NeurIPS 2023 Papers

Existing image editing tools, while powerful, typically disregard the underlying 3D geometry from which the image is projected. As a result, edits made using these tools may become detached from the geometry and lighting conditions that are at the foundation of the image formation process; such edits break the portrayal of a coherent 3D world. 3D-aware generative models are a promising solution, but currently only succeed on small datasets or at the level of a single object. In this work, we formulate the new task of language-guided 3D-aware editing, where objects in an image should be edited according to a language instruction while remaining consistent with the underlying 3D scene. To promote progress towards this goal, we release OBJect: a benchmark dataset of 400K editing examples created from procedurally generated 3D scenes. Each example consists of an input image, editing instruction in language, and the edited image. We also introduce 3DIT: single and multi-task models for four editing tasks. Our models show impressive abilities to understand the 3D composition of entire scenes, factoring in surrounding objects, surfaces, lighting conditions, shadows, and physically-plausible object configurations. Surprisingly, training on only synthetic scenes from \dataset, editing capabilities of 3DIT generalize to real-world images.

This paper addresses the challenge of representing high-fidelity volumetric videos with low storage cost. Some recent feature grid-based methods have shown superior performance of fast learning implicit neural representations from input 2D images. However, such explicit representations easily lead to large model sizes when modeling dynamic scenes. To solve this problem, our key idea is reducing the spatial and temporal redundancy of feature grids, which intrinsically exist due to the self-similarity of scenes. To this end, we propose a novel neural representation, named dynamic codebook, which first merges similar features for the model compression and then compensates for the potential decline in rendering quality by a set of dynamic codes. Experiments on the NHR and DyNeRF datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, while being able to achieve more storage efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/compact_vv.

Neural decoding and its applications to brain computer interfaces (BCI) are essential for understanding the association between neural activity and behavior. A prerequisite for many decoding approaches is spike sorting, the assignment of action potentials (spikes) to individual neurons. Current spike sorting algorithms, however, can be inaccurate and do not properly model uncertainty of spike assignments, therefore discarding information that could potentially improve decoding performance. Recent advances in high-density probes (e.g., Neuropixels) and computational methods now allow for extracting a rich set of spike features from unsorted data; these features can in turn be used to directly decode behavioral correlates. To this end, we propose a spike sorting-free decoding method that directly models the distribution of extracted spike features using a mixture of Gaussians (MoG) encoding the uncertainty of spike assignments, without aiming to solve the spike clustering problem explicitly. We allow the mixing proportion of the MoG to change over time in response to the behavior and develop variational inference methods to fit the resulting model and to perform decoding. We benchmark our method with an extensive suite of recordings from different animals and probe geometries, demonstrating that our proposed decoder can consistently outperform current methods based on thresholding (i.e. multi-unit activity) and spike sorting. Open source code is available at https://github.com/yzhang511/density_decoding.

Despite impressive advances in object-recognition, deep learning systems’ performance degrades significantly across geographies and lower income levels---raising pressing concerns of inequity. Addressing such performance gaps remains a challenge, as little is understood about why performance degrades across incomes or geographies. We take a step in this direction by annotating images from Dollar Street, a popular benchmark of geographically and economically diverse images, labeling each image with factors such as color, shape, and background. These annotations unlock a new granular view into how objects differ across incomes/regions. We then use these object differences to pinpoint model vulnerabilities across incomes and regions. We study a range of modern vision models, finding that performance disparities are most associated with differences in _texture, occlusion_, and images with _darker lighting_. We illustrate how insights from our factor labels can surface mitigations to improve models' performance disparities. As an example, we show that mitigating a model's vulnerability to texture can improve performance on the lower income level. **We release all the factor annotations along with an interactive dashboard to facilitate research into more equitable vision systems.**

Camera-based physiological measurement is a fast growing field of computer vision. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) utilizes imaging devices (e.g., cameras) to measure the peripheral blood volume pulse (BVP) via photoplethysmography, and enables cardiac measurement via webcams and smartphones. However, the task is non-trivial with important pre-processing, modeling and post-processing steps required to obtain state-of-the-art results. Replication of results and benchmarking of new models is critical for scientific progress; however, as with many other applications of deep learning, reliable codebases are not easy to find or use. We present a comprehensive toolbox, rPPG-Toolbox, unsupervised and supervised rPPG models with support for public benchmark datasets, data augmentation and systematic evaluation: https://github.com/ubicomplab/rPPG-Toolbox.

