Distribution-Aware Calibration for Object Detection with Noisy Bounding Boxes

Large-scale well-annotated datasets are of great importance for training an effective object detector. However, obtaining accurate bounding box annotations is laborious and demanding. Unfortunately, the resultant noisy bounding boxes could cause corrupt supervision signals and thus diminish detection performance. Motivated by the observation that the real ground-truth is usually situated in the aggregation region of the proposals assigned to a noisy ground-truth, we propose DIStribution-aware CalibratiOn (DISCO) to model the spatial distribution of proposals for calibrating supervision signals. In DISCO, spatial distribution modeling is performed to statistically extract the potential locations of objects. Based on the modeled distribution, three distribution-aware techniques, i.e., distribution-aware proposal augmentation (DA-Aug), distribution-aware box refinement (DA-Ref), and distribution-aware confidence estimation (DA-Est), are developed to improve classification, localization, and interpretability, respectively. Extensive experiments on large-scale noisy image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO) demonstrate that DISCO can achieve state-of-the-art detection performance, especially at high noise levels.

Clustered-patch Element Connection for Few-shot Learning

Weak feature representation problem has influenced the performance of few-shot classification task for a long time. To alleviate this problem, recent researchers build connections between support and query instances through embedding patch features to generate discriminative representations. However, we observe that there exists semantic mismatches (foreground/ background) among these local patches, because the location and size of the target object are not fixed. What is worse, these mismatches result in unreliable similarity confidences, and complex dense connection exacerbates the problem. According to this, we propose a novel Clustered-patch Element Connection (CEC) layer to correct the mismatch problem. The CEC layer leverages Patch Cluster and Element Connection operations to collect and establish reliable connections with high similarity patch features, respectively. Moreover, we propose a CECNet, including CEC layer based attention module and distance metric. The former is utilized to generate a more discriminative representation benefiting from the global clustered-patch features, and the latter is introduced to reliably measure the similarity between pair-features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CECNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on classification benchmark. Furthermore, our CEC approach can be extended into few-shot segmentation and detection tasks, which achieves competitive performances.

SpatialFormer: Semantic and Target Aware Attentions for Few-Shot Learning

Recent Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods put emphasis on generating a discriminative embedding features to precisely measure the similarity between support and query sets. Current CNN-based cross-attention approaches generate discriminative representations via enhancing the mutually semantic similar regions of support and query pairs. However, it suffers from two problems: CNN structure produces inaccurate attention map based on local features, and mutually similar backgrounds cause distraction. To alleviate these problems, we design a novel SpatialFormer structure to generate more accurate attention regions based on global features. Different from the traditional Transformer modeling intrinsic instance-level similarity which causes accuracy degradation in FSL, our SpatialFormer explores the semantic-level similarity between pair inputs to boost the performance. Then we derive two specific attention modules, named SpatialFormer Semantic Attention (SFSA) and SpatialFormer Target Attention (SFTA), to enhance the target object regions while reduce the background distraction. Particularly, SFSA highlights the regions with same semantic information between pair features, and SFTA finds potential foreground object regions of novel feature that are similar to base categories. Extensive experiments show that our methods are effective and achieve new state-of-the-art results on few-shot classification benchmarks.

HDNet: A Hierarchically Decoupled Network for Crowd Counting

Recently, density map regression-based methods have dominated in crowd counting owing to their excellent fitting ability on density distribution. However, further improvement tends to saturate mainly because of the confusing background noise and the large density variation. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchically Decoupled Network (HDNet) to solve the above two problems within a unified framework. Specifically, a background classification sub-task is decomposed from the density map prediction task, which is then assigned to a Density Decoupling Module (DDM) to exploit its highly discriminative ability. For the remaining foreground prediction sub-task, it is further hierarchically decomposed to several density-specific sub-tasks by the DDM, which are then solved by the regression-based experts in a Foreground Density Estimation Module (FDEM). Although the proposed strategy effectively reduces the hypothesis space so as to relieve the optimization for those task-specific experts, the high correlation of these sub-tasks are ignored. Therefore, we introduce three types of interaction strategies to unify the whole framework, which are Feature Interaction, Gradient Interaction, and Scale Interaction. Integrated with the above spirits, HDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular counting benchmarks.

Global Meets Local: Effective Multi-Label Image Classification via Category-Aware Weak Supervision

Multi-label image classification, which can be categorized into label-dependency and region-based methods, is a challenging problem due to the complex underlying object layouts. Although region-based methods are less likely to encounter issues with model generalizability than label-dependency methods, they often generate hundreds of meaningless or noisy proposals with non-discriminative information, and the contextual dependency among the localized regions is often ignored or over-simplified. This paper builds a unified framework to perform effective noisy-proposal suppression and to interact between global and local features for robust feature learning. Specifically, we propose category-aware weak supervision to concentrate on non-existent categories so as to provide deterministic information for local feature learning, restricting the local branch to focus on more high-quality regions of interest. Moreover, we develop a cross-granularity attention module to explore the complementary information between global and local features, which can build the high-order feature correlation containing not only global-to-local, but also local-to-local relations. Both advantages guarantee a boost in the performance of the whole network. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets (MS-COCO and VOC 2007) demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Rethinking the Metric in Few-shot Learning: From an Adaptive Multi-Distance Perspective

