We propose Masked Capsule Autoencoders (MCAE), the first Capsule Network that utilises pretraining in a modern self-supervised paradigm, specifically the masked image modelling framework. Capsule Networks have emerged as a powerful alternative to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). They have shown favourable properties when compared to Vision Transformers (ViT), but have struggled to effectively learn when presented with more complex data. This has led to Capsule Network models that do not scale to modern tasks. Our proposed MCAE model alleviates this issue by reformulating the Capsule Network to use masked image modelling as a pretraining stage before finetuning in a supervised manner. Across several experiments and ablations studies we demonstrate that similarly to CNNs and ViTs, Capsule Networks can also benefit from self-supervised pretraining, paving the way for further advancements in this neural network domain. For instance, by pretraining on the Imagenette dataset-consisting of 10 classes of Imagenet-sized images-we achieve state-of-the-art results for Capsule Networks, demonstrating a 9% improvement compared to our baseline model. Thus, we propose that Capsule Networks benefit from and should be trained within a masked image modelling framework, using a novel capsule decoder, to enhance a Capsule Network's performance on realistically sized images.
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Facial action units (FAUs) are critical for fine-grained facial expression analysis. Although FAU detection has been actively studied using ideally high quality images, it was not thoroughly studied under heavily occluded conditions. In this paper, we propose the first occlusion-robust FAU recognition method to maintain FAU detection performance under heavy occlusions. Our novel approach takes advantage of rich information from the latent space of masked autoencoder (MAE) and transforms it into FAU features. Bypassing the occlusion reconstruction step, our model efficiently extracts FAU featur…
Continual-MAE: Adaptive Distribution Masked Autoencoders for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；Peking University（北京大学）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；University of Science Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
This paper studies the potential of distilling knowledge from pre-trained models, especially Masked Autoencoders. Our approach is simple: in addition to optimizing the pixel reconstruction loss on masked inputs, we minimize the distance between the intermediate feature map of the teacher model and that of the student model. This design leads to a computationally efficient knowledge distillation framework, given 1) only a small visible subset of patches is used, and 2) the (cumbersome) teacher model only needs to be partially executed, ie, forward propagate inputs through the first few layers, …
Parsing an image into a hierarchy of objects, parts, and relations is important and also challenging in many computer vision tasks. This paper proposes a simple and effective capsule autoencoder to address this issue, called DPR-CAE. In our approach, the encoder parses the input into a set of part capsules, including pose, intensity, and dynamic vector. The decoder introduces a novel dynamic part representation (DPR) by combining the dynamic vector and a shared template bank. These part representations are then regulated by corresponding capsules to composite the final output in an interpretab…
Exploring Self-Supervised Learning with U-Net Masked Autoencoders and EfficientNet-B7 for Improved Gastrointestinal Abnormality Classification in Video Capsule Endoscopy
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore（国际信息技术学院，班加罗尔）；Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad（印度理工学院，海得拉巴）
School of Computing（计算机学院）；NUS Graduate School（新加坡国立大学研究生院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We propose the Motion Capsule Autoencoder (MCAE), which addresses a key challenge in the unsupervised learning of motion representations: transformation invariance. MCAE models motion in a two-level hierarchy. In the lower level, a spatio-temporal motion signal is divided into short, local, and semantic-agnostic snippets. In the higher level, the snippets are aggregated to form full-length semantic-aware segments. For both levels, we represent motion with a set of learned transformation invariant templates and the corresponding geometric transformations by using capsule autoencoders of a novel…
Capsule networks (CapsNets) are new neural networks that classify images based on the spatial relationships of features. By analyzing the pose of features and their relative positions, it is more capable to recognize images after affine transformation. The stacked capsule autoencoder (SCAE) is a state-of-the-art CapsNet, and achieved unsupervised classification of CapsNets for the first time. However, the security vulnerabilities and the robustness of the SCAE has rarely been explored. In this paper, we propose an evasion attack against SCAE, where the attacker can generate adversarial perturb…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Objects are composed of a set of geometrically organized parts. We introduce an unsupervised capsule autoencoder (SCAE), which explicitly uses geometric relationships between parts to reason about objects. Since these relationships do not depend on the viewpoint, our model is robust to viewpoint changes. SCAE consists of two stages. In the first stage, the model predicts presences and poses of part templates directly from the image and tries to reconstruct the image by appropriately arranging the templates. In the second stage, SCAE predicts parameters of a few object capsules, which are then …
In this report, we present our approach and empirical results of applying masked autoencoders in two egocentric video understanding tasks, namely, Object State Change Classification and PNR Temporal Localization, of Ego4D Challenge 2022. As team TheSSVL, we ranked 2nd place in both tasks. Our code will be made available.
