Existing open-vocabulary object detectors typically enlarge their vocabulary sizes by leveraging different forms of weak supervision. This helps generalize to novel objects at inference. Two popular forms of weak-supervision used in open-vocabulary detection (OVD) include pretrained CLIP model and image-level supervision. We note that both these modes of supervision are not optimally aligned for the detection task: CLIP is trained with image-text pairs and lacks precise localization of objects while the image-level supervision has been used with heuristics that do not accurately specify local object regions. In this work, we propose to address this problem by performing object-centric alignment of the language embeddings from the CLIP model. Furthermore, we visually ground the objects with only image-level supervision using a pseudo-labeling process that provides high-quality object proposals and helps expand the vocabulary during training. We establish a bridge between the above two object-alignment strategies via a novel weight transfer function that aggregates their complimentary strengths. In essence, the proposed model seeks to minimize the gap between object and image-centric representations in the OVD setting. On the COCO benchmark, our proposed approach achieves 36.6 AP50 on novel classes, an absolute 8.2 gain over the previous best performance. For LVIS, we surpass the state-of-the-art ViLD model by 5.0 mask AP for rare categories and 3.4 overall. Code: https://github.com/hanoonaR/object-centric-ovd.
Scaling object taxonomies is one of the important steps toward a robust real-world deployment of recognition systems. We have faced remarkable progress in images since the introduction of the LVIS benchmark. To continue this success in videos, a new video benchmark, TAO, was recently presented. Given the recent encouraging results from both detection and tracking communities, we are interested in marrying those two advances and building a strong large vocabulary video tracker. However, supervisions in LVIS and TAO are inherently sparse or even missing, posing two new challenges for training th…
Bridging 3D Gaussians and Semantic Occupancy for Comprehensive Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding from Unposed Images
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Great Wall Motor（长城汽车）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学宁波数字孪生研究院）
SIA-OVD: Shape-Invariant Adapter for Bridging the Image-Region Gap in Open-Vocabulary Detection
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学智能科学与技术学院）
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised object localization aims to find a target object region in a given image with only weak supervision, such as image-level labels. Most existing methods use a class activation map (CAM) to generate a localization map; however, a CAM identifies only the most discriminative parts of a target object rather than the entire object region. In this work, we find the gap between classification and localization in terms of the misalignment of the directions between an input feature and a class-specific weight. We demonstrate that the misalignment suppresses the activation of CAM in area…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Existing multi-agent perception algorithms usually select to share deep neural features extracted from raw sensing data between agents, achieving a trade-off between accuracy and communication bandwidth limit. However, these methods assume all agents have identical neural networks, which might not be practical in the real world. The transmitted features can have a large domain gap when the models differ, leading to a dramatic performance drop in multi-agent perception. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight framework to bridge such domain gaps for multi-agent perception, which can be …
GeoSeg-OV: Bridging Geospatial Gaps with Structural Guidance for Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentation
School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学计算机学院）；Systems Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）系统中心）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机系）；School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University（武汉大学测绘学院）；Data Science and AI Innovation Research Promotion Center, Shiga University（滋贺大学数据科学与人工智能创新研究促进中心）
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所IIS）
After the tremendous advances of deep learning and other AI methods, more attention is flowing into other properties of modern approaches, such as interpretability, fairness, etc. combined in frameworks like Responsible AI. Two research directions, namely Explainable AI and Uncertainty Quantification are becoming more and more important, but have been so far never combined and jointly explored. In this paper, I show how both research areas provide potential for combination, why more research should be done in this direction and how this would lead to an increase in trustability in AI systems.
