ICCV 2019 Papers

Unsupervised domain transfer is the task of transferring or translating samples from a source distribution to a different target distribution. Current solutions unsupervised domain transfer often operate on data on which the modes of the distribution are well-matched, for instance have the same frequencies of classes between source and target distributions. However, these models do not perform well when the modes are not well-matched, as would be the case when samples are drawn independently from two different, but related, domains. This mode imbalance is problematic as generative adversarial networks (GANs), a successful approach in this setting, are sensitive to mode frequency, which results in a mismatch of semantics between source samples and generated samples of the target distribution. We propose a principled method of re-weighting training samples to correct for such mass shift between the transferred distributions, which we call batch weight. We also provide rigorous probabilistic setting for domain transfer and new simplified objective for training transfer networks, an alternative to complex, multi-component loss functions used in the current state-of-the art image-to-image translation models. The new objective stems from the discrimination of joint distributions and enforces cycle-consistency in an abstract, high-level, rather than pixel-wise, sense. Lastly, we experimentally show the effectiveness of the proposed methods in several image-to-image translation tasks.

Since the person re-identification task often suffers from the problem of pose changes and occlusions, some attentive local features are often suppressed when training CNNs. In this paper, we propose the Batch DropBlock (BDB) Network which is a two branch network composed of a conventional ResNet-50 as the global branch and a feature dropping branch.The global branch encodes the global salient representations.Meanwhile, the feature dropping branch consists of an attentive feature learning module called Batch DropBlock, which randomly drops the same region of all input feature maps in a batch to reinforce the attentive feature learning of local regions.The network then concatenates features from both branches and provides a more comprehensive and spatially distributed feature representation. Albeit simple, our method achieves state-of-the-art on person re-identification and it is also applicable to general metric learning tasks. For instance, we achieve 76.4% Rank-1 accuracy on the CUHK03-Detect dataset and 83.0% Recall-1 score on the Stanford Online Products dataset, outperforming the existed works by a large margin (more than 6%).

In this work, we present a framework to measure and mitigate intrinsic biases with respect to protected variables -such as gender- in visual recognition tasks. We show that trained models significantly amplify the association of target labels with gender beyond what one would expect from biased datasets. Surprisingly, we show that even when datasets are balanced such that each label co-occurs equally with each gender, learned models amplify the association between labels and gender, as much as if data had not been balanced! To mitigate this, we adopt an adversarial approach to remove unwanted features corresponding to protected variables from intermediate representations in a deep neural network - and provide a detailed analysis of its effectiveness. Experiments on two datasets: the COCO dataset (objects), and the imSitu dataset (actions), show reductions in gender bias amplification while maintaining most of the accuracy of the original models.

Temporal action proposal generation is an challenging and promising task which aims to locate temporal regions in real-world videos where action or event may occur. Current bottom-up proposal generation methods can generate proposals with precise boundary, but cannot efficiently generate adequately reliable confidence scores for retrieving proposals. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Boundary-Matching (BM) mechanism to evaluate confidence scores of densely distributed proposals, which denote a proposal as a matching pair of starting and ending boundaries and combine all densely distributed BM pairs into the BM confidence map. Based on BM mechanism, we propose an effective, efficient and end-to-end proposal generation method, named Boundary-Matching Network (BMN), which generates proposals with precise temporal boundaries as well as reliable confidence scores simultaneously. The two-branches of BMN are jointly trained in an unified framework. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3, where BMN shows significant performance improvement with remarkable efficiency and generalizability. Further, combining with existing action classifier, BMN can achieve state-of-the-art temporal action detection performance.

