The Treasure Beneath Multiple Annotations: An Uncertainty-aware Edge Detector

Deep learning-based edge detectors heavily rely on pixel-wise labels which are often provided by multiple annotators. Existing methods fuse multiple annotations using a simple voting process, ignoring the inherent ambiguity of edges and labeling bias of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware edge detector (UAED), which employs uncertainty to investigate the subjectivity and ambiguity of diverse annotations. Specifically, we first convert the deterministic label space into a learnable Gaussian distribution, whose variance measures the degree of ambiguity among different annotations. Then we regard the learned variance as the estimated uncertainty of the predicted edge maps, and pixels with higher uncertainty are likely to be hard samples for edge detection. Therefore we design an adaptive weighting loss to emphasize the learning from those pixels with high uncertainty, which helps the network to gradually concentrate on the important pixels. UAED can be combined with various encoder-decoder backbones, and the extensive experiments demonstrate that UAED achieves superior performance consistently across multiple edge detection benchmarks. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZhouCX117/UAED}

Uncertainty-Driven Action Quality Assessment

Automatic action quality assessment (AQA) has attracted more interests due to its wide applications. However, existing AQA methods usually employ the multi-branch models to generate multiple scores, which is not flexible for dealing with a variable number of judges. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Driven AQA (UD-AQA) model to generate multiple predictions only using one single branch. Specifically, we design a CVAE (Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder) based module to encode the uncertainty, where multiple scores can be produced by sampling from the learned latent space multiple times. Moreover, we output the estimation of uncertainty and utilize the predicted uncertainty to re-weight AQA regression loss, which can reduce the contributions of uncertain samples for training. We further design an uncertainty-guided training strategy to dynamically adjust the learning order of the samples from low uncertainty to high uncertainty. The experiments show that our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Olympic events MTL-AQA and surgical skill JIGSAWS datasets.