Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable success due to its large-scale pretraining on general domains, but it still faces challenges when applying it to downstream distant domains that have only scarce training data, which gives rise to the Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) task. Inspired by Self-Attention's insensitivity to token orders, we find an interesting phenomenon neglected in current works: disrupting the continuity of image tokens (i.e., making pixels not smoothly transited across patches) in ViT leads to a noticeable performance decline in the general (source) domain but only a marginal decrease in downstream target domains. This questions the role of image tokens' continuity in ViT's generalization under large domain gaps. In this paper, we delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find continuity aids ViT in learning larger spatial patterns, which are harder to transfer than smaller ones, enlarging domain distances. Meanwhile, it implies that only smaller patterns within each patch could be transferred under extreme domain gaps. Based on this interpretation, we further propose a simple yet effective method for CDFSL that better disrupts the continuity of image tokens, encouraging the model to rely less on large patterns and more on smaller ones. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in reducing domain gaps and outperforming state-of-the-art works. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/ReCIT.

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) aims to transfer knowledge from a data-sufficient source domain to data-scarce target domains. Although Vision Transformer (ViT) has shown superior capability in many vision tasks, its transferability against huge domain gaps in CDFSL is still under-explored. In this paper, we find an intriguing phenomenon: during the source-domain training, prompt tuning, as a common way to train ViT, could be harmful for the generalization of ViT in target domains, but setting them to random noises (i.e., random registers) could consistently improve target-domain performance. We then delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find that learnable prompts capture domain information during the training on the source dataset, which views irrelevant visual patterns as vital cues for recognition. This can be viewed as a kind of overfitting and increases the sharpness of the loss landscapes. In contrast, random registers are essentially a novel way of perturbing attention for the sharpness-aware minimization, which helps the model find a flattened minimum in loss landscapes, increasing the transferability. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a simple but effective approach for CDFSL to enhance the perturbation on attention maps by adding random registers on the semantic regions of image tokens, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of random registers. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks validate our rationale and state-of-the-art performance. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/REAP.

Federated learning has become a popular method to learn from decentralized heterogeneous data. Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) emerges to train models from a small fraction of labeled data due to label scarcity on decentralized clients. Existing FSSL methods assume independent and identically distributed (IID) labeled data across clients and consistent class distribution between labeled and unlabeled data within a client. This work studies a more practical and challenging scenario of FSSL, where data distribution is different not only across clients but also within a client between labeled and unlabeled data. To address this challenge, we propose a novel FSSL framework with dual regulators, FedDure. FedDure lifts the previous assumption with a coarse-grained regulator (C-reg) and a fine-grained regulator (F-reg): C-reg regularizes the updating of the local model by tracking the learning effect on labeled data distribution; F-reg learns an adaptive weighting scheme tailored for unlabeled instances in each client. We further formulate the client model training as bi-level optimization that adaptively optimizes the model in the client with two regulators. Theoretically, we show the convergence guarantee of the dual regulators. Empirically, we demonstrate that FedDure is superior to the existing methods across a wide range of settings, notably by more than 11% on CIFAR-10 and CINIC-10 datasets.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has shown great power in learning from large-scale datasets. However, collecting sufficient data for expert knowledge is always difficult. To handle this problem, Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) has been proposed to transfer the source-domain knowledge learned from sufficient data to target domains where only scarce data is available. In this paper, we find an intriguing phenomenon neglected by previous works for the CDFSL task based on ViT: leaving the CLS token to random initialization, instead of loading source-domain trained parameters, could consistently improve target-domain performance. We then delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find **the CLS token naturally absorbs domain information** due to the inherent structure of the ViT, which is represented as the low-frequency component in the Fourier frequency space of images. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a method for the CDFSL task to decouple the domain information in the CLS token during the source-domain training, and adapt the CLS token on the target domain for efficient few-shot learning. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks validate our rationale and state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Zoilsen/CLS_Token_CDFSL.

The recently proposed MaskFormer [1] gives a refreshed perspective on the task of semantic segmentation: it shifts from the popular pixel-level classification paradigm to a mask-level classification method. In essence, it generates paired probabilities and masks corresponding to category segments and combines them during inference for the segmentation maps. In our study, we find that the per-mask classification decoder on top of a single-scale feature is not effective enough to extract reliable probabilities or masks. To mine for rich semantic information across the feature pyramid, we propose a transformer-based Pyramid Fusion Transformer (PFT) for per-mask approach semantic segmentation with multi-scale features. The proposed transformer decoder performs cross-attention between the learnable queries and each spatial feature from the feature pyramid in parallel and uses cross-scale inter-query attention to exchange complimentary information. We achieve competitive performance on three widely used semantic segmentation datasets. In particular, on ADE20 K validation set, our result with Swin-B backbone surpasses that of MaskFormer's with a much larger Swin-L backbone in both single-scale and multi-scale inference, achieving 54.1 mIoU and 55.7 mIoU respectively. Using a Swin-L backbone, we achieve single-scale 56.1 mIoU and multi-scale 57.4 mIoU, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on the dataset. Extensive experiments on three widely used semantic segmentation datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to transfer knowledge from base classes to novel classes, which receives widespread attention recently. The performance of current techniques is, however, limited by the poor classification ability and the improper features in the detection head. To circumvent this issue, we propose a Multi-level Feature Enhancement (MFE) model to improve the feature for classification from three different perspectives, including the spatial level, the task level and the regularization level. First, we revise the classifier’s input feature at the spatial level by using information from the regression head. Secondly, we separate the RoI-Align feature into two different feature distributions in order to improve features at the task level. Finally, taking into account the overfitting problem in FSOD, we design a simple but efficient regularization enhancement module to sample features into various distributions and enhance the regularization ability of classification. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive results on PASCAL VOC datasets, and exceeds current state-of-the-art methods in all shot settings on challenging MS-COCO datasets.