We treat shape co-segmentation as a representation learning problem and introduce BAE-NET, a branched autoencoder network, for the task. The unsupervised BAE-NET is trained with a collection of un-segmented shapes, using a shape reconstruction loss, without any ground-truth labels. Specifically, the network takes an input shape and encodes it using a convolutional neural network, whereas the decoder concatenates the resulting feature code with a point coordinate and outputs a value indicating whether the point is inside/outside the shape. Importantly, the decoder is branched: each branch learns a compact representation for one commonly recurring part of the shape collection, e.g., airplane wings. By complementing the shape reconstruction loss with a label loss, BAE-NET is easily tuned for one-shot learning. We show unsupervised, weakly supervised, and one-shot learning results by BAE-NET, demonstrating that using only a couple of exemplars, our network can generally outperform state-of-the-art supervised methods trained on hundreds of segmented shapes. Code is available at https://github.com/czq142857/BAE-NET.

Skull registration plays a fundamental role in forensic science and is crucial for craniofacial reconstruction. The complicated topology, lack of anatomical features, and low quality reconstructed mesh make skull registration challenging. In this work, we propose an automatic skull registration method based on the discrete uniformization theory, which can handle complicated topologies and is robust to low quality meshes. We apply dynamic Yamabe flow to realize discrete uniformization, which modifies the mesh combinatorial structure during the flow and conformally maps the multiply connected skull surface onto a planar disk with circular holes. The 3D surfaces can be registered by matching their planar images using harmonic maps. This method is rigorous with theoretic guarantee, automatic without user intervention, and robust to low mesh quality. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the method.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has witnessed prevailing success in image classification and (very recently) segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present the first preliminary study on introducing the NAS algorithm to generative adversarial networks (GANs), dubbed AutoGAN. The marriage of NAS and GANs faces its unique challenges. We define the search space for the generator architectural variations and use an RNN controller to guide the search, with parameter sharing and dynamic-resetting to accelerate the process. Inception score is adopted as the reward, and a multi-level search strategy is introduced to perform NAS in a progressive way. Experiments validate the effectiveness of AutoGAN on the task of unconditional image generation. Specifically, our discovered architectures achieve highly competitive performance compared to current state-of-the-art hand-crafted GANs, e.g., setting new state-of-the-art FID scores of 12.42 on CIFAR-10, and 31.01 on STL-10, respectively. We also conclude with a discussion of the current limitations and future potential of AutoGAN. The code is available at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/AutoGAN

This paper describes AutoFocus, an efficient multi-scale inference algorithm for deep-learning based object detectors. Instead of processing an entire image pyramid, AutoFocus adopts a coarse to fine approach and only processes regions which are likely to contain small objects at finer scales. This is achieved by predicting category agnostic segmentation maps for small objects at coarser scales, called FocusPixels. FocusPixels can be predicted with high recall, and in many cases, they only cover a small fraction of the entire image. To make efficient use of FocusPixels, an algorithm is proposed which generates compact rectangular FocusChips which enclose FocusPixels. The detector is only applied inside FocusChips, which reduces computation while processing finer scales. Different types of error can arise when detections from FocusChips of multiple scales are combined, hence techniques to correct them are proposed. AutoFocus obtains an mAP of 47.9% (68.3% at 50% overlap) on the COCO test-dev set while processing 6.4 images per second on a Titan X (Pascal) GPU. This is 2.5X faster than our multi-scale baseline detector and matches its mAP. The number of pixels processed in the pyramid can be reduced by 5X with a 1% drop in mAP. AutoFocus obtains more than 10% mAP gain compared to RetinaNet but runs at the same speed with the same ResNet-101 backbone.

Much research work in computer vision is being spent on optimizing existing network architectures to obtain a few more percentage points on benchmarks. Recent AutoML approaches promise to relieve us from this effort. However, they are mainly designed for comparatively small-scale classification tasks. In this work, we show how to use and extend existing AutoML techniques to efficiently optimize large-scale U-Net-like encoder-decoder architectures. In particular, we leverage gradient-based neural architecture search and Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter search. The resulting optimization does not require a large-scale compute cluster. We show results on disparity estimation that clearly outperform the manually optimized baseline and reach state-of-the-art performance.

