End-to-end One-shot Human Parsing

Previous human parsing models are limited to parsing humans into pre-defined classes, which is inflexible for applications that need to handle new classes. In this paper, we define a new one-shot human parsing (OSHP) task that requires parsing humans into an open set of classes defined by any test example. During training, only base classes are exposed, which only overlap with part of test-time classes. To address three main challenges in OSHP, i.e., small sizes, testing bias, and similar parts, we devise a novel End-to-end One-shot human Parsing Network (EOP-Net). Firstly, an end-to-end human parsing framework is proposed to mutually share semantic information with different granularities and help recognize the small-size human classes. Then, we devise two collaborative metric learning modules to learn representative prototypes for base classes, which can quickly adapt to unseen classes and mitigate the testing bias. Moreover, we empirically find that robust prototypes empower feature representations with higher transferability to the novel concepts, hence, we propose to adopt momentum-updated dynamic prototypes generated by gradually smoothing the training time prototypes and employ contrastive loss at the prototype level. Experiments on three popular benchmarks tailored for OSHP demonstrate that EOP-Net outperforms representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins, which serves as a strong benchmark for further research on this new task. The source code will be made publicly available.

Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting

Recently, there has been an increasing concern about the privacy issue raised by using personally identifiable information in machine learning. However, previous portrait matting methods were all based on identifiable portrait images. To fill the gap, we present P3M-10k in this paper, which is the first large-scale anonymized benchmark for Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting. P3M-10k consists of 10,000 high-resolution face-blurred portrait images along with high-quality alpha mattes. We systematically evaluate both trimap-free and trimap-based matting methods on P3M-10k and find that existing matting methods show different generalization capabilities when following the Privacy-Preserving Training (PPT) setting, i.e., "training on face-blurred images and testing on arbitrary images". To devise a better trimap-free portrait matting model, we propose P3M-Net, which leverages the power of a unified framework for both semantic perception and detail matting, and specifically emphasizes the interaction between them and the encoder to facilitate the matting process. Extensive experiments on P3M-10k demonstrate that P3M-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective metrics and subjective visual quality. Besides, it shows good generalization capacity under the PPT setting, confirming the value of P3M-10k for facilitating future research and enabling potential real-world applications. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Bridging the Gap Between Clean Data Training and Real-World Inference for Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its upstream automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transform the voice into text. In this case, the upstream perturbations, e.g. ASR errors, environmental noise and careless user speaking, will propagate to the ID and SF models, thus deteriorating the system performance. Therefore, the well-performing SF and ID models are expected to be noise resistant to some extent. However, existing models are trained on clean data, which causes a \textit{gap between clean data training and real-world inference.} To bridge the gap, we propose a method from the perspective of domain adaptation, by which both high- and low-quality samples are embedding into similar vector space. Meanwhile, we design a denoising generation model to reduce the impact of the low-quality samples. Experiments on the widely-used dataset, i.e. Snips, and large scale in-house dataset (10 million training examples) demonstrate that this method not only outperforms the baseline models on real-world (noisy) corpus but also enhances the robustness, that is, it produces high-quality results under a noisy environment. The source code will be released.

Glance and Gaze: Inferring Action-aware Points for One-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection

Modern human-object interaction (HOI) detection approaches can be divided into one-stage methods and twostage ones. One-stage models are more efficient due to their straightforward architectures, but the two-stage models are still advantageous in accuracy. Existing one-stage models usually begin by detecting predefined interaction areas or points, and then attend to these areas only for interaction prediction; therefore, they lack reasoning steps that dynamically search for discriminative cues. In this paper, we propose a novel one-stage method, namely Glance and Gaze Network (GGNet), which adaptively models a set of actionaware points (ActPoints) via glance and gaze steps. The glance step quickly determines whether each pixel in the feature maps is an interaction point. The gaze step leverages feature maps produced by the glance step to adaptively infer ActPoints around each pixel in a progressive manner. Features of the refined ActPoints are aggregated for interaction prediction. Moreover, we design an actionaware approach that effectively matches each detected interaction with its associated human-object pair, along with a novel hard negative attentive loss to improve the optimization of GGNet. All the above operations are conducted simultaneously and efficiently for all pixels in the feature maps. Finally, GGNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on both V-COCO and HICODET benchmarks. Code of GGNet is available at https: //github.com/SherlockHolmes221/GGNet.

MRI-based Alzheimer's disease prediction via distilling the knowledge in multi-modal data

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction, i.e., identifying MCI patients of high risks converting to Alzheimer's disease (AD), is essential for preventing or slowing the progression of AD. Although previous studies have shown that the fusion of multi-modal data can effectively improve the prediction accuracy, their applications are largely restricted by the limited availability or high cost of multi-modal data. Building an effective prediction model using only magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains a challenging research topic. In this work, we propose a multi-modal multi-instance distillation scheme, which aims to distill the knowledge learned from multi-modal data to an MRI-based network for MCI conversion prediction. In contrast to existing distillation algorithms, the proposed multi-instance probabilities demonstrate a superior capability of representing the complicated atrophy distributions, and can guide the MRI-based network to better explore the input MRI. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to improve an MRI-based prediction model by leveraging extra supervision distilled from multi-modal information. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our framework, suggesting its potentials in the data-limited clinical settings.