Both high-level and high-resolution feature representations are of great importance in various visual understanding tasks. To acquire high-resolution feature maps with high-level semantic information, one common strategy is to adopt dilated convolutions in the backbone networks to extract high-resolution feature maps, such as the dilatedFCN-based methods for semantic segmentation. However, due to many convolution operations are conducted on the high-resolution feature maps, such methods have large computational complexity and memory consumption. To balance the performance and efficiency, there also exist encoder-decoder structures that gradually recover the spatial information by combining multi-level feature maps from a feature encoder, such as the FPN architecture for object detection and the U-Net for semantic segmentation. Although being more efficient, the performances of existing encoder-decoder methods for semantic segmentation are far from comparable with the dilatedFCN-based methods. In this paper, we propose one novel holistically-guided decoder which is introduced to obtain the high-resolution semantic-rich feature maps via the multi-scale features from the encoder. The decoding is achieved via novel holistic codeword generation and codeword assembly operations, which take advantages of both the high-level and low-level features from the encoder features. With the proposed holistically-guided decoder, we implement the EfficientFCN architecture for semantic segmentation and HGD-FPN for object detection and instance segmentation. The EfficientFCN achieves comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art methods with only 1/3 of their computational costs for semantic segmentation on PASCAL Context, PASCAL VOC, ADE20K datasets. Meanwhile, the proposed HGD-FPN achieves higher mean Average Precision (mAP) when integrated into several object detection frameworks with ResNet-50 encoding backbones.

Real-scanned point clouds are often incomplete due to viewpoint, occlusion, and noise, which hampers 3D geometric modeling and perception. Existing point cloud completion methods tend to generate global shape skeletons and hence lack fine local details. Furthermore, they mostly learn a deterministic partial-to-complete mapping, but overlook structural relations in man-made objects. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a variational framework, Variational Relational point Completion network (VRCNet) with two appealing properties: 1) Probabilistic Modeling. In particular, we propose a dual-path architecture to enable principled probabilistic modeling across partial and complete clouds. One path consumes complete point clouds for reconstruction by learning a point VAE. The other path generates complete shapes for partial point clouds, whose embedded distribution is guided by distribution obtained from the reconstruction path during training. 2) Relational Enhancement. Specifically, we carefully design point self-attention kernel and point selective kernel module to exploit relational point features, which refines local shape details conditioned on the coarse completion. In addition, we contribute multi-view partial point cloud datasets (MVP and MVP-40 dataset) containing over 200,000 high-quality scans, which render partial 3D shapes from 26 uniformly distributed camera poses for each 3D CAD model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRCNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all standard point cloud completion benchmarks. Notably, VRCNet shows great generalizability and robustness on real-world point cloud scans. Moreover, we can achieve robust 3D classification for partial point clouds with the help of VRCNet, which can highly increase classification accuracy.

Given labeled data in a source domain, unsupervised domain adaptation has been widely adopted to generalize models for unlabeled data in a target domain, whose data distributions are different. However, existing works are inapplicable to face recognition under privacy constraints because they re-quire sharing of sensitive face images between domains. To address this problem, we propose federated unsupervised do-main adaptation for face recognition, FedFR. FedFR jointly optimizes clustering-based domain adaptation and federated learning to elevate performance on the target domain. Specif-ically, for unlabeled data in the target domain, we enhance a clustering algorithm with distance constrain to improve the quality of predicted pseudo labels. Besides, we propose a new domain constraint loss (DCL) to regularize source do-main training in federated learning. Extensive experiments on a newly constructed benchmark demonstrate that FedFR outperforms the baseline and classic methods on the target domain by 3% to 14% on different evaluation metrics.

Panoptic segmentation aims at generating pixel-wise class and instance predictions for each pixel in the input image, which is a challenging task and far more complicated than naively fusing the semantic and instance segmentation results. Prediction fusion is therefore important to achieve accurate panoptic segmentation. In this paper, we present REFINE, pREdiction FusIon NEtwork for panoptic segmentation, to achieve high-quality panoptic segmentation by improving cross-task prediction fusion, and within-task prediction fusion. Our single-model ResNeXt-101 with DCN achieves PQ=51.5 on the COCO dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art performance by a convincing margin and is comparable with ensembled models. Our smaller model with a ResNet-50 backbone achieves PQ=44.9, which is comparable with state-of-the-art methods with larger backbones.

