Human-Object Interaction Detection via Disentangled Transformer

Human-Object Interaction Detection tackles the problem of joint localization and classification of human object interactions. Existing HOI transformers either adopt a single decoder for triplet prediction, or utilize two parallel decoders to detect individual objects and interactions separately, and compose triplets by a matching process. In contrast, we decouple the triplet prediction into human-object pair detection and interaction classification. Our main motivation is that detecting the human-object instances and classifying interactions accurately needs to learn representations that focus on different regions. To this end, we present Disentangled Transformer, where both encoder and decoder are disentangled to facilitate learning of two sub-tasks. To associate the predictions of disentangled decoders, we first generate a unified representation for HOI triplets with a base decoder, and then utilize it as input feature of each disentangled decoder. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms prior work on two public HOI benchmarks by a sizeable margin. Code will be available.

GitNet: Geometric Prior-based Transformation for Birds-Eye-View Segmentation

Birds-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation is critical for autonomous driving for its powerful spatial representation ability. It is challenging to estimate the BEV semantic maps from monocular images due to the spatial gap, since it is implicitly required to realize both the perspective-to-BEV transformation and segmentation. We present a novel two-stage Geometry Prior-based Transformation framework named GitNet, consisting of (i) the geometry-guided pre-alignment and (ii) ray-based transformer. In the first stage, we decouple the BEV segmentation into the perspective image segmentation and geometric prior-based mapping, with explicit supervision by projecting the BEV semantic labels onto the image plane to learn visibility-aware features and learnable geometry to translate into BEV space. Second, the pre-aligned coarse BEV features are further deformed by ray-based transformers to take visibility knowledge into account. GitNet achieves the leading performance on the challenging nuScenes and Argoverse Datasets. The code will be publicly available.

Implicit Sample Extension for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Most existing unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) methods use clustering to generate pseudo labels for model training. Unfortunately, clustering sometimes mixes different true identities together or splits the same identity into two or more sub clusters. Training on these noisy clusters substantially hampers the Re-ID accuracy. Due to the limited samples in each identity, we suppose there may lack some underlying information to well reveal the accurate clusters. To discover these information, we propose an Implicit Sample Extension (\OurWholeMethod) method to generate what we call support samples around the cluster boundaries. Specifically, we generate support samples from actual samples and their neighbouring clusters in the embedding space through a progressive linear interpolation (PLI) strategy. PLI controls the generation with two critical factors, i.e., 1) the direction from the actual sample towards its K-nearest clusters and 2) the degree for mixing up the context information from the K-nearest clusters. Meanwhile, given the support samples, ISE further uses a label-preserving loss to pull them towards their corresponding actual samples, so as to compact each cluster. Consequently, ISE reduces the "sub and mixed" clustering errors, thus improving the Re-ID performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and achieves state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised person Re-ID. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleClas}.

MixFormer: Mixing Features across Windows and Dimensions

While local-window self-attention performs notably in vision tasks, it suffers from limited receptive field and weak modeling capability issues. This is mainly because it performs self-attention within non-overlapped windows and shares weights on the channel dimension. We propose MixFormer to find a solution. First, we combine local-window self-attention with depth-wise convolution in a parallel design, modeling cross-window connections to enlarge the receptive fields. Second, we propose bi-directional interactions across branches to provide complementary clues in the channel and spatial dimensions. These two designs are integrated to achieve efficient feature mixing among windows and dimensions. Our MixFormer provides competitive results on image classification with EfficientNet and shows better results than RegNet and Swin Transformer. Performance in downstream tasks outperforms its alternatives by significant margins with less computational costs in 5 dense prediction tasks on MS COCO, ADE20k, and LVIS. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleClas}.

ViSTA: Vision and Scene Text Aggregation for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Visual appearance is considered to be the most important cue to understand images for cross-modal retrieval, while sometimes the scene text appearing in images can provide valuable information to understand the visual semantics. Most of existing cross-modal retrieval approaches ignore the usage of scene text information and directly adding this information may lead to performance degradation in scene text free scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a full transformer architecture to unify these cross-modal retrieval scenarios in a single $\textbf{Vi}$sion and $\textbf{S}$cene $\textbf{T}$ext $\textbf{A}$ggregation framework (ViSTA). Specifically, ViSTA utilizes transformer blocks to directly encode image patches and fuse scene text embedding to learn an aggregated visual representation for cross-modal retrieval. To tackle the modality missing problem of scene text, we propose a novel fusion token based transformer aggregation approach to exchange the necessary scene text information only through the fusion token and concentrate on the most important features in each modality. To further strengthen the visual modality, we develop dual contrastive learning losses to embed both image-text pairs and fusion-text pairs into a common cross-modal space. Compared to existing methods, ViSTA enables to aggregate relevant scene text semantics with visual appearance, and hence improve results under both scene text free and scene text aware scenarios. Experimental results show that ViSTA outperforms other methods by at least $\bf{8.4}\%$ at Recall@1 for scene text aware retrieval task. Compared with state-of-the-art scene text free retrieval methods, ViSTA can achieve better accuracy on Flicker30K and MSCOCO while running at least three times faster during the inference stage, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Rope3D: TheRoadside Perception Dataset for Autonomous Driving and Monocular 3D Object Detection Task

