This paper presents a new framework for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation with the pre-trained vision-language model, named Side Adapter Network (SAN). Our approach models the semantic segmentation task as a region recognition problem. A side network is attached to a frozen CLIP model with two branches: one for predicting mask proposals, and the other for predicting attention bias which is applied in the CLIP model to recognize the class of masks. This decoupled design has the benefit CLIP in recognizing the class of mask proposals. Since the attached side network can reuse CLIP features, it can be very light. In addition, the entire network can be trained end-to-end, allowing the side network to be adapted to the frozen CLIP model, which makes the predicted mask proposals CLIP-aware. Our approach is fast, accurate, and only adds a few additional trainable parameters. We evaluate our approach on multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our method significantly outperforms other counterparts, with up to 18 times fewer trainable parameters and 19 times faster inference speed. Fig. 1 shows some visualization results on ImageNet. We hope our approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

This article concentrates on open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, where a well optimized model is able to segment arbitrary categories that appear in an image. To achieve this goal, we present a novel framework termed Side Adapter Network, or SAN for short. Our design principles are three-fold: 1) Recent large-scale vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) show promising open-vocabulary image classification capability; it is training-economized to adapt a pre-trained CLIP model to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. 2) Our SAN model should be both lightweight and effective in order to reduce the inference cost-to achieve this, we fuse the CLIP model's intermediate features to enhance the representation capability of the SAN model, and drive the CLIP model to focus on the informative areas of an image with the aid of the attention biases predicted by a side adapter network. 3) Our approach should empower mainstream segmentation architectures to have the capability of open-vocabulary segmentation-we present P-SAN and R-SAN, to support widely adopted pixel-wise segmentation and region-wise segmentation, respectively. Experimentally, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 commonly used benchmarks while having much less trainable parameters and GFLOPs. For instance, our R-SAN outperforms previous best method OvSeg by +2.3 averaged mIoU across all benchmarks while using only 6% of trainable parameters and less than 1% of GFLOPs. In addition, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis of the open-vocabulary semantic segmentation datasets and verify the feasibility of transferring a well optimzied R-SAN model to video segmentation task.

This paper proposes a new generative adversarial network for pose transfer, i.e., transferring the pose of a given person to a target pose. We design a progressive generator which comprises a sequence of transfer blocks. Each block performs an intermediate transfer step by modeling the relationship between the condition and the target poses with attention mechanism. Two types of blocks are introduced, namely pose-attentional transfer block (PATB) and aligned pose-attentional transfer block (APATB). Compared with previous works, our model generates more photorealistic person images that retain better appearance consistency and shape consistency compared with input images. We verify the efficacy of the model on the Market-1501 and DeepFashion datasets, using quantitative and qualitative measures. Furthermore, we show that our method can be used for data augmentation for the person re-identification task, alleviating the issue of data insufficiency. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/tengteng95/Pose-Transfer.git.

This paper presents an end-to-end semi-supervised object detection approach, in contrast to previous more complex multi-stage methods. The end-to-end training gradually improves pseudo label qualities during the curriculum, and the more and more accurate pseudo labels in turn benefit object detection training. We also propose two simple yet effective techniques within this framework: a soft teacher mechanism where the classification loss of each unlabeled bounding box is weighed by the classification score produced by the teacher network; a box jittering approach to select reliable pseudo boxes for the learning of box regression. On the COCO benchmark, the proposed approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin under various labeling ratios, i.e. 1%, 5% and 10%. Moreover, our approach proves to perform also well when the amount of labeled data is relatively large. For example, it can improve a 40.9 mAP baseline detector trained using the full COCO training set by +3.6 mAP, reaching 44.5 mAP, by leveraging the 123K unlabeled images of COCO. On the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer based object detector (58.9 mAP on test-dev), it can still significantly improve the detection accuracy by +1.5 mAP, reaching 60.4 mAP, and improve the instance segmentation accuracy by +1.2 mAP, reaching 52.4 mAP. Further incorporating with the Object365 pre-trained model, the detection accuracy reaches 61.3 mAP and the instance segmentation accuracy reaches 53.0 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/SoftTeacher.

We introduce MixTraining, a new training paradigm for object detection that can improve the performance of existing detectors for free. MixTraining enhances data augmentation by utilizing augmentations of different strengths while excluding the strong augmentations of certain training samples that may be detrimental to training. In addition, it addresses localization noise and missing labels in human annotations by incorporating pseudo boxes that can compensate for these errors. Both of these MixTraining capabilities are made possible through bootstrapping on the detector, which can be used to predict the difficulty of training on a strong augmentation, as well as to generate reliable pseudo boxes thanks to the robustness of neural networks to labeling error. MixTraining is found to bring consistent improvements across various detectors on the COCO dataset. In particular, the performance of Faster R-CNN~\cite{ren2015faster} with a ResNet-50~\cite{he2016deep} backbone is improved from 41.7 mAP to 44.0 mAP, and the accuracy of Cascade-RCNN~\cite{cai2018cascade} with a Swin-Small~\cite{liu2021swin} backbone is raised from 50.9 mAP to 52.8 mAP.