Cross-domain object detection is challenging, because object detection model is often vulnerable to data variance, especially to the considerable domain shift between two distinctive domains. In this paper, we propose a new Unbiased Mean Teacher (UMT) model for cross-domain object detection. We reveal that there often exists a considerable model bias for the simple mean teacher (MT) model in cross-domain scenarios, and eliminate the model bias with several simple yet highly effective strategies. In particular, for the teacher model, we propose a cross-domain distillation method for MT to maximally exploit the expertise of the teacher model. Moreover, for the student model, we alleviate its bias by augmenting training samples with pixel-level adaptation. Finally, for the teaching process, we employ an out-of-distribution estimation strategy to select samples that most fit the current model to further enhance the cross-domain distillation process. By tackling the model bias issue with these strategies, our UMT model achieves mAPs of 44.1%, 58.1%, 41.7%, and 43.1% on benchmark datasets Clipart1k, Watercolor2k, Foggy Cityscapes, and Cityscapes, respectively, which outperforms the existing state-of-the-art results in notable margins. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/kinredon/umt.
Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-…
With the recent development of Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) techniques, object detectors can be improved by using a limited amount of labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, there are still two challenges that are not addressed: (1) there is no prior SS-OD work on anchor-free detectors, and (2) prior works are ineffective when pseudo-labeling bounding box regression. In this paper, we present Unbiased Teacher v2, which shows the generalization of SS-OD method to anchor-free detectors and also introduces Listen2Student mechanism for the unsupervised regression loss. Speci…
Ningbo University（宁波大学）；Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology & Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波材料技术与工程研究所）；Jiaochuan Academy（蛟川书院）
Convolutional neural networks can achieve remarkable performance in semantic segmentation tasks. However, such neural network approaches heavily rely on costly pixel-level annotation. Semi-supervised learning is a promising resolution to tackle this issue, but its performance still far falls behind the fully supervised counterpart. This work proposes a cross-teacher training framework with three modules that significantly improves traditional semi-supervised learning approaches. The core is a cross-teacher module, which could simultaneously reduce the coupling among peer networks and the error…
We address the task of domain adaptation in object detection, where there is a domain gap between a domain with annotations (source) and a domain of interest without annotations (target). As an effective semi-supervised learning method, the teacher-student framework (a student model is supervised by the pseudo labels from a teacher model) has also yielded a large accuracy gain in cross-domain object detection. However, it suffers from the domain shift and generates many low-quality pseudo labels (\textit{e.g.,} false positives), which leads to sub-optimal performance. To mitigate this problem,…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Panasonic Holdings Corporation（松下控股公司）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Recently, DEtection TRansformer (DETR), an end-to-end object detection pipeline, has achieved promising performance. However, it requires large-scale labeled data and suffers from domain shift, especially when no labeled data is available in the target domain. To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end cross-domain detection Transformer based on the mean teacher framework, MTTrans, which can fully exploit unlabeled target domain data in object detection training and transfer knowledge between domains via pseudo labels. We further propose the comprehensive multi-level feature alignment to …
Pseudo-label based self training approaches are a popular method for source-free unsupervised domain adaptation. However, their efficacy depends on the quality of the labels generated by the source trained model. These labels may be incorrect with high confidence, rendering thresholding methods ineffective. In order to avoid reinforcing errors caused by label noise, we propose an uncertainty-aware mean teacher framework which implicitly filters incorrect pseudo-labels during training. Leveraging model uncertainty allows the mean teacher network to perform implicit filtering by down-weighing lo…
Nowadays, Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) is a hot topic, since, while it is rather easy to collect images for creating a new dataset, labeling them is still an expensive and time-consuming task. One of the successful methods to take advantage of raw images on a Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) setting is the Mean Teacher technique, where the operations of pseudo-labeling by the Teacher and the Knowledge Transfer from the Student to the Teacher take place simultaneously. However, the pseudo-labeling by thresholding is not the best solution since the confidence value is not strictly relat…
Cross Domain Object Detection via Multi-Granularity Confidence Alignment based Mean Teacher
National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)（国防科技大学）；College of System Engineering, National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)（国防科技大学系统工程学院）；College of Electronic Science and Technology, NUDT（国防科技大学电子科学学院）；College of Meteorology and Oceanography, NUDT（国防科技大学气象海洋学院）
Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Universität Ulm（乌尔姆大学）
Consistency learning using input image, feature, or network perturbations has shown remarkable results in semi-supervised semantic segmentation, but this approach can be seriously affected by inaccurate predictions of unlabelled training images. There are two consequences of these inaccurate predictions: 1) the training based on the "strict" cross-entropy (CE) loss can easily overfit prediction mistakes, leading to confirmation bias; and 2) the perturbations applied to these inaccurate predictions will use potentially erroneous predictions as training signals, degrading consistency learning. I…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Semi-supervised object detection has made significant progress with the development of mean teacher driven self-training. Despite the promising results, the label mismatch problem is not yet fully explored in the previous works, leading to severe confirmation bias during self-training. In this paper, we delve into this problem and propose a simple yet effective LabelMatch framework from two different yet complementary perspectives, i.e., distribution-level and instance-level. For the former one, it is reasonable to approximate the class distribution of the unlabeled data from that of the label…
Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images via Multi-scale Uncertainty Consistency and Cross-Teacher-Student Attention
Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau（数据科学学院，澳门城市大学）；WMG, University of Warwick（沃里克大学工程学院）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院航天信息研究所）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子、电气与通信工程学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Towards Unbiased Source-Free Object Detection via Vision Foundation Models
State Key Laboratory of Complex and Critical Software Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China（复杂与关键软件环境国家重点实验室，北京航空航天大学，北京，100191，中国）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China（计算机科学与工程学院，北京航空航天大学，北京，100191，中国）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230601, China（计算机科学与信息工程学院，合肥工业大学，合肥，230601，中国）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Domain shift has been a long-standing issue for medical image segmentation. Recently, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have achieved promising cross-modality segmentation performance by distilling knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a target domain without labels. In this work, we propose a multi-scale self-ensembling based UDA framework for automatic segmentation of two key brain structures i.e., Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) and Cochlea on high-resolution T2 images. First, a segmentation-enhanced contrastive unpaired image translation module is designed for image-level doma…
Dual Mean-Teacher: An Unbiased Semi-Supervised Framework for Audio-Visual Source Localization
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
The success of deep learning heavily relies on large-scale data with comprehensive labels, which is more expensive and time-consuming to fetch in 3D compared to 2D images or natural languages. This promotes the potential of utilizing models pretrained with data more than 3D as teachers for cross-modal knowledge transferring. In this paper, we revisit masked modeling in a unified fashion of knowledge distillation, and we show that foundational Transformers pretrained with 2D images or natural languages can help self-supervised 3D representation learning through training Autoencoders as Cross-Mo…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Rendering synthetic data (e.g., 3D CAD-rendered images) to generate annotations for learning deep models in vision tasks has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, simply applying the models learnt on synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to domain shift. To address this issue, recent progress in cross-domain recognition has featured the Mean Teacher, which directly simulates unsupervised domain adaptation as semi-supervised learning. The domain gap is thus naturally bridged with consistency regularization in a teacher-student scheme. In th…
RGB-Infrared (RGB-IR) person re-identification (ReID) is a technology where the system can automatically identify the same person appearing at different parts of a video when light is unavailable. The critical challenge of this task is the cross-modality gap of features under different modalities. To solve this challenge, we proposed a Teacher-Student GAN model (TS-GAN) to adopt different domains and guide the ReID backbone to learn better ReID information. (1) In order to get corresponding RGB-IR image pairs, the RGB-IR Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was used to generate IR images. (2) …
Person re-identification (re-id) has made great progress in recent years, but occlusion is still a challenging problem which significantly degenerates the identification performance. In this paper, we design a teacher-student learning framework to learn an occlusion-robust model from the full-body person domain to the occluded person domain. Notably, the teacher network only uses large-scale full-body person data to simulate the learning process of occluded person re-id. Based on the teacher network, the student network then trains a better model by using inadequate real-world occluded person …
TSCM: A Teacher-Student Model for Vision Place Recognition Using Cross-Metric Knowledge Distillation
Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学智能科学学院）；SIASUN Robot& Automation Co., Ltd（新松机器人自动化股份有限公司）
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)（国际数字经济研究院（IDEA））
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has developed extensively and boosted various tasks. The classical KD method adds the KD loss to the original cross-entropy (CE) loss. We try to decompose the KD loss to explore its relation with the CE loss. Surprisingly, we find it can be regarded as a combination of the CE loss and an extra loss which has the identical form as the CE loss. However, we notice the extra loss forces the student's relative probability to learn the teacher's absolute probability. Moreover, the sum of the two probabilities is different, making it hard to optimize. To address this issue…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Medical image annotations are prohibitively time-consuming and expensive to obtain. To alleviate annotation scarcity, many approaches have been developed to efficiently utilize extra information, e.g.,semi-supervised learning further exploring plentiful unlabeled data, domain adaptation including multi-modality learning and unsupervised domain adaptation resorting to the prior knowledge from additional modality. In this paper, we aim to investigate the feasibility of simultaneously leveraging abundant unlabeled data and well-established cross-modality data for annotation-efficient medical imag…
The outpouring of various pre-trained models empowers knowledge distillation by providing abundant teacher resources, but there lacks a developed mechanism to utilize these teachers adequately. With a massive model repository composed of teachers pre-trained on diverse tasks, we must surmount two obstacles when using knowledge distillation to learn a new task. First, given a fixed computing budget, it is not affordable to try each teacher and train the student repeatedly, making it necessary to seek out the most contributive teacher precisely and efficiently. Second, semantic gaps exist betwee…
Recently, large-scale pre-trained models have shown their advantages in many tasks. However, due to the huge computational complexity and storage requirements, it is challenging to apply the large-scale model to real scenes. A common solution is knowledge distillation which regards the large-scale model as a teacher model and helps to train a small student model to obtain a competitive performance. Cross-task Knowledge distillation expands the application scenarios of the large-scale pre-trained model. Existing knowledge distillation works focus on directly mimicking the final prediction or th…
How to Make Cross Encoder a Good Teacher for Efficient Image-Text Retrieval?