Existing deep learning models for hyperspectral image (HSI) reconstruction achieve good performance but require powerful hardwares with enormous memory and computational resources. Consequently, these methods can hardly be deployed on resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Network (BiSRNet), for efficient and practical HSI restoration from compressed measurement in snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) systems. Firstly, we redesign a compact and easy-to-deploy base model to be binarized. Then we present the basic unit, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Convolution (BiSR-Conv). BiSR-Conv can adaptively redistribute the HSI representations before binarizing activation and uses a scalable hyperbolic tangent function to closer approximate the Sign function in backpropagation. Based on our BiSR-Conv, we customize four binarized convolutional modules to address the dimension mismatch and propagate full-precision information throughout the whole network. Finally, our BiSRNet is derived by using the proposed techniques to binarize the base model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments manifest that our proposed BiSRNet outperforms state-of-the-art binarization algorithms. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/BiSCI

Large vision models with billions of parameters and trained on broad data have great potential in numerous downstream applications. However, these models are typically difficult to adapt due to their large parameter size and sometimes lack of accesss to their weights---entities able to develop large vision models often provide APIs only. In this paper, we study how to better utilize large vision models through the lens of in-context learning, a concept that has been well-known in natural language processing but has only been studied very recently in computer vision. In-context learning refers to the ability to perform inference on tasks never seen during training by simply conditioning on in-context examples (i.e., input-output pairs) without updating any internal model parameters. To demystify in-context learning in computer vision, we conduct an extensive research and identify a critical problem: downstream performance is highly sensitivie to the choice of visual in-context examples. To address this problem, we propose a prompt retrieval framework specifically for large vision models, allowing the selection of in-context examples to be fully automated. Concretely, we provide two implementations: (i) an unsupervised prompt retrieval method based on nearest example search using an off-the-shelf model, and (ii) a supervised prompt retrieval method, which trains a neural network to choose examples that directly maximize in-context learning performance. Both methods do not require access to the internal weights of large vision models. Our results demonstrate that our methods can bring non-trivial improvements to visual in-context learning in comparison to the commonly-used random selection. Code and models will be released.

Equivariant networks are specifically designed to ensure consistent behavior with respect to a set of input transformations, leading to higher sample efficiency and more accurate and robust predictions. However, redesigning each component of prevalent deep neural network architectures to achieve chosen equivariance is a difficult problem and can result in a computationally expensive network during both training and inference. A recently proposed alternative towards equivariance that removes the architectural constraints is to use a simple canonicalization network that transforms the input to a canonical form before feeding it to an unconstrained prediction network. We show here that this approach can effectively be used to make a large pretrained network equivariant. However, we observe that the produced canonical orientations can be misaligned with those of the training distribution, hindering performance. Using dataset-dependent priors to inform the canonicalization function, we are able to make large pretrained models equivariant while maintaining their performance. This significantly improves the robustness of these models to deterministic transformations of the data, such as rotations. We believe this equivariant adaptation of large pretrained models can help their domain-specific applications with known symmetry priors.

In the past years, YOLO-series models have emerged as the leading approaches in the area of real-time object detection. Many studies pushed up the baseline to a higher level by modifying the architecture, augmenting data and designing new losses. However, we find previous models still suffer from information fusion problem, although Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PANet) have alleviated this. Therefore, this study provides an advanced Gatherand-Distribute mechanism (GD) mechanism, which is realized with convolution and self-attention operations. This new designed model named as Gold-YOLO, which boosts the multi-scale feature fusion capabilities and achieves an ideal balance between latency and accuracy across all model scales. Additionally, we implement MAE-style pretraining in the YOLO-series for the first time, allowing YOLOseries models could be to benefit from unsupervised pretraining. Gold-YOLO-N attains an outstanding 39.9% AP on the COCO val2017 datasets and 1030 FPS on a T4 GPU, which outperforms the previous SOTA model YOLOv6-3.0-N with similar FPS by +2.4%. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Detection/Gold-YOLO, and the MindSpore code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/Gold_YOLO.