We propose a method to learn object representations from 3D point clouds using bundles of geometrically interpretable hidden units, which we call geometric capsules. Each geometric capsule represents a visual entity, such as an object or a part, and consists of two components: a pose and a feature. The pose encodes where the entity is, while the feature encodes what it is. We use these capsules to construct a Geometric Capsule Autoencoder that learns to group 3D points into parts (small local surfaces), and these parts into the whole object, in an unsupervised manner. Our novel Multi-View Agre…
Human Pose Estimation (HPE) aims at retrieving the 3D position of human joints from images or videos. We show that current 3D HPE methods suffer a lack of viewpoint equivariance, namely they tend to fail or perform poorly when dealing with viewpoints unseen at training time. Deep learning methods often rely on either scale-invariant, translation-invariant, or rotation-invariant operations, such as max-pooling. However, the adoption of such procedures does not necessarily improve viewpoint generalization, rather leading to more data-dependent methods. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel ca…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Contrastive Masked Autoencoder (CMAE), as a new self-supervised framework, has shown its potential of learning expressive feature representations in visual image recognition. This work shows that CMAE also trivially generalizes well on video action recognition without modifying the architecture and the loss criterion. By directly replacing the original pixel shift with the temporal shift, our CMAE for visual action recognition, CMAE-V for short, can generate stronger feature representations than its counterpart based on pure masked autoencoders. Notably, CMAE-V, with a hybrid architecture, can…
Masked autoencoders have become popular training paradigms for self-supervised visual representation learning. These models randomly mask a portion of the input and reconstruct the masked portion according to the target representations. In this paper, we first show that a careful choice of the target representation is unnecessary for learning good representations, since different targets tend to derive similarly behaved models. Driven by this observation, we propose a multi-stage masked distillation pipeline and use a randomly initialized model as the teacher, enabling us to effectively train …
Vision Transformer (ViT) suffers from data scarcity in semi-supervised learning (SSL). To alleviate this issue, inspired by masked autoencoder (MAE), which is a data-efficient self-supervised learner, we propose Semi-MAE, a pure ViT-based SSL framework consisting of a parallel MAE branch to assist the visual representation learning and make the pseudo labels more accurate. The MAE branch is designed as an asymmetric architecture consisting of a lightweight decoder and a shared-weights encoder. We feed the weakly-augmented unlabeled data with a high masking ratio to the MAE branch and reconstru…
Generic Event Boundary Detection (GEBD) tasks aim at detecting generic, taxonomy-free event boundaries that segment a whole video into chunks. In this paper, we apply Masked Autoencoders to improve algorithm performance on the GEBD tasks. Our approach mainly adopted the ensemble of Masked Autoencoders fine-tuned on the GEBD task as a self-supervised learner with other base models. Moreover, we also use a semi-supervised pseudo-label method to take full advantage of the abundant unlabeled Kinetics-400 data while training. In addition, we propose a soft-label method to partially balance the posi…
Image and language modeling is of crucial importance for vision-language pre-training (VLP), which aims to learn multi-modal representations from large-scale paired image-text data. However, we observe that most existing VLP methods focus on modeling the interactions between image and text features while neglecting the information disparity between image and text, thus suffering from focal bias. To address this problem, we propose a vision-language masked autoencoder framework (VLMAE). VLMAE employs visual generative learning, facilitating the model to acquire fine-grained and unbiased feature…
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Vision Transformers (ViT) become widely-adopted architectures for various vision tasks. Masked auto-encoding for feature pretraining and multi-scale hybrid convolution-transformer architectures can further unleash the potentials of ViT, leading to state-of-the-art performances on image classification, detection and semantic segmentation. In this paper, our ConvMAE framework demonstrates that multi-scale hybrid convolution-transformer can learn more discriminative representations via the mask auto-encoding scheme. However, directly using the original masking strategy leads to the heavy computat…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；ZheJiang University（浙江大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tencent Data Platform（腾讯数据平台）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