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Armed Forces Yangju Hospital（杨州武装部队医院）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
For more clinical applications of deep learning models for medical image segmentation, high demands on labeled data and computational resources must be addressed. This study proposes a coarse-to-fine framework with two teacher models and a student model that combines knowledge distillation and cross teaching, a consistency regularization based on pseudo-labels, for efficient semi-supervised learning. The proposed method is demonstrated on the abdominal multi-organ segmentation task in CT images under the MICCAI FLARE 2022 challenge, with mean Dice scores of 0.8429 and 0.8520 in the validation …
Since experiencing domain shifts during test-time is inevitable in practice, test-time adaption (TTA) continues to adapt the model after deployment. Recently, the area of continual and gradual test-time adaptation (TTA) emerged. In contrast to standard TTA, continual TTA considers not only a single domain shift, but a sequence of shifts. Gradual TTA further exploits the property that some shifts evolve gradually over time. Since in both settings long test sequences are present, error accumulation needs to be addressed for methods relying on self-training. In this work, we propose and show that…
We address the overlooked unbiasedness in existing long-tailed classification methods: we find that their overall improvement is mostly attributed to the biased preference of tail over head, as the test distribution is assumed to be balanced; however, when the test is as imbalanced as the long-tailed training data -- let the test respect Zipf's law of nature -- the tail bias is no longer beneficial overall because it hurts the head majorities. In this paper, we propose Cross-Domain Empirical Risk Minimization (xERM) for training an unbiased model to achieve strong performances on both test dis…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Current Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation often guide the student to mimic the teacher's structured information generated from individual data samples. However, they ignore the global semantic relations among pixels across various images that are valuable for KD. This paper proposes a novel Cross-Image Relational KD (CIRKD), which focuses on transferring structured pixel-to-pixel and pixel-to-region relations among the whole images. The motivation is that a good teacher network could construct a well-structured feature space in terms of global pixel dependencies. CI…
Cross Architecture Distillation for Face Recognition
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；China Telecom Corporation Ltd. Data & AI Technology Company（中国电信股份有限公司数据与AI科技公司）；Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院）
This paper presents a study on semi-supervised learning to solve the visual attribute prediction problem. In many applications of vision algorithms, the precise recognition of visual attributes of objects is important but still challenging. This is because defining a class hierarchy of attributes is ambiguous, so training data inevitably suffer from class imbalance and label sparsity, leading to a lack of effective annotations. An intuitive solution is to find a method to effectively learn image representations by utilizing unlabeled images. With that in mind, we propose a multi-teacher-single…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心）
Accurate and robust segmentation of lung cancers from CT, even those located close to mediastinum, is needed to more accurately plan and deliver radiotherapy and to measure treatment response. Therefore, we developed a new cross-modality educed distillation (CMEDL) approach, using unpaired CT and MRI scans, whereby an informative teacher MRI network guides a student CT network to extract features that signal the difference between foreground and background. Our contribution eliminates two requirements of distillation methods: (i) paired image sets by using an image to image (I2I) translation a…
Knowledge Distillation (KD) based methods adopt the one-way Knowledge Transfer (KT) scheme in which training a lower-capacity student network is guided by a pre-trained high-capacity teacher network. Recently, Deep Mutual Learning (DML) presented a two-way KT strategy, showing that the student network can be also helpful to improve the teacher network. In this paper, we propose Dense Cross-layer Mutual-distillation (DCM), an improved two-way KT method in which the teacher and student networks are trained collaboratively from scratch. To augment knowledge representation learning, well-designed …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）
Knowledge distillation is a technique to enhance the generalization ability of a student model by exploiting outputs from a teacher model. Recently, feature-map based variants explore knowledge transfer between manually assigned teacher-student pairs in intermediate layers for further improvement. However, layer semantics may vary in different neural networks and semantic mismatch in manual layer associations will lead to performance degeneration due to negative regularization. To address this issue, we propose Semantic Calibration for cross-layer Knowledge Distillation (SemCKD), which automat…