Where and What? Examining Interpretable Disentangled Representations

Capturing interpretable variations has long been one of the goals in disentanglement learning. However, unlike the independence assumption, interpretability has rarely been exploited to encourage disentanglement in the unsupervised setting. In this paper, we examine the interpretability of disentangled representations by investigating two questions: where to be interpreted and what to be interpreted? A latent code is easily to be interpreted if it would consistently impact a certain subarea of the resulting generated image. We thus propose to learn a spatial mask to localize the effect of each individual latent dimension. On the other hand, interpretability usually comes from latent dimensions that capture simple and basic variations in data. We thus impose a perturbation on a certain dimension of the latent code, and expect to identify the perturbation along this dimension from the generated images so that the encoding of simple variations can be enforced. Additionally, we develop an unsupervised model selection method, which accumulates perceptual distance scores along axes in the latent space. On various datasets, our models can learn high-quality disentangled representations without supervision, showing the proposed modeling of interpretability is an effective proxy for achieving unsupervised disentanglement.

Affordance Transfer Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Reasoning the human-object interactions (HOI) is essential for deeper scene understanding, while object affordances (or functionalities) are of great importance for human to discover unseen HOIs with novel objects. Inspired by this, we introduce an affordance transfer learning approach to jointly detect HOIs with novel objects and recognize affordances. Specifically, HOI representations can be decoupled into a combination of affordance and object representations, making it possible to compose novel interactions by combining affordance representations and novel object representations from additional images, i.e. transferring the affordance to novel objects. With the proposed affordance transfer learning, the model is also capable of inferring the affordances of novel objects from known affordance representations. The proposed method can thus be used to 1) improve the performance of HOI detection, especially for the HOIs with unseen objects; and 2) infer the affordances of novel objects. Experimental results on two datasets, HICO-DET and HOI-COCO (from V-COCO), demonstrate significant improvements over recent state-of-the-art methods for HOI detection and object affordance detection. Code is available at https://github.com/zhihou7/HOI-CL

Online Multiple Object Tracking with Cross-Task Synergy

Modern online multiple object tracking (MOT) methods usually focus on two directions to improve tracking performance. One is to predict new positions in an incoming frame based on tracking information from previous frames, and the other is to enhance data association by generating more discriminative identity embeddings. Some works combined both directions within one framework but handled them as two individual tasks, thus gaining little mutual benefits. In this paper, we propose a novel unified model with synergy between position prediction and embedding association. The two tasks are linked by temporal-aware target attention and distractor attention, as well as identity-aware memory aggregation model. Specifically, the attention modules can make the prediction focus more on targets and less on distractors, therefore more reliable embeddings can be extracted accordingly for association. On the other hand, such reliable embeddings can boost identity-awareness through memory aggregation, hence strengthen attention modules and suppress drifts. In this way, the synergy between position prediction and embedding association is achieved, which leads to strong robustness to occlusions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over a wide range of existing methods on MOTChallenge benchmarks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/songguocode/TADAM.

Towards understanding the power of quantum kernels in the NISQ era

A key problem in the field of quantum computing is understanding whether quantum machine learning (QML) models implemented on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines can achieve quantum advantages. Recently, Huang et al. [arXiv:2011.01938] partially answered this question by the lens of quantum kernel learning. Namely, they exhibited that quantum kernels can learn specific datasets with lower generalization error over the optimal classical kernel methods. However, most of their results are established on the ideal setting and ignore the caveats of near-term quantum machines. To this end, a crucial open question is: does the power of quantum kernels still hold under the NISQ setting? In this study, we fill this knowledge gap by exploiting the power of quantum kernels when the quantum system noise and sample error are considered. Concretely, we first prove that the advantage of quantum kernels is vanished for large size of datasets, few number of measurements, and large system noise. With the aim of preserving the superiority of quantum kernels in the NISQ era, we further devise an effective method via indefinite kernel learning. Numerical simulations accord with our theoretical results. Our work provides theoretical guidance of exploring advanced quantum kernels to attain quantum advantages on NISQ devices.

Detecting Human-Object Interaction via Fabricated Compositional Learning

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection, inferring the relationships between human and objects from images/videos, is a fundamental task for high-level scene understanding. However, HOI detection usually suffers from the open long-tailed nature of interactions with objects, while human has extremely powerful compositional perception ability to cognize rare or unseen HOI samples. Inspired by this, we devise a novel HOI compositional learning framework, termed as Fabricated Compositional Learning (FCL), to address the problem of open long-tailed HOI detection. Specifically, we introduce an object fabricator to generate effective object representations, and then combine verbs and fabricated objects to compose new HOI samples. With the proposed object fabricator, we are able to generate large-scale HOI samples for rare and unseen categories to alleviate the open long-tailed issues in HOI detection. Extensive experiments on the most popular HOI detection dataset, HICO-DET, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for imbalanced HOI detection and significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance on rare and unseen HOI categories. Code is available at https://github.com/zhihou7/HOI-CL.