Benchmarking Omni-Vision Representation through the Lens of Visual Realms

Though impressive performance has been achieved in specific visual realms (e.g. faces, dogs, and places), an omni-vision representation generalizing to many natural visual domains is highly desirable. But, existing benchmarks are biased and inefficient to evaluate the omni-vision representation -- these benchmarks either only include several specific realms, or cover most realms at the expense of subsuming numerous datasets that have extensive realm overlapping. In this paper, we propose Omni-Realm Benchmark (OmniBenchmark). It includes 21 realm-wise datasets with 7,372 concepts and 1,074,346 images. Without semantic overlapping, these datasets cover most visual realms comprehensively and meanwhile efficiently. In addition, we propose a new supervised contrastive learning framework, namely Relational Contrastive learning (ReCo), for a better omni-vision representation. Beyond pulling two instances from the same concept closer -- the typical supervised contrastive learning framework -- ReCo also pulls two instances from the same semantic realm closer, encoding the semantic relation between concepts, and facilitating omni-vision representation learning. We benchmark ReCo and other advances in omni-vision representation studies that are different in architectures (from CNNs to transformers) and in learning paradigms (from supervised learning to self-supervised learning) on OmniBenchmark. We illustrate the superior of ReCo to other supervised contrastive learning methods and reveal multiple practical observations to facilitate future research.

ST-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning for Action Recognition

Capitalizing on large pre-trained models for various downstream tasks of interest have recently emerged with promising performance. Due to the ever-growing model size, the standard full fine-tuning based task adaptation strategy becomes prohibitively costly in terms of model training and storage. This has led to a new research direction in parameter-efficient transfer learning. However, existing attempts typically focus on downstream tasks from the same modality (e.g., image understanding) of the pre-trained model. This creates a limit because in some specific modalities, (e.g., video understanding) such a strong pre-trained model with sufficient knowledge is less or not available. In this work, we investigate such a novel cross-modality transfer learning setting, namely parameter-efficient image-to-video transfer learning. To solve this problem, we propose a new Spatio-Temporal Adapter (ST-Adapter) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning per video task. With a built-in spatio-temporal reasoning capability in a compact design, ST-Adapter enables a pre-trained image model without temporal knowledge to reason about dynamic video content at a small (~8%) per-task parameter cost, requiring approximately 20 times fewer updated parameters compared to previous work. Extensive experiments on video action recognition tasks show that our ST-Adapter can match or even outperform the strong full fine-tuning strategy and state-of-the-art video models, whilst enjoying the advantage of parameter efficiency.

Parameter-Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Capitalizing on large pre-trained models for various downstream tasks of interest have recently emerged with promising performance. Due to the ever-growing model size, the standard full fine-tuning based task adaptation strategy becomes prohibitively costly in terms of model training and storage. This has led to a new research direction in parameter-efficient transfer learning. However, existing attempts typically focus on downstream tasks from the same modality (e.g., image understanding) of the pre-trained model. This creates a limit because in some specific modalities, (e.g., video understanding) such a strong pre-trained model with sufficient knowledge is less or not available. In this work, we investigate such a novel cross-modality transfer learning setting, namely parameter-efficient image-to-video transfer learning. To solve this problem, we propose a new Spatio-Temporal Adapter (ST-Adapter) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning per video task. With a built-in spatio-temporal reasoning capability in a compact design, ST-Adapter enables a pre-trained image model without temporal knowledge to reason about dynamic video content at a small (~8%) per-task parameter cost, requiring approximately 20 times fewer updated parameters compared to previous work. Extensive experiments on video action recognition tasks show that our ST-Adapter can match or even outperform the strong full fine-tuning strategy and state-of-the-art video models, whilst enjoying the advantage of parameter efficiency.

1st Place Solutions for RxR-Habitat Vision-and-Language Navigation Competition (CVPR 2022)

This report presents the methods of the winning entry of the RxR-Habitat Competition in CVPR 2022. The competition addresses the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), which requires an agent to follow step-by-step natural language instructions to reach a target. We present a modular plan-and-control approach for the task. Our model consists of three modules: the candidate waypoints predictor (CWP), the history enhanced planner and the tryout controller. In each decision loop, CWP first predicts a set of candidate waypoints based on depth observations from multiple views. It can reduce the complexity of the action space and facilitate planning. Then, a history-enhanced planner is adopted to select one of the candidate waypoints as the subgoal. The planner additionally encodes historical memory to track the navigation progress, which is especially effective for long-horizon navigation. Finally, we propose a non-parametric heuristic controller named tryout to execute low-level actions to reach the planned subgoal. It is based on the trial-and-error mechanism which can help the agent to avoid obstacles and escape from getting stuck. All three modules work hierarchically until the agent stops. We further take several recent advances of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to improve the performance such as pretraining based on large-scale synthetic in-domain dataset, environment-level data augmentation and snapshot model ensemble. Our model won the RxR-Habitat Competition 2022, with 48% and 90% relative improvements over existing methods on NDTW and SR metrics respectively.

