Most prior motion prediction endeavors in autonomous driving have inadequately encoded future scenarios, leading to predictions that may fail to accurately capture the diverse movements of agents (e.g., vehicles or pedestrians). To address this, we propose FutureNet, which explicitly integrates initially predicted trajectories into the future scenario and further encodes these future contexts to enhance subsequent forecasting. Additionally, most previous motion forecasting works have focused on predicting independent futures for each agent. However, safe and smooth autonomous driving requires accurately predicting the diverse future behaviors of numerous surrounding agents jointly in complex dynamic environments. Given that all agents occupy certain potential travel spaces and possess lane driving priority, we propose Lane Occupancy Field (LOF), a new representation with lane semantics for motion forecasting in autonomous driving. LOF can simultaneously capture the joint probability distribution of all road participants' future spatial-temporal positions. Due to the high compatibility between lane occupancy field prediction and trajectory prediction, we propose a novel network for joint prediction of these two tasks. Our approach ranks 1st on two large-scale motion forecasting benchmarks: Argoverse 1 and Argoverse 2, while it is also the champion method of the CVPR 2024 Argoverse 2 motion forecasting challenge.

Recent real-time semantic segmentation methods usually adopt an additional semantic branch to pursue rich long-range context. However, the additional branch incurs undesirable computational overhead and slows inference speed. To eliminate this dilemma, we propose SCTNet, a single branch CNN with transformer semantic information for real-time segmentation. SCTNet enjoys the rich semantic representations of an inference-free semantic branch while retaining the high efficiency of lightweight single branch CNN. SCTNet utilizes a transformer as the training-only semantic branch considering its superb ability to extract long-range context. With the help of the proposed transformer-like CNN block CFBlock and the semantic information alignment module, SCTNet could capture the rich semantic information from the transformer branch in training. During the inference, only the single branch CNN needs to be deployed. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K, and the results show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at https://github.com/xzz777/SCTNet.

Language-image pre-training is an effective technique for learning powerful representations in general domains. However, when directly turning to person representation learning, these general pre-training methods suffer from unsatisfactory performance. The reason is that they neglect critical person-related characteristics, i.e., fine-grained attributes and identities. To address this issue, we propose a novel language-image pre-training framework for person representation learning, termed PLIP. Specifically, we elaborately design three pretext tasks: 1) Text-guided Image Colorization, aims to establish the correspondence between the person-related image regions and the fine-grained color-part textual phrases. 2) Image-guided Attributes Prediction, aims to mine fine-grained attribute information of the person body in the image; and 3) Identity-based Vision-Language Contrast, aims to correlate the cross-modal representations at the identity level rather than the instance level. Moreover, to implement our pre-train framework, we construct a large-scale person dataset with image-text pairs named SYNTH-PEDES by automatically generating textual annotations. We pre-train PLIP on SYNTH-PEDES and evaluate our models by spanning downstream person-centric tasks. PLIP not only significantly improves existing methods on all these tasks, but also shows great ability in the zero-shot and domain generalization settings. The code, dataset and weight will be made publicly available.

Predicting the future motion of road participants is crucial for autonomous driving but is extremely challenging due to staggering motion uncertainty. Recently, most motion forecasting methods resort to the goal-based strategy, i.e., predicting endpoints of motion trajectories as conditions to regress the entire trajectories, so that the search space of solution can be reduced. However, accurate goal coordinates are hard to predict and evaluate. In addition, the point representation of the destination limits the utilization of a rich road context, leading to inaccurate prediction results in many cases. Goal area, i.e., the possible destination area, rather than goal coordinate, could provide a more soft constraint for searching potential trajectories by involving more tolerance and guidance. In view of this, we propose a new goal area-based framework, named Goal Area Network (GANet), for motion forecasting, which models goal areas as preconditions for trajectory prediction, performing more robustly and accurately. Specifically, we propose a GoICrop (Goal Area of Interest) operator to effectively aggregate semantic lane features in goal areas and model actors' future interactions as feedback, which benefits a lot for future trajectory estimations. GANet ranks the 1st on the leaderboard of Argoverse Challenge among all public literature (till the paper submission). Code will be available at https://github.com/kingwmk/GANet.