Estimating 3D bounding boxes from monocular images is an essential component in autonomous driving, while accurate 3D object detection from this kind of data is very challenging. In this work, by intensive diagnosis experiments, we quantify the impact introduced by each sub-task and found the ‘localization error’ is the vital factor in restricting monocular 3D detection. Besides, we also investigate the underlying reasons behind localization errors, analyze the issues they might bring, and propose three strategies. First, we revisit the misalignment between the center of the 2D bounding box and the projected center of the 3D object, which is a vital factor leading to low localization accuracy. Second, we observe that accurately localizing distant objects with existing technologies is almost impossible, while those samples will mislead the learned network. To this end, we propose to remove such samples from the training set for improving the overall performance of the detector. Lastly, we also propose a novel 3D IoU oriented loss for the size estimation of the object, which is not affected by ‘localization error’. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset, where the proposed method achieves real-time detection and outperforms previous methods by a large margin. The code will be made available at: https://github.com/xinzhuma/monodle.

Real-scanned point clouds are often incomplete due to viewpoint, occlusion, and noise. Existing point cloud completion methods tend to generate global shape skeletons and hence lack fine local details. Furthermore, they mostly learn a deterministic partial-to-complete mapping, but overlook structural relations in man-made objects. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a variational framework, Variational Relational point Completion network (VRC-Net) with two appealing properties: 1) Probabilistic Modeling. In particular, we propose a dual-path architecture to enable principled probabilistic modeling across partial and complete clouds. One path consumes complete point clouds for reconstruction by learning a point VAE. The other path generates complete shapes for partial point clouds, whose embedded distribution is guided by distribution obtained from the reconstruction path during training. 2) Relational Enhancement. Specifically, we carefully design point self-attention kernel and point selective kernel module to exploit relational point features, which refines local shape de tails conditioned on the coarse completion. In addition, we contribute a multi-view partial point cloud dataset (MVP dataset) containing over 100,000 high-quality scans, which renders partial 3D shapes from 26 uniformly distributed camera poses for each 3D CAD model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRCNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all standard point cloud completion benchmarks. Notably, VRCNet shows great generalizability and robustness on real-world point cloud scans.

Most 3D shape completion approaches rely heavily on partial-complete shape pairs and learn in a fully super-vised manner. Despite their impressive performances on in-domain data, when generalizing to partial shapes in other forms or real-world partial scans, they often obtain unsatisfactory results due to domain gaps. In contrast to previous fully supervised approaches, in this paper we present ShapeInversion, which introduces Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) inversion to shape completion for the first time. ShapeInversion uses a GAN pre-trained on complete shapes by searching for a latent code that gives a complete shape that best reconstructs the given partial input. In this way, ShapeInversion no longer needs paired training data, and is capable of incorporating the rich prior captured in a well-trained generative model. On the ShapeNet bench-mark, the proposed ShapeInversion outperforms the SOTA unsupervised method, and is comparable with supervised methods that are learned using paired data. It also demonstrates remarkable generalization ability, giving robust results for real-world scans and partial inputs of various forms and incompleteness levels. Importantly, ShapeInversion naturally enables a series of additional abilities thanks to the involvement of a pre-trained GAN, such as producing multiple valid complete shapes for an ambiguous partial input, as well as shape manipulation and interpolation.

Group activity recognition is a crucial yet challenging problem, whose core lies in fully exploring spatial-temporal interactions among individuals and generating reasonable group representations. However, previous methods either model spatial and temporal information separately, or directly aggregate individual features to form group features. To address these issues, we propose a novel group activity recognition network termed GroupFormer. It captures spatial-temporal contextual information jointly to augment the individual and group representations effectively with a clustered spatial-temporal transformer. Specifically, our GroupFormer has three appealing advantages: (1) A tailor-modified Transformer, Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer, is proposed to enhance the individual representation and group representation. (2) It models the spatial and temporal dependencies integrally and utilizes decoders to build the bridge between the spatial and temporal information. (3) A clustered attention mechanism is utilized to dynamically divide individuals into multiple clusters for better learning activity-aware semantic representations. Moreover, experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Volleyball dataset and Collective Activity dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/xueyee/GroupFormer

Deep learning-based 3D object detection has achieved unprecedented success with the advent of large-scale autonomous driving datasets. However, drastic performance degradation remains a critical challenge for cross-domain deployment. In addition, existing 3D domain adaptive detection methods often assume prior access to the target domain annotations, which is rarely feasible in the real world. To address this challenge, we study a more realistic setting, unsupervised 3D domain adaptive detection, which only utilizes source domain annotations. 1) We first comprehensively investigate the major underlying factors of the domain gap in 3D detection. Our key insight is that geometric mismatch is the key factor of domain shift. 2) Then, we propose a novel and unified framework, Multi-Level Consistency Network (MLC-Net), which employs a teacher-student paradigm to generate adaptive and reliable pseudo-targets. MLC-Net exploits point-, instance- and neural statistics-level consistency to facilitate cross-domain transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLC-Net out-performs existing state-of-the-art methods (including those using additional target domain information) on standard benchmarks. Notably, our approach is detector-agnostic, which achieves consistent gains on both single- and two-stage 3D detectors. Code will be released.

