This paper studies the unsupervised embedding learning problem, which requires an effective similarity measurement between samples in low-dimensional embedding space. Motivated by the positive concentrated and negative separated properties observed from category-wise supervised learning, we propose to utilize the instance-wise supervision to approximate these properties, which aims at learning data augmentation invariant and instance spread-out features. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel instance based softmax embedding method, which directly optimizes the `real' instance features on top of the softmax function. It achieves significantly faster learning speed and higher accuracy than all existing methods. The proposed method performs well for both seen and unseen testing categories with cosine similarity. It also achieves competitive performance even without pre-trained network over samples from fine-grained categories.
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
We propose a method for unsupervised video object segmentation by transferring the knowledge encapsulated in image-based instance embedding networks. The instance embedding network produces an embedding vector for each pixel that enables identifying all pixels belonging to the same object. Though trained on static images, the instance embeddings are stable over consecutive video frames, which allows us to link objects together over time. Thus, we adapt the instance networks trained on static images to video object segmentation and incorporate the embeddings with objectness and optical flow fea…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；European Systems Integration（欧洲系统集成公司）
Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims at learning discriminative identity features without annotations. Recently, self-supervised contrastive learning has gained increasing attention for its effectiveness in unsupervised representation learning. The main idea of instance contrastive learning is to match a same instance in different augmented views. However, the relationship between different instances has not been fully explored in previous contrastive methods, especially for instance-level contrastive loss. To address this issue, we propose Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding (ICE…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Despite the great progress achieved in unsupervised feature embedding, existing contrastive learning methods typically pursue view-invariant representations through attracting positive sample pairs and repelling negative sample pairs in the embedding space, while neglecting to systematically explore instance relations. In this paper, we explore instance relations including intra-instance multi-view relation and inter-instance interpolation relation for unsupervised feature embedding. Specifically, we embed intra-instance multi-view relation by aligning the distribution of the distance between …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；State Key Lab of Intelligent Technologies and Systems（智能技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
In this paper, we propose an instance similarity learning (ISL) method for unsupervised feature representation. Conventional methods assign close instance pairs in the feature space with high similarity, which usually leads to wrong pairwise relationship for large neighborhoods because the Euclidean distance fails to depict the true semantic similarity on the feature manifold. On the contrary, our method mines the feature manifold in an unsupervised manner, through which the semantic similarity among instances is learned in order to obtain discriminative representations. Specifically, we emplo…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
The divergence between labeled training data and unlabeled testing data is a significant challenge for recent deep learning models. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to solve such a problem. Recent works show that self-training is a powerful approach to UDA. However, existing methods have difficulty in balancing scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an instance adaptive self-training framework for UDA on the task of semantic segmentation. To effectively improve the quality of pseudo-labels, we develop a novel pseudo-label generation strategy with an instance adapti…
In the biomedical domain, there is an abundance of dense, complex data where objects of interest may be challenging to detect or constrained by limits of human knowledge. Labelled domain specific datasets for supervised tasks are often expensive to obtain, and furthermore discovery of novel distinct objects may be desirable for unbiased scientific discovery. Therefore, we propose leveraging the wealth of annotations in benchmark computer vision datasets to conduct unsupervised instance segmentation for diverse biomedical datasets. The key obstacle is thus overcoming the large domain shift from…
Instance segmentation is an active topic in computer vision that is usually solved by using supervised learning approaches over very large datasets composed of object level masks. Obtaining such a dataset for any new domain can be very expensive and time-consuming. In addition, models trained on certain annotated categories do not generalize well to unseen objects. The goal of this paper is to propose a method that can perform unsupervised discovery of long-tail categories in instance segmentation, through learning instance embeddings of masked regions. Leveraging rich relationship and hierarc…