Prevailing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for person re-IDentification (reID) are usually built upon ResNet or VGG backbones, which were originally designed for classification. Because reID is different from classification, the architecture should be modified accordingly. We propose to automatically search for a CNN architecture that is specifically suitable for the reID task. There are three aspects to be tackled. First, body structural information plays an important role in reID but it is not encoded in backbones. Second, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) automates the process of architecture design without human effort, but no existing NAS methods incorporate the structure information of input images. Third, reID is essentially a retrieval task but current NAS algorithms are merely designed for classification. To solve these problems, we propose a retrieval-based search algorithm over a specifically designed reID search space, named Auto-ReID. Our Auto-ReID enables the automated approach to find an efficient and effective CNN architecture for reID. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the searched architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing 50% parameters and 53% FLOPs compared to others.

Abstract Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great potential in automating the manual process of designing a good CNN architecture for image classification. In this paper, we study NAS for object detection, a core computer vision task that classifies and localizes object instances in an image. Existing works focus on transferring the searched architecture from classification task (ImageNet) to the detector backbone, while the rest of the architecture of the detector remains unchanged. However, this pipeline is not task-specific or data-oriented network search which cannot guarantee optimal adaptation to any dataset. Therefore, we propose an architecture search framework named Auto-FPN specifically designed for detection beyond simply searching a classification backbone. Specifically, we propose two auto search modules for detection: Auto-fusion to search a better fusion of the multi-level features; Auto-head to search a better structure for classification and bounding-box(bbox) regression. Instead of searching for one repeatable cell structure, we relax the constraint and allow different cells. The search space of both modules covers many popular designs of detectors and allows efficient gradient-based architecture search with resource constraint (2 days for COCO on 8 GPU cards). Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC, COCO, BDD, VisualGenome and ADE demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, e.g. achieving around 5% improvement than FPN in terms of mAP while requiring around 50% fewer parameters on the searched modules.

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown increasing success in generating photorealistic images. But they also raise challenges to visual forensics and model attribution. We present the first study of learning GAN fingerprints towards image attribution and using them to classify an image as real or GAN-generated. For GAN-generated images, we further identify their sources. Our experiments show that (1) GANs carry distinct model fingerprints and leave stable fingerprints in their generated images, which support image attribution; (2) even minor differences in GAN training can result in different fingerprints, which enables fine-grained model authentication; (3) fingerprints persist across different image frequencies and patches and are not biased by GAN artifacts; (4) fingerprint finetuning is effective in immunizing against five types of adversarial image perturbations; and (5) comparisons also show our learned fingerprints consistently outperform several baselines in a variety of setups.

Current image translation methods, albeit effective to produce high-quality results in various applications, still do not consider much geometric transform. We in this paper propose the spontaneous motion estimation module, along with a refinement part, to learn attribute-driven deformation between source and target domains. Extensive experiments and visualization demonstrate effectiveness of these modules. We achieve promising results in unpaired-image translation tasks, and enable interesting applications based on spontaneous motion.

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made it possible to conduct multi-domain image-to-image translation using a single generative network. While recent methods such as Ganimation and SaGAN are able to conduct translations on attribute-relevant regions using attention, they do not perform well when the number of attributes increases as the training of attention masks mostly rely on classification losses. To address this and other limitations, we introduce Attribute Manipulation Generative Adversarial Networks (AMGAN) for fashion images. While AMGAN's generator network uses class activation maps (CAMs) to empower its attention mechanism, it also exploits perceptual losses by assigning reference (target) images based on attribute similarities. AMGAN incorporates an additional discriminator network that focuses on attribute-relevant regions to detect unrealistic translations. Additionally, AMGAN can be controlled to perform attribute manipulations on specific regions such as the sleeve or torso regions. Experiments show that AMGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods using traditional evaluation metrics as well as an alternative one that is based on image retrieval.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to accurately recognize unseen objects by learning mapping matrices that bridge the gap between visual information and semantic attributes. Previous works implicitly treat attributes equally in compatibility score while ignoring that they have different importance for discrimination, which leads to severe semantic ambiguity. Considering both low-level visual information and global class-level features that relate to this ambiguity, we propose a practical Latent Feature Guided Attribute Attention (LFGAA) framework to perform object-based attribute attention for semantic disambiguation. By distracting semantic activation in dimensions that cause ambiguity, our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on AwA2, CUB and SUN datasets in both inductive and transductive settings.

