ECCV 2022 Papers

"Classical LIDAR semantic segmentation is not robust for real-world applications, e.g., autonomous driving, since it is closed-set and static. The closed-set network is only able to output labels of trained classes, even for objects never seen before, while a static network cannot update its knowledge base according to what it has seen. Therefore, we propose the open-world semantic segmentation task for LIDAR point clouds, which aims to 1) identify both old and novel classes using open-set semantic segmentation, and 2) gradually incorporate novel objects into the existing knowledge base using incremental learning without forgetting old classes. We propose a REdundAncy cLassifier (REAL) framework to provide a general architecture for both open-set semantic segmentation and incremental learning. The experimental results show that REAL can achieves state-of-the-art performance in the open-set semantic segmentation task on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, and alleviate the catastrophic forgetting with a large margin during incremental learning."

"Open-vocabulary object detection, which is concerned with the problem of detecting novel objects guided by natural language, has gained increasing attention from the community. Ideally, we would like to extend an open-vocabulary detector such that it can produce bounding box predictions based on user inputs in form of either natural language or exemplar image. This offers great flexibility and user experience for human-computer interaction. To this end, we propose a novel open-vocabulary detector based on DETR---hence the name OV-DETR---which, once trained, can detect any object given its class name or an exemplar image. The biggest challenge of turning DETR into an open-vocabulary detector is that it is impossible to calculate the classification cost matrix of novel classes without access to their labeled images. To overcome this challenge, we formulate the learning objective as a binary matching one between input queries (class name or exemplar image) and the corresponding objects, which learns useful correspondence to generalize to unseen queries during testing. For training, we choose to condition the Transformer decoder on the input embeddings obtained from a pre-trained vision-language model like CLIP, in order to enable matching for both text and image queries. With extensive experiments on LVIS and COCO datasets, we demonstrate that our OV-DETR---the first end-to-end Transformer-based open-vocabulary detector---achieves non-trivial improvements over current state of the arts."

"Recent developments for Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) have shown the promise of leveraging unlabeled data to improve an object detector. However, thus far these methods have assumed that the unlabeled data does not contain out-of-distribution (OOD) classes, which is unrealistic with larger-scale unlabeled datasets. In this paper, we consider a more practical yet challenging problem, Open-Set Semi-Supervised Object Detection (OSSOD). We first find the existing SSOD method obtains a lower performance gain in open-set conditions, and this is caused by the semantic expansion, where the distracting OOD objects are mispredicted as in-distribution pseudo-labels for the semi-supervised training. To address this problem, we consider online and offline OOD detection modules, which are integrated with SSOD methods. With the extensive studies, we found that leveraging an offline OOD detector based on a self-supervised vision transformer performs favorably against online OOD detectors due to its robustness to the interference of pseudo-labeling. In the experiment, our proposed framework effectively addresses the semantic expansion issue and shows consistent improvements on many OSSOD benchmarks, including large-scale COCO-OpenImages. We also verify the effectiveness of our framework under different OSSOD conditions, including varying numbers of in-distribution classes, different degrees of supervision, and different combinations of unlabeled sets."

"Despite great progress in object detection, most existing methods work only on a limited set of object categories, due to the tremendous human effort needed for bounding-box annotations of training data. To alleviate the problem, recent open vocabulary and zero-shot detection methods attempt to detect novel object categories beyond those seen during training. They achieve this goal by training on a pre-defined base categories to induce generalization to novel objects. However, their potential is still constrained by the small set of base categories available for training. To enlarge the set of base classes, we propose a method to automatically generate pseudo bounding-box annotations of diverse objects from large-scale image-caption pairs. Our method leverages the localization ability of pre-trained vision-language models to generate pseudo bounding-box labels and then directly uses them for training object detectors. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art open vocabulary detector by 8% AP on COCO novel categories, by 6.3% AP on PASCAL VOC, by 2.3% AP on Objects365 and by 2.8% AP on LVIS. Code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/PB-OVD."