Generating an interpretable and compact representation of 3D shapes from point clouds is an important and challenging problem. This paper presents CSG-Stump Net, an unsupervised end-to-end network for learning shapes from point clouds and discovering the underlying constituent modeling primitives and operations as well. At the core is a three-level structure called CSG-Stump, consisting of a complement layer at the bottom, an intersection layer in the middle, and a union layer at the top. CSG-Stump is proven to be equivalent to CSG in terms of representation, therefore inheriting the interpretable, compact and editable nature of CSG while freeing from CSG’s complex tree structures. Particularly, the CSG-Stump has a simple and regular structure, allowing neural networks to give outputs of a constant dimensionality, which makes itself deep-learning friendly. Due to these characteristics of CSG-Stump, CSG-Stump Net achieves superior results compared to previous CSG-based methods and generates much more appealing shapes, as confirmed by extensive experiments.

3D human shape and pose estimation is the essential task for human motion analysis, which is widely used in many 3D applications. However, existing methods cannot simultaneously capture the relations at multiple levels, including spatial-temporal level and human joint level. Therefore they fail to make accurate predictions in some hard scenarios when there is cluttered background, occlusion, or extreme pose. To this end, we propose Multi-level Attention Encoder-Decoder Network (MAED), including a Spatial-Temporal Encoder (STE) and a Kinematic Topology Decoder (KTD) to model multi-level attentions in a unified framework. STE consists of a series of cascaded blocks based on Multi-Head Self-Attention, and each block uses two parallel branches to learn spatial and temporal attention respectively. Meanwhile, KTD aims at modeling the joint level attention. It regards pose estimation as a top-down hierarchical process similar to SMPL kinematic tree. With the training set of 3DPW, MAED outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 6.2, 7.2, and 2.4 mm of PA-MPJPE on the three widely used benchmarks 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziniuwan/maed.

Unsupervised representation learning has achieved outstanding performances using centralized data available on the Internet. However, the increasing awareness of privacy protection limits sharing of decentralized unlabeled image data that grows explosively in multiple parties (e.g., mobile phones and cameras). As such, a natural problem is how to leverage these data to learn visual representations for downstream tasks while preserving data privacy. To address this problem, we propose a novel federated unsupervised learning framework, FedU. In this framework, each party trains models from unlabeled data independently using contrastive learning with an online network and a target network. Then, a central server aggregates trained models and updates clients’ models with the aggregated model. It preserves data privacy as each party only has access to its raw data. Decentralized data among multiple parties are normally non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), leading to performance degradation. To tackle this challenge, we propose two simple but effective methods: 1) We design the communication protocol to upload only the encoders of online networks for server aggregation and update them with the aggregated encoder; 2) We introduce a new module to dynamically decide how to update predictors based on the divergence caused by non-IID. The predictor is the other component of the online network. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of FedU. It outperforms training with only one party by over 5% and other methods by over 14% in linear and semi-supervised evaluation on non-IID data.

Dot-product attention has wide applications in computer vision and natural language processing. However, its memory and computational costs grow quadratically with the input size. Such growth prohibits its application on high- resolution inputs. To remedy this drawback, this paper proposes a novel efficient attention mechanism equivalent to dot-product attention but with substantially less memory and computational costs. Its resource efficiency allows more widespread and flexible integration of attention modules into a network, which leads to better accuracies. Empirical evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of its advantages. Efficient attention modules brought significant performance boosts to object detectors and instance segmenters on MS-COCO 2017. Further, the resource efficiency democratizes attention to complex models, where high costs prohibit the use of dot-product attention. As an exemplar, a model with efficient attention achieved state-of- the-art accuracies for stereo depth estimation on the Scene Flow dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/cmsflash/efficient-attention.

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to robustly measure visual affinities between person images. It has wide applications in intelligent surveillance by associating same persons' images across multiple cameras. It is generally treated as an image retrieval problem: given a probe person image, the affinities between the probe image and gallery images (P2G affinities) are used to rank the retrieved gallery images. There exist two main challenges for effectively solving this problem. 1) Person images usually show significant variations because of different person poses and viewing angles. The spatial layouts and correspondences between person images are therefore vital information for tackling this problem. State-of-the-art methods either ignore such spatial variation or utilize extra pose information for handling the challenge. 2) Most existing person re-ID methods rank gallery images considering only P2G affinities but ignore the affinities between the gallery images (G2G affinity). Such affinities could provide important clues for accurate gallery image ranking but were only utilized in post-processing stages by current methods. In this article, we propose a unified end-to-end deep learning framework to tackle the two challenges. For handling viewpoint and pose variations between compared person images, we propose a novel Kronecker Product Matching operation to match and warp feature maps of different persons. Comparing warped feature maps results in more accurate P2G affinities. To fully utilize all available P2G and G2G affinities for accurately ranking gallery person images, a novel group-shuffling random walk operation is proposed. Both Kronecker Product Matching and Group-shuffling Random Walk operations are end-to-end trainable and are shown to improve the learned visual features if integrated in the deep learning framework. The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Market-1501, CUHK03 and DukeMTMC datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/YantaoShen/kpm_rw_person_reid.