Open set domain adaptation aims to diminish the domain shift across domains, with partially shared classes. There exist unknown target samples out of the knowledge of source domain. Compared to the close set setting, how to separate the unknown (unshared) class from the known (shared) ones plays the key role. Whereas, previous methods did not emphasize the semantic structure of the open set data, which may introduce bias into the domain alignment and confuse the classifier around the decision boundary. In this paper, we exploit the semantic structure of open set data from two aspects: 1) Semantic Categorical Alignment, which aims to achieve good separability of target known classes by categorically aligning the centroid of target with the source. 2) Semantic Contrastive Mapping, which aims to push the unknown class away from the decision boundary. Empirically, we demonstrate that our method performs favourably against the state-of-the-art methods on representative benchmarks, e.g. Digits and Office-31 datasets.

Crowd counting has recently generated huge popularity in computer vision, and is extremely challenging due to the huge scale variations of objects. In this paper, we propose the Attentional Neural Field (ANF) for crowd counting via density estimation. Within the encoder-decoder network, we introduce conditional random fields (CRFs) to aggregate multi-scale features, which can build more informative representations. To better model pair-wise potentials in CRFs, we incorperate non-local attention mechanism implemented as inter- and intra-layer attentions to expand the receptive field to the entire image respectively within the same layer and across different layers, which captures long-range dependencies to conquer huge scale variations. The CRFs coupled with the attention mechanism are seamlessly integrated into the encoder-decoder network, establishing an ANF that can be optimized end-to-end by back propagation. We conduct extensive experiments on four public datasets, including ShanghaiTech, WorldEXPO 10, UCF-CC-50 and UCF-QNRF. The results show that our ANF achieves high counting performance, surpassing most previous methods.

Human face recognition is one of the most important research areas in biometrics. However, the robust face recognition under a drastic change of the facial pose, expression, and illumination is a big challenging problem for its practical application. Such variations make face recognition more difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition method, called Attentional Feature-pair Relation Network (AFRN), which represents the face by the relevant pairs of local appearance block features with their attention scores. The AFRN represents the face by all possible pairs of the 9x9 local appearance block features, the importance of each pair is considered by the attention map that is obtained from the low-rank bilinear pooling, and each pair is weighted by its corresponding attention score. To increase the accuracy, we select top-K pairs of local appearance block features as relevant facial information and drop the remaining irrelevant. The weighted top-K pairs are propagated to extract the joint feature-pair relation by using bilinear attention network. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed AFRN and achieve the outstanding performance in the 1:1 face verification and 1:N face identification tasks compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on the challenging LFW, YTF, CALFW, CPLFW, CFP, AgeDB, IJB-A, IJB-B, and IJB-C datasets.

Visual attention mechanisms have proven to be integrally important constituent components of many modern deep neural architectures. They provide an efficient and effective way to utilize visual information selectively, which has shown to be especially valuable in multi-modal learning tasks. However, all prior attention frameworks lack the ability to explicitly model structural dependencies among attention variables, making it difficult to predict consistent attention masks. In this paper we develop a novel structured spatial attention mechanism which is end-to-end trainable and can be integrated with any feed-forward convolutional neural network. This proposed AttentionRNN layer explicitly enforces structure over the spatial attention variables by sequentially predicting attention values in the spatial mask in a bi-directional raster-scan and inverse raster-scan order. As a result, each attention value depends not only on local image or contextual information, but also on the previously predicted attention values. Our experiments show consistent quantitative and qualitative improvements on a variety of recognition tasks and datasets; including image categorization, question answering and image generation.