NEVIS'22: A Stream of 100 Tasks Sampled from 30 Years of Computer Vision Research

We introduce the Never Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, crowd counting, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and each task is a classical supervised learning problem. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and a simple evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute. We hope that NEVIS'22 can be useful to researchers working on continual learning, meta-learning, AutoML and more generally sequential learning, and help these communities join forces towards more robust and efficient models that efficiently adapt to a never ending stream of data. Implementations have been made available at https://github.com/deepmind/dm_nevis.

SL3D: Self-supervised-Self-labeled 3D Recognition

There are a lot of promising results in 3D recognition, including classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. However, many of these results rely on manually collecting densely annotated real-world 3D data, which is highly time-consuming and expensive to obtain, limiting the scalability of 3D recognition tasks. Thus in this paper, we study unsupervised 3D recognition and propose a Self-supervised-Self-Labeled 3D Recognition (SL3D) framework. SL3D simultaneously solves two coupled objectives, i.e., clustering and learning feature representation to generate pseudo labeled data for unsupervised 3D recognition. SL3D is a generic framework and can be applied to solve different 3D recognition tasks, including classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/fcendra/sl3d.

Towards Efficient and Scale-Robust Ultra-High-Definition Image Demoireing

With the rapid development of mobile devices, modern widely-used mobile phones typically allow users to capture 4K resolution (i.e., ultra-high-definition) images. However, for image demoireing, a challenging task in low-level vision, existing works are generally carried out on low-resolution or synthetic images. Hence, the effectiveness of these methods on 4K resolution images is still unknown. In this paper, we explore moire pattern removal for ultra-high-definition images. To this end, we propose the first ultra-high-definition demoireing dataset (UHDM), which contains 5,000 real-world 4K resolution image pairs, and conduct a benchmark study on current state-of-the-art methods. Further, we present an efficient baseline model ESDNet for tackling 4K moire images, wherein we build a semantic-aligned scale-aware module to address the scale variation of moire patterns. Extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while being much more lightweight. Code and dataset are available at https://xinyu-andy.github.io/uhdm-page.

Federated Self-supervised Learning for Video Understanding

The ubiquity of camera-enabled mobile devices has lead to large amounts of unlabelled video data being produced at the edge. Although various self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been proposed to harvest their latent spatio-temporal representations for task-specific training, practical challenges including privacy concerns and communication costs prevent SSL from being deployed at large scales. To mitigate these issues, we propose the use of Federated Learning (FL) to the task of video SSL. In this work, we evaluate the performance of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) video-SSL techniques and identify their shortcomings when integrated into the large-scale FL setting simulated with kinetics-400 dataset. We follow by proposing a novel federated SSL framework for video, dubbed FedVSSL, that integrates different aggregation strategies and partial weight updating. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of FedVSSL as it outperforms the centralized SOTA for the downstream retrieval task by 6.66% on UCF-101 and 5.13% on HMDB-51.

Reconstruct Face from Features Using GAN Generator as a Distribution Constraint

Face recognition based on the deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) shows superior accuracy performance attributed to the high discriminative features extracted. Yet, the security and privacy of the extracted features from deep learning models (deep features) have been often overlooked. This paper proposes the reconstruction of face images from deep features without accessing the CNN network configurations as a constrained optimization problem. Such optimization minimizes the distance between the features extracted from the original face image and the reconstructed face image. Instead of directly solving the optimization problem in the image space, we innovatively reformulate the problem by looking for a latent vector of a GAN generator, then use it to generate the face image. The GAN generator serves as a dual role in this novel framework, i.e., face distribution constraint of the optimization goal and a face generator. On top of the novel optimization task, we also propose an attack pipeline to impersonate the target user based on the generated face image. Our results show that the generated face images can achieve a state-of-the-art successful attack rate of 98.0\% on LFW under type-I attack @ FAR of 0.1\%. Our work sheds light on the biometric deployment to meet the privacy-preserving and security policies.