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention mechanism are two main approaches used in recent scene text recognition works. Compared with attention-based methods, CTC decoder has a much shorter inference time, yet a lower accuracy. To design an efficient and effective model, we propose the guided training of CTC (GTC), where CTC model learns a better alignment and feature representations from a more powerful attentional guidance. With the benefit of guided training, CTC model achieves robust and accurate prediction for both regular and irregular scene text while maintaining a fast inference speed. Moreover, to further leverage the potential of CTC decoder, a graph convolutional network (GCN) is proposed to learn the local correlations of extracted features. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end model achieves a new state-of-the-art for regular and irregular scene text recognition and needs 6 times shorter inference time than attention-based methods.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieves significant progress in many computer vision tasks. While many methods are proposed to improve the efficiency of NAS, the search progress is still laborious because training and evaluating plausible architectures over large search space is time-consuming. Assessing network candidates under a proxy (i.e., computationally reduced setting) thus becomes inevitable. In this paper, we observe that most existing proxies exhibit different behaviors in maintaining the rank consistency among network candidates. In particular, some proxies can be more reliable - the rank of candidates does not differ much comparing their reduced setting performance and final performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate some widely adopted reduction factors and report our observations. Inspired by these observations, we present a reliable proxy and further formulate a hierarchical proxy strategy that spends more computations on candidate networks that are potentially more accurate, while discards unpromising ones in early stage with a fast proxy. This leads to an economical evolutionary-based NAS (EcoNAS), which achieves an impressive 400×search time reduction in comparison to the evolutionary-based state of the art [19] (8 v.s. 3150 GPU days). Some new proxies led by our observations can also be applied to accelerate other NAS methods while still able to discover good candidate networks with performance matching those found by previous proxy strategies. Codes and models will be released to facilitate future research.

Pedestrian attribute recognition aims to accurately identify attributes from pedestrian images. Visually similar pedestrian images tend to share similar attributes, and the upper and lower clothing attributes normally match in style. However, how to effectively capture these relations remains a challenging topic. In this paper, we propose a novel network Pentadent-Net (PD-Net). The network consists of a “Representation Refining Branch (RRB)” and an “Attribute Fusion Branch (AFB)”. The RRB reduces the feature distances among visually similar images, and the AFB generates a joint-representation for each attribute based on its correlation with other attributes. The polished features from the two branches are then applied to capture the inter-sample relations and attribute dependencies respectively. We also further associate features from the two branches to enrich feature representations. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (PETA and PA-100K) by our proposed approach demonstrate its advantages over state-of-the-art methods.

Federated learning is a privacy-preserving machine learning technique that learns a shared model across decentralized clients. It can alleviate privacy concerns of personal re-identification, an important computer vision task. In this work, we implement federated learning to person re-identification (FedReID) and optimize its performance affected by statistical heterogeneity in the real-world scenario. We first construct a new benchmark to investigate the performance of FedReID. This benchmark consists of (1) nine datasets with different volumes sourced from different domains to simulate the heterogeneous situation in reality, (2) two federated scenarios, and (3) an enhanced federated algorithm for FedReID. The benchmark analysis shows that the client-edge-cloud architecture, represented by the federated-by-dataset scenario, has better performance than client-server architecture in FedReID. It also reveals the bottlenecks of FedReID under the real-world scenario, including poor performance of large datasets caused by unbalanced weights in model aggregation and challenges in convergence. Then we propose two optimization methods: (1) To address the unbalanced weight problem, we propose a new method to dynamically change the weights according to the scale of model changes in clients in each training round; (2) To facilitate convergence, we adopt knowledge distillation to refine the server model with knowledge generated from client models on a public dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our strategies can achieve much better convergence with superior performance on all datasets. We believe that our work will inspire the community to further explore the implementation of federated learning on more computer vision tasks in real-world scenarios.

Deep classifiers have achieved great success in visual recognition. However, real-world data is long-tailed by nature, leading to the mismatch between training and testing distributions. In this paper, we show that the Softmax function, though used in most classification tasks, gives a biased gradient estimation under the long-tailed setup. This paper presents Balanced Softmax, an elegant unbiased extension of Softmax, to accommodate the label distribution shift between training and testing. Theoretically, we derive the generalization bound for multiclass Softmax regression and show our loss minimizes the bound. In addition, we introduce Balanced Meta-Softmax, applying a complementary Meta Sampler to estimate the optimal class sample rate and further improve long-tailed learning. In our experiments, we demonstrate that Balanced Meta-Softmax outperforms state-of-the-art long-tailed classification solutions on both visual recognition and instance segmentation tasks.