The fact that there exists a gap between low-level features and semantic meanings of images, called the semantic gap, is known for decades. Resolution of the semantic gap is a long standing problem. The semantic gap problem is reviewed and a survey on recent efforts in bridging the gap is made in this work. Most importantly, we claim that the semantic gap is primarily bridged through supervised learning today. Experiences are drawn from two application domains to illustrate this point: 1) object detection and 2) metric learning for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). To begin with, this pape…
Image harmonization has been significantly advanced with large-scale harmonization dataset. However, the current way to build dataset is still labor-intensive, which adversely affects the extendability of dataset. To address this problem, we propose to construct rendered harmonization dataset with fewer human efforts to augment the existing real-world dataset. To leverage both real-world images and rendered images, we propose a cross-domain harmonization network to bridge the domain gap between two domains. Moreover, we also employ well-designed style classifiers and losses to facilitate cross…
Guangzhou University（广州大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Visible-infrared cross-modality person re-identification (VI-ReID), whose aim is to match person images between visible and infrared modality, is a challenging cross-modality image retrieval task. Most existing works integrate batch normalization layers into their neural network, but we found out that batch normalization layers would lead to two types of distribution gap: 1) inter-mini-batch distribution gap -- the distribution gap of the same modality between each mini-batch; 2) intra-mini-batch modality distribution gap -- the distribution gap of different modality within the same mini-batch…
Bridging the Synthetic-to-Real Gap for Few-Shot Cryo-ET Classification
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；National Institute of Technology Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦国立理工学院）；University of Minnesota – Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）
Sim2Real domain adaptation (DA) research focuses on the constrained setting of adapting from a labeled synthetic source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled real target domain. However, for high-stakes applications (e.g. autonomous driving), it is common to have a modest amount of human-labeled real data in addition to plentiful auto-labeled source data (e.g. from a driving simulator). We study this setting of supervised sim2real DA applied to 2D object detection. We propose Domain Translation via Conditional Alignment and Reweighting (CARE) a novel algorithm that systematically exploits…
Can we train a hybrid discriminative-generative model within a single network? This question has recently been answered in the affirmative, introducing the field of Joint Energy-based Model (JEM), which achieves high classification accuracy and image generation quality simultaneously. Despite recent advances, there remain two performance gaps: the accuracy gap to the standard softmax classifier, and the generation quality gap to state-of-the-art generative models. In this paper, we introduce a variety of training techniques to bridge the accuracy gap and the generation quality gap of JEM. 1) W…
Data-driven depth estimation methods struggle with the generalization outside their training scenes due to the immense variability of the real-world scenes. This problem can be partially addressed by utilising synthetically generated images, but closing the synthetic-real domain gap is far from trivial. In this paper, we tackle this issue by using domain invariant defocus blur as direct supervision. We leverage defocus cues by using a permutation invariant convolutional neural network that encourages the network to learn from the differences between images with a different point of focus. Our …
Given the dependency of current CNN architectures on a large training set, the possibility of using synthetic data is alluring as it allows generating a virtually infinite amount of labeled training data. However, producing such data is a non-trivial task as current CNN architectures are sensitive to the domain gap between real and synthetic data. We propose to adopt general-purpose GAN models for pixel-level image translation, allowing to formulate the domain gap itself as a learning problem. The obtained models are then used either during training or inference to bridge the domain gap. Here,…
There are many real-world classification problems wherein the issue of data imbalance (the case when a data set contains substantially more samples for one/many classes than the rest) is unavoidable. While under-sampling the problematic classes is a common solution, this is not a compelling option when the large data class is itself diverse and/or the limited data class is especially small. We suggest a strategy based on recent work concerning limited data problems which utilizes a supplemental set of images with similar properties to the limited data class to aid in the training of a neural n…
Roux Institute（鲁克斯研究所）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Maine（缅因大学）
We lay the groundwork for research in the algorithmic comprehension of infant faces, in anticipation of applications from healthcare to psychology, especially in the early prediction of developmental disorders. Specifically, we introduce the first-ever dataset of infant faces annotated with facial landmark coordinates and pose attributes, demonstrate the inadequacies of existing facial landmark estimation algorithms in the infant domain, and train new state-of-the-art models that significantly improve upon those algorithms using domain adaptation techniques. We touch on the closely related tas…
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Large-scale synthetic datasets are beneficial to stereo matching but usually introduce known domain bias. Although unsupervised image-to-image translation networks represented by CycleGAN show great potential in dealing with domain gap, it is non-trivial to generalize this method to stereo matching due to the problem of pixel distortion and stereo mismatch after translation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end training framework with domain translation and stereo matching networks to tackle this challenge. First, joint optimization between domain translation and stereo matching networks in…
Recently, differentiable search methods have made major progress in reducing the computational costs of neural architecture search. However, these approaches often report lower accuracy in evaluating the searched architecture or transferring it to another dataset. This is arguably due to the large gap between the architecture depths in search and evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm which allows the depth of searched architectures to grow gradually during the training procedure. This brings two issues, namely, heavier computational overheads and weaker search …
Center for Computational Neuroscience, Flatiron Institute（Flatiron研究所计算神经科学中心）
In the field of Connectomics, a primary problem is that of 3D neuron segmentation. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable accuracy, errors still exist, especially in regions with image defects. One common type of defect is that of consecutive missing image sections. Here, data is lost along some axis, and the resulting neuron segmentations are split across the gap. To address this problem, we propose a novel method based on point cloud representations of neurons. We formulate the problem as a classification problem and train CurveNet, a state-of-the-art point cloud class…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；LPIXEL Inc.（LPIXEL公司）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Network-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis research, its clinical applications remain challenging. Accordingly, developing medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) fitting into a clinical environment requires identifying/bridging the gap between AI and Healthcare sides. Since the biggest problem in Medical Imaging lies in data paucity, confirming the clinical relevance for diagnosis of research-proven image augmentation techniques is essential. Therefore, we hold a clinically valuable AI-envisioning workshop among Japanese Medical Imaging experts, physicians…
