Humans are capable of accumulating knowledge by sequentially learning different tasks, while neural networks fail to achieve this due to catastrophic forgetting problems. Most current incremental learning methods focus more on tackling catastrophic forgetting for traditional classification networks. Notably, however, embedding networks that are basic architectures for many metric learning applications also suffer from this problem. Moreover, the most significant difficulty for continual embedding networks is that the relationships between the latent features and prototypes of previous tasks will be destroyed once new tasks have been learned. Accordingly, we propose a novel incremental method for embedding networks, called the disentangled representation translation (DRT) method, to obtain the discriminative class-disentangled features without reusing any samples of previous tasks and while avoiding the perturbation of task-related information. Next, a mask-guided module is specifically explored to adaptively change or retain the valuable information of latent features. This module enables us to effectively preserve the discriminative yet representative features in the disentangled translation process. In addition, DRT can easily be equipped with a regularization item of incremental learning to further improve performance. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular datasets; as the experimental results clearly demonstrate, our method can effectively alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem for embedding networks.

In Video Object Detection (VID), a common practice is to leverage the rich temporal contexts from the video to enhance the object representations in each frame. Existing methods treat the temporal contexts obtained from different objects indiscriminately and ignore their different identities. While intuitively, aggregating local views of the same object in different frames may facilitate a better understanding of the object. Thus, in this paper, we aim to enable the model to focus on the identity-consistent temporal contexts of each object to obtain more comprehensive object representations and handle the rapid object appearance variations such as occlusion, motion blur, etc. However, realizing this goal on top of existing VID models faces low-efficiency problems due to their redundant region proposals and nonparallel frame-wise prediction manner. To aid this, we propose ClipVID, a VID model equipped with Identity-Consistent Aggregation (ICA) layers specifically designed for mining fine-grained and identity-consistent temporal contexts. It effectively reduces the redundancies through the set prediction strategy, making the ICA layers very efficient and further allowing us to design an architecture that makes parallel clip-wise predictions for the whole video clip. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method: a state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance (84.7% mAP) on the ImageNet VID dataset while running at a speed about 7× faster (39.3 fps) than previous SOTAs.

In text-video retrieval, recent works have benefited from the powerful learning capabilities of pre-trained text-image foundation models (e.g., CLIP) by adapting them to the video domain. A critical problem for them is how to effectively capture the rich semantics inside the video using the image encoder of CLIP. To tackle this, state-of-the-art methods adopt complex cross-modal modeling techniques to fuse the text information into video frame representations, which, however, incurs severe efficiency issues in large-scale retrieval systems as the video representations must be recomputed online for every text query. In this paper, we discard this problematic cross-modal fusion process and aim to learn semantically-enhanced representations purely from the video, so that the video representations can be computed offline and reused for different texts. Concretely, we first introduce a spatial-temporal "Prompt Cube" into the CLIP image encoder and iteratively switch it within the encoder layers to efficiently incorporate the global video semantics into frame representations. We then propose to apply an auxiliary video captioning objective to train the frame representations, which facilitates the learning of detailed video semantics by providing fine-grained guidance in the semantic space. With a naive temporal fusion strategy (i.e., mean-pooling) on the enhanced frame representations, we obtain state-of-the-art performances on three benchmark datasets, i.e., MSR-VTT, MSVD, and LSMDC.

Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector’s OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector’s architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.

