Modality-Guided Subnetwork for Salient Object Detection

Recent RGBD-based models for saliency detection have attracted research attention. The depth clues such as boundary clues, surface normal, shape attribute, etc., contribute to the identification of salient objects with complicated scenarios. However, most RGBD networks require multi-modalities from the input side and feed them separately through a two-stream design, which inevitably results in extra costs on depth sensors and computation. To tackle these inconveniences, we present in this paper a novel fusion design named modality-guided subnetwork (MGSnet). It has the following superior designs: 1) Our model works for both RGB and RGBD data, and dynamically estimating depth if not available. Taking the inner workings of depth-prediction networks into account, we propose to estimate the pseudo-geometry maps from RGB input - essentially mimicking the multi-modality input. 2) Our MGSnet for RGB SOD results in real-time inference but achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other RGB models. 3) The flexible and lightweight design of MGS facilitates the integration into RGBD two-streaming models. The introduced fusion design enables a cross-modality interaction to enable further progress but with a minimal cost.

A Riemannian Mean Field Formulation for Two-layer Neural Networks with Batch Normalization

The training dynamics of two-layer neural networks with batch normalization (BN) is studied. It is written as the training dynamics of a neural network without BN on a Riemannian manifold. Therefore, we identify BN's effect of changing the metric in the parameter space. Later, the infinite-width limit of the two-layer neural networks with BN is considered, and a mean-field formulation is derived for the training dynamics. The training dynamics of the mean-field formulation is shown to be the Wasserstein gradient flow on the manifold. Theoretical analysis are provided on the well-posedness and convergence of the Wasserstein gradient flow.

Learning to Track Objects from Unlabeled Videos

In this paper, we propose to learn an Unsupervised Single Object Tracker (USOT) from scratch. We identify that three major challenges, i.e., moving object discovery, rich temporal variation exploitation, and online update, are the central causes of the performance bottleneck of existing unsupervised trackers. To narrow the gap between unsupervised trackers and supervised counterparts, we propose an effective unsupervised learning approach composed of three stages. First, we sample sequentially moving objects with unsupervised optical flow and dynamic programming, instead of random cropping. Second, we train a naive Siamese tracker from scratch using single-frame pairs. Third, we continue training the tracker with a novel cycle memory learning scheme, which is conducted in longer temporal spans and also enables our tracker to update online. Extensive experiments show that the proposed USOT learned from unlabeled videos performs well over the state-of-the-art unsupervised trackers by large margins, and on par with recent supervised deep trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/VISION-SJTU/USOT.

On Perceptual Lossy Compression: The Cost of Perceptual Reconstruction and An Optimal Training Framework

Lossy compression algorithms are typically designed to achieve the lowest possible distortion at a given bit rate. However, recent studies show that pursuing high perceptual quality would lead to increase of the lowest achievable distortion (e.g., MSE). This paper provides nontrivial results theoretically revealing that, \textit{1}) the cost of achieving perfect perception quality is exactly a doubling of the lowest achievable MSE distortion, \textit{2}) an optimal encoder for the "classic" rate-distortion problem is also optimal for the perceptual compression problem, \textit{3}) distortion loss is unnecessary for training a perceptual decoder. Further, we propose a novel training framework to achieve the lowest MSE distortion under perfect perception constraint at a given bit rate. This framework uses a GAN with discriminator conditioned on an MSE-optimized encoder, which is superior over the traditional framework using distortion plus adversarial loss. Experiments are provided to verify the theoretical finding and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed training framework.

The Sobolev Regularization Effect of Stochastic Gradient Descent

The multiplicative structure of parameters and input data in the first layer of neural networks is explored to build connection between the landscape of the loss function with respect to parameters and the landscape of the model function with respect to input data. By this connection, it is shown that flat minima regularize the gradient of the model function, which explains the good generalization performance of flat minima. Then, we go beyond the flatness and consider high-order moments of the gradient noise, and show that Stochastic Gradient Dascent (SGD) tends to impose constraints on these moments by a linear stability analysis of SGD around global minima. Together with the multiplicative structure, we identify the Sobolev regularization effect of SGD, i.e. SGD regularizes the Sobolev seminorms of the model function with respect to the input data. Finally, bounds for generalization error and adversarial robustness are provided for solutions found by SGD under assumptions of the data distribution.

Learning Transferable Kinematic Dictionary for 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction

Estimating 3D human pose and shape from a single image is highly under-constrained. To address this ambiguity, we propose a novel prior, namely kinematic dictionary, which explicitly regularizes the solution space of relative 3D rotations of human joints in the kinematic tree. Integrated with a statistical human model and a deep neural network, our method achieves end-to-end 3D reconstruction without the need of using any shape annotations during the training of neural networks. The kinematic dictionary bridges the gap between in-the-wild images and 3D datasets, and thus facilitates end-to-end training across all types of datasets. The proposed method achieves competitive results on large-scale datasets including Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and LSP, while running in real-time given the human bounding boxes.

Nonlinear Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph and A Priori Estimates for Neural Networks

In an attempt to better understand structural benefits and generalization power of deep neural networks, we firstly present a novel graph theoretical formulation of neural network models, including fully connected, residual network~(ResNet) and densely connected networks~(DenseNet). Secondly, we extend the error analysis of the population risk for two layer network~\cite{ew2019prioriTwo} and ResNet~\cite{e2019prioriRes} to DenseNet, and show further that for neural networks satisfying certain mild conditions, similar estimates can be obtained. These estimates are a priori in nature since they depend sorely on the information prior to the training process, in particular, the bounds for the estimation errors are independent of the input dimension.

IoU Attack: Towards Temporally Coherent Black-Box Adversarial Attack for Visual Object Tracking

Adversarial attack arises due to the vulnerability of deep neural networks to perceive input samples injected with imperceptible perturbations. Recently, adversarial attack has been applied to visual object tracking to evaluate the robustness of deep trackers. Assuming that the model structures of deep trackers are known, a variety of white-box attack approaches to visual tracking have demonstrated promising results. However, the model knowledge about deep trackers is usually unavailable in real applications. In this paper, we propose a decision-based black-box attack method for visual object tracking. In contrast to existing black-box adversarial attack methods that deal with static images for image classification, we propose IoU attack that sequentially generates perturbations based on the predicted IoU scores from both current and historical frames. By decreasing the IoU scores, the proposed attack method degrades the accuracy of temporal coherent bounding boxes (i.e., object motions) accordingly. In addition, we transfer the learned perturbations to the next few frames to initialize temporal motion attack. We validate the proposed IoU attack on state-of-the-art deep trackers (i.e., detection based, correlation filter based, and long-term trackers). Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed IoU attack method. The source code is available at https://github.com/VISION-SJTU/IoUattack.