零样本分类

This paper presents a method that effectively combines two prevalent visual recognition methods, i.e., image classification and contrastive language-image pre-training, dubbed iCLIP. Instead of naive multi-task learning that use two separate heads for each task, we fuse the two tasks in a deep fashion that adapts the image classification to share the same formula and the same model weights with the language-image pre-training. To further bridge these two tasks, we propose to enhance the category names in image classification tasks using external knowledge, such as their descriptions in dictionaries. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method combines the advantages of two tasks well: the strong discrimination ability in image classification tasks due to the clear and clean category labels, and the good zero-shot ability in CLIP tasks ascribed to the richer semantics in the text descriptions. In particular, it reaches 82.9% top-1 accuracy on IN-1K, and surpasses CLIPby 1.8%, with similar model size, on zero-shot recognition of Kornblith 12-dataset benchmark. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/weiyx16/iCLIP.

Recent popular Role-Playing Games (RPGs) saw the great success of character auto-creation systems. The bone-driven face model controlled by continuous parameters (like the position of bones) and discrete parameters (like the hairstyles) makes it possible for users to personalize and customize in-game characters. Previous in-game character auto-creation systems are mostly image-driven, where facial parameters are optimized so that the rendered character looks similar to the reference face photo. This paper proposes a novel text-to-parameter translation method (T2P) to achieve zero-shot text-driven game character auto-creation. With our method, users can create a vivid in-game character with arbitrary text description without using any reference photo or editing hundreds of parameters manually. In our method, taking the power of large-scale pre-trained multi-modal CLIP and neural rendering, T2P searches both continuous facial parameters and discrete facial parameters in a unified framework. Due to the discontinuous parameter representation, previous methods have difficulty in effectively learning discrete facial parameters. T2P, to our best knowledge, is the first method that can handle the optimization of both discrete and continuous parameters. Experimental results show that T2P can generate high-quality and vivid game characters with given text prompts. T2P outperforms other SOTA text-to-3D generation methods on both objective evaluations and subjective evaluations.

Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to find a segmentation mask given a referring expression grounded to a region of the input image. Collecting labelled datasets for this task, however, is notoriously costly and labor-intensive. To overcome this issue, we propose a simple yet effective zero-shot referring image segmentation method by leveraging the pre-trained cross-modal knowledge from CLIP. In order to obtain segmentation masks grounded to the input text, we propose a mask-guided visual encoder that captures global and local contextual information of an input image. By utilizing instance masks obtained from off-the-shelf mask proposal techniques, our method is able to segment fine-detailed instance-level groundings. We also introduce a global-local text encoder where the global feature captures complex sentence-level semantics of the entire input expression while the local feature focuses on the target noun phrase extracted by a dependency parser. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms several zero-shot baselines of the task and even the weakly supervised referring expression segmentation method with substantial margins. Our code is available at https://github.com/Seonghoon-Yu/Zero-shot-RIS.

Transferring the pose of a reference avatar to stylized 3D characters of various shapes is a fundamental task in computer graphics. Existing methods either require the stylized characters to be rigged, or they use the stylized character in the desired pose as ground truth at training. We present a zero-shot approach that requires only the widely available deformed non-stylized avatars in training, and deforms stylized characters of significantly different shapes at inference. Classical methods achieve strong generalization by deforming the mesh at the triangle level, but this requires labelled correspondences. We leverage the power of local deformation, but without requiring explicit correspondence labels. We introduce a semi-supervised shape-understanding module to bypass the need for explicit correspondences at test time, and an implicit pose deformation module that deforms individual surface points to match the target pose. Furthermore, to encourage realistic and accurate deformation of stylized characters, we introduce an efficient volume-based test-time training procedure. Because it does not need rigging, nor the deformed stylized character at training time, our model generalizes to categories with scarce annotation, such as stylized quadrupeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches trained with comparable or more supervision. Our project page is available at https://jiashunwang.github.io/ZPT