Dense depth cues are important and have wide applications in various computer vision tasks. In autonomous driving, LIDAR sensors are adopted to acquire depth measurements around the vehicle to perceive the surrounding environments. However, depth maps obtained by LIDAR are generally sparse because of its hardware limitation. The task of depth completion attracts increasing attention, which aims at generating a dense depth map from an input sparse depth map. To effectively utilize multi-scale features, we propose three novel sparsity-invariant operations, based on which, a sparsity-invariant multi-scale encoder-decoder network (HMS-Net) for handling sparse inputs and sparse feature maps is also proposed. Additional RGB features could be incorporated to further improve the depth completion performance. Our extensive experiments and component analysis on two public benchmarks, KITTI depth completion benchmark and NYU-depth-v2 dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. As of Aug. 12th, 2018, on KITTI depth completion leaderboard, our proposed model without RGB guidance ranks 1st among all peer-reviewed methods without using RGB information, and our model with RGB guidance ranks 2nd among all RGB-guided methods.

In this paper, we address video-based person re-identification with competitive snippet-similarity aggregation and co-attentive snippet embedding. Our approach divides long person sequences into multiple short video snippets and aggregates the top-ranked snippet similarities for sequence-similarity estimation. With this strategy, the intra-person visual variation of each sample could be minimized for similarity estimation, while the diverse appearance and temporal information are maintained. The snippet similarities are estimated by a deep neural network with a novel temporal co-attention for snippet embedding. The attention weights are obtained based on a query feature, which is learned from the whole probe snippet by an LSTM network, making the resulting embeddings less affected by noisy frames. The gallery snippet shares the same query feature with the probe snippet. Thus the embedding of gallery snippet can present more relevant features to compare with the probe snippet, yielding more accurate snippet similarity. Extensive ablation studies verify the effectiveness of competitive snippet-similarity aggregation as well as the temporal co-attentive embedding. Our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches on multiple datasets.

Person re-identification aims at finding a person of interest in an image gallery by comparing the probe image of this person with all the gallery images. It is generally treated as a retrieval problem, where the affinities between the probe image and gallery images (P2G affinities) are used to rank the retrieved gallery images. However, most existing methods only consider P2G affinities but ignore the affinities between all the gallery images (G2G affinity). Some frameworks incorporated G2G affinities into the testing process, which is not end-to-end trainable for deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel group-shuffling random walk network for fully utilizing the affinity information between gallery images in both the training and testing processes. The proposed approach aims at end-to-end refining the P2G affinities based on G2G affinity information with a simple yet effective matrix operation, which can be integrated into deep neural networks. Feature grouping and group shuffle are also proposed to apply rich supervisions for learning better person features. The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC datasets by large margins, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Person re-identification aims to robustly measure similarities between person images. The significant variation of person poses and viewing angles challenges for accurate person re-identification. The spatial layout and correspondences between query person images are vital information for tackling this problem but are ignored by most state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Kronecker Product Matching module to match feature maps of different persons in an end-to-end trainable deep neural network. A novel feature soft warping scheme is designed for aligning the feature maps based on matching results, which is shown to be crucial for achieving superior accuracy. The multi-scale features based on hourglass-like networks and self residual attention are also exploited to further boost the re-identification performance. The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed approach.

Person re-identification is an important topic in intelligent surveillance and computer vision. It aims to accurately measure visual similarities between person images for determining whether two images correspond to the same person. State-of-the-art methods mainly utilize deep learning based approaches for learning visual features for describing person appearances. However, we observe that existing deep learning models are biased to capture too much relevance between background appearances of person images. We design a series of experiments with newly created datasets to validate the influence of background information. To solve the background bias problem, we propose a person-region guided pooling deep neural network based on human parsing maps to learn more discriminative person-part features, and propose to augment training data with person images with random background. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method.

Person re-identification (reID) is an important task that requires to retrieve a person's images from an image dataset, given one image of the person of interest. For learning robust person features, the pose variation of person images is one of the key challenges. Existing works targeting the problem either perform human alignment, or learn human-region-based representations. Extra pose information and computational cost is generally required for inference. To solve this issue, a Feature Distilling Generative Adversarial Network (FD-GAN) is proposed for learning identity-related and pose-unrelated representations. It is a novel framework based on a Siamese structure with multiple novel discriminators on human poses and identities. In addition to the discriminators, a novel same-pose loss is also integrated, which requires appearance of a same person's generated images to be similar. After learning pose-unrelated person features with pose guidance, no auxiliary pose information and additional computational cost is required during testing. Our proposed FD-GAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three person reID datasets, which demonstrates that the effectiveness and robust feature distilling capability of the proposed FD-GAN.