Human parsing is a fine-grained semantic segmentation task, which needs to understand human semantic parts. Most existing methods model human parsing as a general semantic segmentation, which ignores the inherent relationship among hierarchical human parts. In this work, we propose a pose-guided hierarchical semantic decomposition and composition framework for human parsing. Specifically, our method includes a semantic maintained decomposition and composition (SMDC) module and a pose distillation (PC) module. SMDC progressively disassembles the human body to focus on the more concise regions of interest in the decomposition stage and then gradually assembles human parts under the guidance of pose information in the composition stage. Notably, SMDC maintains the atomic semantic labels during both stages to avoid the error propagation issue of the hierarchical structure. To further take advantage of the relationship of human parts, we introduce pose information as explicit guidance for the composition. However, the discrete structure prediction in pose estimation is against the requirement of the continuous region in human parsing. To this end, we design a PC module to broadcast the maximum responses of pose estimation to form the continuous structure in the way of knowledge distillation. The experimental results on the look-into-person (LIP) and PASCAL-Person-Part datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods, that is, 55.21% mean Intersection of Union (mIoU) on LIP and 69.88% mIoU on PASCAL-Person-Part.

Improving boundary segmentation results has recently attracted increasing attention in the field of semantic segmentation. Since existing popular methods usually exploit the long-range context, the boundary cues are obscure in the feature space, leading to poor boundary results. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional boundary loss (CBL) for semantic segmentation to improve the performance of the boundaries. The CBL creates a unique optimization goal for each boundary pixel, conditioned on its surrounding neighbors. The conditional optimization of the CBL is easy yet effective. In contrast, most previous boundary-aware methods have difficult optimization goals or may cause potential conflicts with the semantic segmentation task. Specifically, the CBL enhances the intra-class consistency and inter-class difference, by pulling each boundary pixel closer to its unique local class center and pushing it away from its different-class neighbors. Moreover, the CBL filters out noisy and incorrect information to obtain precise boundaries, since only surrounding neighbors that are correctly classified participate in the loss calculation. Our loss is a plug-and-play solution that can be used to improve the boundary segmentation performance of any semantic segmentation network. We conduct extensive experiments on ADE20K, Cityscapes, and Pascal Context, and the results show that applying the CBL to various popular segmentation networks can significantly improve the mIoU and boundary F-score performance.

Motion prediction from raw LiDAR sensor data has drawn increasing attention and led to a surge of studies following two main paradigms. One paradigm is global motion paradigm, which simultaneously detects objects from point clouds and predicts the trajectories of each object in the future. The other paradigm is local motion paradigm, which directly performs dense motion prediction pointwisely. We observe that global motion prediction can benefit from local motion representation, since it contains rich local displacement contexts that are not explicitly exploited in global motion prediction. Correspondingly, local motion prediction can benefit from global motion representation, since it provides object contexts to improve prediction consistency inside an object. However, the complement of these two motion representations has not fully explored in the literature. To this end, we propose Hybrid Motion Representation Learning (HyMo), a unified framework to address the problem of motion prediction by making the best of both global and local motion cues. We have conducted extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the learned hybrid motion representation achieves state-of-the-art performance on both global and local motion prediction tasks.

We present an efficient high-resolution network, Lite-HRNet, for human pose estimation. We start by simply applying the efficient shuffle block in ShuffleNet to HRNet (high-resolution network), yielding stronger performance over popular lightweight networks, such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and Small HRNet. We find that the heavily-used pointwise (1 × 1) convolutions in shuffle blocks become the computational bottleneck. We introduce a lightweight unit, conditional channel weighting, to replace costly pointwise (1 × 1) convolutions in shuffle blocks. The complexity of channel weighting is linear w.r.t the number of channels and lower than the quadratic time complexity for pointwise convolutions. Our solution learns the weights from all the channels and over multiple resolutions that are readily available in the parallel branches in HRNet. It uses the weights as the bridge to exchange information across channels and resolutions, compensating the role played by the pointwise (1 × 1) convolution. Lite-HRNet demonstrates superior results on human pose estimation over popular lightweight networks. Moreover, Lite-HRNet can be easily applied to semantic segmentation task in the same lightweight manner. The code and models have been publicly available at https://github.com/HRNet/Lite-HRNet.

Image manipulation with StyleGAN has been an increasing concern in recent years. Recent works have achieved tremendous success in analyzing several semantic latent spaces to edit the attributes of the generated images. However, due to the limited semantic and spatial manipulation precision in these latent spaces, the existing endeavors are defeated in fine-grained StyleGAN image manipulation, i.e., local attribute translation. To address this issue, we discover attribute-specific control units, which consist of multiple channels of feature maps and modulation styles. Specifically, we collaboratively manipulate the modulation style channels and feature maps in control units rather than individual ones to obtain the semantic and spatial disentangled controls. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method to detect the attribute-specific control units. We move the modulation style along a specific sparse direction vector and replace the filter-wise styles used to compute the feature maps to manipulate these control units. We evaluate our proposed method in various face attribute manipulation tasks. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. The manipulation results of real images further show the effectiveness of our method.