Video Demoireing with Relation-Based Temporal Consistency

Moire patterns, appearing as color distortions, severely degrade image and video qualities when filming a screen with digital cameras. Considering the increasing demands for capturing videos, we study how to remove such undesirable moire patterns in videos, namely video demoireing. To this end, we introduce the first hand-held video demoireing dataset with a dedicated data collection pipeline to ensure spatial and temporal alignments of captured data. Further, a baseline video demoireing model with implicit feature space alignment and selective feature aggregation is developed to leverage complementary information from nearby frames to improve frame-level video demoireing. More importantly, we propose a relation-based temporal consistency loss to encourage the model to learn temporal consistency priors directly from ground-truth reference videos, which facilitates producing temporally consistent predictions and effectively maintains frame-level qualities. Extensive experiments manifest the superiority of our model. Code is available at \url{https://daipengwa.github.io/VDmoire_ProjectPage/}.

Abandoning the Bayer-Filter to See in the Dark

Low-light image enhancement - a pervasive but challenging problem, plays a central role in enhancing the visibility of an image captured in a poor illumination environment. Due to the fact that not all photons can pass the Bayer-Filter on the sensor of the color camera, in this work, we first present a De-Bayer-Filter simulator based on deep neural networks to generate a monochrome raw image from the colored raw image. Next, a fully convolutional network is proposed to achieve the low-light image enhancement by fusing colored raw data with synthesized monochrome raw data. Channel-wise attention is also introduced to the fusion process to establish a complementary interaction between features from colored and monochrome raw images. To train the convolutional networks, we propose a dataset with monochrome and color raw pairs named Mono-Colored Raw paired dataset (MCR) collected by using a monochrome camera without Bayer-Filter and a color camera with Bayer-Filter. The proposed pipeline take advantages of the fusion of the virtual monochrome and the color raw images and our extensive experiments indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by leveraging raw sensor data and data-driven learning.

Learning to Erase the Bayer-Filter to See in the Dark

Low-light image enhancement - a pervasive but challenging problem, plays a central role in enhancing the visibility of an image captured in a poor illumination environment. Due to the fact that not all photons can pass the Bayer-Filter on the sensor of the color camera, in this work, we first present a De-Bayer-Filter simulator based on deep neural networks to generate a monochrome raw image from the colored raw image. Next, a fully convolutional network is proposed to achieve the low-light image enhancement by fusing colored raw data with synthesized monochrome raw data. Channel-wise attention is also introduced to the fusion process to establish a complementary interaction between features from colored and monochrome raw images. To train the convolutional networks, we propose a dataset with monochrome and color raw pairs named Mono-Colored Raw paired dataset (MCR) collected by using a monochrome camera without Bayer-Filter and a color camera with Bayer-Filter. The proposed pipeline take advantages of the fusion of the virtual monochrome and the color raw images and our extensive experiments indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by leveraging raw sensor data and data-driven learning.

Reinforced Meta-path Selection for Recommendation on Heterogeneous Information Networks

Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) capture complex relations among entities of various kinds and have been used extensively to improve the effectiveness of various data mining tasks, such as in recommender systems. Many existing HIN-based recommendation algorithms utilize hand-crafted meta-paths to extract semantic information from the networks. These algorithms rely on extensive domain knowledge with which the best set of meta-paths can be selected. For applications where the HINs are highly complex with numerous node and link types, the approach of hand-crafting a meta-path set is too tedious and error-prone. To tackle this problem, we propose the Reinforcement learning-based Meta-path Selection (RMS) framework to select effective meta-paths and to incorporate them into existing meta-path-based recommenders. To identify high-quality meta-paths, RMS trains a reinforcement learning (RL) based policy network(agent), which gets rewards from the performance on the downstream recommendation tasks. We design a HIN-based recommendation model, HRec, that effectively uses the meta-path information. We further integrate HRec with RMS and derive our recommendation solution, RMS-HRec, that automatically utilizes the effective meta-paths. Experiments on real datasets show that our algorithm can significantly improve the performance of recommendation models by capturing important meta-paths automatically.