Visual prompt-based detection enables generalization to arbitrary novel instances in the target image by using one or a few visual templates. Previous methods rely on complex relation or explicit feature matching modules, and their designs are deeply coupled with specific detectors, greatly limiting their applicability. Instead, we propose our ‘Any Detector can Detect Anything’ framework that can enable any detector to detect any object given a single or a few visual templates. Specifically, we design an adapter called Template-Aware Adapter that can be added on top of any existing detector architecture to inject visual template information directly into the detection features. After integration, localization is done on the feature maps as in standard object detectors, effectively transforming any detector into a visual prompt-based detector. Furthermore, we revisit current visual prompt detection benchmarks and correct their unrealistic test assumptions and class splits, which limit the usability of the developed algorithms in the real world. We introduce a set of realistic benchmarks to remedy these issues. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed model on both existing and our new benchmarks, outperforming current state-of-the-art one-shot and few-shot detection methods by a large margin.

Performing multiple heterogeneous visual tasks in dynamic scenes is a hallmark of human perception capability. Despite remarkable progress in image and video recognition via representation learning, current research still focuses on designing specialized networks for singular, homogeneous, or simple combination of tasks. We instead explore the construction of a unified model for major image and video recognition tasks in autonomous driving with diverse input and output structures. To enable such an investigation, we design a new challenge, Video Task Decathlon (VTD), which includes ten representative image and video tasks spanning classification, segmentation, localization, and association of objects and pixels. On VTD, we develop our unified network, VTDNet, that uses a single structure and a single set of weights for all ten tasks. VTDNet groups similar tasks and employs task interaction stages to exchange information within and between task groups. Given the impracticality of labeling all tasks on all frames and the performance degradation associated with joint training of many tasks, we design a Curriculum training, Pseudo-labeling, and Fine-tuning (CPF) scheme to successfully train VTDNet on all tasks and mitigate performance loss. Armed with CPF, VTDNet significantly outperforms its single-task counterparts on most tasks with only 20% overall computations. VTD is a promising new direction for exploring the unification of perception tasks in autonomous driving.

Multi-task learning promises better model generalization on a target task by jointly optimizing it with an auxiliary task. However, the current practice requires additional labeling efforts for the auxiliary task, while not guaranteeing better model performance. In this paper, we find that jointly training a dense prediction (target) task with a self-supervised (auxiliary) task can consistently improve the performance of the target task, while eliminating the need for labeling auxiliary tasks. We refer to this joint training as Composite Learning (CompL). Experiments of CompL on monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and boundary detection show consistent performance improvements in fully and partially labeled datasets. Further analysis on depth estimation reveals that joint training with self-supervision outperforms most labeled auxiliary tasks. We also find that CompL can improve model robustness when the models are evaluated in new domains. These results demonstrate the benefits of self-supervision as an auxiliary task, and establish the design of novel task-specific self-supervised methods as a new axis of investigation for future multi-task learning research.

Aggregating information from features across different layers is essential for dense prediction models. Despite its limited expressiveness, vanilla feature concatenation dominates the choice of aggregation operations. In this paper, we introduce Attentive Feature Aggregation (AFA) to fuse different network layers with more expressive non-linear operations. AFA exploits both spatial and channel attention to compute weighted averages of the layer activations. Inspired by neural volume rendering, we further extend AFA with Scale-Space Rendering (SSR) to perform a late fusion of multi-scale predictions. AFA is applicable to a wide range of existing network designs. Our experiments show consistent and significant improvements on challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks, including Cityscapes and BDD100K at negligible computational and parameter overhead. In particular, AFA improves the performance of the Deep Layer Aggregation (DLA) model by nearly 6% mIoU on Cityscapes. Our experimental analyses show that AFA learns to progressively refine segmentation maps and improve boundary details, leading to new state-of-the-art results on boundary detection benchmarks on NYUDv2 and BSDS500.

Similarity learning has been recognized as a crucial step for object tracking. However, existing multiple object tracking methods only use sparse ground truth matching as the training objective, while ignoring the majority of the informative regions in images. In this paper, we present Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning, which densely samples hundreds of object regions on a pair of images for contrastive learning. We combine this similarity learning with multiple existing object detectors to build Quasi-Dense Tracking (QDTrack), which does not require displacement regression or motion priors. We find that the resulting distinctive feature space admits a simple nearest neighbor search at inference time for object association. In addition, we show that our similarity learning scheme is not limited to video data, but can learn effective instance similarity even from static input, enabling a competitive tracking performance without training on videos or using tracking supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide variety of popular MOT benchmarks. We find that, despite its simplicity, QDTrack rivals the performance of state-of-the-art tracking methods on all benchmarks and sets a new state-of-the-art on the large-scale BDD100K MOT benchmark, while introducing negligible computational overhead to the detector.

Building reliable object detectors that are robust to domain shifts, such as various changes in context, viewpoint, and object appearances, is critical for real-world applications. In this work, we study the effectiveness of auxiliary self-supervised tasks to improve the out-of-distribution generalization of object detectors. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy, we introduce a novel self-supervised task, instance-level temporal cycle confusion (CycConf), which operates on the region features of the object detectors. For each object, the task is to find the most different object proposals in the adjacent frame in a video and then cycle back to itself for self-supervision. CycConf encourages the object detector to explore invariant structures across instances under various motions, which leads to improved model robustness in unseen domains at test time. We observe consistent out-of-domain performance improvements when training object detectors in tandem with self-supervised tasks on various do-main adaptation benchmarks with static images (Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, Sim10K) and large-scale video datasets (BDD100K and Waymo open data)1.

Detecting rare objects from a few examples is an emerging problem. Prior works show meta-learning is a promising approach. But, fine-tuning techniques have drawn scant attention. We find that fine-tuning only the last layer of existing detectors on rare classes is crucial to the few-shot object detection task. Such a simple approach outperforms the meta-learning methods by roughly 2 20 points on current benchmarks and sometimes even doubles the accuracy of the prior methods. However, the high variance in the few samples often leads to the unreliability of existing benchmarks. We revise the evaluation protocols by sampling multiple groups of training examples to obtain stable comparisons and build new benchmarks based on three datasets: PASCAL VOC, COCO and LVIS. Again, our fine-tuning approach establishes a new state of the art on the revised benchmarks. The code as well as the pretrained models are available at https://github.com/ucbdrive/few-shot-object-detection.

Understanding, reasoning, and manipulating semantic concepts of images have been a fundamental research problem for decades. Previous work mainly focused on direct manipulation of natural image manifold through color strokes, key-points, textures, and holes-to-fill. In this work, we present a novel hierarchical framework for semantic image manipulation. Key to our hierarchical framework is that we employ structured semantic layout as our intermediate representations for manipulation. Initialized with coarse-level bounding boxes, our layout generator first creates pixel-wise semantic layout capturing the object shape, object-object interactions, and object-scene relations. Then our image generator fills in the pixel-level textures guided by the semantic layout. Such framework allows a user to manipulate images at object-level by adding, removing, and moving one bounding box at a time. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the advantages of the hierarchical manipulation framework over existing image generation and context hole-filing models, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Benefits of the hierarchical framework are further demonstrated in applications such as semantic object manipulation, interactive image editing, and data-driven image manipulation.