CDAD-Net: Bridging Domain Gaps in Generalized Category Discovery

In Generalized Category Discovery (GCD), we cluster unlabeled samples of known and novel classes, leveraging a training dataset of known classes. A salient challenge arises due to domain shifts between these datasets. To address this, we present a novel setting: Across Domain Generalized Category Discovery (AD-GCD) and bring forth CDAD-NET (Class Discoverer Across Domains) as a remedy. CDAD-NET is architected to synchronize potential known class samples across both the labeled (source) and unlabeled (target) datasets, while emphasizing the distinct categorization of the target data. To facilitate this, we propose an entropy-driven adversarial learning strategy that accounts for the distance distributions of target samples relative to source-domain class prototypes. Parallelly, the discriminative nature of the shared space is upheld through a fusion of three metric learning objectives. In the source domain, our focus is on refining the proximity between samples and their affiliated class prototypes, while in the target domain, we integrate a neighborhood-centric contrastive learning mechanism, enriched with an adept neighborsmining approach. To further accentuate the nuanced feature interrelation among semantically aligned images, we champion the concept of conditional image inpainting, underscoring the premise that semantically analogous images prove more efficacious to the task than their disjointed counterparts. Experimentally, CDAD-NET eclipses existing literature with a performance increment of 8-15% on three AD-GCD benchmarks we present.

Unknown Prompt, the only Lacuna: Unveiling CLIP's Potential for Open Domain Generalization

We delve into Open Domain Generalization (ODG), marked by domain and category shifts between training's labeled source and testing's unlabeled target domains. Existing solutions to ODG face limitations due to constrained generalizations of traditional CNN backbones and errors in detecting target open samples in the absence of prior knowledge. Addressing these pitfalls, we introduce ODG-CLIP, harnessing the semantic prowess of the vision-language model, CLIP. Our framework brings forth three primary innovations: Firstly, distinct from prevailing paradigms, we conceptualize ODG as a multi-class classification challenge encompassing both known and novel categories. Central to our approach is modeling a unique prompt tailored for detecting unknown class samples, and to train this, we employ a readily accessible stable diffusion model, elegantly generating proxy images for the open class. Secondly, aiming for domain-tailored classification (prompt) weights while ensuring a balance of precision and simplicity, we devise a novel visual stylecentric prompt learning mechanism. Finally, we infuse images with class-discriminative knowledge derived from the prompt space to augment the fidelity of CLIP's visual embeddings. We introduce a novel objective to safeguard the continuity of this infused semantic intel across domains, especially for the shared classes. Through rigorous testing on diverse datasets, covering closed and open-set DG contexts, ODG-CLIP demonstrates clear supremacy, consistently outpacing peers with performance boosts between 8%-16%. Code will be available at https://github.com/mainaksingha01/ODG-CLIP.

C-SAW: Self-Supervised Prompt Learning for Image Generalization in Remote Sensing

We focus on domain and class generalization problems in analyzing optical remote sensing images, using the large-scale pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), CLIP. While contrastively trained VLMs show impressive zero-shot generalization performance, their effectiveness is limited when dealing with diverse domains during training and testing. Existing prompt learning techniques overlook the importance of incorporating domain and content information into the prompts, which results in a drop in performance while dealing with such multi-domain data. To address these challenges, we propose a solution that ensures domain-invariant prompt learning while enhancing the expressiveness of visual features. We observe that CLIP's vision encoder struggles to identify contextual image information, particularly when image patches are jumbled up. This issue is especially severe in optical remote sensing images, where land-cover classes exhibit well-defined contextual appearances. To this end, we introduce C-SAW, a method that complements CLIP with a self-supervised loss in the visual space and a novel prompt learning technique that emphasizes both visual domain and content-specific features. We keep the CLIP backbone frozen and introduce a small set of projectors for both the CLIP encoders to train C-SAW contrastively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of C-SAW across multiple remote sensing benchmarks and different generalization tasks.

