Universal visual anomaly detection aims to identify anomalies from novel or unseen vision domains without additional fine-tuning, which is critical in open scenarios. Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP exhibit strong generalization with just zero or a few normal images. However, existing methods struggle to design prompt templates, handle complex token interactions, or require fine-tuning on target domains, resulting in limited flexibility. In this work, we present a simple yet effective AdaptCLIP based on two key insights. First, adaptive visual and textual representations should be learned alternately rather than jointly. Second, comparative learning between query and normal image prompt should incorporate both contextual and aligned residual features, rather than relying solely on residual features. AdaptCLIP treats CLIP models as a foundational service, adding only three simple adapters, visual adapter, textual adapter, and prompt-query adapter, at its input or output ends. AdaptCLIP supports zero-/few-shot generalization across domains and provides a training-free approach on target domains once trained on a base dataset. AdaptCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 anomaly detection benchmarks from industrial and medical domains, significantly outperforming existing competitive methods.

The performance of anomaly inspection in industrial manufacturing is constrained by the scarcity of anomaly data. To overcome this challenge, researchers have started employing anomaly generation approaches to augment the anomaly dataset. However, existing anomaly generation methods suffer from limited diversity in the generated anomalies and struggle to achieve a seamless blending of this anomaly with the original image. Moreover, the generated mask is usually not aligned with the generated anomaly. In this paper, we overcome these challenges from a new perspective, simultaneously generating a pair of the overall image and the corresponding anomaly part. We propose DualAnoDiff, a novel diffusion-based few-shot anomaly image generation model, which can generate diverse and realistic anomaly images by using a dual-interrelated diffusion model, where one of them is employed to generate the whole image while the other one generates the anomaly part. Moreover, we extract background and shape information to mitigate the distortion and blurriness phenomenon in few-shot image generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over state-of-the-art methods in terms of diversity, realism and the accuracy of mask. Overall, our approach significantly improves the performance of downstream anomaly inspection tasks, including anomaly detection, anomaly localization, and anomaly classification tasks. Code will be made available.

Image matching and object detection are two fundamental and challenging tasks, while many related applications consider them two individual tasks (i.e. task-individual). In this paper, a collaborative framework called MatchDet (i.e. task-collaborative) is proposed for image matching and object detection to obtain mutual improvements. To achieve the collaborative learning of the two tasks, we propose three novel modules, including a Weighted Spatial Attention Module (WSAM) for Detector, and Weighted Attention Module (WAM) and Box Filter for Matcher. Specifically, the WSAM highlights the foreground regions of target image to benefit the subsequent detector, the WAM enhances the connection between the foreground regions of pair images to ensure high-quality matches, and Box Filter mitigates the impact of false matches. We evaluate the approaches on a new benchmark with two datasets called Warp-COCO and miniScanNet. Experimental results show our approaches are effective and achieve competitive improvements.

Class-incremental object detection (CIOD) is a real-world desired capability, requiring an object detector to continuously adapt to new tasks without forgetting learned ones, with the main challenge being catastrophic forgetting. Many methods based on distillation and replay have been proposed to alleviate this problem. However, they typically learn on a pure visual backbone, neglecting the powerful representation capabilities of textual cues, which to some extent limits their performance. In this paper, we propose task-aware language-image representation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, introducing a new paradigm for language-image-based CIOD. First of all, we demonstrate the significant advantage of language-image detectors in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Secondly, we propose a learning task-aware language-image representation method that overcomes the existing drawback of directly utilizing the language-image detector for CIOD. More specifically, we learn the language-image representation of different tasks through an insulating approach in the training stage, while using the alignment scores produced by task-specific language-image representation in the inference stage. Through our proposed method, language-image detectors can be more practical for CIOD. We conduct extensive experiments on COCO 2017 and Pascal VOC 2007 and demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results under the various CIOD settings.

Continual learning is a research field of artificial neural networks to simulate human lifelong learning ability. Although a surge of investigations has achieved considerable performance, most rely only on image modality for incremental image recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel yet effective framework coined cross-modal Alternating Learning with Task-Aware representations (ALTA) to make good use of visual and linguistic modal information and achieve more effective continual learning. To do so, ALTA presents a cross-modal joint learning mechanism that leverages simultaneous learning of image and text representations to provide more effective supervision. And it mitigates forgetting by endowing task-aware representations with continual learning capability. Concurrently, considering the dilemma of stability and plasticity, ALTA proposes a cross-modal alternating learning strategy that alternately learns the task-aware cross-modal representations to match the image-text pairs between tasks better, further enhancing the ability of continual learning. We conduct extensive experiments under various popular image classification benchmarks to demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. At the same time, systematic ablation studies and visualization analyses validate the effectiveness and rationality of our method. Our code will be available upon publication.