Recent advances in person re-identification have demonstrated enhanced discriminability, especially with supervised learning or transfer learning. However, since the data requirements---including the degree of data curations---are becoming increasingly complex and laborious, there is a critical need for unsupervised methods that are robust to large intra-class variations, such as changes in perspective, illumination, articulated motion, resolution, etc. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised framework for person re-identification which is trained in an end-to-end manner without any pre-training…
The instance discrimination paradigm has become dominant in unsupervised learning. It always adopts a teacher-student framework, in which the teacher provides embedded knowledge as a supervision signal for the student. The student learns meaningful representations by enforcing instance spatial consistency with the views from the teacher. However, the outputs of the teacher can vary dramatically on the same instance during different training stages, introducing unexpected noise and leading to catastrophic forgetting caused by inconsistent objectives. In this paper, we first integrate instance t…
UC San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；Toyota InfoTechnology Center（丰田信息技术中心）
Unsupervised learning for geometric perception (depth, optical flow, etc.) is of great interest to autonomous systems. Recent works on unsupervised learning have made considerable progress on perceiving geometry; however, they usually ignore the coherence of objects and perform poorly under scenarios with dark and noisy environments. In contrast, supervised learning algorithms, which are robust, require large labeled geometric dataset. This paper introduces SIGNet, a novel framework that provides robust geometry perception without requiring geometrically informative labels. Specifically, SIGNe…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for nuclei instance segmentation is important for digital pathology, as it alleviates the burden of labor-intensive annotation and domain shift across datasets. In this work, we propose a Cycle Consistency Panoptic Domain Adaptive Mask R-CNN (CyC-PDAM) architecture for unsupervised nuclei segmentation in histopathology images, by learning from fluorescence microscopy images. More specifically, we first propose a nuclei inpainting mechanism to remove the auxiliary generated objects in the synthesized images. Secondly, a semantic branch with a domain discrimi…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
Part feature learning is critical for fine-grained semantic understanding in vehicle re-identification. However, existing approaches directly model part features and global features, which can easily lead to serious gradient vanishing issues due to their unequal feature information and unreliable pseudo-labels for unsupervised vehicle re-identification. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a simple Triplet Contrastive Representation Learning (TCRL) framework which leverages cluster features to bridge the part features and global features for unsupervised vehicle re-identification…
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-Id) has attracted increasing attention due to its practical application in the read-world video surveillance system. The traditional unsupervised Re-Id are mostly based on the method alternating between clustering and fine-tuning with the classification or metric learning objectives on the grouped clusters. However, since person Re-Id is an open-set problem, the clustering based methods often leave out lots of outlier instances or group the instances into the wrong clusters, thus they can not make full use of the training samples as a whole. To solve t…
Inria Rennes VRG, FEE, CTU in Prague（法国国家信息与自动化研究所雷恩分所VRG、费尔科学院（FEE）、捷克技术大学布拉格分校（CTU in Prague））；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CTU in Prague（捷克技术大学布拉格分校）
Severe background clutter is challenging in many computer vision tasks, including large-scale image retrieval. Global descriptors, that are popular due to their memory and search efficiency, are especially prone to corruption by such a clutter. Eliminating the impact of the clutter on the image descriptor increases the chance of retrieving relevant images and prevents topic drift due to actually retrieving the clutter in the case of query expansion. In this work, we propose a novel salient region detection method. It captures, in an unsupervised manner, patterns that are both discriminative an…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Instance contrast for unsupervised representation learning has achieved great success in recent years. In this work, we explore the idea of instance contrastive learning in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and propose a novel Category Contrast technique (CaCo) that introduces semantic priors on top of instance discrimination for visual UDA tasks. By considering instance contrastive learning as a dictionary look-up operation, we construct a semantics-aware dictionary with samples from both source and target domains where each target sample is assigned a (pseudo) category label based on the …
Enhancing Object Discovery for Unsupervised Instance Segmentation and Object Detection
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University（计算机科学与人工智能学院，温州大学）；Oujiang Laboratory (Zhejiang Lab for Regenerative Medicine, Vision and Brain Health), Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University（瓯江实验室（浙江省再生医学、视觉与脑健康实验室），温州医科大学眼医院）
The linear ensemble based strategy, i.e., averaging ensemble, has been proposed to improve the performance in unsupervised domain adaptation tasks. However, a typical UDA task is usually challenged by dynamically changing factors, such as variable weather, views, and background in the unlabeled target domain. Most previous ensemble strategies ignore UDA's dynamic and uncontrollable challenge, facing limited feature representations and performance bottlenecks. To enhance the model, adaptability between domains and reduce the computational cost when deploying the ensemble model, we propose a nov…