Class-agnostic object counting aims to count object instances of an arbitrary class at test time. It is challenging but also enables many potential applications. Current methods require human-annotated exemplars as inputs which are often unavailable for novel categories, especially for autonomous systems. Thus, we propose zero-shot object counting (ZSC), a new setting where only the class name is available during test time. Such a counting system does not require human annotators in the loop and can operate automatically. Starting from a class name, we propose a method that can accurately identify the optimal patches which can then be used as counting exemplars. Specifically, we first construct a class prototype to select the patches that are likely to contain the objects of interest, namely class-relevant patches. Furthermore, we introduce a model that can quantitatively measure how suitable an arbitrary patch is as a counting exemplar. By applying this model to all the candidate patches, we can select the most suitable patches as exemplars for counting. Experimental results on a recent class-agnostic counting dataset, FSC-147, validate the effectiveness of our method.

Recently, self-supervised neural networks have shown excellent image denoising performance. However, current dataset free methods are either computationally expensive, require a noise model, or have inadequate image quality. In this work we show that a simple 2-layer network, without any training data or knowledge of the noise distribution, can enable high-quality image denoising at low computational cost. Our approach is motivated by Noise2Noise and Neighbor2Neighbor and works well for denoising pixel-wise independent noise. Our experiments on artificial, real-world camera, and microscope noise show that our method termed ZS-N2N (Zero Shot Noise2Noise) often outperforms existing dataset-free methods at a reduced cost, making it suitable for use cases with scarce data availability and limited compute.

When it comes to deploying deep vision models, the behavior of these systems must be explicable to ensure confidence in their reliability and fairness. A common approach to evaluate deep learning models is to build a labeled test set with attributes of interest and assess how well it performs. However, creating a balanced test set (i.e., one that is uniformly sampled over all the important traits) is often time-consuming, expensive, and prone to mistakes. The question we try to address is: can we evaluate the sensitivity of deep learning models to arbitrary visual attributes without an annotated test set? This paper argues the case that Zero-shot Model Diagnosis (ZOOM) is possible without the need for a test set nor labeling. To avoid the need for test sets, our system relies on a generative model and CLIP. The key idea is enabling the user to select a set of prompts (relevant to the problem) and our system will automatically search for semantic counterfactual images (i.e., synthesized images that flip the prediction in the case of a binary classifier) using the generative model. We evaluate several visual tasks (classification, key-point detection, and segmentation) in multiple visual domains to demonstrate the viability of our methodology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of producing counterfactual images and offering sensitivity analysis for model diagnosis without the need for a test set.

Recently, CLIP-guided image synthesis has shown appealing performance on adapting a pre-trained source-domain generator to an unseen target domain. It does not require any target-domain samples but only the textual domain labels. The training is highly efficient, e.g., a few minutes. However, existing methods still have some limitations in the quality of generated images and may suffer from the mode collapse issue. A key reason is that a fixed adaptation direction is applied for all cross-domain image pairs, which leads to identical supervision signals. To address this issue, we propose an Image-specific Prompt Learning (IPL) method, which learns specific prompt vectors for each source-domain image. This produces a more precise adaptation direction for every cross-domain image pair, endowing the target-domain generator with greatly enhanced flexibility. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on various domains demonstrate that IPL effectively improves the quality and diversity of synthesized images and alleviates the mode collapse. Moreover, IPL is independent of the structure of the generative model, such as generative adversarial networks or diffusion models. Code is available at https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/IPL-Zero-Shot-Generative-Model-Adaptation.