As a promising scheme of self-supervised learning, masked autoencoding has significantly advanced natural language processing and computer vision. Inspired by this, we propose a neat scheme of masked autoencoders for point cloud self-supervised learning, addressing the challenges posed by point cloud's properties, including leakage of location information and uneven information density. Concretely, we divide the input point cloud into irregular point patches and randomly mask them at a high ratio. Then, a standard Transformer based autoencoder, with an asymmetric design and a shifting mask tok…
Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have been popular paradigms for large-scale vision representation pre-training. However, MAE solely reconstructs the low-level RGB signals after the decoder and lacks supervision upon high-level semantics for the encoder, thus suffering from sub-optimal learned representations and long pre-training epochs. To alleviate this, previous methods simply replace the pixel reconstruction targets of 75% masked tokens by encoded features from pre-trained image-image (DINO) or image-language (CLIP) contrastive learning. Different from those efforts, we propose to Mimic before R…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）
Recognizing human actions from point cloud videos has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry due to its wide applications like automatic driving, robotics, and so on. However, current methods for point cloud action recognition usually require a huge amount of data with manual annotations and a complex backbone network with high computation costs, which makes it impractical for real-world applications. Therefore, this paper considers the task of semi-supervised point cloud action recognition. We propose a Masked Pseudo-Labeling autoEncoder (\textbf{MAPLE}) framework to l…
Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory prediction (Traj-MAE) that better represents the complicated behaviors of agents in the driving environment. Specifically, our Traj-MAE employs diverse masking strategies to pre-train the trajectory encoder and map encoder, allowing for the capture of social and temporal information among agents while l…
Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this pa…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology, Chinese Academy of Military Science（中国人民解放军军事科学院国防科技创新研究院）；Anhui University of Technology（安徽工业大学）
Deep learning methodology contributes a lot to the development of hyperspectral image (HSI) analysis community. However, it also makes HSI analysis systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To this end, we propose a masked spatial-spectral autoencoder (MSSA) in this paper under self-supervised learning theory, for enhancing the robustness of HSI analysis systems. First, a masked sequence attention learning module is conducted to promote the inherent robustness of HSI analysis systems along spectral channel. Then, we develop a graph convolutional network with learnable graph structure to estab…
Masked Autoencoding (MAE) has emerged as an effective approach for pre-training representations across multiple domains. In contrast to discrete tokens in natural languages, the input for image MAE is continuous and subject to additional specifications. We systematically study each input specification during the pre-training stage, and find sequence length is a key axis that further scales MAE. Our study leads to a long-sequence version of MAE with minimal changes to the original recipe, by just decoupling the mask size from the patch size. For object detection and semantic segmentation, our l…
With the development of generative-based self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches like BeiT and MAE, how to learn good representations by masking random patches of the input image and reconstructing the missing information has grown in concern. However, BeiT and PeCo need a "pre-pretraining" stage to produce discrete codebooks for masked patches representing. MAE does not require a pre-training codebook process, but setting pixels as reconstruction targets may introduce an optimization gap between pre-training and downstream tasks that good reconstruction quality may not always lead to the hi…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
This paper proposes a self-supervised approach to learn universal facial representations from videos, that can transfer across a variety of facial analysis tasks such as Facial Attribute Recognition (FAR), Facial Expression Recognition (FER), DeepFake Detection (DFD), and Lip Synchronization (LS). Our proposed framework, named MARLIN, is a facial video masked autoencoder, that learns highly robust and generic facial embeddings from abundantly available non-annotated web crawled facial videos. As a challenging auxiliary task, MARLIN reconstructs the spatio-temporal details of the face from the …
Deblurring Masked Autoencoder is Better Recipe for Ultrasound Image Recognition
West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Test-time training adapts to a new test distribution on the fly by optimizing a model for each test input using self-supervision. In this paper, we use masked autoencoders for this one-sample learning problem. Empirically, our simple method improves generalization on many visual benchmarks for distribution shifts. Theoretically, we characterize this improvement in terms of the bias-variance trade-off.