Weight Average (WA) is an active research topic due to its simplicity in ensembling deep networks and the effectiveness in promoting generalization. Existing weight average approaches, however, are often carried out along only one training trajectory in a post-hoc manner (i.e., the weights are averaged after the entire training process is finished), which significantly degrades the diversity between networks and thus impairs the effectiveness. In this paper, inspired by weight average, we propose Lookaround, a straightforward yet effective SGD-based optimizer leading to flatter minima with better generalization. Specifically, Lookaround iterates two steps during the whole training period: the around step and the average step. In each iteration, 1) the around step starts from a common point and trains multiple networks simultaneously, each on transformed data by a different data augmentation, and 2) the average step averages these trained networks to get the averaged network, which serves as the starting point for the next iteration. The around step improves the functionality diversity while the average step guarantees the weight locality of these networks during the whole training, which is essential for WA to work. We theoretically explain the superiority of Lookaround by convergence analysis, and make extensive experiments to evaluate Lookaround on popular benchmarks including CIFAR and ImageNet with both CNNs and ViTs, demonstrating clear superiority over state-of-the-arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ardcy/Lookaround.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a fundamental topic of geometric computer vision and a core technique for many downstream applications. Recently, several methods reframe the MDE as a classification-regression problem where a linear combination of probabilistic distribution and bin centers is used to predict depth. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of iterative elastic bins (IEBins) for the classification-regression-based MDE. The proposed IEBins aims to search for high-quality depth by progressively optimizing the search range, which involves multiple stages and each stage performs a finer-grained depth search in the target bin on top of its previous stage. To alleviate the possible error accumulation during the iterative process, we utilize a novel elastic target bin to replace the original target bin, the width of which is adjusted elastically based on the depth uncertainty. Furthermore, we develop a dedicated framework composed of a feature extractor and an iterative optimizer that has powerful temporal context modeling capabilities benefiting from the GRU-based architecture. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NYU-Depth-v2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses prior state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShuweiShao/IEBins.

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment objects of new categories given only a handful of annotated samples. Previous works focus their efforts on exploring the support information while paying less attention to the mining of the critical query branch. In this paper, we rethink the importance of support information and propose a new query-centric FSS model Adversarial Mining Transformer (AMFormer), which achieves accurate query image segmentation with only rough support guidance or even weak support labels. The proposed AMFormer enjoys several merits. First, we design an object mining transformer (G) that can achieve the expansion of incomplete region activated by support clue, and a detail mining transformer (D) to discriminate the detailed local difference between the expanded mask and the ground truth. Second, we propose to train G and D via an adversarial process, where G is optimized to generate more accurate masks approaching ground truth to fool D. We conduct extensive experiments on commonly used Pascal-5i and COCO-20i benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art results across all settings. In addition, the decent performance with weak support labels in our query-centric paradigm may inspire the development of more general FSS models.

Despite the growing use of transformer models in computer vision, a mechanistic understanding of these networks is still needed. This work introduces a method to reverse-engineer Vision Transformers trained to solve image classification tasks. Inspired by previous research in NLP, we demonstrate how the inner representations at any level of the hierarchy can be projected onto the learned class embedding space to uncover how these networks build categorical representations for their predictions. We use our framework to show how image tokens develop class-specific representations that depend on attention mechanisms and contextual information, and give insights on how self-attention and MLP layers differentially contribute to this categorical composition. We additionally demonstrate that this method (1) can be used to determine the parts of an image that would be important for detecting the class of interest, and (2) exhibits significant advantages over traditional linear probing approaches. Taken together, our results position our proposed framework as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability and explainability research.

In 3D computer vision, translation averaging solves for absolute translations given a set of pairwise relative translation directions. While there has been much work on robustness to outliers and studies on the uniqueness of the solution, this paper deals with a distinctly different problem of sensitivity in translation averaging under uncertainty. We first analyze sensitivity in estimating scales corresponding to relative directions under small perturbations of the relative directions. Then, we formally define the conditioning of the translation averaging problem, which assesses the reliability of estimated translations based solely on the input directions. We give a sufficient criterion to ensure that the problem is well-conditioned. Subsequently, we provide an efficient algorithm to identify and remove combinations of directions which make the problem ill-conditioned while ensuring uniqueness of the solution. We demonstrate the utility of such analysis in global structure-from-motion pipelines for obtaining 3D reconstructions, which reveals the benefits of filtering the ill-conditioned set of directions in translation averaging in terms of reduced translation errors, a higher number of 3D points triangulated and faster convergence of bundle adjustment.