Aligning Instance-Semantic Sparse Representation towards Unsupervised Object Segmentation and Shape Abstraction with Repeatable Primitives
School of Big Data and Software Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学大数据与软件学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校计算机科学与工程系）
Ajou University（亚洲大学）；NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods have utilized vicinal space between the source and target domains. However, the equilibrium collapse of labels, a problem where the source labels are dominant over the target labels in the predictions of vicinal instances, has never been addressed. In this paper, we propose an instance-wise minimax strategy that minimizes the entropy of high uncertainty instances in the vicinal space to tackle the stated problem. We divide the vicinal space into two subspaces through the solution of the minimax problem: contrastive space and consensus space. In the…
We introduce the first approach to solve the challenging problem of unsupervised 4D visual scene understanding for complex dynamic scenes with multiple interacting people from multi-view video. Our approach simultaneously estimates a detailed model that includes a per-pixel semantically and temporally coherent reconstruction, together with instance-level segmentation exploiting photo-consistency, semantic and motion information. We further leverage recent advances in 3D pose estimation to constrain the joint semantic instance segmentation and 4D temporally coherent reconstruction. This enables…
HUNTER: Unsupervised Human-centric 3D Detection via Transferring Knowledge from Synthetic Instances to Real Scenes
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Innovation Academy for Microsatellites, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微小卫星创新研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is a promising and very challenging research problem in computer vision. Learning robust and discriminative features with unlabeled data is of central importance to Re-ID. Recently, more attention has been paid to unsupervised Re-ID algorithms based on clustered pseudo-label. However, the previous approaches did not fully exploit information of hard samples, simply using cluster centroid or all instances for contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose a Hard-sample Guided Hybrid Contrast Learning (HHCL) approach combining cluster-level loss wit…
In this paper, we propose a genuine group-level contrastive visual representation learning method whose linear evaluation performance on ImageNet surpasses the vanilla supervised learning. Two mainstream unsupervised learning schemes are the instance-level contrastive framework and clustering-based schemes. The former adopts the extremely fine-grained instance-level discrimination whose supervisory signal is not efficient due to the false negatives. Though the latter solves this, they commonly come with some restrictions affecting the performance. To integrate their advantages, we design the S…
A Unified Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation based on Instance Weighting
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
A high-performance unsupervised nuclei instance segmentation (HUNIS) method is proposed in this work. HUNIS consists of two-stage block-wise operations. The first stage includes: 1) adaptive thresholding of pixel intensities, 2) incorporation of nuclei size/shape priors and 3) removal of false positive nuclei instances. Then, HUNIS conducts the second stage segmentation by receiving guidance from the first one. The second stage exploits the segmentation masks obtained in the first stage and leverages color and shape distributions for a more accurate segmentation. The main purpose of the two-st…
We introduce CellSegmenter, a structured deep generative model and an amortized inference framework for unsupervised representation learning and instance segmentation tasks. The proposed inference algorithm is convolutional and parallelized, without any recurrent mechanisms, and is able to resolve object-object occlusion while simultaneously treating distant non-occluding objects independently. This leads to extremely fast training times while allowing extrapolation to arbitrary number of instances. We further introduce a transparent posterior regularization strategy that encourages scene reco…
Unsupervised object discovery aims to localize objects in images, while removing the dependence on annotations required by most deep learning-based methods. To address this problem, we propose a fully unsupervised, bottom-up approach, for multiple objects discovery. The proposed approach is a two-stage framework. First, instances of object parts are segmented by using the intra-image similarity between self-supervised local features. The second step merges and filters the object parts to form complete object instances. The latter is performed by two CNN models that capture semantic information…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Agency for Defense Development (ADD)（国防科学研究所）
We present a novel unsupervised framework for instance-level image-to-image translation. Although recent advances have been made by incorporating additional object annotations, existing methods often fail to handle images with multiple disparate objects. The main cause is that, during inference, they apply a global style to the whole image and do not consider the large style discrepancy between instance and background, or within instances. To address this problem, we propose a class-aware memory network that explicitly reasons about local style variations. A key-values memory structure, with a…
