The fusion of multiple modalities, such as vision and language, has led to significant progress in grounding and tracking tasks. However, this success has not yet translated to aerial single-object tracking (SOT) due to the lack of text annotations in existing aerial SOT datasets. To overcome this limitation, we provide text annotations for five existing aerial datasets, designed to support and promote multi-modal research in the aerial tracking domain. Furthermore, to address challenges such as small object dimensions, similar-looking objects, and target size fluctuations, we introduce a third input modality: click (or point prompt). We seamlessly integrate click and language information in the model's input to offer a user-friendly and interactive alternative to precise bounding box annotations. This enables approximate target specification with reduced effort and time. We introduce CLaVi, a novel multimodal framework that redefines input interaction by in-corporating multiple modalities. This integration improves target localization and tracking efficiency, providing a significant advancement in the way input is provided to the model. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on the five datasets, to provide AerTrack-460 benchmark, to validate the effectiveness of our approach. AerTrack-460 benchmark shows competitive performance and, in some cases, outperforms previous language-based grounding and tracking techniques, setting a strong baseline for future research. Code and data will be made available soon.

As the size of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) continues to grow, their runtime latency also scales. While model pruning and Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can effectively reduce the computation workload, their effectiveness fails to consistently translate into runtime latency reduction. In this paper, we identify the root cause behind the mismatch between workload reduction and latency reduction is GPU tail effect – a classic system issue caused by resource under-utilization in the last processing wave of the GPU. We conduct detailed DNN workload characterization and demonstrate the prevalence of GPU tail effect across different DNN architectures, and meanwhile reveal that the unique deep structure and the light-weight layer workload of DNNs exacerbate the tail effect for DNN inference. We then propose a tail-awareness design space enhancement and DNN optimization algorithm to optimize existing NAS and pruning designs and achieve better runtime latency and model accuracy performance. Extensive experiments show 11%-27% latency reduction over SOTA DNN pruning and NAS methods.

Current state-of-the-art object detectors can have significant performance drop when deployed in the wild due to domain gaps with training data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a promising approach to adapt detectors for new domains/environments without any expensive label cost. Previous mainstream UDA works for object detection usually focused on image-level and/or feature-level adaptation by using adversarial learning methods. In this work, we show that such adversarial-based methods can only reduce domain style gap, but cannot address the domain content gap that is also important for object detectors. To overcome this limitation, we propose the SC-UDA framework to concurrently reduce both gaps: We propose fine-grained domain style transfer to reduce the style gaps with finer image details preserved for detecting small objects; Then we leverage the pseudo label-based self-training to reduce content gaps; To address pseudo label error accumulation during self-training, novel optimizations are proposed, including uncertainty-based pseudo labeling and imbalanced mini-batch sampling strategy. Experiment results show that our approach consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods (up to 8.6%, 2.7% and 2.5% mAP on three UDA benchmarks).

While deep neural networks excel in solving visual recognition tasks, they require significant effort to find hyperparameters that make them work optimally. Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) approaches have automated the process of finding good hyperparameters but they do not adapt to a given task (task-agnostic), making them computationally inefficient. To reduce HPO time, we present HyperSTAR (System for Task Aware Hyperparameter Recommendation), a task-aware method to warm-start HPO for deep neural networks. HyperSTAR ranks and recommends hyperparameters by predicting their performance conditioned on a joint dataset-hyperparameter space. It learns a dataset (task) representation along with the performance predictor directly from raw images in an end-to-end fashion. The recommendations, when integrated with an existing HPO method, make it task-aware and significantly reduce the time to achieve optimal performance. We conduct extensive experiments on 10 publicly available large-scale image classification datasets over two different network architectures, validating that HyperSTAR evaluates 50% less configurations to achieve the best performance compared to existing methods. We further demonstrate that HyperSTAR makes Hyperband (HB) task-aware, achieving the optimal accuracy in just 25% of the budget required by both vanilla HB and Bayesian Optimized HB (BOHB).

We conduct an empirical study to test the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to reduce the effects of nuisance transformations of the input data, such as location, scale and aspect ratio. We isolate factors by adopting a common convolutional architecture either deployed globally on the image to compute class posterior distributions, or restricted locally to compute class conditional distributions given location, scale and aspect ratios of bounding boxes determined by proposal heuristics. In theory, averaging the latter should yield inferior performance compared to proper marginalization. Yet empirical evidence suggests the converse, leading us to conclude that - at the current level of complexity of convolutional architectures and scale of the data sets used to train them - CNNs are not very effective at marginalizing nuisance variability. We also quantify the effects of context on the overall classification task and its impact on the performance of CNNs, and propose improved sampling techniques for heuristic proposal schemes that improve end-to-end performance to state-of-the-art levels. We test our hypothesis on a classification task using the ImageNet Challenge benchmark and on a wide-baseline matching task using the Oxford and Fischer's datasets.

We frame the problem of local representation of imaging data as the computation of minimal sufficient statistics that are invariant to nuisance variability induced by viewpoint and illumination. We show that, under very stringent conditions, these are related to “feature descriptors” commonly used in Computer Vision. Such conditions can be relaxed if multiple views of the same scene are available. We propose a sampling-based and a point-estimate based approximation of such a representation, compared empirically on image-to-(multiple)image matching, for which we introduce a multi-view wide-baseline matching benchmark, consisting of a mixture of real and synthetic objects with ground truth camera motion and dense three-dimensional geometry.