We tackle the problem of Persistent Independent Particles (PIPs), also called Tracking Any Point (TAP), in videos, which specifically aims at estimating persistent long-term trajectories of query points in videos. Previous methods attempted to estimate these trajectories independently to incorporate longer image sequences, therefore, ignoring the potential benefits of incorporating spatial context features. We argue that independent video point tracking also demands spatial context features. To this end, we propose a novel framework Context-PIPs, which effectively improves point trajectory accuracy by aggregating spatial context features in videos. Context-PIPs contains two main modules: 1) a SOurse Feature Enhancement (SOFE) module, and 2) a TArget Feature Aggregation (TAFA) module. Context-PIPs significantly improves PIPs all-sided, reducing 11.4\% Average Trajectory Error of Occluded Points (ATE-Occ) on CroHD and increasing 11.8\% Average Percentage of Correct Keypoint (A-PCK) on TAP-Vid-Kinetics. Demos are available at \url{https://wkbian.github.io/Projects/Context-PIPs/}.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the predominant model used for a variety of medical image analysis tasks. At inference time, these models are computationally intensive, especially with volumetric data.In principle, it is possible to trade accuracy for computational efficiency by manipulating the rescaling factor in the downsample and upsample layers of CNN architectures.However, properly exploring the accuracy-efficiency trade-off is prohibitively expensive with existing models.To address this, we introduce Scale-Space HyperNetworks (SSHN), a method that learns a spectrum of CNNs with varying internal rescaling factors.A single SSHN characterizes an entire Pareto accuracy-efficiency curve of models that match, and occasionally surpass, the outcomes of training many separate networks with fixed rescaling factors.We demonstrate the proposed approach in several medical image analysis applications, comparing SSHN against strategies with both fixed and dynamic rescaling factors.We find that SSHN consistently provides a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off at a fraction of the training cost. Trained SSHNs enable the user to quickly choose a rescaling factor that appropriately balances accuracy and computational efficiency for their particular needs at inference.

Vision transformers (ViTs) are top-performing models on many computer vision benchmarks and can accurately predict human behavior on object recognition tasks. However, researchers question the value of using ViTs as models of biological learning because ViTs are thought to be more “data hungry” than brains, with ViTs requiring more training data than brains to reach similar levels of performance. To test this assumption, we directly compared the learning abilities of ViTs and animals, by performing parallel controlled-rearing experiments on ViTs and newborn chicks. We first raised chicks in impoverished visual environments containing a single object, then simulated the training data available in those environments by building virtual animal chambers in a video game engine. We recorded the first-person images acquired by agents moving through the virtual chambers and used those images to train self-supervised ViTs that leverage time as a teaching signal, akin to biological visual systems. When ViTs were trained “through the eyes” of newborn chicks, the ViTs solved the same view-invariant object recognition tasks as the chicks. Thus, ViTs were not more data hungry than newborn chicks: both learned view-invariant object representations in impoverished visual environments. The flexible and generic attention-based learning mechanism in ViTs—combined with the embodied data streams available to newborn animals—appears sufficient to drive the development of animal-like object recognition.

The examination of blood samples at a microscopic level plays a fundamental role in clinical diagnostics. For instance, an in-depth study of White Blood Cells (WBCs), a crucial component of our blood, is essential for diagnosing blood-related diseases such as leukemia and anemia. While multiple datasets containing WBC images have been proposed, they mostly focus on cell categorization, often lacking the necessary morphological details to explain such categorizations, despite the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in medical domains. This paper seeks to address this limitation by introducing comprehensive annotations for WBC images. Through collaboration with pathologists, a thorough literature review, and manual inspection of microscopic images, we have identified 11 morphological attributes associated with the cell and its components (nucleus, cytoplasm, and granules). We then annotated ten thousand WBC images with these attributes, resulting in 113k labels (11 attributes x 10.3k images). Annotating at this level of detail and scale is unprecedented, offering unique value to AI in pathology. Moreover, we conduct experiments to predict these attributes from cell images, and also demonstrate specific applications that can benefit from our detailed annotations. Overall, our dataset paves the way for interpreting WBC recognition models, further advancing XAI in the fields of pathology and hematology.

The advent of high-capacity pre-trained models has revolutionized problem-solving in computer vision, shifting the focus from training task-specific models to adapting pre-trained models. Consequently, effectively adapting large pre-trained models to downstream tasks in an efficient manner has become a prominent research area. Existing solutions primarily concentrate on designing lightweight adapters and their interaction with pre-trained models, with the goal of minimizing the number of parameters requiring updates. In this study, we propose a novel Adapter Re-Composing (ARC) strategy that addresses efficient pre-trained model adaptation from a fresh perspective. Our approach considers the reusability of adaptation parameters and introduces a parameter-sharing scheme. Specifically, we leverage symmetric down-/up-projections to construct bottleneck operations, which are shared across layers. By learning low-dimensional re-scaling coefficients, we can effectively re-compose layer-adaptive adapters. This parameter-sharing strategy in adapter design allows us to further reduce the number of new parameters while maintaining satisfactory performance, thereby offering a promising approach to compress the adaptation cost. We conduct experiments on 24 downstream image classification tasks using various Vision Transformer variants to evaluate our method. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves compelling transfer learning performance with a reduced parameter count. Our code is available at https://github.com/DavidYanAnDe/ARC.