Unsupervised feature learning has made great strides with contrastive learning based on instance discrimination and invariant mapping, as benchmarked on curated class-balanced datasets. However, natural data could be highly correlated and long-tail distributed. Natural between-instance similarity conflicts with the presumed instance distinction, causing unstable training and poor performance. Our idea is to discover and integrate between-instance similarity into contrastive learning, not directly by instance grouping, but by cross-level discrimination (CLD) between instances and local instance…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Caltech（加州理工学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Instance segmentation is a fundamental vision task that aims to recognize and segment each object in an image. However, it requires costly annotations such as bounding boxes and segmentation masks for learning. In this work, we propose a fully unsupervised learning method that learns class-agnostic instance segmentation without any annotations. We present FreeSOLO, a self-supervised instance segmentation framework built on top of the simple instance segmentation method SOLO. Our method also presents a novel localization-aware pre-training framework, where objects can be discovered from complic…
Domain adaptation deals with training models using large scale labeled data from a specific source domain and then adapting the knowledge to certain target domains that have few or no labels. Many prior works learn domain agnostic feature representations for this purpose using a global distribution alignment objective which does not take into account the finer class specific structure in the source and target domains. We address this issue in our work and propose an instance affinity based criterion for source to target transfer during adaptation, called ILA-DA. We first propose a reliable and…
This paper presents a simple unsupervised visual representation learning method with a pretext task of discriminating all images in a dataset using a parametric, instance-level classifier. The overall framework is a replica of a supervised classification model, where semantic classes (e.g., dog, bird, and ship) are replaced by instance IDs. However, scaling up the classification task from thousands of semantic labels to millions of instance labels brings specific challenges including 1) the large-scale softmax computation; 2) the slow convergence due to the infrequent visiting of instance samp…
Unsupervised image retrieval aims to learn an efficient retrieval system without expensive data annotations, but most existing methods rely heavily on handcrafted feature descriptors or pre-trained feature extractors. To minimize human supervision, recent advance proposes deep fully unsupervised image retrieval aiming at training a deep model from scratch to jointly optimize visual features and quantization codes. However, existing approach mainly focuses on instance contrastive learning without considering underlying semantic structure information, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In thi…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
This paper presents parametric instance classification (PIC) for unsupervised visual feature learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art approaches which do instance discrimination in a dual-branch non-parametric fashion, PIC directly performs a one-branch parametric instance classification, revealing a simple framework similar to supervised classification and without the need to address the information leakage issue. We show that the simple PIC framework can be as effective as the state-of-the-art approaches, i.e. SimCLR and MoCo v2, by adapting several common component settings used in the state-o…
This paper proposes key instance selection based on video saliency covering objectness and dynamics for unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS). Our method takes frames sequentially and extracts object proposals with corresponding masks for each frame. We link objects according to their similarity until the M-th frame and then assign them unique IDs (i.e., instances). Similarity measure takes into account multiple properties such as ReID descriptor, expected trajectory, and semantic co-segmentation result. After M-th frame, we select K IDs based on video saliency and frequency of appeara…
Unsupervised Pre-training with Language-Vision Prompts for Low-Data Instance Segmentation
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition（模式识别国家重点实验室）
Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subt…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Existing unsupervised methods for keypoint learning rely heavily on the assumption that a specific keypoint type (e.g. elbow, digit, abstract geometric shape) appears only once in an image. This greatly limits their applicability, as each instance must be isolated before applying the method-an issue that is never discussed or evaluated. We thus propose a novel method to learn Task-agnostic, UnSupervised Keypoints (TUSK) which can deal with multiple instances. To achieve this, instead of the commonly-used strategy of detecting multiple heatmaps, each dedicated to a specific keypoint type, we us…
Meituan（美团）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Recent unsupervised contrastive representation learning follows a Single Instance Multi-view (SIM) paradigm where positive pairs are usually constructed with intra-image data augmentation. In this paper, we propose an effective approach called Beyond Single Instance Multi-view (BSIM). Specifically, we impose more accurate instance discrimination capability by measuring the joint similarity between two randomly sampled instances and their mixture, namely spurious-positive pairs. We believe that learning joint similarity helps to improve the performance when encoded features are distributed more…