Recent Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods put emphasis on generating a discriminative embedding features to precisely measure the similarity between support and query sets. Current CNN-based cross-attention approaches generate discriminative representations via enhancing the mutually semantic similar regions of support and query pairs. However, it suffers from two problems: CNN structure produces inaccurate attention map based on local features, and mutually similar backgrounds cause distraction. To alleviate these problems, we design a novel SpatialFormer structure to generate more accurate attention regions based on global features. Different from the traditional Transformer modeling intrinsic instance-level similarity which causes accuracy degradation in FSL, our SpatialFormer explores the semantic-level similarity between pair inputs to boost the performance. Then we derive two specific attention modules, named SpatialFormer Semantic Attention (SFSA) and SpatialFormer Target Attention (SFTA), to enhance the target object regions while reduce the background distraction. Particularly, SFSA highlights the regions with same semantic information between pair features, and SFTA finds potential foreground object regions of novel feature that are similar to base categories. Extensive experiments show that our methods are effective and achieve new state-of-the-art results on few-shot classification benchmarks.

Continual learning aims to incrementally learn novel classes over time, while not forgetting the learned knowledge. Recent studies have found that learning would not forget if the updated gradient is orthogonal to the feature space. However, previous approaches require the gradient to be fully orthogonal to the whole feature space, leading to poor plasticity, as the feasible gradient direction becomes narrow when the tasks continually come, i.e., feature space is unlimitedly expanded. In this paper, we propose a space decoupling (SD) algorithm to decouple the feature space into a pair of complementary subspaces, i.e., the stability space$\mathcal{I}$and the plasticity space$\mathcal{R}. \mathcal{I}$is established by conducting space intersection between the historic and current feature space, and thus$\mathcal{I}$contains more task-shared bases.$\mathcal{R}$is constructed by seeking the orthogonal complementary subspace of$T$and thus$\mathcal{R}$mainly contains task-specific bases. By putting distinguishing constraints on$\mathcal{R}$and$\mathcal{I}$, our method achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments are conducted by applying SD to gradient projection baselines, and show SD is model-agnostic and achieves SOTA results on publicly available datasets.

Continual Learning (CL) is the constant development of complex behaviors by building upon previously acquired skills. Yet, current CL algorithms tend to incur class-level forgetting as the label information is often quickly overwritten by new knowledge. This motivates attempts to mine instance-level discrimination by resorting to recent self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. However, previous works have pointed out that the self-supervised learning objective is essentially a trade-off between invariance to distortion and preserving sample information, which seriously hinders the unleashing of instance-level discrimination.In this work, we reformulate SSL from the information-theoretic perspective by disentangling the goal of instance-level discrimination, and tackle the trade-off to promote compact representations with maximally preserved invariance to distortion. On this basis, we develop a novel alternate learning paradigm to enjoy the complementary merits of instance-level and category-level supervision, which yields improved robustness against forgetting and better adaptation to each task. To verify the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on four different benchmarks using both class-incremental and task-incremental settings, where the leap in performance and thorough ablation studies demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our modeling strategy.

Weak feature representation problem has influenced the performance of few-shot classification task for a long time. To alleviate this problem, recent researchers build connections between support and query instances through embedding patch features to generate discriminative representations. However, we observe that there exists semantic mismatches (foreground/ background) among these local patches, because the location and size of the target object are not fixed. What is worse, these mismatches result in unreliable similarity confidences, and complex dense connection exacerbates the problem. According to this, we propose a novel Clustered-patch Element Connection (CEC) layer to correct the mismatch problem. The CEC layer leverages Patch Cluster and Element Connection operations to collect and establish reliable connections with high similarity patch features, respectively. Moreover, we propose a CECNet, including CEC layer based attention module and distance metric. The former is utilized to generate a more discriminative representation benefiting from the global clustered-patch features, and the latter is introduced to reliably measure the similarity between pair-features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CECNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on classification benchmark. Furthermore, our CEC approach can be extended into few-shot segmentation and detection tasks, which achieves competitive performances.

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) requires a classifier trained on seen classes that can recognize objects from both seen and unseen classes. Due to the absence of unseen training samples, the classifier tends to bias towards seen classes. To mitigate this problem, feature generation based models are proposed to synthesize visual features for unseen classes. However, these features are generated in the visual feature space which lacks of discriminative ability. Therefore, some methods turn to find a better embedding space for the classifier training. They emphasize the inter-class relationships of seen classes, leading the embedding space overfitted to seen classes and unfriendly to unseen classes. Instead, in this paper, we propose an Intra-Class Compactness Enhancement method (ICCE) for GZSL. Our ICCE promotes intra-class compactness with inter-class separability on both seen and unseen classes in the embedding space and visual feature space. By promoting the intra-class relationships but the inter-class structures, we can distinguish different classes with better generalization. Specifically, we propose a Self-Distillation Embedding (SDE) module and a Semantic-Visual Contrastive Generation (SVCG) module. The former promotes intra-class compactness in the embedding space, while the latter accomplishes it in the visual feature space. The experiments demonstrate that our ICCE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four datasets and achieves competitive results on the remaining dataset.