"This paper addresses the very challenging problem of online task-free continual learning in which a sequence of new tasks is learned from non-stationary data using each sample only once for training and without knowledge of task boundaries. We propose in this paper an efficient semi-distributed associative memory algorithm called Dynamic Sparse Distributed Memory (DSDM) where learning and evaluating can be carried out at any point of time. DSDM evolves dynamically and continually modeling the distribution of any non-stationary data streams. DSDM relies on locally distributed, but only partially overlapping clusters of representations to effectively eliminate catastrophic forgetting, while at the same time, maintaining the generalization capacities of distributed networks. In addition, a local density-based pruning technique is used to control the network’s memory footprint. DSDM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on different image classification baselines, even in a low data regime. Code is publicly available: https://github.com/Julien-pour/Dynamic-Sparse-Distributed-Memory "

"Roof-mounted spinning LiDAR sensors are widely used by autonomous vehicles. However, most semantic datasets and algorithms used for LiDAR sequence segmentation operate on 360° frames, causing an acquisition latency incompatible with real-time applications. To address this issue, we first introduce HelixNet, a 10 billion point dataset with fine-grained labels, timestamps, and sensor rotation information necessary to accurately assess the real-time readiness of segmentation algorithms. Second, we propose Helix4D, a compact and efficient spatio-temporal transformer architecture specifically designed for rotating LiDAR sequences. Helix4D operates on acquisition slices corresponding to a fraction of a full sensor rotation, significantly reducing the total latency. Helix4D reaches accuracy on par with the best segmentation algorithms on HelixNet and SemanticKITTI with a reduction of over 5x in terms of latency and 50x in model size. The code and data are available at: https://romainloiseau.fr/helixnet"

"Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at reducing the domain gap between training and testing data and is, in most cases, carried out in offline manner. However, domain changes may occur continuously and unpredictably during deployment (e.g. sudden weather changes). In such conditions, deep neural networks witness dramatic drops in accuracy and offline adaptation may not be enough to contrast it. In this paper, we tackle Online Domain Adaptation (OnDA) for semantic segmentation. We design a pipeline that is robust to continuous domain shifts, either gradual or sudden, and we evaluate it in the case of rainy and foggy scenarios. Our experiments show that our framework can effectively adapt to new domains during deployment, while not being affected by catastrophic forgetting of the previous domains."

"Online continual learning (online CL) studies the problem of learning sequential tasks from an online data stream without task boundaries, aiming to adapt to new data while alleviating catastrophic forgetting on the past tasks. This paper proposes a framework Contrastive Vision Transformer (CVT), which designs a focal contrastive learning strategy based on a transformer architecture, to achieve a better stability-plasticity trade-off for online CL. Specifically, we design a new external attention mechanism for online CL that implicitly captures previous tasks’ information. Besides, CVT contains learnable focuses for each class, which could accumulate the knowledge of previous classes to alleviate forgetting. Based on the learnable focuses, we design a focal contrastive loss to rebalance contrastive learning between new and past classes and consolidate previously learned representations. Moreover, CVT contains a dual-classifier structure for decoupling learning current classes and balancing all observed classes. The extensive experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with even fewer parameters on online CL benchmarks and effectively alleviates the catastrophic forgetting."

"Face recognition (FR) has witnessed remarkable progress with the surge of deep learning. Current FR evaluation protocols usually adopt different thresholds to calculate the True Accept Rate (TAR) under a pre-defined False Accept Rate (FAR) for different datasets. How- ever, in practice, when the FR model is deployed on industry systems (e.g., hardware devices), only one fixed threshold is adopted for all scenarios to distinguish whether a face image pair belongs to the same identity. Therefore, current evaluation protocols using different thresholds for different datasets are not fully compatible with the practical evaluation scenarios with one fixed threshold, and it is critical to measure the performance of FR models by using one threshold for all datasets. In this paper, we rethink the limitations of existing evaluation protocols for FR and propose to evaluate the performance of FR models from a new perspective. Specifically, in our OneFace, we first propose the One- Threshold-for-All (OTA) evaluation protocol for FR, which utilizes one fixed threshold called as Calibration Threshold to measure the performance on different datasets. Then, to improve the performance of FR models under the OTA protocol, we propose the Threshold Consistency Penalty (TCP) to improve the consistency of the thresholds among multiple domains, which includes Implicit Domain Division (IDD) as well as Calibration and Domain Thresholds Estimation (CDTE). Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for FR."