The fully convolutional network (FCN) has achieved tremendous success in dense visual recognition tasks, such as scene segmentation. The last layer of FCN is typically a global classifier (1×1 convolution) to recognize each pixel to a semantic label. We empirically show that this global classifier, ignoring the intra-class distinction, may lead to sub-optimal results. In this work, we present a conditional classifier to replace the traditional global classifier, where the kernels of the classifier are generated dynamically conditioned on the input. The main advantages of the new classifier consist of: (i) it attends on the intra-class distinction, leading to stronger dense recognition capability; (ii) the conditional classifier is simple and flexible to be integrated into almost arbitrary FCN architectures to improve the prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed classifier performs favourably against the traditional classifier on the FCN architecture. The framework equipped with the conditional classifier (called CondNet) achieves new state-of-the-art performances on two datasets. The code and models are available at https://git.io/CondNet.

We propose a Generative Transfer Network (GTNet) for zero-shot object detection (ZSD). GTNet consists of an Object Detection Module and a Knowledge Transfer Module. The Object Detection Module can learn large-scale seen domain knowledge. The Knowledge Transfer Module leverages a feature synthesizer to generate unseen class features, which are applied to train a new classification layer for the Object Detection Module. In order to synthesize features for each unseen class with both the intra-class variance and the IoU variance, we design an IoU-Aware Generative Adversarial Network (IoUGAN) as the feature synthesizer, which can be easily integrated into GTNet. Specifically, IoUGAN consists of three unit models: Class Feature Generating Unit (CFU), Foreground Feature Generating Unit (FFU), and Background Feature Generating Unit (BFU). CFU generates unseen features with the intra-class variance conditioned on the class semantic embeddings. FFU and BFU add the IoU variance to the results of CFU, yielding class-specific foreground and background features, respectively. We evaluate our method on three public datasets and the results demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art ZSD approaches.

Recent works have widely explored the contextual dependencies to achieve more accurate segmentation results. However, most approaches rarely distinguish different types of contextual dependencies, which may pollute the scene understanding. In this work, we directly supervise the feature aggregation to distinguish the intra-class and interclass context clearly. Specifically, we develop a Context Prior with the supervision of the Affinity Loss. Given an input image and corresponding ground truth, Affinity Loss constructs an ideal affinity map to supervise the learning of Context Prior. The learned Context Prior extracts the pixels belonging to the same category, while the reversed prior focuses on the pixels of different classes. Embedded into a conventional deep CNN, the proposed Context Prior Layer can selectively capture the intra-class and inter-class contextual dependencies, leading to robust feature representation. To validate the effectiveness, we design an effective Context Prior Network (CPNet). Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches. More specifically, our algorithm achieves 46.3% mIoU on ADE20K, 53.9% mIoU on PASCAL-Context, and 81.3% mIoU on Cityscapes. Code is available at https://git.io/ContextPrior.

Panoptic segmentation, which needs to assign a category label to each pixel and segment each object instance simultaneously, is a challenging topic. Traditionally, the existing approaches utilize two independent models without sharing features, which makes the pipeline inefficient to implement. In addition, a heuristic method is usually employed to merge the results. However, the overlapping relationship between object instances is difficult to determine without sufficient context information during the merging process. To address the problems, we propose a novel end-to-end Occlusion Aware Network (OANet) for panoptic segmentation, which can efficiently and effectively predict both the instance and stuff segmentation in a single network. Moreover, we introduce a novel spatial ranking module to deal with the occlusion problem between the predicted instances. Extensive experiments have been done to validate the performance of our proposed method and promising results have been achieved on the COCO Panoptic benchmark.

Most existing methods of semantic segmentation still suffer from two aspects of challenges: intra-class inconsistency and inter-class indistinction. To tackle these two problems, we propose a Discriminative Feature Network (DFN), which contains two sub-networks: Smooth Network and Border Network. Specifically, to handle the intra-class inconsistency problem, we specially design a Smooth Network with Channel Attention Block and global average pooling to select the more discriminative features. Furthermore, we propose a Border Network to make the bilateral features of boundary distinguishable with deep semantic boundary supervision. Based on our proposed DFN, we achieve state-of-the-art performance 86.2% mean IOU on PASCAL VOC 2012 and 80.3% mean IOU on Cityscapes dataset.

Although correlation filter based trackers have recently demonstrated excellent performance, they still suffer from the boundary effects. The cosine window is introduced to alleviate the boundary affects, which however may result in poor performance in case of occlusion or fast motion. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective framework, which builds a spatially attentive model with multiple features to guide the detection of the correlation filter based trackers. The proposed method not only can breakthrough the spatial extent of cosine window, but also can provides prior information about the target object. Moreover, to model a robust object prior, we propose a generic strategy for adaptive fusion and update of multiple features. Extensive experiments over multiple tracking benchmarks demonstrate the superior accuracy and real-time performance of our methods compared to the state-of-the-art trackers.