Concurrent perception datasets for autonomous driving are mainly limited to frontal view with sensors mounted on the vehicle. None of them is designed for the overlooked roadside perception tasks. On the other hand, the data captured from roadside cameras have strengths over frontal-view data, which is believed to facilitate a safer and more intelligent autonomous driving system. To accelerate the progress of roadside perception, we present the first high-diversity challenging Roadside Perception 3D dataset- Rope3D from a novel view. The dataset consists of 50k images and over 1.5M 3D objects in various scenes, which are captured under different settings including various cameras with ambiguous mounting positions, camera specifications, viewpoints, and different environmental conditions. We conduct strict 2D-3D joint annotation and comprehensive data analysis, as well as set up a new 3D roadside perception benchmark with metrics and evaluation devkit. Furthermore, we tailor the existing frontal-view monocular 3D object detection approaches and propose to leverage the geometry constraint to solve the inherent ambiguities caused by various sensors, viewpoints. Our dataset is available on https://thudair.baai.ac.cn/rope.

Towards Bidirectional Arbitrary Image Rescaling: Joint Optimization and Cycle Idempotence

Deep learning based single image super-resolution models have been widely studied and superb results are achieved in upscaling low-resolution images with fixed scale factor and downscaling degradation kernel. To improve real world applicability of such models, there are growing interests to develop models optimized for arbitrary upscaling factors. Our proposed method is the first to treat arbitrary rescaling, both upscaling and downscaling, as one unified process. Using joint optimization of both directions, the proposed model is able to learn upscaling and downscaling simultaneously and achieve bidirectional arbitrary image rescaling. It improves the performance of current arbitrary upscaling models by a large margin while at the same time learns to maintain visual perception quality in downscaled images. The proposed model is further shown to be robust in cycle idempotence test, free of severe degradations in reconstruction accuracy when the downscaling-to-upscaling cycle is applied repetitively. This robustness is beneficial for image rescaling in the wild when this cycle could be applied to one image for multiple times. It also performs well on tests with arbitrary large scales and asymmetric scales, even when the model is not trained with such tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our model.

Adversarial Dual-Student with Differentiable Spatial Warping for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

A common challenge posed to robust semantic segmentation is the expensive data annotation cost. Existing semi-supervised solutions show great potential toward solving this problem. Their key idea is constructing consistency regularization with unsupervised data augmentation from unlabeled data for model training. The perturbations for unlabeled data enable the consistency training loss, which benefits semi-supervised semantic segmentation. However, these perturbations destroy image context and introduce unnatural boundaries, which is harmful for semantic segmentation. Besides, the widely adopted semi-supervised learning framework, i.e. mean-teacher, suffers performance limitation since the student model finally converges to the teacher model. In this paper, first of all, we propose a context friendly differentiable geometric warping to conduct unsupervised data augmentation; secondly, a novel adversarial dual-student framework is proposed to improve the Mean-Teacher from the following two aspects: (1) dual student models are learnt independently except for a stabilization constraint to encourage exploiting model diversities; (2) adversarial training scheme is applied to both students and the discriminators are resorted to distinguish reliable pseudo-label of unlabeled data for self-training. Effectiveness is validated via extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2012 and Citescapes. Our solution significantly improves the performance and state-of-the-art results are achieved on both datasets. Remarkably, compared with fully supervision, our solution achieves comparable mIoU of 73.4% using only 12.5% annotated data on PASCAL VOC2012.

MobileFaceSwap: A Lightweight Framework for Video Face Swapping

Advanced face swapping methods have achieved appealing results. However, most of these methods have many parameters and computations, which makes it challenging to apply them in real-time applications or deploy them on edge devices like mobile phones. In this work, we propose a lightweight Identity-aware Dynamic Network (IDN) for subject-agnostic face swapping by dynamically adjusting the model parameters according to the identity information. In particular, we design an efficient Identity Injection Module (IIM) by introducing two dynamic neural network techniques, including the weights prediction and weights modulation. Once the IDN is updated, it can be applied to swap faces given any target image or video. The presented IDN contains only 0.50M parameters and needs 0.33G FLOPs per frame, making it capable for real-time video face swapping on mobile phones. In addition, we introduce a knowledge distillation-based method for stable training, and a loss reweighting module is employed to obtain better synthesized results. Finally, our method achieves comparable results with the teacher models and other state-of-the-art methods.

The Devil is in the Task: Exploiting Reciprocal Appearance-Localization Features for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Low-cost monocular 3D object detection plays a fundamental role in autonomous driving, whereas its accuracy is still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we dig into the 3D object detection task and reformulate it as the sub-tasks of object localization and appearance perception, which benefits to a deep excavation of reciprocal information underlying the entire task. We introduce a Dynamic Feature Reflecting Network, named DFR-Net, which contains two novel standalone modules: (i) the Appearance-Localization Feature Reflecting module (ALFR) that first separates taskspecific features and then self-mutually reflects the reciprocal features; (ii) the Dynamic Intra-Trading module (DIT) that adaptively realigns the training processes of various sub-tasks via a self-learning manner. Extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of DFR-Net. We rank 1st among all the monocular 3D object detectors in the KITTI test set (till March 16th, 2021). The proposed method is also easy to be plug-and-play in many cutting-edge 3D detection frameworks at negligible cost to boost performance. The code will be made publicly available.