"Recent studies made great progress in video matting by extending the success of trimap-based image matting to the video domain. In this paper, we push this task toward a more practical setting and propose One-Trimap Video Matting network (OTVM) that performs video matting robustly using only one user-annotated trimap. A key of OTVM is the joint modeling of trimap propagation and alpha prediction. Starting from baseline trimap propagation and alpha prediction networks, our OTVM combines the two networks with an alpha-trimap refinement module to facilitate information flow. We also present an end-to-end training strategy to take full advantage of the joint model. Our joint modeling greatly improves the temporal stability of trimap propagation compared to the previous decoupled methods. We evaluate our model on two latest video matting benchmarks, Deep Video Matting and VideoMatting108, and outperform state-of-the-art by significant margins (MSE improvements of 56.4% and 56.7%, respectively). The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/Hongje/OTVM."

"As an important upstream task for many medical applications, supervised landmark localization still requires non-negligible annotation costs to achieve desirable performance. Besides, due to cumbersome collection procedures, the limited size of medical landmark datasets impacts the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised pre-training methods. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage framework for one-shot medical landmark localization, which first infers landmarks by unsupervised registration from the labeled exemplar to unlabeled targets, and then utilizes these noisy pseudo labels to train robust detectors. To handle the significant structure variations, we learn an end-to-end cascade of global alignment and local deformations, under the guidance of novel loss functions which incorporate edge information. In stage \uppercase\expandafter{\romannumeral2}, we explore self-consistency for selecting reliable pseudo labels and cross-consistency for semi-supervised learning. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on public datasets of different body parts, which demonstrates its general applicability. Code will be publicly available."

"Adversarial robustness is critical for deep learning models to defend against adversarial attacks. Although adversarial training is considered to be one of the most effective ways to improve the model’s adversarial robustness, it usually yields models with lower natural accuracy. In this paper, we argue that, for the attackable examples, traditional adversarial training which utilizes a fixed size perturbation ball can create adversarial examples that deviate far away from the original class towards the target class. Thus, the model’s performance on the natural target class will drop drastically, which leads to the decline of natural accuracy. To this end, we propose the Data-Adaptive Adversarial Training (DAAT) which adaptively adjusts the perturbation ball to a proper size for each of the natural examples with the help of a natural trained calibration network. Besides, a dynamic training strategy empowers the DAAT models with impressive robustness while retaining remarkable natural accuracy. Based on a toy example, we theoretically prove the recession of the natural accuracy caused by adversarial training and show how the data-adaptive perturbation size helps the model resist it. Finally, empirical experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement of DAAT models on natural accuracy compared with strong baselines."

"Comparing the functional behavior of neural network models, whether it is a single network over time or two (or more networks) during or post-training, is an essential step in understanding what they are learning (and what they are not), and for identifying strategies for regularization or efficiency improvements. Despite recent progress, e.g., comparing vision transformers to CNNs, systematic comparison of function, especially across different networks, remains difficult and is often carried out layer by layer. Approaches such as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) are applicable in principle, but have been sparingly used so far. In this paper, we revisit a (less widely known) from statistics, called distance correlation (and its partial variant), designed to evaluate correlation between feature spaces of different dimensions. We describe the steps necessary to carry out its deployment for large scale models -- this opens the door to a surprising array of applications ranging from conditioning one deep model w.r.t. another, learning disentangled representations as well as optimizing diverse models that would directly be more robust to adversarial attacks. Our experiments suggest a versatile regularizer (or constraint) with many advantages, which avoids some of the common difficulties one faces in such analyses."