Learning Class and Domain Augmentations for Single-Source Open-Domain Generalization

Single-source open-domain generalization (SS-ODG) addresses the challenge of labeled source domains with supervision during training and unlabeled novel target domains during testing. The target domain includes both known classes from the source domain and samples from previously unseen classes. Existing techniques for SS-ODG primarily focus on calibrating source-domain classifiers to identify open samples in the target domain. However, these methods struggle with visually fine-grained open-closed data, often misclassifying open samples as closed-set classes. Moreover, relying solely on a single source domain restricts the model's ability to generalize. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called SODG-Net that simultaneously synthesizes novel domains and generates pseudo-open samples using a learning-based objective, in contrast to the ad-hoc mixing strategies commonly found in the literature. Our approach enhances generalization by diversifying the styles of known class samples using a novel metric criterion and generates diverse pseudo-open samples to train a unified and confident multi-class classifier capable of handling both open and closed-set data. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on multiple benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superior performance of SODG-Net compared to the literature.

HAVE-Net: Hallucinated Audio-Visual Embeddings for Few-Shot Classification with Unimodal Cues

Recognition of remote sensing (RS) or aerial images is currently of great interest, and advancements in deep learning algorithms added flavor to it in recent years. Occlusion, intra-class variance, lighting, etc., might arise while training neural networks using unimodal RS visual input. Even though joint training of audio-visual modalities improves classification performance in a low-data regime, it has yet to be thoroughly investigated in the RS domain. Here, we aim to solve a novel problem where both the audio and visual modalities are present during the meta-training of a few-shot learning (FSL) classifier; however, one of the modalities might be missing during the meta-testing stage. This problem formulation is pertinent in the RS domain, given the difficulties in data acquisition or sensor malfunctioning. To mitigate, we propose a novel few-shot generative framework, Hallucinated Audio-Visual Embeddings-Network (HAVE-Net), to meta-train cross-modal features from limited unimodal data. Precisely, these hallucinated features are meta-learned from base classes and used for few-shot classification on novel classes during the inference phase. The experimental results on the benchmark ADVANCE and AudioSetZSL datasets show that our hallucinated modality augmentation strategy for few-shot classification outperforms the classifier performance trained with the real multimodal information at least by 0.8-2%.

GOPro: Generate and Optimize Prompts in CLIP using Self-Supervised Learning

Large-scale foundation models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable success in visual recognition tasks by embedding images in a semantically rich space. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has also shown promise in improving visual recognition by learning invariant features. However, the combination of CLIP with SSL is found to face challenges due to the multi-task framework that blends CLIP's contrastive loss and SSL's loss, including difficulties with loss weighting and inconsistency among different views of images in CLIP's output space. To overcome these challenges, we propose a prompt learning-based model called GOPro, which is a unified framework that ensures similarity between various augmented views of input images in a shared image-text embedding space, using a pair of learnable image and text projectors atop CLIP, to promote invariance and generalizability. To automatically learn such prompts, we leverage the visual content and style primitives extracted from pre-trained CLIP and adapt them to the target task. In addition to CLIP's cross-domain contrastive loss, we introduce a visual contrastive loss and a novel prompt consistency loss, considering the different views of the images. GOPro is trained end-to-end on all three loss objectives, combining the strengths of CLIP and SSL in a principled manner. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that GOPro outperforms the state-of-the-art prompting techniques on three challenging domain generalization tasks across multiple benchmarks by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/mainaksingha01/GOPro.