Few-shot learning problem focuses on recognizing unseen classes given a few labeled images. In recent effort, more attention is paid to fine-grained feature embedding, ignoring the relationship among different distance metrics. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate the contributions of different distance metrics, and propose an adaptive fusion scheme, bringing significant improvements in few-shot classification. We start from a naive baseline of confidence summation and demonstrate the necessity of exploiting the complementary property of different distance metrics. By finding the competition problem among them, built upon the baseline, we propose an Adaptive Metrics Module (AMM) to decouple metrics fusion into metric-prediction fusion and metric-losses fusion. The former encourages mutual complementary, while the latter alleviates metric competition via multi-task collaborative learning. Based on AMM, we design a few-shot classification framework AMTNet, including the AMM and the Global Adaptive Loss (GAL), to jointly optimize the few-shot task and auxiliary self-supervised task, making the embedding features more robust. In the experiment, the proposed AMM achieves 2% higher performance than the naive metrics fusion module, and our AMTNet outperforms the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmark datasets.

tSF: Transformer-based Semantic Filter for Few-Shot Learning

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) alleviates the data shortage challenge via embedding discriminative target-aware features among plenty seen (base) and few unseen (novel) labeled samples. Most feature embedding modules in recent FSL methods are specially designed for corresponding learning tasks (e.g., classification, segmentation, and object detection), which limits the utility of embedding features. To this end, we propose a light and universal module named transformer-based Semantic Filter (tSF), which can be applied for different FSL tasks. The proposed tSF redesigns the inputs of a transformer-based structure by a semantic filter, which not only embeds the knowledge from whole base set to novel set but also filters semantic features for target category. Furthermore, the parameters of tSF is equal to half of a standard transformer block (less than 1M). In the experiments, our tSF is able to boost the performances in different classic few-shot learning tasks (about 2% improvement), especially outperforms the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmark datasets in few-shot classification task.

How to Reduce Change Detection to Semantic Segmentation

Change detection (CD) aims to identify changes that occur in an image pair taken different times. Prior methods devise specific networks from scratch to predict change masks in pixel-level, and struggle with general segmentation problems. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm that reduces CD to semantic segmentation which means tailoring an existing and powerful semantic segmentation network to solve CD. This new paradigm conveniently enjoys the mainstream semantic segmentation techniques to deal with general segmentation problems in CD. Hence we can concentrate on studying how to detect changes. We propose a novel and importance insight that different change types exist in CD and they should be learned separately. Based on it, we devise a module named MTF to extract the change information and fuse temporal features. MTF enjoys high interpretability and reveals the essential characteristic of CD. And most segmentation networks can be adapted to solve the CD problems with our MTF module. Finally, we propose C-3PO, a network to detect changes at pixel-level. C-3PO achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles. It is simple but effective and can be considered as a new baseline in this field. Our code will be available.

APANet: Adaptive Prototypes Alignment Network for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to segment novel-class objects in a given query image with only a few labeled support images. Most advanced solutions exploit a metric learning framework that performs segmentation through matching each query feature to a learned class-specific prototype. However, this framework suffers from biased classification due to incomplete feature comparisons. To address this issue, we present an adaptive prototype representation by introducing class-specific and class-agnostic prototypes and thus construct complete sample pairs for learning semantic alignment with query features. The complementary features learning manner effectively enriches feature comparison and helps yield an unbiased segmentation model in the few-shot setting. It is implemented with a two-branch end-to-end network (\ie, a class-specific branch and a class-agnostic branch), which generates prototypes and then combines query features to perform comparisons. In addition, the proposed class-agnostic branch is simple yet effective. In practice, it can adaptively generate multiple class-agnostic prototypes for query images and learn feature alignment in a self-contrastive manner. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ demonstrate the superiority of our method. At no expense of inference efficiency, our model achieves state-of-the-art results in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings for semantic segmentation.

A Coarse-to-Fine Instance Segmentation Network with Learning Boundary Representation

Boundary-based instance segmentation has drawn much attention since of its attractive efficiency. However, existing methods suffer from the difficulty in long-distance regression. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine module to address the problem. Approximate boundary points are generated at the coarse stage and then features of these points are sampled and fed to a refined regressor for fine prediction. It is end-to-end trainable since differential sampling operation is well supported in the module. Furthermore, we design a holistic boundary-aware branch and introduce instance-agnostic supervision to assist regression. Equipped with ResNet-101, our approach achieves 31.7\% mask AP on COCO dataset with single-scale training and testing, outperforming the baseline 1.3\% mask AP with less than 1\% additional parameters and GFLOPs. Experiments also show that our proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to existing boundary-based methods with a lightweight design and a simple pipeline.