Multi-modal Queried Object Detection in the Wild

We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% zero-shot AP on the LVIS benchmark and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely 3% pre-training time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.

Heterogeneous Face Recognition via Face Synthesis with Identity-Attribute Disentanglement

Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) aims to match faces across different domains (e.g., visible to near-infrared images), which has been widely applied in authentication and forensics scenarios. However, HFR is a challenging problem because of the large cross-domain discrepancy, limited heterogeneous data pairs, and large variation of facial attributes. To address these challenges, we propose a new HFR method from the perspective of heterogeneous data augmentation, named Face Synthesis with Identity-Attribute Disentanglement (FSIAD). Firstly, the identity-attribute disentanglement (IAD) decouples face images into identity-related representations and identity-unrelated representations (called attributes), and then decreases the correlation between identities and attributes. Secondly, we devise a face synthesis module (FSM) to generate a large number of images with stochastic combinations of disentangled identities and attributes for enriching the attribute diversity of synthetic images. Both the original images and the synthetic ones are utilized to train the HFR network for tackling the challenges and improving the performance of HFR. Extensive experiments on five HFR databases validate that FSIAD obtains superior performance than previous HFR approaches. Particularly, FSIAD obtains 4.8% improvement over state of the art in terms of VR@FAR=0.01% on LAMP-HQ, the largest HFR database so far.

Learning Causal Representation for Face Transfer across Large Appearance Gap

Identity transfer often faces the challenge of generalizing to new situations where large pose and expression or background gaps exist between source and target face images. To improve generalization in such situations, biases take a key role~\cite{mitchell_1980_bias}. This paper proposes an Errors-in-Variables Adapter (EVA) model to induce learning of proper generalizations by explicitly employing biases to identity estimation based on prior knowledge about the target situation. To better match the source face with the target situation in terms of pose, expression, and background factors, we model the bias as a causal effect of the target situation on source identity and estimate this effect through a controlled intervention trial. To achieve smoother transfer for the target face across the identity gap, we eliminate the target face specificity through multiple kernel regressions. The kernels are used to constrain the regressions to operate only on identity information in the internal representations of the target image, while leaving other perceptual information invariant. Combining these post-regression representations with the biased estimation for identity, EVA shows impressive performance even in the presence of large gaps, providing empirical evidence supporting the utility of the inductive biases in identity estimation.

Inductive Biased Estimation: Learning Generalizations for Identity Transfer

Identity transfer often faces the challenge of generalizing to new situations where large pose and expression or background gaps exist between source and target face images. To improve generalization in such situations, biases take a key role~\cite{mitchell_1980_bias}. This paper proposes an Errors-in-Variables Adapter (EVA) model to induce learning of proper generalizations by explicitly employing biases to identity estimation based on prior knowledge about the target situation. To better match the source face with the target situation in terms of pose, expression, and background factors, we model the bias as a causal effect of the target situation on source identity and estimate this effect through a controlled intervention trial. To achieve smoother transfer for the target face across the identity gap, we eliminate the target face specificity through multiple kernel regressions. The kernels are used to constrain the regressions to operate only on identity information in the internal representations of the target image, while leaving other perceptual information invariant. Combining these post-regression representations with the biased estimation for identity, EVA shows impressive performance even in the presence of large gaps, providing empirical evidence supporting the utility of the inductive biases in identity estimation.

Everything's Talkin': Pareidolia Face Reenactment

We present a new application direction named Pareidolia Face Reenactment, which is defined as animating a static illusory face to move in tandem with a human face in the video. For the large differences between pareidolia face reenactment and traditional human face reenactment, two main challenges are introduced, i.e., shape variance and texture variance. In this work, we propose a novel Parametric Unsupervised Reenactment Algorithm to tackle these two challenges. Specifically, we propose to decompose the reenactment into three catenate processes: shape modeling, motion transfer and texture synthesis. With the decomposition, we introduce three crucial components, i.e., Parametric Shape Modeling, Expansionary Motion Transfer and Unsupervised Texture Synthesizer, to overcome the problems brought by the remarkably variances on pareidolia faces. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code, model and data are available on our project page.

CM-NAS: Rethinking Cross-Modality Neural Architectures for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-Infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims at matching cross-modality pedestrian images, breaking through the limitation of single-modality person ReID in dark environment. In order to mitigate the impact of large modality discrepancy, existing works manually design various two-stream architectures to separately learn modality-specific and modality-sharable representations. Such a manual design routine, however, highly depends on massive experiments and empirical practice, which is time consuming and labor intensive. In this paper, we systematically study the manually designed architectures, and identify that appropriately splitting Batch Normalization (BN) layers to learn modality-specific representations will bring a great boost towards cross-modality matching. Based on this observation, the essential objective is to find the optimal splitting scheme for each BN layer. To this end, we propose a novel method, named Cross-Modality Neural Architecture Search (CM-NAS). It consists of a BN-oriented search space in which the standard optimization can be fulfilled subject to the cross-modality task. Besides, in order to better guide the search process, we further formulate a new Correlation Consistency based Class-specific Maximum Mean Discrepancy (C3MMD) loss. Apart from the modality discrepancy, it also concerns the similarity correlations, which have been overlooked before, in the two modalities. Resorting to these advantages, our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts in extensive experiments, improving the Rank-1/mAP by 6.70%/6.13% on SYSU-MM01 and 12.17%/11.23% on RegDB. The source code will be released soon.