Robust Face Anti-Spoofing with Dual Probabilistic Modeling

The field of face anti-spoofing (FAS) has witnessed great progress with the surge of deep learning. Due to its data-driven nature, existing FAS methods are sensitive to the noise in the dataset, which will hurdle the learning process. However, very few works consider noise modeling in FAS. In this work, we attempt to fill this gap by automatically addressing the noise problem from both label and data perspectives in a probabilistic manner. Specifically, we propose a unified framework called Dual Probabilistic Modeling (DPM), with two dedicated modules, DPM-LQ (Label Quality aware learning) and DPM-DQ (Data Quality aware learning). Both modules are designed based on the assumption that data and label should form coherent probabilistic distributions. DPM-LQ is able to produce robust feature representations without overfitting to the distribution of noisy semantic labels. DPM-DQ can eliminate data noise from `False Reject' and `False Accept' during inference by correcting the prediction confidence of noisy data based on its quality distribution. Both modules can be incorporated into existing deep networks seamlessly and efficiently. Furthermore, we propose the generalized DPM to address the noise problem in practical usage without the need of semantic annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this probabilistic modeling can 1) significantly improve the accuracy, and 2) make the model robust to the noise in real-world datasets. Without bells and whistles, our proposed DPM achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple standard FAS benchmarks.

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify causal relations between event pairs in a document. It poses a great challenge of across-sentence reasoning without clear causal indicators. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, which improves existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods upon two aspects. First, we formulate DECI as a node classification problem by constructing an event relational graph, without the needs of prior knowledge or tools. Second, ERGO seamlessly integrates event-pair relation classification and global inference, which leverages a Relational Graph Transformer (RGT) to capture the potential causal chain. Besides, we introduce edge-building strategies and adaptive focal loss to deal with the massive false positives caused by common spurious correlation. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that ERGO significantly outperforms previous SOTA methods (13.1% F1 gains on average). We have conducted extensive quantitative analysis and case studies to provide insights for future research directions (Section 4.8).

Few-shot Forgery Detection via Guided Adversarial Interpolation

Realistic visual media synthesis is becoming a critical societal issue with the surge of face manipulation models; new forgery approaches emerge at an unprecedented pace. Unfortunately, existing forgery detection methods suffer significant performance drops when applied to novel forgery approaches. In this work, we address the few-shot forgery detection problem by designing a comprehensive benchmark based on coverage analysis among various forgery approaches, and proposing Guided Adversarial Interpolation (GAI). Our key insight is that there exist transferable distribution characteristics among different forgery approaches with the majority and minority classes. Specifically, we enhance the discriminative ability against novel forgery approaches via adversarially interpolating the artifacts of the minority samples to the majority samples under the guidance of a teacher network. Unlike the standard re-balancing method which usually results in over-fitting to minority classes, our method simultaneously takes account of the diversity of majority information as well as the significance of minority information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GAI achieves state-of-the-art performances on the established few-shot forgery detection benchmark. Notably, our method is also validated to be robust to choices of majority and minority forgery approaches.

Prompt for Extraction? PAIE: Prompting Argument Interaction for Event Argument Extraction

In this paper, we propose an effective yet efficient model PAIE for both sentence-level and document-level Event Argument Extraction (EAE), which also generalizes well when there is a lack of training data. On the one hand, PAIE utilizes prompt tuning for extractive objectives to take the best advantages of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). It introduces two span selectors based on the prompt to select start/end tokens among input texts for each role. On the other hand, it captures argument interactions via multi-role prompts and conducts joint optimization with optimal span assignments via a bipartite matching loss. Also, with a flexible prompt design, PAIE can extract multiple arguments with the same role instead of conventional heuristic threshold tuning. We have conducted extensive experiments on three benchmarks, including both sentence- and document-level EAE. The results present promising improvements from PAIE (3.5\% and 2.3\% F1 gains in average on three benchmarks, for PAIE-base and PAIE-large respectively). Further analysis demonstrates the efficiency, generalization to few-shot settings, and effectiveness of different extractive prompt tuning strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/mayubo2333/PAIE.

X-Learner: Learning Cross Sources and Tasks for Universal Visual Representation

In computer vision, pre-training models based on largescale supervised learning have been proven effective over the past few years. However, existing works mostly focus on learning from individual task with single data source (e.g., ImageNet for classification or COCO for detection). This restricted form limits their generalizability and usability due to the lack of vast semantic information from various tasks and data sources. Here, we demonstrate that jointly learning from heterogeneous tasks and multiple data sources contributes to universal visual representation, leading to better transferring results of various downstream tasks. Thus, learning how to bridge the gaps among different tasks and data sources is the key, but it still remains an open question. In this work, we propose a representation learning framework called X-Learner, which learns the universal feature of multiple vision tasks supervised by various sources, with expansion and squeeze stage: 1) Expansion Stage: X-Learner learns the task-specific feature to alleviate task interference and enrich the representation by reconciliation layer. 2) Squeeze Stage: X-Learner condenses the model to a reasonable size and learns the universal and generalizable representation for various tasks transferring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Learner achieves strong performance on different tasks without extra annotations, modalities and computational costs compared to existing representation learning methods. Notably, a single X-Learner model shows remarkable gains of 3.0%, 3.3% and 1.8% over current pretrained models on 12 downstream datasets for classification, object detection and semantic segmentation.