In recent years, simultaneous learning of multiple dense prediction tasks with partially annotated label data has emerged as an important research area. Previous works primarily focus on leveraging cross-task relations or conducting adversarial training for extra regularization, which achieve promising performance improvements, while still suffering from the lack of direct pixel-wise supervision and extra training of heavy mapping networks. To effectively tackle this challenge, we propose a novel approach to optimize a set of compact learnable hierarchical task tokens, including global and fine-grained ones, to discover consistent pixel-wise supervision signals in both feature and prediction levels. Specifically, the global task tokens are designed for effective cross-task feature interactions in a global context. Then, a group of fine-grained task-specific spatial tokens for each task is learned from the corresponding global task tokens. It is embedded to have dense interactions with each task-specific feature map. The learned global and local fine-grained task tokens are further used to discover pseudo task-specific dense labels at different levels of granularity, and they can be utilized to directly supervise the learning of the multi-task dense prediction framework. Extensive experimental results on challenging NYUD-v2, Cityscapes, and PASCAL Context datasets demonstrate significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods for partially annotated multi-task dense prediction.

Existing single-view 3D generative models typically adopt multiview diffusion priors to reconstruct object surfaces, yet they remain prone to inter-view inconsistencies and are unable to faithfully represent complex internal structure or nontrivial topologies. In particular, we encode geometry information by projecting it onto a bounding sphere and unwrapping it into a compact and structural multi-layer 2D Spherical Projection (SP) representation. Operating solely in the image domain, SPGen offers three key advantages simultaneously: (1) Consistency. The injective SP mapping encodes surface geometry with a single viewpoint which naturally eliminates view inconsistency and ambiguity; (2) Flexibility. Multi-layer SP maps represent nested internal structures and support direct lifting to watertight or open 3D surfaces; (3) Efficiency. The image-domain formulation allows the direct inheritance of powerful 2D diffusion priors and enables efficient finetuning with limited computational resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPGen significantly outperforms existing baselines in geometric quality and computational efficiency.

Multi-task dense prediction aims at handling multiple pixel-wise prediction tasks within a unified network simultaneously for visual scene understanding. However, cross-task feature interactions of current methods are still suffering from incomplete levels of representations, less discriminative semantics in feature participants, and inefficient pair-wise task interaction processes. To tackle these under-explored issues, we propose a novel BridgeNet framework, which extracts comprehensive and discriminative intermediate Bridge Features, and conducts interactions based on them. Specifically, a Task Pattern Propagation (TPP) module is first applied to ensure highly semantic task-specific feature participants are prepared for subsequent interactions, and a Bridge Feature Extractor (BFE) is specially designed to selectively integrate both high-level and low-level representations to generate the comprehensive bridge features. Then, instead of conducting heavy pair-wise cross-task interactions, a Task-Feature Refiner (TFR) is developed to efficiently take guidance from bridge features and form final task predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work considering the completeness and quality of feature participants in cross-task interactions. Extensive experiments are conducted on NYUD-v2, Cityscapes and PASCAL Context benchmarks, and the superior performance shows the proposed architecture is effective and powerful in promoting different dense prediction tasks simultaneously.

Cross-domain pedestrian detection aims to generalize pedestrian detectors from one label-rich domain to another label-scarce domain, which is crucial for various real-world applications. Most recent works focus on domain alignment to train domain-adaptive detectors either at the instance level or image level. From a practical point of view, one-stage detectors are faster. Therefore, we concentrate on designing a cross-domain algorithm for rapid one-stage detectors that lacks instance-level proposals and can only perform image-level feature alignment. However, pure image-level feature alignment causes the foreground-background misalignment issue to arise, i.e., the foreground features in the source domain image are falsely aligned with background features in the target domain image. To address this issue, we systematically analyze the importance of foreground and background in image-level cross-domain alignment, and learn that background plays a more critical role in image-level cross-domain alignment. Therefore, we focus on cross-domain background feature alignment while minimizing the influence of foreground features on the cross-domain alignment stage. This paper proposes a novel framework, namely, background-focused distribution alignment (BFDA), to train domain adaptive one-stage pedestrian detectors. Specifically, BFDA first decouples the background features from the whole image feature maps and then aligns them via a novel long-short-range discriminator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to mainstream domain adaptation technologies, BFDA significantly enhances cross-domain pedestrian detection performance for either one-stage or two-stage detectors. Moreover, by employing the efficient one-stage detector (YOLOv5), BFDA can reach 217.4 FPS ( 640×480 pixels) on NVIDIA Tesla V100 (7~12 times the FPS of the existing frameworks), which is highly significant for practical applications. The code from this study will be made publicly available.