Face benchmarks empower the research community to train and evaluate high-performance face recognition systems. In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale recognition benchmark, containing uncurated 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. First, we collect 4M name lists and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical deployments, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a new test set with rich attributes are constructed. Besides, we gather a large-scale masked face sub-set for biometrics assessment under COVID-19. For a comprehensive evaluation of face matchers, three recognition tasks are performed under standard, masked and unbiased settings, respectively. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Enabled by WebFace42M, we reduce 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set and rank 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with the public training sets. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established under the FRUITS-100/500/1000 milliseconds protocols. The proposed benchmark shows enormous potential on standard, masked and unbiased face recognition scenarios. Our WebFace260M website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale face benchmark containing noisy 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name list and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical scenarios, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a test set are constructed to comprehensively evaluate face matchers.Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Empowered by Web-Face42M, we reduce relative 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set, and rank the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with public training set. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established on our rich-attribute test set under FRUITS-100ms/500ms/1000ms protocol, including MobileNet, EfficientNet, AttentionNet, ResNet, SENet, ResNeXt and RegNet families. Benchmark website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in a wide range of computer vision areas, but the applications to mobile devices is limited due to their high storage and computational cost. Much efforts have been devoted to compress DNNs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for deep networks compression, named Cluster Regularized Quantization (CRQ), which can reduce the presentation precision of a full-precision model to ternary values without significant accuracy drop. In particular, the proposed method aims at reducing the quantization error by introducing a cluster regularization term, which is imposed on the full-precision weights to enable them naturally concentrate around the target values. Through explicitly regularizing the weights during the re-training stage, the full-precision model can achieve the smooth transition to the low-bit one. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Channel pruning, which seeks to reduce the model size by removing redundant channels, is a popular solution for deep networks compression. Existing channel pruning methods usually conduct layer-wise channel selection by directly minimizing the reconstruction error of feature maps between the baseline model and the pruned one. However, they ignore the feature and semantic distributions within feature maps and real contribution of channels to the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a new channel pruning method by explicitly using both intermediate outputs of the baseline model and the classification loss of the pruned model to supervise layer-wise channel selection. Particularly, we introduce an additional loss to encode the differences in the feature and semantic distributions within feature maps between the baseline model and the pruned one. By considering the reconstruction error, the additional loss and the classification loss at the same time, our approach can significantly improve the performance of the pruned model. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Existing RGB and CNN-based methods in video action recognition mostly do not distinguish human body from the environment, thus easily overfit the scenes and objects of training sets. In this work, we present a conceptually simple, general and high-performance framework for action recognition in videos, aiming at person-centric modeling. The method, called Action Machine, is based on person bounding boxes for instance-level action analysis. It extends the Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) by adding a branch for human pose estimation and a 2D CNN for pose-based action recognition. Action Machine can benefit from the multi-task training of action recognition and pose estimation, the fusion of predictions from RGB images and poses. Experiments results are provided on trimmed video action datasets, NTU RGB+D, Northwestern UCLA Multiview Action3D, MSR Daily Activity3D. Action Machine achieves superior performance and generalizes well across datasets.

This paper presents an approach for learning the evasion strategy for the evader in pursuit-evasion against the pursuers with Deep Q-network (DQN). To give the immediate reward to the agent, we handcraft a reward function, which considers both the evader escaping from being surrounded by the pursuers and keeping distance from the pursuers. This is a combination of the artificial potential field method with deep reinforcement learning. Our learned evasion strategy is verified by a series of experiments in three different game scenarios. The training stability and the value function are analyzed respectively. The three learned agents are compared with a random agent and a repulsive agent. We show the effectiveness of our method.

The two-stream ConvNets in action recognition always fuse the two streams' predictions by the weighted averaging scheme. This fusion way with fixed weights lacks of pertinence to different action videos and always needs trial and error on the validation set. In order to enhance the adaptability of two-stream ConvNets, an end-to-end trainable gated fusion method, namely gating ConvNet, is proposed in this paper based on the MoE (Mixture of Experts) theory. The gating ConvNet takes the combination of convolutional layers of the spatial and temporal nets as input and outputs two fusion weights. To reduce the over-fitting of gating ConvNet caused by the redundancy of parameters, a new multi-task learning method is designed, which jointly learns the gating fusion weights for the two streams and learns the gating ConvNet for action classification. With the proposed gated fusion method and multi-task learning approach, competitive performance is achieved on the video action dataset UCF101.

From the frame/clip-level feature learning to the video-level representation building, deep learning methods in action recognition have developed rapidly in recent years. However, current methods suffer from the confusion caused by partial observation training, or without end-to-end learning, or restricted to single temporal scale modeling and so on. In this paper, we build upon two-stream ConvNets and propose Deep networks with Temporal Pyramid Pooling (DTPP), an end-to-end video-level representation learning approach, to address these problems. Specifically, at first, RGB images and optical flow stacks are sparsely sampled across the whole video. Then a temporal pyramid pooling layer is used to aggregate the frame-level features which consist of spatial and temporal cues. Lastly, the trained model has compact video-level representation with multiple temporal scales, which is both global and sequence-aware. Experimental results show that DTPP achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two challenging video action datasets: UCF101 and HMDB51, either by ImageNet pre-training or Kinetics pre-training.