Most prior work represents the shapes of point clouds by coordinates. However, it is insufficient to describe the local geometry directly. In this paper, we present RepSurf (representative surfaces), a novel representation of point clouds to explicitly depict the very local structure. We explore two variants of RepSurf, Triangular RepSurf and Umbrella RepSurf inspired by triangle meshes and umbrella curvature in computer graphics. We compute the representations of RepSurf by predefined geometric priors after surface reconstruction. RepSurf can be a plug-and-play module for most point cloud models thanks to its free collaboration with irregular points. Based on a simple baseline of PointNet++ (SSG version), Umbrella RepSurf surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin for classification, segmentation and detection on various benchmarks in terms of performance and efficiency. With an increase of around 0.008M number of parameters, 0.04G FLOPs, and 1.12ms inference time, our method achieves 94.7% (+0.5%) on ModelNet40, and 84.6% (+1.8%) on ScanObjectNN for classification, while 74.3% (+0.8%) mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold, and 70.0% (+1.6%) mIoU on ScanNet for segmentation. For detection, previous state-of-the-art detector with our RepSurf obtains 71.2% (+2.1%) mAP25, 54.8% (+2.0%) mAP50on ScanNetV2, and 64.9% (+1.9%) mAP25, 47.7% (+2.5%) mAP50on SUN RGB-D. Our lightweight Triangular RepSurf performs its excellence on these benchmarks as well. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hancyran/RepSurf.

Recently, density map regression-based methods have dominated in crowd counting owing to their excellent fitting ability on density distribution. However, further improvement tends to saturate mainly because of the confusing background noise and the large density variation. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchically Decoupled Network (HDNet) to solve the above two problems within a unified framework. Specifically, a background classification sub-task is decomposed from the density map prediction task, which is then assigned to a Density Decoupling Module (DDM) to exploit its highly discriminative ability. For the remaining foreground prediction sub-task, it is further hierarchically decomposed to several density-specific sub-tasks by the DDM, which are then solved by the regression-based experts in a Foreground Density Estimation Module (FDEM). Although the proposed strategy effectively reduces the hypothesis space so as to relieve the optimization for those task-specific experts, the high correlation of these sub-tasks are ignored. Therefore, we introduce three types of interaction strategies to unify the whole framework, which are Feature Interaction, Gradient Interaction, and Scale Interaction. Integrated with the above spirits, HDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular counting benchmarks.

Few-shot learning problem focuses on recognizing unseen classes given a few labeled images. In recent effort, more attention is paid to fine-grained feature embedding, ignoring the relationship among different distance metrics. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate the contributions of different distance metrics, and propose an adaptive fusion scheme, bringing significant improvements in few-shot classification. We start from a naive baseline of confidence summation and demonstrate the necessity of exploiting the complementary property of different distance metrics. By finding the competition problem among them, built upon the baseline, we propose an Adaptive Metrics Module (AMM) to decouple metrics fusion into metric-prediction fusion and metric-losses fusion. The former encourages mutual complementary, while the latter alleviates metric competition via multi-task collaborative learning. Based on AMM, we design a few-shot classification framework AMTNet, including the AMM and the Global Adaptive Loss (GAL), to jointly optimize the few-shot task and auxiliary self-supervised task, making the embedding features more robust. In the experiment, the proposed AMM achieves 2% higher performance than the naive metrics fusion module, and our AMTNet outperforms the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmark datasets.

Anomaly detection (AD) has gained widespread attention due to its ability to identify defects in industrial scenarios using only normal samples. Although traditional AD methods achieved acceptable performance, they mainly focus on the current set of examples solely, leading to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks when trained on a new one. Due to the limitation of flexibility and the requirements of realistic industrial scenarios, it is urgent to enhance the ability of continual adaptation of AD models. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified framework by incorporating continual learning (CL) to achieve our newly designed task of continual anomaly detection (CAD). Note that, we observe that data augmentation strategy can make AD methods well adapted to supervised CL (SCL) via constructing anomaly samples. Based on this, we hence propose a novel method named Distribution of Normal Embeddings (DNE), which utilizes the feature distribution of normal training samples from past tasks. It not only effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting in CAD but also can be integrated with SCL methods to further improve their performance. Extensive experiments and visualization results on the popular benchmark dataset MVTec AD, have demonstrated advanced performance and the excellent continual adaption ability of our proposed method compared to other AD methods. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce and tackle the task of CAD. We believe that the proposed task and benchmark will be beneficial to the field of AD. Our code is available in thesupplementary material.

Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) has become an emerging task for night-time surveillance systems. In order to reduce the cross-modality discrepancy, previous works either align the features via metric learning or generate synthesized cross-modality images by Generative Adversary Network. However, feature-level alignment ignores the heterogeneous data itself while generative framework suffers from the low generation quality, limiting their applications. In this paper, we propose a dense contrastive learning framework (DCLNet), which performs pixel-to-pixel dense alignment acting on the intermediate representations, rather than the final deep feature. It is a new loss function that brings views of positive pixels with same semantic information closer in shallow representation space, whilst pushing views of negative pixels apart. It naturally provides additional dense supervision and captures fine-grained pixel correspondence, reducing the modality gap from a new perspective. To implement it, a Part Aware Parsing (PAP) module and a Semantic Rectification Module (SRM) are introduced to learn and refine a semantic-guided mask, allowing us to efficiently find positive pairs only requiring instance-level supervision. Extensive experiments on the public SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets demonstrate the superiority of our pipeline over state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/sunhz0117/DCLNet.

Recently, transformer purely based on attention mechanism has been applied to a wide range of tasks and achieved impressive performance. Though extensive efforts have been made, there are still drawbacks to the transformer architecture which hinder its further applications: (i) the quadratic complexity brought by attention mechanism; (ii) barely incorporated inductive bias.

Multi-label image classification, which can be categorized into label-dependency and region-based methods, is a challenging problem due to the complex underlying object layouts. Although region-based methods are less likely to encounter issues with model generalizability than label-dependency methods, they often generate hundreds of meaningless or noisy proposals with non-discriminative information, and the contextual dependency among the localized regions is often ignored or over-simplified. This paper builds a unified framework to perform effective noisy-proposal suppression and to interact between global and local features for robust feature learning. Specifically, we propose category-aware weak supervision to concentrate on non-existent categories so as to provide deterministic information for local feature learning, restricting the local branch to focus on more high-quality regions of interest. Moreover, we develop a cross-granularity attention module to explore the complementary information between global and local features, which can build the high-order feature correlation containing not only global-to-local, but also local-to-local relations. Both advantages guarantee a boost in the performance of the whole network. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets (MS-COCO and VOC 2007) demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

This paper focus on few-shot object detection~(FSOD) and instance segmentation~(FSIS), which requires a model to quickly adapt to novel classes with a few labeled instances. The existing methods severely suffer from bias classification because of the missing label issue which naturally exists in an instance-level few-shot scenario and is first formally proposed by us. Our analysis suggests that the standard classification head of most FSOD or FSIS models needs to be decoupled to mitigate the bias classification. Therefore, we propose an embarrassingly simple but effective method that decouples the standard classifier into two heads. Then, these two individual heads are capable of independently addressing clear positive samples and noisy negative samples which are caused by the missing label. In this way, the model can effectively learn novel classes while mitigating the effects of noisy negative samples. Without bells and whistles, our model without any additional computation cost and parameters consistently outperforms its baseline and state-of-the-art by a large margin on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmarks for FSOD and FSIS tasks.\footnote{\url{https://csgaobb.github.io/Projects/DCFS}.}

The prevalence of relation networks in computer vision is in stark contrast to underexplored point-based methods. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of local relation operators and survey their feasibility. We propose a scalable and efficient module, called group relation aggregator. The module computes a feature of a group based on the aggregation of the features of the inner-group points weighted by geometric relations and semantic relations. We adopt this module to design our RPNet. We further verify the expandability of RPNet, in terms of both depth and width, on the tasks of classification and segmentation. Surprisingly, empirical results show that wider RPNet fits for classification, while deeper RPNet works better on segmentation. RPNet achieves state-of-the-art for classification and segmentation on challenging benchmarks. We also compare our local aggregator with PointNet++, with around 30% parameters and 50% computation saving. Finally, we conduct experiments to reveal the robustness of RPNet with regard to rigid transformation and noises.

In this study, we propose a neural network-based face anti-spoofing algorithm using dual pixel (DP) sensor images. The proposed algorithm has two stages: depth reconstruction and depth classification. The first network takes a DP image pair as input and generates a depth map with a baseline of approximately 1 mm. Then, the classification network is trained to distinguish real individuals and planar attack shapes to produce a binary output. A DP image is utilized to estimate the depth map; thus, the proposed face anti-spoofing method is simple and robust. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated depth map helps distinguish real human faces from nonface attack, including images recaptured from photos or screens. The proposed algorithm achieves better anti-spoofing performance compared with other stereo and phase-based depth estimation schemes.