AD-CLIP: Adapting Domains in Prompt Space Using CLIP

Although deep learning models have shown impressive performance on supervised learning tasks, they often struggle to generalize well when the training (source) and test (target) domains differ. Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) has emerged as a popular solution to this problem. However, current DA techniques rely on visual backbones, which may lack semantic richness. Despite the potential of large-scale vision-language foundation models like CLIP, their effectiveness for DA has yet to be fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce AD-CLIP, a domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy for CLIP that aims to solve the DA problem in the prompt space. We leverage the frozen vision backbone of CLIP to extract both image style (domain) and content information, which we apply to learn prompt tokens. Our prompts are designed to be domain-invariant and class-generalizable, by conditioning prompt learning on image style and content features simultaneously. We use standard supervised contrastive learning in the source domain, while proposing an entropy minimization strategy to align domains in the embedding space given the target domain data. We also consider a scenario where only target domain samples are available during testing, without any source domain data, and propose a cross-domain style mapping network to hallucinate domain-agnostic tokens. Our extensive experiments on three benchmark DA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AD-CLIP compared to existing literature.

APPLeNet: Visual Attention Parameterized Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Generalization using CLIP

In recent years, the success of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP has led to their increased usage in various computer vision tasks. These models enable zero-shot inference through carefully crafted instructional text prompts without task-specific supervision. However, the potential of VLMs for generalization tasks in remote sensing (RS) has not been fully realized. To address this research gap, we propose a novel image-conditioned prompt learning strategy called the Visual Attention Parameterized Prompts Learning Network (APPLeNet). APPLeNet emphasizes the importance of multi-scale feature learning in RS scene classification and disentangles visual style and content primitives for domain generalization tasks. To achieve this, APPLeNet combines visual content features obtained from different layers of the vision encoder and style properties obtained from feature statistics of domain-specific batches. An attention-driven injection module is further introduced to generate visual tokens from this information. We also introduce an anti-correlation regularizer to ensure discrimination among the token embeddings, as this visual information is combined with the textual tokens. To validate APPLeNet, we curated four available RS benchmarks and introduced experimental protocols and datasets for three domain generalization tasks. Our results consistently outperform the relevant literature and code is available at https://github.com/mainaksingha01/APPLeNet

StyLIP: Multi-Scale Style-Conditioned Prompt Learning for CLIP-based Domain Generalization

Large-scale foundation models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization performance on downstream tasks by leveraging carefully designed language prompts. However, despite their success, most prompt learning techniques tend to underperform in the presence of domain shift. Our study addresses this problem and, to improve CLIP's generalization ability across domains, proposes \textsc{StyLIP}, a novel approach for Domain Generalization (DG) based on a domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy. In the absence of explicit domain knowledge, we aim to disentangle the visual style and the content information extracted from the pre-trained CLIP in the prompts so they can be effortlessly adapted to novel domains during inference. Furthermore, we consider a set of style projectors to learn the prompt tokens directly from these multi-scale style features, and the generated prompt embeddings are later fused with the multi-scale visual features learned through a content projector. The projectors are contrastively trained, given CLIP's frozen vision and text encoders. We present extensive experiments in five different DG settings on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that \textsc{StyLIP} consistently outperforms the relevant state-of-the-art methods.

GesSure -- A Robust Face-Authentication enabled Dynamic Gesture Recognition GUI Application

Using physical interactive devices like mouse and keyboards hinders naturalistic human-machine interaction and increases the probability of surface contact during a pandemic. Existing gesture-recognition systems do not possess user authentication, making them unreliable. Static gestures in current gesture-recognition technology introduce long adaptation periods and reduce user compatibility. Our technology places a strong emphasis on user recognition and safety. We use meaningful and relevant gestures for task operation, resulting in a better user experience. This paper aims to design a robust, face-verification-enabled gesture recognition system that utilizes a graphical user interface and primarily focuses on security through user recognition and authorization. The face model uses MTCNN and FaceNet to verify the user, and our LSTM-CNN architecture for gesture recognition, achieving an accuracy of 95% with five classes of gestures. The prototype developed through our research has successfully executed context-dependent tasks like save, print, control video-player operations and exit, and context-free operating system tasks like sleep, shut-down, and unlock intuitively. Our application and dataset are available as open source.