This paper studies the problem of zero-short sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), however with two significant differentiators to prior art (i) we tackle all variants (inter-category, intra-category, and cross datasets) of ZS-SBIR with just one network ("everything"), and (ii) we would really like to understand how this sketch-photo matching operates ("explainable"). Our key innovation lies with the realization that such a cross-modal matching problem could be reduced to comparisons of groups of key local patches -- akin to the seasoned "bag-of-words" paradigm. Just with this change, we are able to achieve both of the aforementioned goals, with the added benefit of no longer requiring external semantic knowledge. Technically, ours is a transformer-based cross-modal network, with three novel components (i) a self-attention module with a learnable tokenizer to produce visual tokens that correspond to the most informative local regions, (ii) a cross-attention module to compute local correspondences between the visual tokens across two modalities, and finally (iii) a kernel-based relation network to assemble local putative matches and produce an overall similarity metric for a sketch-photo pair. Experiments show ours indeed delivers superior performances across all ZS-SBIR settings. The all important explainable goal is elegantly achieved by visualizing cross-modal token correspondences, and for the first time, via sketch to photo synthesis by universal replacement of all matched photo patches.

The asymmetric dual-lens configuration is commonly available on mobile devices nowadays, which naturally stores a pair of wide-angle and telephoto images of the same scene to support realistic super-resolution (SR). Even on the same device, however, the degradation for modeling realistic SR is image-specific due to the unknown acquisition process (e.g., tiny camera motion). In this paper, we propose a zero-shot solution for dual-lens SR (ZeDuSR), where only the dual-lens pair at test time is used to learn an image-specific SR model. As such, ZeDuSR adapts itself to the current scene without using external training data, and thus gets rid of generalization difficulty. However, there are two major challenges to achieving this goal: 1) dual-lens alignment while keeping the realistic degradation, and 2) effective usage of highly limited training data. To overcome these two challenges, we propose a degradation-invariant alignment method and a degradation-aware training strategy to fully exploit the information within a single dual-lens pair. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of ZeDuSR over existing solutions on both synthesized and real-world dual-lens datasets.

Recently, CLIP has been applied to pixel-level zero-shot learning tasks via a wo-stage scheme. The general idea is to first generate class-agnostic region proposals and then feed the cropped proposal regions to CLIP to utilize its image-level zero-shot classification capability. While effective, such a scheme requires two image encoders, one for proposal generation and one for CLIP, leading to a complicated pipeline and high computational cost. In this work, we pursue a simpler-and-efficient one-stage solution that directly extends CLIP's zero-shot prediction capability from image to pixel level. Our investigation starts with a straightforward extension as our baseline that generates semantic masks by comparing the similarity between text and patch embeddings extracted from CLIP. However, such a paradigm could heavily overfit the seen classes and fail to generalize to unseen classes. To handle this issue, we propose three simple-but-effective designs and figure out that they can significantly retain the inherent zero-shot capacity of CLIP and improve pixel-level generalization ability. Incorporating those modifications leads to an efficient zero-shot semantic segmentation system called ZegCLIP. Through extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, ZegCLIP demonstrates superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin under both "inductive" and "transductive" zero-shot settings. In addition, compared with the two-stage method, our one-stage ZegCLIP achieves a speedup of about 5 times faster during inference. We release the code at https://github.com/ZiqinZhou66/ZegCLIP.git.

Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subtraction ZBS. The proposed method fully utilizes the advantages of zero-shot object detection to build the open-vocabulary instance-level background model. Based on it, the foreground can be effectively extracted by comparing the detection results of new frames with the background model. ZBS performs well for sophisticated scenarios, and it has rich and extensible categories. Furthermore, our method can easily generalize to other tasks, such as abandoned object detection in unseen environments. We experimentally show that ZBS surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised BGS methods by 4.70% F-Measure on the CDnet 2014 dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ZBS.

Visual anomaly classification and segmentation are vital for automating industrial quality inspection. The focus of prior research in the field has been on training custom models for each quality inspection task, which requires task-specific images and annotation. In this paper we move away from this regime, addressing zero-shot and few-normal-shot anomaly classification and segmentation. Recently CLIP, a vision-language model, has shown revolutionary generality with competitive zero/few-shot performance in comparison to full-supervision. But CLIP falls short on anomaly classification and segmentation tasks. Hence, we propose window-based CLIP (WinCLIP) with (1) a compositional ensemble on state words and prompt templates and (2) efficient extraction and aggregation of window/patch/image-level features aligned with text. We also propose its few-normal-shot extension WinCLIP+, which uses complementary information from normal images. In MVTec-AD (and VisA), without further tuning, WinCLIP achieves 91.8%/85.1% (78.1%/79.6%) AUROC in zero-shot anomaly classification and segmentation while WinCLIP+ does 93.1%/95.2% (83.8%/96.4%) in 1-normal-shot, surpassing state-of-the-art by large margins.