The basic principles in designing convolutional neural network (CNN) structures for predicting objects on different levels, e.g., image-level, region-level, and pixel-level, are diverging. Generally, network structures designed specifically for image classification are directly used as default backbone structure for other tasks including detection and segmentation, but there is seldom backbone structure designed under the consideration of unifying the advantages of networks designed for pixel-level or region-level predicting tasks, which may require very deep features with high resolution. Towards this goal, we design a fish-like network, called FishNet. In FishNet, the information of all resolutions is preserved and refined for the final task. Besides, we observe that existing works still cannot \emph{directly} propagate the gradient information from deep layers to shallow layers. Our design can better handle this problem. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the remarkable performance of the FishNet. In particular, on ImageNet-1k, the accuracy of FishNet is able to surpass the performance of DenseNet and ResNet with fewer parameters. FishNet was applied as one of the modules in the winning entry of the COCO Detection 2018 challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/kevin-ssy/FishNet.

Person re-identification (ReID) is an important task in video surveillance and has various applications. It is non-trivial due to complex background clutters, varying illumination conditions, and uncontrollable camera settings. Moreover, the person body misalignment caused by detectors or pose variations is sometimes too severe for feature matching across images. In this study, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), called Spindle Net, based on human body region guided multi-stage feature decomposition and tree-structured competitive feature fusion. It is the first time human body structure information is considered in a CNN framework to facilitate feature learning. The proposed Spindle Net brings unique advantages: 1) it separately captures semantic features from different body regions thus the macro-and micro-body features can be well aligned across images, 2) the learned region features from different semantic regions are merged with a competitive scheme and discriminative features can be well preserved. State of the art performance can be achieved on multiple datasets by large margins. We further demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed Spindle Net on our proposed dataset SenseReID without fine-tuning.

Pedestrian analysis plays a vital role in intelligent video surveillance and is a key component for security-centric computer vision systems. Despite that the convolutional neural networks are remarkable in learning discriminative features from images, the learning of comprehensive features of pedestrians for fine-grained tasks remains an open problem. In this study, we propose a new attentionbased deep neural network, named as HydraPlus-Net (HPnet), that multi-directionally feeds the multi-level attention maps to different feature layers. The attentive deep features learned from the proposed HP-net bring unique advantages: (1) the model is capable of capturing multiple attentions from low-level to semantic-level, and (2) it explores the multi-scale selectiveness of attentive features to enrich the final feature representations for a pedestrian image. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed HP-net for pedestrian analysis on two tasks, i.e. pedestrian attribute recognition and person reidentification. Intensive experimental results have been provided to prove that the HP-net outperforms the state-of-theart methods on various datasets.

Vehicle re-identification is an important problem and has many applications in video surveillance and intelligent transportation. It gains increasing attention because of the recent advances of person re-identification techniques. However, unlike person re-identification, the visual differences between pairs of vehicle images are usually subtle and even challenging for humans to distinguish. Incorporating additional spatio-temporal information is vital for solving the challenging re-identification task. Existing vehicle re-identification methods ignored or used oversimplified models for the spatio-temporal relations between vehicle images. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework that incorporates complex spatio-temporal information for effectively regularizing the re-identification results. Given a pair of vehicle images with their spatiotemporal information, a candidate visual-spatio-temporal path is first generated by a chain MRF model with a deeply learned potential function, where each visual-spatiotemporal state corresponds to an actual vehicle image with its spatio-temporal information. A Siamese-CNN+Path- LSTM model takes the candidate path as well as the pairwise queries to generate their similarity score. Extensive experiments and analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed method and individual components.