"This work evaluates the robustness of quality measures of generative models such as Inception Score (IS) and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). Analogous to the vulnerability of deep models against a variety of adversarial attacks, we show that such metrics can also be manipulated by additive pixel perturbations. Our experiments indicate that one can generate a distribution of images with very high scores but low perceptual quality. Conversely, one can optimize for small imperceptible perturbations that, when added to real world images, deteriorate their scores. We further extend our evaluation to generative models themselves, including the state of the art network StyleGANv2. We show the vulnerability of both the generative model and the FID against additive perturbations in the latent space. Finally, we show that the FID can be robustified by simply replacing the standard Inception with a robust Inception. We validate the effectiveness of the robustified metric through extensive experiments, showing it is more robust against manipulation."

"Modern deep neural networks are equipped with normalization layers such as batch normalization or layer normalization to enhance and stabilize training dynamics. If a network contains such normalization layers, the optimization objective is invariant to the scale of the neural network parameters. The scale-invariance induces the neural network’s output to be only affected by the weights’ direction and not the weights’ scale. We first find a common feature of good hyperparameter combinations on such a scale-invariant network, including learning rate, weight decay, number of data samples, and batch size. Then we observe that hyperparameter setups that lead to good performance show similar degrees of angular update during one epoch. Using a stochastic differential equation, we analyze the angular update and show how each hyperparameter affects it. With this relationship, we can derive a simple hyperparameter tuning method and apply it to the efficient hyperparameter search."

"Face clustering is a promising way to scale up face recognition systems using large-scale unlabeled face images. It remains challenging to identify small or sparse face image clusters that we call hard clusters, which is caused by the heterogeneity, i.e., high variations in size and sparsity, of the clusters. Consequently, the conventional way of using a uniform threshold (to identify clusters) often leads to a terrible misclassification for the samples that should belong to hard clusters. We tackle this problem by leveraging the neighborhood information of samples and inferring the cluster memberships (of samples) in a probabilistic way. We introduce two novel modules, Neighborhood-Diffusion-based Density (NDDe) and Transition-Probability-based Distance (TPDi), based on which we can simply apply the standard Density Peak Clustering algorithm with a uniform threshold. Our experiments on multiple benchmarks show that each module contributes to the final performance of our method, and by incorporating them into other advanced face clustering methods, these two modules can boost the performance of these methods to a new state-of-the-art."

"Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to learn representations that encode object location using only image-level category labels. However, many objects can be labeled at different levels of granularity. Is it an animal, a bird, or a great horned owl? Which image-level labels should we use? In this paper we study the role of label granularity in WSOL. To facilitate this investigation we introduce iNatLoc500, a new large-scale fine-grained benchmark dataset for WSOL. Surprisingly, we find that choosing the right training label granularity provides a much larger performance boost than choosing the best WSOL algorithm. We also show that changing the label granularity can significantly improve data efficiency."

"Dataset bias and spurious correlations can significantly impair generalization in deep neural networks. Many prior efforts have addressed this problem using either alternative loss functions or sampling strategies that focus on rare patterns. We propose a new direction: modifying the network architecture to impose inductive biases that make the network robust to dataset bias. Specifically, we propose OccamNets, which are biased to favor simpler solutions by design. OccamNets have two inductive biases. First, they are biased to use as little network depth as needed for an individual example. Second, they are biased toward using fewer image locations for prediction. While OccamNets are biased toward simpler hypotheses, they can learn more complex hypotheses if necessary. In experiments, OccamNets outperform or rival state-of-the-art methods using architectures that do not incorporate these inductive biases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when these methods are combined with OccamNets results further improve."

"AR/VR applications and robots need to know when the scene has changed. An example is when objects are moved, added, or removed from the scene. We propose a 3D object discovery method that is based only on scene changes. Our method does not need to encode any assumptions about what is an object, but rather discovers objects by exploiting their coherent move. Changes are initially detected as differences in the depth maps and segmented as objects if they undergo rigid motions. A graph cut optimization propagates the changing labels to geometrically consistent regions. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 3RScan dataset against competitive baselines. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/katadam/ObjectsCanMove."