AOT: Appearance Optimal Transport Based Identity Swapping for Forgery Detection

Recent studies have shown that the performance of forgery detection can be improved with diverse and challenging Deepfakes datasets. However, due to the lack of Deepfakes datasets with large variance in appearance, which can be hardly produced by recent identity swapping methods, the detection algorithm may fail in this situation. In this work, we provide a new identity swapping algorithm with large differences in appearance for face forgery detection. The appearance gaps mainly arise from the large discrepancies in illuminations and skin colors that widely exist in real-world scenarios. However, due to the difficulties of modeling the complex appearance mapping, it is challenging to transfer fine-grained appearances adaptively while preserving identity traits. This paper formulates appearance mapping as an optimal transport problem and proposes an Appearance Optimal Transport model (AOT) to formulate it in both latent and pixel space. Specifically, a relighting generator is designed to simulate the optimal transport plan. It is solved via minimizing the Wasserstein distance of the learned features in the latent space, enabling better performance and less computation than conventional optimization. To further refine the solution of the optimal transport plan, we develop a segmentation game to minimize the Wasserstein distance in the pixel space. A discriminator is introduced to distinguish the fake parts from a mix of real and fake image patches. Extensive experiments reveal that the superiority of our method when compared with state-of-the-art methods and the ability of our generated data to improve the performance of face forgery detection.

DVG-Face: Dual Variational Generation for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) refers to matching cross-domain faces, playing a crucial role in public security. Nevertheless, HFR is confronted with the challenges from large domain discrepancy and insufficient heterogeneous data. In this paper, we formulate HFR as a dual generation problem, and tackle it via a novel Dual Variational Generation (DVG-Face) framework. Specifically, a dual variational generator is elaborately designed to learn the joint distribution of paired heterogeneous images. However, the small-scale paired heterogeneous training data may limit the identity diversity of sampling. With this in mind, we propose to integrate abundant identity information of large-scale VIS images into the joint distribution. Furthermore, a pairwise identity preserving loss is imposed on the generated paired heterogeneous images to ensure their identity consistency. As a consequence, massive new diverse paired heterogeneous images with the same identity can be generated from noises. The identity consistency and diversity properties allow us to employ these generated images to train the HFR network via a contrastive learning mechanism, yielding both domain invariant and discriminative embedding features. Concretely, the generated paired heterogeneous images are regarded as positive pairs, and the images obtained from different samplings are considered as negative pairs. Our method achieves superior performances over state-of-the-art methods on seven databases belonging to five HFR tasks, including NIR-VIS, Sketch-Photo, Profile-Frontal Photo, Thermal-VIS, and ID-Camera. The related code will be released at https://github.com/BradyFU.

Deep Momentum Uncertainty Hashing

Discrete optimization is one of the most intractable problems in deep hashing. Previous methods usually mitigate this problem by binary approximation, substituting binary codes for real-values via activation functions or regularizations. However, such approximation leads to uncertainty between real-values and binary ones, degrading retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Momentum Uncertainty Hashing (DMUH). It explicitly estimates the uncertainty during training and leverages the uncertainty information to guide the approximation process. Specifically, we model \emph{bit-level uncertainty} via measuring the discrepancy between the output of a hashing network and that of a momentum-updated network. The discrepancy of each bit indicates the uncertainty of the hashing network to the approximate output of that bit. Meanwhile, the mean discrepancy of all bits in a hashing code can be regarded as \emph{image-level uncertainty}. It embodies the uncertainty of the hashing network to the corresponding input image. The hashing bit and the image with higher uncertainty are paid more attention during optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the uncertainty in hashing bits. Extensive experiments are conducted on four datasets to verify the superiority of our method, including CIFAR-10, NUS-WIDE, MS-COCO, and a million-scale dataset Clothing1M. Our method achieves best performance on all datasets and surpasses existing state-of-the-arts by a large margin, especially on Clothing1M.

Pose Agnostic Cross-spectral Hallucination via Disentangling Independent Factors

The cross-sensor gap is one of the challenges that arise much research interests in Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). Although recent methods have attempted to fill the gap with deep generative networks, most of them suffered from the inevitable misalignment between different face modalities. Instead of imaging sensors, the misalignment primarily results from geometric variations (e.g., pose and expression) on faces that stay independent from spectrum. Rather than building a monolithic but complex structure, this paper proposes a Pose Agnostic Cross-spectral Hallucination (PACH) approach to disentangle the independent factors and deal with them in individual stages. In the first stage, an Unsupervised Face Alignment (UFA) network is designed to align the near-infrared (NIR) and visible (VIS) images in a generative way, where 3D information is effectively utilized as the pose guidance. Thus the task of the second stage becomes spectrum transform with paired data. We develop a Texture Prior Synthesis (TPS) network to accomplish complexion control and consequently generate more realistic VIS images than existing methods. Experiments on three challenging NIR-VIS datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in producing visually appealing images and achieving state-of-the-art performance in cross-spectral HFR.