In this paper, we tackle the vehicle Re-identification (ReID) problem which is of great importance in urban surveillance and can be used for multiple applications. In our vehicle ReID framework, an orientation invariant feature embedding module and a spatial-temporal regularization module are proposed. With orientation invariant feature embedding, local region features of different orientations can be extracted based on 20 key point locations and can be well aligned and combined. With spatial-temporal regularization, the log-normal distribution is adopted to model the spatial-temporal constraints and the retrieval results can be refined. Experiments are conducted on public vehicle ReID datasets and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Investigations of the proposed framework is conducted, including the landmark regressor and comparisons with attention mechanism. Both the orientation invariant feature embedding and the spatio-temporal regularization achieve considerable improvements.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of stationary crowd analysis which is as important as modeling mobile groups in crowd scenes and finds many important applications in crowd surveillance. Our key contribution is to propose a robust algorithm for estimating how long a foreground pixel becomes stationary. It is much more challenging than only subtracting background because failure at a single frame due to local movement of objects, lighting variation, and occlusion could lead to large errors on stationary-time estimation. To achieve robust and accurate estimation, sparse constraints along spatial and temporal dimensions are jointly added by mixed partials (which are second-order gradients) to shape a 3D stationary-time map. It is formulated as an L0optimization problem. Besides background subtraction, it distinguishes among different foreground objects, which are close or overlapped in the spatio-temporal space by using a locally shared foreground codebook. The proposed technologies are further demonstrated through three applications. 1) Based on the results of stationary-time estimation, 12 descriptors are proposed to detect four types of stationary crowd activities. 2) The averaged stationary-time map is estimated to analyze crowd scene structures. 3) The result of stationary-time estimation is also used to study the influence of stationary crowd groups to traffic patterns.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of no-reference image quality assessment (IQA). A learning-based IQA framework “VIDGIQA” is proposed, which extracts quality features from the input image and regresses the visual quality on these features. Since different distortions lead to different visual perceptions in the human visual system, distortion information is adopted to guide the feature learning process together with the human quality scores. Besides, a regression method is proposed to model and estimate the visual importance weights of all local regions, which can effectively improve the performance. More importantly, all these operations are integrated into one deep neural network, so that they can be jointly optimized and well cooperate with each other. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the power of the proposed method on several datasets, including the LIVE dataset [1], the TID 2013 dataset [2], the LIVE multiply distorted IQA dataset [3], CSIQ [4] , and the LIVE in the wild image quality database [5]. The proposed method achieves 0.969 and 0.973 on the LIVE dataset [1] in terms of the spearman rank-order correlation coefficient and the Pearson linear correlation coefficient, respectively, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Pedestrian behavior modeling and analysis is important for crowd scene understanding and has various applications in video surveillance. Stationary crowd groups are a key factor influencing pedestrian walking patterns but was mostly ignored in the literature. It plays different roles for different pedestrians in a crowded scene and can change over time. In this paper, a novel model is proposed to model pedestrian behaviors by incorporating stationary crowd groups as a key component. Through inference on the interactions between stationary crowd groups and pedestrians, our model can be used to investigate pedestrian behaviors. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through multiple applications, including walking path prediction, destination prediction, personality attribute classification, and abnormal event detection. To evaluate our model, two large pedestrian walking route datasets are built. The walking routes of around 15 000 pedestrians from two crowd surveillance videos are manually annotated. The datasets will be released to the public and benefit future research on pedestrian behavior analysis and crowd scene understanding.

Pedestrian behavior modeling and analysis is important for crowd scene understanding and has various applications in video surveillance. Stationary crowd groups are a key factor influencing pedestrian walking patterns but was largely ignored in literature. In this paper, a novel model is proposed for pedestrian behavior modeling by including stationary crowd groups as a key component. Through inference on the interactions between stationary crowd groups and pedestrians, our model can be used to investigate pedestrian behaviors. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through multiple applications, including walking path prediction, destination prediction, personality classification, and abnormal event detection. To evaluate our model, a large pedestrian walking route dataset1is built. The walking routes of 12, 684 pedestrians from a one-hour crowd surveillance video are manually annotated. It will be released to the public and benefit future research on pedestrian behavior analysis and crowd scene understanding.

In this paper, we target on the problem of estimating the statistic of pedestrian travel time within a period from an entrance to a destination in a crowded scene. Such estimation is based on the global distributions of crowd densities and velocities instead of complete trajectories of pedestrians, which cannot be obtained in crowded scenes. The proposed method is motivated by our statistical investigation into the correlations between travel time and global properties of crowded scenes. Active regions are created for each source-destination pair to model the probable walking regions over the corresponding source-destination traffic flow. Two sets of scene features are specially designed for modeling moving and stationary persons inside the active regions and their influences on pedestrian travel time. The estimation of pedestrian travel time provides valuable information for both crowd scene understanding and pedestrian behavior analysis, but was not sufficiently studied in literature. The effectiveness of the proposed pedestrian travel time estimation model is demonstrated through several surveillance applications, including dynamic scene monitoring, localization of regions blocking traffics, and detection of abnormal pedestrian behaviors. Many more valuable applications based on our method are to be explored in the future.

We tackle stationary crowd analysis in this paper, which is similarly important as modeling mobile groups in crowd scenes and finds many applications in surveillance. Our key contribution is to propose a robust algorithm of estimating how long a foreground pixel becomes stationary. It is much more challenging than only subtracting background because failure at a single frame due to local movement of objects, lighting variation, and occlusion could lead to large errors on stationary time estimation. To accomplish decent results, sparse constraints along spatial and temporal dimensions are jointly added by mixed partials to shape a 3D stationary time map. It is formulated as a L0optimization problem. Besides background subtraction, it distinguishes among different foreground objects, which are close or overlapped in the spatio-temporal space by using a locally shared foreground codebook. The proposed technologies are used to detect four types of stationary group activities and analyze crowd scene structures. We provide the first public benchmark dataset for stationary time estimation and stationary group analysis.

Detecting stationary crowd groups and analyzing their behaviors have important applications in crowd video surveillance, but have rarely been studied. The contributions of this paper are in two aspects. First, a stationary crowd detection algorithm is proposed to estimate the stationary time of foreground pixels. It employs spatial-temporal filtering and motion filtering in order to be robust to noise caused by occlusions and crowd clutters. Second, in order to characterize the emergence and dispersal processes of stationary crowds and their behaviors during the stationary periods, three attributes are proposed for quantitative analysis. These attributes are recognized with a set of proposed crowd descriptors which extract visual features from the results of stationary crowd detection. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is shown through experiments on a benchmark dataset.