Weak-shot Object Detection methods exploit a fully-annotated source dataset to facilitate the detection performance on the target dataset which only contains image-level labels for novel categories. To bridge the gap between these two datasets, we aim to transfer the object knowledge between the source (S) and target (T) datasets in a bi-directional manner. We propose a novel Knowledge Transfer (KT) loss which simultaneously distills the knowledge of objectness and class entropy from a proposal generator trained on the S dataset to optimize a multiple instance learning module on the T dataset. By jointly optimizing the classification loss and the proposed KT loss, the multiple instance learning module effectively learns to classify object proposals into novel categories in the T dataset with the transferred knowledge from base categories in the S dataset. Noticing the predicted boxes on the T dataset can be regarded as an extension for the original annotations on the S dataset to refine the proposal generator in return, we further propose a novel Consistency Filtering (CF) method to reliably remove inaccurate pseudo labels by evaluating the stability of the multiple instance learning module upon noise injections. Via mutually transferring knowledge between the S and T datasets in an iterative manner, the detection performance on the target dataset is significantly improved. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate that the proposed method performs favourably against the state-of-the-art methods without increasing the model parameters or inference computational complexity.

Contrastive visual language pretraining has emerged as a powerful method for either training new language-aware image encoders or augmenting existing pretrained models with zero-shot visual recognition capabilities. However, existing works typically train on large datasets of image-text pairs and have been designed to perform downstream tasks involving only small to medium sized-images, neither of which are applicable to the emerging field of computational pathology where there are limited publicly available paired image-text datasets and each image can span up to 100,000 x 100,000 pixels in dimensions. In this paper we present MI-Zero, a simple and intuitive framework for unleashing the zero-shot transfer capabilities of contrastively aligned image and text models to gigapixel histopathology whole slide images, enabling multiple downstream diagnostic tasks to be carried out by pretrained encoders without requiring any additional labels. MI-Zero reformulates zero-shot transfer under the framework of multiple instance learning to overcome the computational challenge of inference on extremely large images. We used over 550k pathology reports and other available in-domain text corpora to pretrain our text encoder. By effectively leveraging strong pretrained encoders, our best model pretrained on over 33k histopathology image-caption pairs achieves an average median zero-shot accuracy of 70.2% across three different real-world cancer subtyping tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mahmoodlab/MI-Zero.

Although different approaches have been proposed for 3D point cloud-related tasks, few-shot learning (FSL) of 3D point clouds still remains under-explored. In FSL, unlike traditional supervised learning, the classes of training and test data do not overlap, and a model needs to recognize unseen classes from only a few samples. Existing FSL methods for 3D point clouds employ point-based models as their backbone. Yet, based on our extensive experiments and analysis, we first show that using a point-based backbone is not the most suitable FSL approach, since (i) a large number of points' features are discarded by the max pooling operation used in 3D point-based backbones, decreasing the ability of representing shape information; (ii)point-based backbones are sensitive to occlusion. To address these issues, we propose employing a projection- and 2D Convolutional Neural Network-based backbone, referred to as the ViewNet, for FSL from 3D point clouds. Our approach first projects a 3D point cloud onto six different views to alleviate the issue of missing points. Also, to generate more descriptive and distinguishing features, we propose View Pooling, which combines different projected plane combinations into five groups and performs max-pooling on each of them. The experiments performed on the ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN and ModelNet40-C datasets, with cross validation, show that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, compared to traditional image classification backbones, such as ResNet, the proposed ViewNet can extract more distinguishing features from multiple views of a point cloud. We also show that ViewNet can be used as a backbone with different FSL heads and provides improved performance compared to traditionally used backbones.