To promote the safe application of detectors, a task of unsupervised out-of-distribution object detection (OOD-OD) is recently proposed, whose goal is to detect unseen OOD objects without accessing any auxiliary OOD data. For this task, the challenge mainly lies in how to only leverage the known in-distribution (ID) data to detect OOD objects accurately without affecting the detection of ID objects, which can be framed as the diffusion problem for deep feature synthesis. Accordingly, such challenge could be addressed by the forward and reverse processes in the diffusion model. In this paper, we propose a new approach of Deep Feature Deblurring Diffusion (DFDD), consisting of forward blurring and reverse deblurring processes. Specifically, the forward process gradually performs Gaussian Blur on the extracted features, which is instrumental in retaining sufficient input-relevant information. By this way, the forward process could synthesize virtual OOD features that are close to the classification boundary between ID and OOD objects, which improves the performance of detecting OOD objects. During the reverse process, based on the blurred features, a dedicated deblurring model is designed to continually recover the lost details in the forward process. Both the deblurred features and original features are taken as the input for training, strengthening the discrimination ability. In the experiments, our method is evaluated on OOD-OD, open-set object detection, and incremental object detection. The significant performance gains over baselines demonstrate the superiorities of our method. The source code will be made available at: https://github.com/AmingWu/DFDD-OOD.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to locate the time interval in a video that is semantically relevant to a language query. Existing VTG methods interact the query with entangled video features and treat the instances in a dataset independently. However, intra-video entanglement and inter-video connection are rarely considered in these methods, leading to mismatches between the video and language. To this end, we propose a novel method, dubbed Hierarchically Semantic Associating (HiSA), which aims to precisely align the video with language and obtain discriminative representation for further location regression. Specifically, the action factors and background factors are disentangled from adjacent video segments, enforcing precise multimodal interaction and alleviating the intra-video entanglement. In addition, cross-guided contrast is elaborately framed to capture the inter-video connection, which benefits the multimodal understanding to locate the time interval. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The project page is available at: https://github.com/zhexu1997/HiSA.

The dense video captioning task aims to detect and describe a sequence of events in a video for detailed and coherent storytelling. Previous works mainly adopt a "detect-then-describe" framework, which firstly detects event proposals in the video and then generates descriptions for the detected events. However, the definitions of events are diverse which could be as simple as a single action or as complex as a set of events, depending on different semantic con-texts. Therefore, directly detecting events based on video information is ill-defined and hurts the coherency and accuracy of generated dense captions. In this work, we reverse the predominant "detect-then-describe" fashion, proposing a top-down way to first generate paragraphs from a global view and then ground each event description to a video segment for detailed refinement. It is formulated as a Sketch, Ground, and Refine process (SGR). The sketch stage first generates a coarse-grained multi-sentence paragraph to describe the whole video, where each sentence is treated as an event and gets localised in the grounding stage. In the re-fining stage, we improve captioning quality via refinement-enhanced training and dual-path cross attention on both coarse-grained event captions and aligned event segments. The updated event caption can further adjust its segment boundaries. Our SGR model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ActivityNet Captioning benchmark under traditional and story-oriented dense caption evaluations. Code will be released at github.com/bearcatt/SGR.

Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labelled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta-learning becomes an essential component and can largely affect the performance in practice. To this end, most of the existing methods highly rely on the efficient embedding network. Due to the limited labelled data, the scale of embedding network is constrained under a supervised learning(SL) manner which becomes a bottleneck of the few-shot learning methods. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets (i.e., MiniImageNet and CUB) and achieve better performance over baselines. Tests on four datasets in cross-domain few-shot learning classification show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results and further prove the robustness of the proposed model. Our code is available at https://github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.

In this paper, we investigate video summarization in the supervised setting. Since video summarization is subjective to the preference of the end-user, the design of a unique model is limited. In this work, we propose a model that provides personalized video summaries by conditioning the summarization process with predefined categorical user labels referred to as preferences. The underlying method is based on multiple pairwise rankers (called Multi-ranker), where the rankers are trained jointly to provide local summaries as well as a global summarization of a given video. In order to demonstrate the relevance and applications of our method in contrast with a classical global summarizer, we conduct experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, notably through a user study and comparisons with the state-of-art methods in the global video summarization task.

Video classification problem is a challenging task in computer vision. The performance of this task is highly relied on the scale of training data and the effectiveness of video embedding via a robust embedding network. Unsupervised solutions such as feature average pooling technique, as a simple label-independent and parameter-free based method, cannot efficiently represent the video sequences. While supervised methods, such as RNN, can improve the recognition accuracy. The performance of RNN based methods, however, is decreased with the increasing length of the videos and the hierarchical relationships between frames across events in the video. In this paper, we propose a novel video classification method based on a deep convolutional graph neural network (DCGN). The proposed method utilizes the characteristics of the hierarchical structure of the video, and performed multi-level embedding feature extraction on the video frame sequence through the graph network, and obtained a video representation which reflects the event semantics hierarchically. Experiments on YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding dataset show that our proposed model outperforms the commonly used RNN based models, verifying its effectiveness for video classification.