approach aims to maximize the posterior probability for adversarially perturbed training data. However, such a training strategy ignores the fact that the clean data and adversarial examples should have intrinsically different feature distributions despite that they are assigned with the same class label under adversarial training. We propose that this problem can be solved by explicitly modeling the deep feature distribution, for example as a Gaussian Mixture, and then properly introducing the likelihood regularization into the loss function. Specifically, by maximizing the likelihood of features of clean data and minimizing that of adversarial examples simultaneously, the neural network learns a more reasonable feature distribution in which the intrinsic difference between clean data and adversarial examples can be explicitly preserved. We call such a new robust training strategy the adversarial training with bi-directional likelihood regularization (ATBLR) method. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that the ATBLR method facilitates robust classification of both clean data and adversarial examples, and performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art methods for robust visual classification."

It is known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The so-called physical adversarial examples deceive DNN-based decision makers by attaching adversarial patches to real objects. However, most of the existing works on physical adversarial attacks focus on static objects such as glass frames, stop signs and images attached to cardboard. In this work, we proposed adversarial T-shirts, a robust physical adversarial example for evading person detectors even if it could undergo non-rigid deformation due to a moving person’s pose changes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that models the effect of deformation for designing physical adversarial examples with respect to non-rigid objects such as T-shirts. We show that the proposed method achieves 74% and 57% attack success rates in the digital and physical worlds respectively against YOLOv2. In contrast, the state-of-the-art physical attack method to fool a person detector only achieves 18% attack success rate. Furthermore, by leveraging min-max optimization, we extend our method to the ensemble attack setting against two object detectors YOLO-v2 and Faster R-CNN simultaneously."