Robust and non-destructive material classification is a challenging but crucial first-step in numerous vision applications. We propose a physics-guided material classification framework that relies on thermal properties of the object. Our key observation is that the rate of heating and cooling of an object depends on the unique intrinsic properties of the material, namely the emissivity and diffusivity. We leverage this observation by gently heating the objects in the scene with a low-power laser for a fixed duration and then turning it off, while a thermal camera captures measurements during the heating and cooling process. We then take this spatial and temporal "thermal spread function" (TSF) to solve an inverse heat equation using the finite-differences approach, resulting in a spatially varying estimate of diffusivity and emissivity. These tuples are then used to train a classifier that produces a fine-grained material label at each spatial pixel. Our approach is extremely simple requiring only a small light source (low power laser) and a thermal camera, and produces robust classification results with 86% accuracy over 16 classes

Vision Transformers (ViTs) emerge to achieve impressive performance on many data-abundant computer vision tasks by capturing long-range dependencies among local features. However, under few-shot learning (FSL) settings on small datasets with only a few labeled data, ViT tends to overfit and suffers from severe performance degradation due to its absence of CNN-alike inductive bias. Previous works in FSL avoid such problem either through the help of self-supervised auxiliary losses, or through the dextile uses of label information under supervised settings. But the gap between self-supervised and supervised few-shot Transformers is still unfilled. Inspired by recent advances in self-supervised knowledge distillation and masked image modeling (MIM), we propose a novel Supervised Masked Knowledge Distillation model (SMKD) for few-shot Transformers which incorporates label information into self-distillation frameworks. Compared with previous self-supervised methods, we allow intra-class knowledge distillation on both class and patch tokens, and introduce the challenging task of masked patch tokens reconstruction across intra-class images. Experimental results on four few-shot classification benchmark datasets show that our method with simple design outperforms previous methods by a large margin and achieves a new start-of-the-art. Detailed ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component of our model. Code for this paper is available here: https://github.com/HL-hanlin/SMKD.

3D style transfer aims to render stylized novel views of a 3D scene with multi-view consistency. However, most existing work suffers from a three-way dilemma over accurate geometry reconstruction, high-quality stylization, and being generalizable to arbitrary new styles. We propose StyleRF (Style Radiance Fields), an innovative 3D style transfer technique that resolves the three-way dilemma by performing style transformation within the feature space of a radiance field. StyleRF employs an explicit grid of high-level features to represent 3D scenes, with which high-fidelity geometry can be reliably restored via volume rendering. In addition, it transforms the grid features according to the reference style which directly leads to high-quality zero-shot style transfer. StyleRF consists of two innovative designs. The first is sampling-invariant content transformation that makes the transformation invariant to the holistic statistics of the sampled 3D points and accordingly ensures multi-view consistency. The second is deferred style transformation of 2D feature maps which is equivalent to the transformation of 3D points but greatly reduces memory footprint without degrading multi-view consistency. Extensive experiments show that StyleRF achieves superior 3D stylization quality with precise geometry reconstruction and it can generalize to various new styles in a zero-shot manner. Project website: https://kunhao-liu.github.io/StyleRF/

Zero-shot instance segmentation aims to detect and precisely segment objects of unseen categories without any training samples. Since the model is trained on seen categories, there is a strong bias that the model tends to classify all the objects into seen categories. Besides, there is a natural confusion between background and novel objects that have never shown up in training. These two challenges make novel objects hard to be raised in the final instance segmentation results. It is desired to rescue novel objects from background and dominated seen categories. To this end, we propose D^2Zero with Semantic-Promoted Debiasing and Background Disambiguation to enhance the performance of Zero-shot instance segmentation. Semantic-promoted debiasing utilizes inter-class semantic relationships to involve unseen categories in visual feature training and learns an input-conditional classifier to conduct dynamical classification based on the input image. Background disambiguation produces image-adaptive background representation to avoid mistaking novel objects for background. Extensive experiments show that we significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, e.g., 16.86% improvement on COCO.